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20524 lines
1.2 MiB
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MD GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
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Version 01, 18 October 1851
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Copyright 2023 Stef Dunlap <kindrobot@tilde.team>
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1. Permissions
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Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose
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with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice
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and this permission notice appear in all copies.
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2. Warranty
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THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES WITH
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REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND
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FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT,
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INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS
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OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER
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TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF
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THIS SOFTWARE.
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3. Moby-Dick, or the Whale, by Herman Melville
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CONTENTS
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ETYMOLOGY.
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EXTRACTS (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian).
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CHAPTER 1. Loomings.
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CHAPTER 2. The Carpet-Bag.
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CHAPTER 3. The Spouter-Inn.
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CHAPTER 4. The Counterpane.
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CHAPTER 5. Breakfast.
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CHAPTER 6. The Street.
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CHAPTER 7. The Chapel.
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CHAPTER 8. The Pulpit.
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CHAPTER 9. The Sermon.
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CHAPTER 10. A Bosom Friend.
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CHAPTER 11. Nightgown.
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CHAPTER 12. Biographical.
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CHAPTER 13. Wheelbarrow.
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CHAPTER 14. Nantucket.
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CHAPTER 15. Chowder.
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CHAPTER 16. The Ship.
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CHAPTER 17. The Ramadan.
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CHAPTER 18. His Mark.
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CHAPTER 19. The Prophet.
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CHAPTER 20. All Astir.
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CHAPTER 21. Going Aboard.
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CHAPTER 22. Merry Christmas.
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CHAPTER 23. The Lee Shore.
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CHAPTER 24. The Advocate.
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CHAPTER 25. Postscript.
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CHAPTER 26. Knights and Squires.
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CHAPTER 27. Knights and Squires.
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CHAPTER 28. Ahab.
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CHAPTER 29. Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb.
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CHAPTER 30. The Pipe.
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CHAPTER 31. Queen Mab.
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CHAPTER 32. Cetology.
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CHAPTER 33. The Specksnyder.
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CHAPTER 34. The Cabin-Table.
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CHAPTER 35. The Mast-Head.
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CHAPTER 36. The Quarter-Deck.
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CHAPTER 37. Sunset.
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CHAPTER 38. Dusk.
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CHAPTER 39. First Night-Watch.
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CHAPTER 40. Midnight, Forecastle.
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CHAPTER 41. Moby Dick.
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CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of the Whale.
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CHAPTER 43. Hark!
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CHAPTER 44. The Chart.
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CHAPTER 45. The Affidavit.
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CHAPTER 46. Surmises.
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CHAPTER 47. The Mat-Maker.
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CHAPTER 48. The First Lowering.
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CHAPTER 49. The Hyena.
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CHAPTER 50. Ahab’s Boat and Crew. Fedallah.
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CHAPTER 51. The Spirit-Spout.
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CHAPTER 52. The Albatross.
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CHAPTER 53. The Gam.
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CHAPTER 54. The Town-Ho’s Story.
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CHAPTER 55. Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales.
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CHAPTER 56. Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True Pictures
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of Whaling Scenes.
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CHAPTER 57. Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone;
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in Mountains; in Stars.
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CHAPTER 58. Brit.
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CHAPTER 59. Squid.
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CHAPTER 60. The Line.
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CHAPTER 61. Stubb Kills a Whale.
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CHAPTER 62. The Dart.
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CHAPTER 63. The Crotch.
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CHAPTER 64. Stubb’s Supper.
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CHAPTER 65. The Whale as a Dish.
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CHAPTER 66. The Shark Massacre.
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CHAPTER 67. Cutting In.
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CHAPTER 68. The Blanket.
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CHAPTER 69. The Funeral.
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CHAPTER 70. The Sphynx.
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CHAPTER 71. The Jeroboam’s Story.
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CHAPTER 72. The Monkey-Rope.
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CHAPTER 73. Stubb and Flask kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk over
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Him.
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CHAPTER 74. The Sperm Whale’s Head—Contrasted View.
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CHAPTER 75. The Right Whale’s Head—Contrasted View.
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CHAPTER 76. The Battering-Ram.
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CHAPTER 77. The Great Heidelburgh Tun.
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CHAPTER 78. Cistern and Buckets.
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CHAPTER 79. The Prairie.
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CHAPTER 80. The Nut.
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CHAPTER 81. The Pequod Meets The Virgin.
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CHAPTER 82. The Honor and Glory of Whaling.
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CHAPTER 83. Jonah Historically Regarded.
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CHAPTER 84. Pitchpoling.
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CHAPTER 85. The Fountain.
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CHAPTER 86. The Tail.
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CHAPTER 87. The Grand Armada.
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CHAPTER 88. Schools and Schoolmasters.
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CHAPTER 89. Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish.
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CHAPTER 90. Heads or Tails.
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CHAPTER 91. The Pequod Meets The Rose-Bud.
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CHAPTER 92. Ambergris.
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CHAPTER 93. The Castaway.
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CHAPTER 94. A Squeeze of the Hand.
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CHAPTER 95. The Cassock.
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CHAPTER 96. The Try-Works.
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CHAPTER 97. The Lamp.
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CHAPTER 98. Stowing Down and Clearing Up.
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CHAPTER 99. The Doubloon.
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CHAPTER 100. Leg and Arm.
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CHAPTER 101. The Decanter.
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CHAPTER 102. A Bower in the Arsacides.
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CHAPTER 103. Measurement of The Whale’s Skeleton.
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CHAPTER 104. The Fossil Whale.
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CHAPTER 105. Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish?—Will He Perish?
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CHAPTER 106. Ahab’s Leg.
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CHAPTER 107. The Carpenter.
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CHAPTER 108. Ahab and the Carpenter.
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CHAPTER 109. Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin.
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CHAPTER 110. Queequeg in His Coffin.
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CHAPTER 111. The Pacific.
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CHAPTER 112. The Blacksmith.
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CHAPTER 113. The Forge.
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CHAPTER 114. The Gilder.
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CHAPTER 115. The Pequod Meets The Bachelor.
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CHAPTER 116. The Dying Whale.
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CHAPTER 117. The Whale Watch.
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CHAPTER 118. The Quadrant.
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CHAPTER 119. The Candles.
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CHAPTER 120. The Deck Towards the End of the First Night Watch.
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CHAPTER 121. Midnight.—The Forecastle Bulwarks.
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CHAPTER 122. Midnight Aloft.—Thunder and Lightning.
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CHAPTER 123. The Musket.
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CHAPTER 124. The Needle.
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CHAPTER 125. The Log and Line.
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CHAPTER 126. The Life-Buoy.
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CHAPTER 127. The Deck.
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CHAPTER 128. The Pequod Meets The Rachel.
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CHAPTER 129. The Cabin.
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CHAPTER 130. The Hat.
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CHAPTER 131. The Pequod Meets The Delight.
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CHAPTER 132. The Symphony.
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CHAPTER 133. The Chase—First Day.
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CHAPTER 134. The Chase—Second Day.
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CHAPTER 135. The Chase.—Third Day.
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Epilogue
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Original Transcriber’s Notes:
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This text is a combination of etexts, one from the now-defunct ERIS project at
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Virginia Tech and one from Project Gutenberg’s archives. The proofreaders of
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this version are indebted to The University of Adelaide Library for preserving
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the Virginia Tech version. The resulting etext was compared with a public domain
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hard copy version of the text.
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ETYMOLOGY. (Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School.)
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The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was
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ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly
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embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He
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loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.
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“While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what name a
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whale-fish is to be called in our tongue, leaving out, through ignorance, the
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letter H, which almost alone maketh up the signification of the word, you
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deliver that which is not true.” —Hackluyt.
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“WHALE. * * * Sw. and Dan. hval. This animal is named from roundness or rolling;
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for in Dan. hvalt is arched or vaulted.” —Webster’s Dictionary.
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“WHALE. * * * It is more immediately from the Dut. and Ger. Wallen; A.S.
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Walw-ian, to roll, to wallow.” —Richardson’s Dictionary. חו, Hebrew.
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ϰητος, Greek. CETUS, Latin. WHŒL, Anglo-Saxon. HVALT, Danish. WAL,
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Dutch. HWAL, Swedish. HVALUR, Icelandic. WHALE, English. BALEINE,
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French. BALLENA, Spanish. PEKEE-NUEE-NUEE, Fegee. PEHEE-NUEE-NUEE,
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Erromangoan.
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EXTRACTS. (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian).
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It will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a poor
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devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long Vaticans and
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street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to whales he
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could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane. Therefore you must
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not, in every case at least, take the higgledy-piggledy whale statements,
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however authentic, in these extracts, for veritable gospel cetology. Far from
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it. As touching the ancient authors generally, as well as the poets here
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appearing, these extracts are solely valuable or entertaining, as affording a
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glancing bird’s eye view of what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied,
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and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and generations, including our own.
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So fare thee well, poor devil of a Sub-Sub, whose commentator I am. Thou
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belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world will ever
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warm; and for whom even Pale Sherry would be too rosy-strong; but with whom one
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sometimes loves to sit, and feel poor-devilish, too; and grow convivial upon
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tears; and say to them bluntly, with full eyes and empty glasses, and in not
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altogether unpleasant sadness—Give it up, Sub-Subs! For by how much the more
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pains ye take to please the world, by so much the more shall ye for ever go
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thankless! Would that I could clear out Hampton Court and the Tuileries for ye!
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But gulp down your tears and hie aloft to the royal-mast with your hearts; for
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your friends who have gone before are clearing out the seven-storied heavens,
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and making refugees of long-pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, against your
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coming. Here ye strike but splintered hearts together—there, ye shall strike
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unsplinterable glasses! EXTRACTS.
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“And God created great whales.” —Genesis.
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“Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him; One would think the deep to be
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hoary.” —Job.
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“Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.” —Jonah.
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“There go the ships; there is that Leviathan whom thou hast made to play
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therein.” —Psalms.
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“In that day, the Lord with his sore, and great, and strong sword, shall punish
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Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that crooked serpent; and he
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shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.” —Isaiah.
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“And what thing soever besides cometh within the chaos of this monster’s mouth,
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be it beast, boat, or stone, down it goes all incontinently that foul great
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swallow of his, and perisheth in the bottomless gulf of his paunch.” —Holland’s
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Plutarch’s Morals.
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“The Indian Sea breedeth the most and the biggest fishes that are: among which
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the Whales and Whirlpooles called Balaene, take up as much in length as four
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acres or arpens of land.” —Holland’s Pliny.
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“Scarcely had we proceeded two days on the sea, when about sunrise a great many
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Whales and other monsters of the sea, appeared. Among the former, one was of a
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most monstrous size.... This came towards us, open-mouthed, raising the waves on
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all sides, and beating the sea before him into a foam.” —Tooke’s Lucian. “The
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True History.”
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“He visited this country also with a view of catching horse-whales, which had
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bones of very great value for their teeth, of which he brought some to the
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king.... The best whales were catched in his own country, of which some were
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forty-eight, some fifty yards long. He said that he was one of six who had
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killed sixty in two days.” —Other or Other’s verbal narrative taken down from
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his mouth by King Alfred, A.D. 890.
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“And whereas all the other things, whether beast or vessel, that enter into the
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dreadful gulf of this monster’s (whale’s) mouth, are immediately lost and
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swallowed up, the sea-gudgeon retires into it in great security, and there
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sleeps.” —MONTAIGNE. —Apology for Raimond Sebond.
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“Let us fly, let us fly! Old Nick take me if it is not Leviathan described by
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the noble prophet Moses in the life of patient Job.” —Rabelais.
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“This whale’s liver was two cartloads.” —Stowe’s Annals.
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“The great Leviathan that maketh the seas to seethe like boiling pan.” —Lord
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Bacon’s Version of the Psalms.
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“Touching that monstrous bulk of the whale or ork we have received nothing
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certain. They grow exceeding fat, insomuch that an incredible quantity of oil
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will be extracted out of one whale.” —Ibid. “History of Life and Death.”
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“The sovereignest thing on earth is parmacetti for an inward bruise.” —King
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Henry.
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“Very like a whale.” —Hamlet.
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“Which to secure, no skill of leach’s art Mote him availle, but to returne
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againe To his wound’s worker, that with lowly dart, Dinting his breast, had
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bred his restless paine, Like as the wounded whale to shore flies thro’ the
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maine.” —The Fairie Queen.
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“Immense as whales, the motion of whose vast bodies can in a peaceful calm
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trouble the ocean till it boil.” —Sir William Davenant. Preface to Gondibert.
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“What spermacetti is, men might justly doubt, since the learned Hosmannus in his
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work of thirty years, saith plainly, Nescio quid sit.” —Sir T. Browne. Of Sperma
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Ceti and the Sperma Ceti Whale. Vide his V. E.
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“Like Spencer’s Talus with his modern flail He threatens ruin with his
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ponderous tail. ... Their fixed jav’lins in his side he wears, And on his
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back a grove of pikes appears.” —Waller’s Battle of the Summer Islands.
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“By art is created that great Leviathan, called a Commonwealth or State—(in
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Latin, Civitas) which is but an artificial man.” —Opening sentence of Hobbes’s
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Leviathan.
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“Silly Mansoul swallowed it without chewing, as if it had been a sprat in the
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mouth of a whale.” —Pilgrim’s Progress.
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“That sea beast Leviathan, which God of all his works Created hugest that
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swim the ocean stream.” —Paradise Lost.
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—“There Leviathan, Hugest of living creatures, in the deep Stretched like a
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promontory sleeps or swims, And seems a moving land; and at his gills Draws
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in, and at his breath spouts out a sea.” —Ibid.
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“The mighty whales which swim in a sea of water, and have a sea of oil swimming
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in them.” —Fuller’s Profane and Holy State.
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“So close behind some promontory lie The huge Leviathan to attend their
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prey, And give no chance, but swallow in the fry, Which through their
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gaping jaws mistake the way.” —Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis.
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“While the whale is floating at the stern of the ship, they cut off his head,
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and tow it with a boat as near the shore as it will come; but it will be aground
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in twelve or thirteen feet water.” —Thomas Edge’s Ten Voyages to Spitzbergen, in
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Purchas.
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“In their way they saw many whales sporting in the ocean, and in wantonness
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fuzzing up the water through their pipes and vents, which nature has placed on
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their shoulders.” —Sir T. Herbert’s Voyages into Asia and Africa. Harris Coll.
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“Here they saw such huge troops of whales, that they were forced to proceed with
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a great deal of caution for fear they should run their ship upon them.”
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—Schouten’s Sixth Circumnavigation.
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“We set sail from the Elbe, wind N.E. in the ship called The
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Jonas-in-the-Whale.... Some say the whale can’t open his mouth, but that is a
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fable.... They frequently climb up the masts to see whether they can see a
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whale, for the first discoverer has a ducat for his pains.... I was told of a
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whale taken near Shetland, that had above a barrel of herrings in his belly....
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One of our harpooneers told me that he caught once a whale in Spitzbergen that
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was white all over.” —A Voyage to Greenland, A.D. 1671. Harris Coll.
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“Several whales have come in upon this coast (Fife) Anno 1652, one eighty feet
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in length of the whale-bone kind came in, which (as I was informed), besides a
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vast quantity of oil, did afford 500 weight of baleen. The jaws of it stand for
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a gate in the garden of Pitferren.” —Sibbald’s Fife and Kinross.
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“Myself have agreed to try whether I can master and kill this Sperma-ceti whale,
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for I could never hear of any of that sort that was killed by any man, such is
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his fierceness and swiftness.” —Richard Strafford’s Letter from the Bermudas.
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Phil. Trans. A.D. 1668.
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“Whales in the sea God’s voice obey.” —N. E. Primer.
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“We saw also abundance of large whales, there being more in those southern seas,
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as I may say, by a hundred to one; than we have to the northward of us.”
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—Captain Cowley’s Voyage round the Globe, A.D. 1729.
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“... and the breath of the whale is frequently attended with such an
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insupportable smell, as to bring on a disorder of the brain.” —Ulloa’s South
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America.
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“To fifty chosen sylphs of special note, We trust the important charge, the
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petticoat. Oft have we known that seven-fold fence to fail, Tho’ stuffed
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with hoops and armed with ribs of whale.” —Rape of the Lock.
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“If we compare land animals in respect to magnitude, with those that take up
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their abode in the deep, we shall find they will appear contemptible in the
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comparison. The whale is doubtless the largest animal in creation.” —Goldsmith,
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Nat. Hist.
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“If you should write a fable for little fishes, you would make them speak like
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great whales.” —Goldsmith to Johnson.
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“In the afternoon we saw what was supposed to be a rock, but it was found to be
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a dead whale, which some Asiatics had killed, and were then towing ashore. They
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seemed to endeavor to conceal themselves behind the whale, in order to avoid
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being seen by us.” —Cook’s Voyages.
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“The larger whales, they seldom venture to attack. They stand in so great dread
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of some of them, that when out at sea they are afraid to mention even their
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||
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’s step has died away, and Starbuck, the first
|
||
Emir, has every reason to suppose that he is seated, then Starbuck rouses from
|
||
his quietude, takes a few turns along the planks, and, after a grave peep into
|
||
the binnacle, says, with some touch of pleasantness, “Dinner, Mr. Stubb,” and
|
||
descends the scuttle. The second Emir lounges about the rigging awhile, and then
|
||
slightly shaking the main brace, to see whether it will be all right with that
|
||
important rope, he likewise takes up the old burden, and with a rapid “Dinner,
|
||
Mr. Flask,” follows after his predecessors.
|
||
|
||
But the third Emir, now seeing himself all alone on the quarter-deck, seems to
|
||
feel relieved from some curious restraint; for, tipping all sorts of knowing
|
||
winks in all sorts of directions, and kicking off his shoes, he strikes into a
|
||
sharp but noiseless squall of a hornpipe right over the Grand Turk’s head; and
|
||
then, by a dexterous sleight, pitching his cap up into the mizentop for a shelf,
|
||
he goes down rollicking so far at least as he remains visible from the deck,
|
||
reversing all other processions, by bringing up the rear with music. But ere
|
||
stepping into the cabin doorway below, he pauses, ships a new face altogether,
|
||
and, then, independent, hilarious little Flask enters King Ahab’s presence, in
|
||
the character of Abjectus, or the Slave.
|
||
|
||
It is not the least among the strange things bred by the intense artificialness
|
||
of sea-usages, that while in the open air of the deck some officers will, upon
|
||
provocation, bear themselves boldly and defyingly enough towards their
|
||
commander; yet, ten to one, let those very officers the next moment go down to
|
||
their customary dinner in that same commander’s cabin, and straightway their
|
||
inoffensive, not to say deprecatory and humble air towards him, as he sits at
|
||
the head of the table; this is marvellous, sometimes most comical. Wherefore
|
||
this difference? A problem? Perhaps not. To have been Belshazzar, King of
|
||
Babylon; and to have been Belshazzar, not haughtily but courteously, therein
|
||
certainly must have been some touch of mundane grandeur. But he who in the
|
||
rightly regal and intelligent spirit presides over his own private dinner-table
|
||
of invited guests, that man’s unchallenged power and dominion of individual
|
||
influence for the time; that man’s royalty of state transcends Belshazzar’s, for
|
||
Belshazzar was not the greatest. Who has but once dined his friends, has tasted
|
||
what it is to be Cæsar. It is a witchery of social czarship which there is no
|
||
withstanding. Now, if to this consideration you superadd the official supremacy
|
||
of a ship-master, then, by inference, you will derive the cause of that
|
||
peculiarity of sea-life just mentioned.
|
||
|
||
Over his ivory-inlaid table, Ahab presided like a mute, maned sea-lion on the
|
||
white coral beach, surrounded by his warlike but still deferential cubs. In his
|
||
own proper turn, each officer waited to be served. They were as little children
|
||
before Ahab; and yet, in Ahab, there seemed not to lurk the smallest social
|
||
arrogance. With one mind, their intent eyes all fastened upon the old man’s
|
||
knife, as he carved the chief dish before him. I do not suppose that for the
|
||
world they would have profaned that moment with the slightest observation, even
|
||
upon so neutral a topic as the weather. No! And when reaching out his knife and
|
||
fork, between which the slice of beef was locked, Ahab thereby motioned
|
||
Starbuck’s plate towards him, the mate received his meat as though receiving
|
||
alms; and cut it tenderly; and a little started if, perchance, the knife grazed
|
||
against the plate; and chewed it noiselessly; and swallowed it, not without
|
||
circumspection. For, like the Coronation banquet at Frankfort, where the German
|
||
Emperor profoundly dines with the seven Imperial Electors, so these cabin meals
|
||
were somehow solemn meals, eaten in awful silence; and yet at table old Ahab
|
||
forbade not conversation; only he himself was dumb. What a relief it was to
|
||
choking Stubb, when a rat made a sudden racket in the hold below. And poor
|
||
little Flask, he was the youngest son, and little boy of this weary family
|
||
party. His were the shinbones of the saline beef; his would have been the
|
||
drumsticks. For Flask to have presumed to help himself, this must have seemed to
|
||
him tantamount to larceny in the first degree. Had he helped himself at that
|
||
table, doubtless, never more would he have been able to hold his head up in this
|
||
honest world; nevertheless, strange to say, Ahab never forbade him. And had
|
||
Flask helped himself, the chances were Ahab had never so much as noticed it.
|
||
Least of all, did Flask presume to help himself to butter. Whether he thought
|
||
the owners of the ship denied it to him, on account of its clotting his clear,
|
||
sunny complexion; or whether he deemed that, on so long a voyage in such
|
||
marketless waters, butter was at a premium, and therefore was not for him, a
|
||
subaltern; however it was, Flask, alas! was a butterless man!
|
||
|
||
Another thing. Flask was the last person down at the dinner, and Flask is the
|
||
first man up. Consider! For hereby Flask’s dinner was badly jammed in point of
|
||
time. Starbuck and Stubb both had the start of him; and yet they also have the
|
||
privilege of lounging in the rear. If Stubb even, who is but a peg higher than
|
||
Flask, happens to have but a small appetite, and soon shows symptoms of
|
||
concluding his repast, then Flask must bestir himself, he will not get more than
|
||
three mouthfuls that day; for it is against holy usage for Stubb to precede
|
||
Flask to the deck. Therefore it was that Flask once admitted in private, that
|
||
ever since he had arisen to the dignity of an officer, from that moment he had
|
||
never known what it was to be otherwise than hungry, more or less. For what he
|
||
ate did not so much relieve his hunger, as keep it immortal in him. Peace and
|
||
satisfaction, thought Flask, have for ever departed from my stomach. I am an
|
||
officer; but, how I wish I could fish a bit of old-fashioned beef in the
|
||
forecastle, as I used to when I was before the mast. There’s the fruits of
|
||
promotion now; there’s the vanity of glory: there’s the insanity of life!
|
||
Besides, if it were so that any mere sailor of the Pequod had a grudge against
|
||
Flask in Flask’s official capacity, all that sailor had to do, in order to
|
||
obtain ample vengeance, was to go aft at dinner-time, and get a peep at Flask
|
||
through the cabin sky-light, sitting silly and dumfoundered before awful Ahab.
|
||
|
||
Now, Ahab and his three mates formed what may be called the first table in the
|
||
Pequod’s cabin. After their departure, taking place in inverted order to their
|
||
arrival, the canvas cloth was cleared, or rather was restored to some hurried
|
||
order by the pallid steward. And then the three harpooneers were bidden to the
|
||
feast, they being its residuary legatees. They made a sort of temporary
|
||
servants’ hall of the high and mighty cabin.
|
||
|
||
In strange contrast to the hardly tolerable constraint and nameless invisible
|
||
domineerings of the captain’s table, was the entire care-free license and ease,
|
||
the almost frantic democracy of those inferior fellows the harpooneers. While
|
||
their masters, the mates, seemed afraid of the sound of the hinges of their own
|
||
jaws, the harpooneers chewed their food with such a relish that there was a
|
||
report to it. They dined like lords; they filled their bellies like Indian ships
|
||
all day loading with spices. Such portentous appetites had Queequeg and
|
||
Tashtego, that to fill out the vacancies made by the previous repast, often the
|
||
pale Dough-Boy was fain to bring on a great baron of salt-junk, seemingly
|
||
quarried out of the solid ox. And if he were not lively about it, if he did not
|
||
go with a nimble hop-skip-and-jump, then Tashtego had an ungentlemanly way of
|
||
accelerating him by darting a fork at his back, harpoon-wise. And once Daggoo,
|
||
seized with a sudden humor, assisted Dough-Boy’s memory by snatching him up
|
||
bodily, and thrusting his head into a great empty wooden trencher, while
|
||
Tashtego, knife in hand, began laying out the circle preliminary to scalping
|
||
him. He was naturally a very nervous, shuddering sort of little fellow, this
|
||
bread-faced steward; the progeny of a bankrupt baker and a hospital nurse. And
|
||
what with the standing spectacle of the black terrific Ahab, and the periodical
|
||
tumultuous visitations of these three savages, Dough-Boy’s whole life was one
|
||
continual lip-quiver. Commonly, after seeing the harpooneers furnished with all
|
||
things they demanded, he would escape from their clutches into his little pantry
|
||
adjoining, and fearfully peep out at them through the blinds of its door, till
|
||
all was over.
|
||
|
||
It was a sight to see Queequeg seated over against Tashtego, opposing his filed
|
||
teeth to the Indian’s: crosswise to them, Daggoo seated on the floor, for a
|
||
bench would have brought his hearse-plumed head to the low carlines; at every
|
||
motion of his colossal limbs, making the low cabin framework to shake, as when
|
||
an African elephant goes passenger in a ship. But for all this, the great negro
|
||
was wonderfully abstemious, not to say dainty. It seemed hardly possible that by
|
||
such comparatively small mouthfuls he could keep up the vitality diffused
|
||
through so broad, baronial, and superb a person. But, doubtless, this noble
|
||
savage fed strong and drank deep of the abounding element of air; and through
|
||
his dilated nostrils snuffed in the sublime life of the worlds. Not by beef or
|
||
by bread, are giants made or nourished. But Queequeg, he had a mortal, barbaric
|
||
smack of the lip in eating—an ugly sound enough—so much so, that the trembling
|
||
Dough-Boy almost looked to see whether any marks of teeth lurked in his own lean
|
||
arms. And when he would hear Tashtego singing out for him to produce himself,
|
||
that his bones might be picked, the simple-witted steward all but shattered the
|
||
crockery hanging round him in the pantry, by his sudden fits of the palsy. Nor
|
||
did the whetstone which the harpooneers carried in their pockets, for their
|
||
lances and other weapons; and with which whetstones, at dinner, they would
|
||
ostentatiously sharpen their knives; that grating sound did not at all tend to
|
||
tranquillize poor Dough-Boy. How could he forget that in his Island days,
|
||
Queequeg, for one, must certainly have been guilty of some murderous, convivial
|
||
indiscretions. Alas! Dough-Boy! hard fares the white waiter who waits upon
|
||
cannibals. Not a napkin should he carry on his arm, but a buckler. In good time,
|
||
though, to his great delight, the three salt-sea warriors would rise and depart;
|
||
to his credulous, fable-mongering ears, all their martial bones jingling in them
|
||
at every step, like Moorish scimetars in scabbards.
|
||
|
||
But, though these barbarians dined in the cabin, and nominally lived there;
|
||
still, being anything but sedentary in their habits, they were scarcely ever in
|
||
it except at mealtimes, and just before sleeping-time, when they passed through
|
||
it to their own peculiar quarters.
|
||
|
||
In this one matter, Ahab seemed no exception to most American whale captains,
|
||
who, as a set, rather incline to the opinion that by rights the ship’s cabin
|
||
belongs to them; and that it is by courtesy alone that anybody else is, at any
|
||
time, permitted there. So that, in real truth, the mates and harpooneers of the
|
||
Pequod might more properly be said to have lived out of the cabin than in it.
|
||
For when they did enter it, it was something as a street-door enters a house;
|
||
turning inwards for a moment, only to be turned out the next; and, as a
|
||
permanent thing, residing in the open air. Nor did they lose much hereby; in the
|
||
cabin was no companionship; socially, Ahab was inaccessible. Though nominally
|
||
included in the census of Christendom, he was still an alien to it. He lived in
|
||
the world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled Missouri. And as
|
||
when Spring and Summer had departed, that wild Logan of the woods, burying
|
||
himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the winter there, sucking his own
|
||
paws; so, in his inclement, howling old age, Ahab’s soul, shut up in the caved
|
||
trunk of his body, there fed upon the sullen paws of its gloom!
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 35. The Mast-Head.
|
||
|
||
It was during the more pleasant weather, that in due rotation with the other
|
||
seamen my first mast-head came round.
|
||
|
||
In most American whalemen the mast-heads are manned almost simultaneously with
|
||
the vessel’s leaving her port; even though she may have fifteen thousand miles,
|
||
and more, to sail ere reaching her proper cruising ground. And if, after a
|
||
three, four, or five years’ voyage she is drawing nigh home with anything empty
|
||
in her—say, an empty vial even—then, her mast-heads are kept manned to the last;
|
||
and not till her skysail-poles sail in among the spires of the port, does she
|
||
altogether relinquish the hope of capturing one whale more.
|
||
|
||
Now, as the business of standing mast-heads, ashore or afloat, is a very ancient
|
||
and interesting one, let us in some measure expatiate here. I take it, that the
|
||
earliest standers of mast-heads were the old Egyptians; because, in all my
|
||
researches, I find none prior to them. For though their progenitors, the
|
||
builders of Babel, must doubtless, by their tower, have intended to rear the
|
||
loftiest mast-head in all Asia, or Africa either; yet (ere the final truck was
|
||
put to it) as that great stone mast of theirs may be said to have gone by the
|
||
board, in the dread gale of God’s wrath; therefore, we cannot give these Babel
|
||
builders priority over the Egyptians. And that the Egyptians were a nation of
|
||
mast-head standers, is an assertion based upon the general belief among
|
||
archæologists, that the first pyramids were founded for astronomical purposes: a
|
||
theory singularly supported by the peculiar stair-like formation of all four
|
||
sides of those edifices; whereby, with prodigious long upliftings of their legs,
|
||
those old astronomers were wont to mount to the apex, and sing out for new
|
||
stars; even as the look-outs of a modern ship sing out for a sail, or a whale
|
||
just bearing in sight. In Saint Stylites, the famous Christian hermit of old
|
||
times, who built him a lofty stone pillar in the desert and spent the whole
|
||
latter portion of his life on its summit, hoisting his food from the ground with
|
||
a tackle; in him we have a remarkable instance of a dauntless
|
||
stander-of-mast-heads; who was not to be driven from his place by fogs or
|
||
frosts, rain, hail, or sleet; but valiantly facing everything out to the last,
|
||
literally died at his post. Of modern standers-of-mast-heads we have but a
|
||
lifeless set; mere stone, iron, and bronze men; who, though well capable of
|
||
facing out a stiff gale, are still entirely incompetent to the business of
|
||
singing out upon discovering any strange sight. There is Napoleon; who, upon the
|
||
top of the column of Vendome, stands with arms folded, some one hundred and
|
||
fifty feet in the air; careless, now, who rules the decks below; whether Louis
|
||
Philippe, Louis Blanc, or Louis the Devil. Great Washington, too, stands high
|
||
aloft on his towering main-mast in Baltimore, and like one of Hercules’ pillars,
|
||
his column marks that point of human grandeur beyond which few mortals will go.
|
||
Admiral Nelson, also, on a capstan of gun-metal, stands his mast-head in
|
||
Trafalgar Square; and ever when most obscured by that London smoke, token is yet
|
||
given that a hidden hero is there; for where there is smoke, must be fire. But
|
||
neither great Washington, nor Napoleon, nor Nelson, will answer a single hail
|
||
from below, however madly invoked to befriend by their counsels the distracted
|
||
decks upon which they gaze; however it may be surmised, that their spirits
|
||
penetrate through the thick haze of the future, and descry what shoals and what
|
||
rocks must be shunned.
|
||
|
||
It may seem unwarrantable to couple in any respect the mast-head standers of the
|
||
land with those of the sea; but that in truth it is not so, is plainly evinced
|
||
by an item for which Obed Macy, the sole historian of Nantucket, stands
|
||
accountable. The worthy Obed tells us, that in the early times of the whale
|
||
fishery, ere ships were regularly launched in pursuit of the game, the people of
|
||
that island erected lofty spars along the sea-coast, to which the look-outs
|
||
ascended by means of nailed cleats, something as fowls go upstairs in a
|
||
hen-house. A few years ago this same plan was adopted by the Bay whalemen of New
|
||
Zealand, who, upon descrying the game, gave notice to the ready-manned boats
|
||
nigh the beach. But this custom has now become obsolete; turn we then to the one
|
||
proper mast-head, that of a whale-ship at sea. The three mast-heads are kept
|
||
manned from sun-rise to sun-set; the seamen taking their regular turns (as at
|
||
the helm), and relieving each other every two hours. In the serene weather of
|
||
the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant the mast-head; nay, to a dreamy
|
||
meditative man it is delightful. There you stand, a hundred feet above the
|
||
silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts,
|
||
while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of
|
||
the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at
|
||
old Rhodes. There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with
|
||
nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy
|
||
trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in
|
||
this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no
|
||
news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never
|
||
delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions;
|
||
bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what
|
||
you shall have for dinner—for all your meals for three years and more are snugly
|
||
stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable.
|
||
|
||
In one of those southern whalesmen, on a long three or four years’ voyage, as
|
||
often happens, the sum of the various hours you spend at the mast-head would
|
||
amount to several entire months. And it is much to be deplored that the place to
|
||
which you devote so considerable a portion of the whole term of your natural
|
||
life, should be so sadly destitute of anything approaching to a cosy
|
||
inhabitiveness, or adapted to breed a comfortable localness of feeling, such as
|
||
pertains to a bed, a hammock, a hearse, a sentry box, a pulpit, a coach, or any
|
||
other of those small and snug contrivances in which men temporarily isolate
|
||
themselves. Your most usual point of perch is the head of the t’ gallant-mast,
|
||
where you stand upon two thin parallel sticks (almost peculiar to whalemen)
|
||
called the t’ gallant cross-trees. Here, tossed about by the sea, the beginner
|
||
feels about as cosy as he would standing on a bull’s horns. To be sure, in cold
|
||
weather you may carry your house aloft with you, in the shape of a watch-coat;
|
||
but properly speaking the thickest watch-coat is no more of a house than the
|
||
unclad body; for as the soul is glued inside of its fleshy tabernacle, and
|
||
cannot freely move about in it, nor even move out of it, without running great
|
||
risk of perishing (like an ignorant pilgrim crossing the snowy Alps in winter);
|
||
so a watch-coat is not so much of a house as it is a mere envelope, or
|
||
additional skin encasing you. You cannot put a shelf or chest of drawers in your
|
||
body, and no more can you make a convenient closet of your watch-coat.
|
||
|
||
Concerning all this, it is much to be deplored that the mast-heads of a southern
|
||
whale ship are unprovided with those enviable little tents or pulpits, called
|
||
crow’s-nests, in which the look-outs of a Greenland whaler are protected from
|
||
the inclement weather of the frozen seas. In the fireside narrative of Captain
|
||
Sleet, entitled “A Voyage among the Icebergs, in quest of the Greenland Whale,
|
||
and incidentally for the re-discovery of the Lost Icelandic Colonies of Old
|
||
Greenland;” in this admirable volume, all standers of mast-heads are furnished
|
||
with a charmingly circumstantial account of the then recently invented
|
||
crow’s-nest of the Glacier, which was the name of Captain Sleet’s good craft. He
|
||
called it the Sleet’s crow’s-nest, in honor of himself; he being the original
|
||
inventor and patentee, and free from all ridiculous false delicacy, and holding
|
||
that if we call our own children after our own names (we fathers being the
|
||
original inventors and patentees), so likewise should we denominate after
|
||
ourselves any other apparatus we may beget. In shape, the Sleet’s crow’s-nest is
|
||
something like a large tierce or pipe; it is open above, however, where it is
|
||
furnished with a movable side-screen to keep to windward of your head in a hard
|
||
gale. Being fixed on the summit of the mast, you ascend into it through a little
|
||
trap-hatch in the bottom. On the after side, or side next the stern of the ship,
|
||
is a comfortable seat, with a locker underneath for umbrellas, comforters, and
|
||
coats. In front is a leather rack, in which to keep your speaking trumpet, pipe,
|
||
telescope, and other nautical conveniences. When Captain Sleet in person stood
|
||
his mast-head in this crow’s-nest of his, he tells us that he always had a rifle
|
||
with him (also fixed in the rack), together with a powder flask and shot, for
|
||
the purpose of popping off the stray narwhales, or vagrant sea unicorns
|
||
infesting those waters; for you cannot successfully shoot at them from the deck
|
||
owing to the resistance of the water, but to shoot down upon them is a very
|
||
different thing. Now, it was plainly a labor of love for Captain Sleet to
|
||
describe, as he does, all the little detailed conveniences of his crow’s-nest;
|
||
but though he so enlarges upon many of these, and though he treats us to a very
|
||
scientific account of his experiments in this crow’s-nest, with a small compass
|
||
he kept there for the purpose of counteracting the errors resulting from what is
|
||
called the “local attraction” of all binnacle magnets; an error ascribable to
|
||
the horizontal vicinity of the iron in the ship’s planks, and in the Glacier’s
|
||
case, perhaps, to there having been so many broken-down blacksmiths among her
|
||
crew; I say, that though the Captain is very discreet and scientific here, yet,
|
||
for all his learned “binnacle deviations,” “azimuth compass observations,” and
|
||
“approximate errors,” he knows very well, Captain Sleet, that he was not so much
|
||
immersed in those profound magnetic meditations, as to fail being attracted
|
||
occasionally towards that well replenished little case-bottle, so nicely tucked
|
||
in on one side of his crow’s nest, within easy reach of his hand. Though, upon
|
||
the whole, I greatly admire and even love the brave, the honest, and learned
|
||
Captain; yet I take it very ill of him that he should so utterly ignore that
|
||
case-bottle, seeing what a faithful friend and comforter it must have been,
|
||
while with mittened fingers and hooded head he was studying the mathematics
|
||
aloft there in that bird’s nest within three or four perches of the pole.
|
||
|
||
But if we Southern whale-fishers are not so snugly housed aloft as Captain Sleet
|
||
and his Greenlandmen were; yet that disadvantage is greatly counter-balanced by
|
||
the widely contrasting serenity of those seductive seas in which we South
|
||
fishers mostly float. For one, I used to lounge up the rigging very leisurely,
|
||
resting in the top to have a chat with Queequeg, or any one else off duty whom I
|
||
might find there; then ascending a little way further, and throwing a lazy leg
|
||
over the top-sail yard, take a preliminary view of the watery pastures, and so
|
||
at last mount to my ultimate destination.
|
||
|
||
Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but sorry
|
||
guard. With the problem of the universe revolving in me, how could I—being left
|
||
completely to myself at such a thought-engendering altitude—how could I but
|
||
lightly hold my obligations to observe all whale-ships’ standing orders, “Keep
|
||
your weather eye open, and sing out every time.”
|
||
|
||
And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of Nantucket!
|
||
Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow
|
||
eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who offers to ship with the
|
||
Phædon instead of Bowditch in his head. Beware of such an one, I say; your
|
||
whales must be seen before they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed young
|
||
Platonist will tow you ten wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of
|
||
sperm the richer. Nor are these monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the
|
||
whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and
|
||
absent-minded young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking
|
||
sentiment in tar and blubber. Childe Harold not unfrequently perches himself
|
||
upon the mast-head of some luckless disappointed whale-ship, and in moody phrase
|
||
ejaculates:—
|
||
|
||
“Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand
|
||
blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain.”
|
||
|
||
Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded young
|
||
philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient “interest” in
|
||
the voyage; half-hinting that they are so hopelessly lost to all honorable
|
||
ambition, as that in their secret souls they would rather not see whales than
|
||
otherwise. But all in vain; those young Platonists have a notion that their
|
||
vision is imperfect; they are short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the
|
||
visual nerve? They have left their opera-glasses at home.
|
||
|
||
“Why, thou monkey,” said a harpooneer to one of these lads, “we’ve been cruising
|
||
now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale yet. Whales are
|
||
scarce as hen’s teeth whenever thou art up here.” Perhaps they were; or perhaps
|
||
there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an
|
||
opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded
|
||
youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his
|
||
identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep,
|
||
blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange,
|
||
half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered,
|
||
uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those
|
||
elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it.
|
||
In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused
|
||
through time and space; like Cranmer’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at
|
||
last a part of every shore the round globe over.
|
||
|
||
There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently
|
||
rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable
|
||
tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand
|
||
an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over
|
||
Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather,
|
||
with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the
|
||
summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 36. The Quarter-Deck.
|
||
|
||
(Enter Ahab: Then, all.)
|
||
|
||
It was not a great while after the affair of the pipe, that one morning shortly
|
||
after breakfast, Ahab, as was his wont, ascended the cabin-gangway to the deck.
|
||
There most sea-captains usually walk at that hour, as country gentlemen, after
|
||
the same meal, take a few turns in the garden.
|
||
|
||
Soon his steady, ivory stride was heard, as to and fro he paced his old rounds,
|
||
upon planks so familiar to his tread, that they were all over dented, like
|
||
geological stones, with the peculiar mark of his walk. Did you fixedly gaze,
|
||
too, upon that ribbed and dented brow; there also, you would see still stranger
|
||
foot-prints—the foot-prints of his one unsleeping, ever-pacing thought.
|
||
|
||
But on the occasion in question, those dents looked deeper, even as his nervous
|
||
step that morning left a deeper mark. And, so full of his thought was Ahab, that
|
||
at every uniform turn that he made, now at the main-mast and now at the
|
||
binnacle, you could almost see that thought turn in him as he turned, and pace
|
||
in him as he paced; so completely possessing him, indeed, that it all but seemed
|
||
the inward mould of every outer movement.
|
||
|
||
“D’ye mark him, Flask?” whispered Stubb; “the chick that’s in him pecks the
|
||
shell. ’Twill soon be out.”
|
||
|
||
The hours wore on;—Ahab now shut up within his cabin; anon, pacing the deck,
|
||
with the same intense bigotry of purpose in his aspect.
|
||
|
||
It drew near the close of day. Suddenly he came to a halt by the bulwarks, and
|
||
inserting his bone leg into the auger-hole there, and with one hand grasping a
|
||
shroud, he ordered Starbuck to send everybody aft.
|
||
|
||
“Sir!” said the mate, astonished at an order seldom or never given on ship-board
|
||
except in some extraordinary case.
|
||
|
||
“Send everybody aft,” repeated Ahab. “Mast-heads, there! come down!”
|
||
|
||
When the entire ship’s company were assembled, and with curious and not wholly
|
||
unapprehensive faces, were eyeing him, for he looked not unlike the weather
|
||
horizon when a storm is coming up, Ahab, after rapidly glancing over the
|
||
bulwarks, and then darting his eyes among the crew, started from his standpoint;
|
||
and as though not a soul were nigh him resumed his heavy turns upon the deck.
|
||
With bent head and half-slouched hat he continued to pace, unmindful of the
|
||
wondering whispering among the men; till Stubb cautiously whispered to Flask,
|
||
that Ahab must have summoned them there for the purpose of witnessing a
|
||
pedestrian feat. But this did not last long. Vehemently pausing, he cried:—
|
||
|
||
“What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?”
|
||
|
||
“Sing out for him!” was the impulsive rejoinder from a score of clubbed voices.
|
||
|
||
“Good!” cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones; observing the hearty
|
||
animation into which his unexpected question had so magnetically thrown them.
|
||
|
||
“And what do ye next, men?”
|
||
|
||
“Lower away, and after him!”
|
||
|
||
“And what tune is it ye pull to, men?”
|
||
|
||
“A dead whale or a stove boat!”
|
||
|
||
More and more strangely and fiercely glad and approving, grew the countenance of
|
||
the old man at every shout; while the mariners began to gaze curiously at each
|
||
other, as if marvelling how it was that they themselves became so excited at
|
||
such seemingly purposeless questions.
|
||
|
||
But, they were all eagerness again, as Ahab, now half-revolving in his
|
||
pivot-hole, with one hand reaching high up a shroud, and tightly, almost
|
||
convulsively grasping it, addressed them thus:—
|
||
|
||
“All ye mast-headers have before now heard me give orders about a white whale.
|
||
Look ye! d’ye see this Spanish ounce of gold?”—holding up a broad bright coin to
|
||
the sun—“it is a sixteen dollar piece, men. D’ye see it? Mr. Starbuck, hand me
|
||
yon top-maul.”
|
||
|
||
While the mate was getting the hammer, Ahab, without speaking, was slowly
|
||
rubbing the gold piece against the skirts of his jacket, as if to heighten its
|
||
lustre, and without using any words was meanwhile lowly humming to himself,
|
||
producing a sound so strangely muffled and inarticulate that it seemed the
|
||
mechanical humming of the wheels of his vitality in him.
|
||
|
||
Receiving the top-maul from Starbuck, he advanced towards the main-mast with the
|
||
hammer uplifted in one hand, exhibiting the gold with the other, and with a high
|
||
raised voice exclaiming: “Whosoever of ye raises me a white-headed whale with a
|
||
wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw; whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed
|
||
whale, with three holes punctured in his starboard fluke—look ye, whosoever of
|
||
ye raises me that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!”
|
||
|
||
“Huzza! huzza!” cried the seamen, as with swinging tarpaulins they hailed the
|
||
act of nailing the gold to the mast.
|
||
|
||
“It’s a white whale, I say,” resumed Ahab, as he threw down the topmaul: “a
|
||
white whale. Skin your eyes for him, men; look sharp for white water; if ye see
|
||
but a bubble, sing out.”
|
||
|
||
All this while Tashtego, Daggoo, and Queequeg had looked on with even more
|
||
intense interest and surprise than the rest, and at the mention of the wrinkled
|
||
brow and crooked jaw they had started as if each was separately touched by some
|
||
specific recollection.
|
||
|
||
“Captain Ahab,” said Tashtego, “that white whale must be the same that some call
|
||
Moby Dick.”
|
||
|
||
“Moby Dick?” shouted Ahab. “Do ye know the white whale then, Tash?”
|
||
|
||
“Does he fan-tail a little curious, sir, before he goes down?” said the
|
||
Gay-Header deliberately.
|
||
|
||
“And has he a curious spout, too,” said Daggoo, “very bushy, even for a
|
||
parmacetty, and mighty quick, Captain Ahab?”
|
||
|
||
“And he have one, two, three—oh! good many iron in him hide, too, Captain,”
|
||
cried Queequeg disjointedly, “all twiske-tee be-twisk, like him—him—” faltering
|
||
hard for a word, and screwing his hand round and round as though uncorking a
|
||
bottle—“like him—him—”
|
||
|
||
“Corkscrew!” cried Ahab, “aye, Queequeg, the harpoons lie all twisted and
|
||
wrenched in him; aye, Daggoo, his spout is a big one, like a whole shock of
|
||
wheat, and white as a pile of our Nantucket wool after the great annual
|
||
sheep-shearing; aye, Tashtego, and he fan-tails like a split jib in a squall.
|
||
Death and devils! men, it is Moby Dick ye have seen—Moby Dick—Moby Dick!”
|
||
|
||
“Captain Ahab,” said Starbuck, who, with Stubb and Flask, had thus far been
|
||
eyeing his superior with increasing surprise, but at last seemed struck with a
|
||
thought which somewhat explained all the wonder. “Captain Ahab, I have heard of
|
||
Moby Dick—but it was not Moby Dick that took off thy leg?”
|
||
|
||
“Who told thee that?” cried Ahab; then pausing, “Aye, Starbuck; aye, my hearties
|
||
all round; it was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick that brought me to this
|
||
dead stump I stand on now. Aye, aye,” he shouted with a terrific, loud, animal
|
||
sob, like that of a heart-stricken moose; “Aye, aye! it was that accursed white
|
||
whale that razed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!” Then
|
||
tossing both arms, with measureless imprecations he shouted out: “Aye, aye! and
|
||
I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway
|
||
Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up. And this is what
|
||
ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and
|
||
over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say
|
||
ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave.”
|
||
|
||
“Aye, aye!” shouted the harpooneers and seamen, running closer to the excited
|
||
old man: “A sharp eye for the white whale; a sharp lance for Moby Dick!”
|
||
|
||
“God bless ye,” he seemed to half sob and half shout. “God bless ye, men.
|
||
Steward! go draw the great measure of grog. But what’s this long face about, Mr.
|
||
Starbuck; wilt thou not chase the white whale? art not game for Moby Dick?”
|
||
|
||
“I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too, Captain Ahab, if
|
||
it fairly comes in the way of the business we follow; but I came here to hunt
|
||
whales, not my commander’s vengeance. How many barrels will thy vengeance yield
|
||
thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our
|
||
Nantucket market.”
|
||
|
||
“Nantucket market! Hoot! But come closer, Starbuck; thou requirest a little
|
||
lower layer. If money’s to be the measurer, man, and the accountants have
|
||
computed their great counting-house the globe, by girdling it with guineas, one
|
||
to every three parts of an inch; then, let me tell thee, that my vengeance will
|
||
fetch a great premium here!”
|
||
|
||
“He smites his chest,” whispered Stubb, “what’s that for? methinks it rings most
|
||
vast, but hollow.”
|
||
|
||
“Vengeance on a dumb brute!” cried Starbuck, “that simply smote thee from
|
||
blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems
|
||
blasphemous.”
|
||
|
||
“Hark ye yet again—the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as
|
||
pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there,
|
||
some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features
|
||
from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!
|
||
How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me,
|
||
the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s
|
||
naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him
|
||
outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable
|
||
thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white
|
||
whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy,
|
||
man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could
|
||
I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy
|
||
presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play.
|
||
Who’s over me? Truth hath no confines. Take off thine eye! more intolerable than
|
||
fiends’ glarings is a doltish stare! So, so; thou reddenest and palest; my heat
|
||
has melted thee to anger-glow. But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat, that
|
||
thing unsays itself. There are men from whom warm words are small indignity. I
|
||
meant not to incense thee. Let it go. Look! see yonder Turkish cheeks of spotted
|
||
tawn—living, breathing pictures painted by the sun. The Pagan leopards—the
|
||
unrecking and unworshipping things, that live; and seek, and give no reasons for
|
||
the torrid life they feel! The crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all
|
||
with Ahab, in this matter of the whale? See Stubb! he laughs! See yonder
|
||
Chilian! he snorts to think of it. Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one
|
||
tost sapling cannot, Starbuck! And what is it? Reckon it. ’Tis but to help
|
||
strike a fin; no wondrous feat for Starbuck. What is it more? From this one poor
|
||
hunt, then, the best lance out of all Nantucket, surely he will not hang back,
|
||
when every foremast-hand has clutched a whetstone? Ah! constrainings seize thee;
|
||
I see! the billow lifts thee! Speak, but speak!—Aye, aye! thy silence, then,
|
||
that voices thee. (Aside) Something shot from my dilated nostrils, he has
|
||
inhaled it in his lungs. Starbuck now is mine; cannot oppose me now, without
|
||
rebellion.”
|
||
|
||
“God keep me!—keep us all!” murmured Starbuck, lowly.
|
||
|
||
But in his joy at the enchanted, tacit acquiescence of the mate, Ahab did not
|
||
hear his foreboding invocation; nor yet the low laugh from the hold; nor yet the
|
||
presaging vibrations of the winds in the cordage; nor yet the hollow flap of the
|
||
sails against the masts, as for a moment their hearts sank in. For again
|
||
Starbuck’s downcast eyes lighted up with the stubbornness of life; the
|
||
subterranean laugh died away; the winds blew on; the sails filled out; the ship
|
||
heaved and rolled as before. Ah, ye admonitions and warnings! why stay ye not
|
||
when ye come? But rather are ye predictions than warnings, ye shadows! Yet not
|
||
so much predictions from without, as verifications of the foregoing things
|
||
within. For with little external to constrain us, the innermost necessities in
|
||
our being, these still drive us on.
|
||
|
||
“The measure! the measure!” cried Ahab.
|
||
|
||
Receiving the brimming pewter, and turning to the harpooneers, he ordered them
|
||
to produce their weapons. Then ranging them before him near the capstan, with
|
||
their harpoons in their hands, while his three mates stood at his side with
|
||
their lances, and the rest of the ship’s company formed a circle round the
|
||
group; he stood for an instant searchingly eyeing every man of his crew. But
|
||
those wild eyes met his, as the bloodshot eyes of the prairie wolves meet the
|
||
eye of their leader, ere he rushes on at their head in the trail of the bison;
|
||
but, alas! only to fall into the hidden snare of the Indian.
|
||
|
||
“Drink and pass!” he cried, handing the heavy charged flagon to the nearest
|
||
seaman. “The crew alone now drink. Round with it, round! Short draughts—long
|
||
swallows, men; ’tis hot as Satan’s hoof. So, so; it goes round excellently. It
|
||
spiralizes in ye; forks out at the serpent-snapping eye. Well done; almost
|
||
drained. That way it went, this way it comes. Hand it me—here’s a hollow! Men,
|
||
ye seem the years; so brimming life is gulped and gone. Steward, refill!
|
||
|
||
“Attend now, my braves. I have mustered ye all round this capstan; and ye mates,
|
||
flank me with your lances; and ye harpooneers, stand there with your irons; and
|
||
ye, stout mariners, ring me in, that I may in some sort revive a noble custom of
|
||
my fisherman fathers before me. O men, you will yet see that—Ha! boy, come back?
|
||
bad pennies come not sooner. Hand it me. Why, now, this pewter had run brimming
|
||
again, wer’t not thou St. Vitus’ imp—away, thou ague!
|
||
|
||
“Advance, ye mates! Cross your lances full before me. Well done! Let me touch
|
||
the axis.” So saying, with extended arm, he grasped the three level, radiating
|
||
lances at their crossed centre; while so doing, suddenly and nervously twitched
|
||
them; meanwhile, glancing intently from Starbuck to Stubb; from Stubb to Flask.
|
||
It seemed as though, by some nameless, interior volition, he would fain have
|
||
shocked into them the same fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of
|
||
his own magnetic life. The three mates quailed before his strong, sustained, and
|
||
mystic aspect. Stubb and Flask looked sideways from him; the honest eye of
|
||
Starbuck fell downright.
|
||
|
||
“In vain!” cried Ahab; “but, maybe, ’tis well. For did ye three but once take
|
||
the full-forced shock, then mine own electric thing, that had perhaps expired
|
||
from out me. Perchance, too, it would have dropped ye dead. Perchance ye need it
|
||
not. Down lances! And now, ye mates, I do appoint ye three cupbearers to my
|
||
three pagan kinsmen there—yon three most honorable gentlemen and noblemen, my
|
||
valiant harpooneers. Disdain the task? What, when the great Pope washes the feet
|
||
of beggars, using his tiara for ewer? Oh, my sweet cardinals! your own
|
||
condescension, that shall bend ye to it. I do not order ye; ye will it. Cut your
|
||
seizings and draw the poles, ye harpooneers!”
|
||
|
||
Silently obeying the order, the three harpooneers now stood with the detached
|
||
iron part of their harpoons, some three feet long, held, barbs up, before him.
|
||
|
||
“Stab me not with that keen steel! Cant them; cant them over! know ye not the
|
||
goblet end? Turn up the socket! So, so; now, ye cup-bearers, advance. The irons!
|
||
take them; hold them while I fill!” Forthwith, slowly going from one officer to
|
||
the other, he brimmed the harpoon sockets with the fiery waters from the pewter.
|
||
|
||
“Now, three to three, ye stand. Commend the murderous chalices! Bestow them, ye
|
||
who are now made parties to this indissoluble league. Ha! Starbuck! but the deed
|
||
is done! Yon ratifying sun now waits to sit upon it. Drink, ye harpooneers!
|
||
drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat’s bow—Death to Moby
|
||
Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!” The long,
|
||
barbed steel goblets were lifted; and to cries and maledictions against the
|
||
white whale, the spirits were simultaneously quaffed down with a hiss. Starbuck
|
||
paled, and turned, and shivered. Once more, and finally, the replenished pewter
|
||
went the rounds among the frantic crew; when, waving his free hand to them, they
|
||
all dispersed; and Ahab retired within his cabin.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 37. Sunset.
|
||
|
||
The cabin; by the stern windows; Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out.
|
||
|
||
I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where’er I sail. The
|
||
envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass.
|
||
|
||
Yonder, by ever-brimming goblet’s rim, the warm waves blush like wine. The gold
|
||
brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun—slow dived from noon—goes down; my soul
|
||
mounts up! she wearies with her endless hill. Is, then, the crown too heavy that
|
||
I wear? this Iron Crown of Lombardy. Yet is it bright with many a gem; I the
|
||
wearer, see not its far flashings; but darkly feel that I wear that, that
|
||
dazzlingly confounds. ’Tis iron—that I know—not gold. ’Tis split, too—that I
|
||
feel; the jagged edge galls me so, my brain seems to beat against the solid
|
||
metal; aye, steel skull, mine; the sort that needs no helmet in the most
|
||
brain-battering fight!
|
||
|
||
Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred me, so
|
||
the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness
|
||
is anguish to me, since I can ne’er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I
|
||
lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned
|
||
in the midst of Paradise! Good night—good night! (waving his hand, he moves from
|
||
the window.)
|
||
|
||
’Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find one stubborn, at the least; but my
|
||
one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they revolve. Or, if
|
||
you will, like so many ant-hills of powder, they all stand before me; and I
|
||
their match. Oh, hard! that to fire others, the match itself must needs be
|
||
wasting! What I’ve dared, I’ve willed; and what I’ve willed, I’ll do! They think
|
||
me mad—Starbuck does; but I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness
|
||
that’s only calm to comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should be
|
||
dismembered; and—Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my
|
||
dismemberer. Now, then, be the prophet and the fulfiller one. That’s more than
|
||
ye, ye great gods, ever were. I laugh and hoot at ye, ye cricket-players, ye
|
||
pugilists, ye deaf Burkes and blinded Bendigoes! I will not say as schoolboys do
|
||
to bullies—Take some one of your own size; don’t pommel me! No, ye’ve knocked me
|
||
down, and I am up again; but ye have run and hidden. Come forth from behind your
|
||
cotton bags! I have no long gun to reach ye. Come, Ahab’s compliments to ye;
|
||
come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve
|
||
yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid
|
||
with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges,
|
||
through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush!
|
||
Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 38. Dusk.
|
||
|
||
By the Mainmast; Starbuck leaning against it.
|
||
|
||
My soul is more than matched; she’s overmanned; and by a madman! Insufferable
|
||
sting, that sanity should ground arms on such a field! But he drilled deep down,
|
||
and blasted all my reason out of me! I think I see his impious end; but feel
|
||
that I must help him to it. Will I, nill I, the ineffable thing has tied me to
|
||
him; tows me with a cable I have no knife to cut. Horrible old man! Who’s over
|
||
him, he cries;—aye, he would be a democrat to all above; look, how he lords it
|
||
over all below! Oh! I plainly see my miserable office,—to obey, rebelling; and
|
||
worse yet, to hate with touch of pity! For in his eyes I read some lurid woe
|
||
would shrivel me up, had I it. Yet is there hope. Time and tide flow wide. The
|
||
hated whale has the round watery world to swim in, as the small gold-fish has
|
||
its glassy globe. His heaven-insulting purpose, God may wedge aside. I would up
|
||
heart, were it not like lead. But my whole clock’s run down; my heart the
|
||
all-controlling weight, I have no key to lift again.
|
||
|
||
[A burst of revelry from the forecastle.]
|
||
|
||
Oh, God! to sail with such a heathen crew that have small touch of human mothers
|
||
in them! Whelped somewhere by the sharkish sea. The white whale is their
|
||
demigorgon. Hark! the infernal orgies! that revelry is forward! mark the
|
||
unfaltering silence aft! Methinks it pictures life. Foremost through the
|
||
sparkling sea shoots on the gay, embattled, bantering bow, but only to drag dark
|
||
Ahab after it, where he broods within his sternward cabin, builded over the dead
|
||
water of the wake, and further on, hunted by its wolfish gurglings. The long
|
||
howl thrills me through! Peace! ye revellers, and set the watch! Oh, life! ’tis
|
||
in an hour like this, with soul beat down and held to knowledge,—as wild,
|
||
untutored things are forced to feed—Oh, life! ’tis now that I do feel the latent
|
||
horror in thee! but ’tis not me! that horror’s out of me! and with the soft
|
||
feeling of the human in me, yet will I try to fight ye, ye grim, phantom
|
||
futures! Stand by me, hold me, bind me, O ye blessed influences!
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 39. First Night-Watch.
|
||
|
||
Fore-Top.
|
||
|
||
(Stubb solus, and mending a brace.)
|
||
|
||
Ha! ha! ha! ha! hem! clear my throat!—I’ve been thinking over it ever since, and
|
||
that ha, ha’s the final consequence. Why so? Because a laugh’s the wisest,
|
||
easiest answer to all that’s queer; and come what will, one comfort’s always
|
||
left—that unfailing comfort is, it’s all predestinated. I heard not all his talk
|
||
with Starbuck; but to my poor eye Starbuck then looked something as I the other
|
||
evening felt. Be sure the old Mogul has fixed him, too. I twigged it, knew it;
|
||
had had the gift, might readily have prophesied it—for when I clapped my eye
|
||
upon his skull I saw it. Well, Stubb, wise Stubb—that’s my title—well, Stubb,
|
||
what of it, Stubb? Here’s a carcase. I know not all that may be coming, but be
|
||
it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing. Such a waggish leering as lurks in all
|
||
your horribles! I feel funny. Fa, la! lirra, skirra! What’s my juicy little pear
|
||
at home doing now? Crying its eyes out?—Giving a party to the last arrived
|
||
harpooneers, I dare say, gay as a frigate’s pennant, and so am I—fa, la! lirra,
|
||
skirra! Oh—
|
||
|
||
We’ll drink to-night with hearts as light, To love, as gay and fleeting As
|
||
bubbles that swim, on the beaker’s brim, And break on the lips while
|
||
meeting.
|
||
|
||
A brave stave that—who calls? Mr. Starbuck? Aye, aye, sir—(Aside) he’s my
|
||
superior, he has his too, if I’m not mistaken.—Aye, aye, sir, just through with
|
||
this job—coming.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 40. Midnight, Forecastle.
|
||
|
||
HARPOONEERS AND SAILORS.
|
||
|
||
(Foresail rises and discovers the watch standing, lounging, leaning, and lying
|
||
in various attitudes, all singing in chorus.)
|
||
|
||
Farewell and adieu to you, Spanish ladies! Farewell and adieu to you,
|
||
ladies of Spain! Our captain’s commanded.—
|
||
|
||
1ST NANTUCKET SAILOR. Oh, boys, don’t be sentimental; it’s bad for the
|
||
digestion! Take a tonic, follow me!
|
||
|
||
(Sings, and all follow.)
|
||
|
||
Our captain stood upon the deck, A spy-glass in his hand, A viewing of those
|
||
gallant whales That blew at every strand. Oh, your tubs in your boats, my
|
||
boys, And by your braces stand, And we’ll have one of those fine whales,
|
||
Hand, boys, over hand! So, be cheery, my lads! may your hearts never fail!
|
||
While the bold harpooner is striking the whale!
|
||
|
||
MATE’S VOICE FROM THE QUARTER-DECK. Eight bells there, forward!
|
||
|
||
2ND NANTUCKET SAILOR. Avast the chorus! Eight bells there! d’ye hear, bell-boy?
|
||
Strike the bell eight, thou Pip! thou blackling! and let me call the watch. I’ve
|
||
the sort of mouth for that—the hogshead mouth. So, so, (thrusts his head down
|
||
the scuttle,) Star-bo-l-e-e-n-s, a-h-o-y! Eight bells there below! Tumble up!
|
||
|
||
DUTCH SAILOR. Grand snoozing to-night, maty; fat night for that. I mark this in
|
||
our old Mogul’s wine; it’s quite as deadening to some as filliping to others. We
|
||
sing; they sleep—aye, lie down there, like ground-tier butts. At ’em again!
|
||
There, take this copper-pump, and hail ’em through it. Tell ’em to avast
|
||
dreaming of their lasses. Tell ’em it’s the resurrection; they must kiss their
|
||
last, and come to judgment. That’s the way—that’s it; thy throat ain’t spoiled
|
||
with eating Amsterdam butter.
|
||
|
||
FRENCH SAILOR. Hist, boys! let’s have a jig or two before we ride to anchor in
|
||
Blanket Bay. What say ye? There comes the other watch. Stand by all legs! Pip!
|
||
little Pip! hurrah with your tambourine!
|
||
|
||
PIP. (Sulky and sleepy.) Don’t know where it is.
|
||
|
||
FRENCH SAILOR. Beat thy belly, then, and wag thy ears. Jig it, men, I say;
|
||
merry’s the word; hurrah! Damn me, won’t you dance? Form, now, Indian-file, and
|
||
gallop into the double-shuffle? Throw yourselves! Legs! legs!
|
||
|
||
ICELAND SAILOR. I don’t like your floor, maty; it’s too springy to my taste. I’m
|
||
used to ice-floors. I’m sorry to throw cold water on the subject; but excuse me.
|
||
|
||
MALTESE SAILOR. Me too; where’s your girls? Who but a fool would take his left
|
||
hand by his right, and say to himself, how d’ye do? Partners! I must have
|
||
partners!
|
||
|
||
SICILIAN SAILOR. Aye; girls and a green!—then I’ll hop with ye; yea, turn
|
||
grasshopper!
|
||
|
||
LONG-ISLAND SAILOR. Well, well, ye sulkies, there’s plenty more of us. Hoe corn
|
||
when you may, say I. All legs go to harvest soon. Ah! here comes the music; now
|
||
for it!
|
||
|
||
AZORE SAILOR. (Ascending, and pitching the tambourine up the scuttle.) Here you
|
||
are, Pip; and there’s the windlass-bitts; up you mount! Now, boys! (The half of
|
||
them dance to the tambourine; some go below; some sleep or lie among the coils
|
||
of rigging. Oaths a-plenty.)
|
||
|
||
AZORE SAILOR. (Dancing) Go it, Pip! Bang it, bell-boy! Rig it, dig it, stig it,
|
||
quig it, bell-boy! Make fire-flies; break the jinglers!
|
||
|
||
PIP. Jinglers, you say?—there goes another, dropped off; I pound it so.
|
||
|
||
CHINA SAILOR. Rattle thy teeth, then, and pound away; make a pagoda of thyself.
|
||
|
||
FRENCH SAILOR. Merry-mad! Hold up thy hoop, Pip, till I jump through it! Split
|
||
jibs! tear yourselves!
|
||
|
||
TASHTEGO. (Quietly smoking.) That’s a white man; he calls that fun: humph! I
|
||
save my sweat.
|
||
|
||
OLD MANX SAILOR. I wonder whether those jolly lads bethink them of what they are
|
||
dancing over. I’ll dance over your grave, I will—that’s the bitterest threat of
|
||
your night-women, that beat head-winds round corners. O Christ! to think of the
|
||
green navies and the green-skulled crews! Well, well; belike the whole world’s a
|
||
ball, as you scholars have it; and so ’tis right to make one ballroom of it.
|
||
Dance on, lads, you’re young; I was once.
|
||
|
||
3D NANTUCKET SAILOR. Spell oh!—whew! this is worse than pulling after whales in
|
||
a calm—give us a whiff, Tash.
|
||
|
||
(They cease dancing, and gather in clusters. Meantime the sky darkens—the wind
|
||
rises.)
|
||
|
||
LASCAR SAILOR. By Brahma! boys, it’ll be douse sail soon. The sky-born,
|
||
high-tide Ganges turned to wind! Thou showest thy black brow, Seeva!
|
||
|
||
MALTESE SAILOR. (Reclining and shaking his cap.) It’s the waves—the snow’s caps
|
||
turn to jig it now. They’ll shake their tassels soon. Now would all the waves
|
||
were women, then I’d go drown, and chassee with them evermore! There’s naught so
|
||
sweet on earth—heaven may not match it!—as those swift glances of warm, wild
|
||
bosoms in the dance, when the over-arboring arms hide such ripe, bursting
|
||
grapes.
|
||
|
||
SICILIAN SAILOR. (Reclining.) Tell me not of it! Hark ye, lad—fleet interlacings
|
||
of the limbs—lithe swayings—coyings—flutterings! lip! heart! hip! all graze:
|
||
unceasing touch and go! not taste, observe ye, else come satiety. Eh, Pagan?
|
||
(Nudging.)
|
||
|
||
TAHITAN SAILOR. (Reclining on a mat.) Hail, holy nakedness of our dancing
|
||
girls!—the Heeva-Heeva! Ah! low veiled, high palmed Tahiti! I still rest me on
|
||
thy mat, but the soft soil has slid! I saw thee woven in the wood, my mat! green
|
||
the first day I brought ye thence; now worn and wilted quite. Ah me!—not thou
|
||
nor I can bear the change! How then, if so be transplanted to yon sky? Hear I
|
||
the roaring streams from Pirohitee’s peak of spears, when they leap down the
|
||
crags and drown the villages?—The blast! the blast! Up, spine, and meet it!
|
||
(Leaps to his feet.)
|
||
|
||
PORTUGUESE SAILOR. How the sea rolls swashing ’gainst the side! Stand by for
|
||
reefing, hearties! the winds are just crossing swords, pell-mell they’ll go
|
||
lunging presently.
|
||
|
||
DANISH SAILOR. Crack, crack, old ship! so long as thou crackest, thou holdest!
|
||
Well done! The mate there holds ye to it stiffly. He’s no more afraid than the
|
||
isle fort at Cattegat, put there to fight the Baltic with storm-lashed guns, on
|
||
which the sea-salt cakes!
|
||
|
||
4TH NANTUCKET SAILOR. He has his orders, mind ye that. I heard old Ahab tell him
|
||
he must always kill a squall, something as they burst a waterspout with a
|
||
pistol—fire your ship right into it!
|
||
|
||
ENGLISH SAILOR. Blood! but that old man’s a grand old cove! We are the lads to
|
||
hunt him up his whale!
|
||
|
||
ALL. Aye! aye!
|
||
|
||
OLD MANX SAILOR. How the three pines shake! Pines are the hardest sort of tree
|
||
to live when shifted to any other soil, and here there’s none but the crew’s
|
||
cursed clay. Steady, helmsman! steady. This is the sort of weather when brave
|
||
hearts snap ashore, and keeled hulls split at sea. Our captain has his
|
||
birthmark; look yonder, boys, there’s another in the sky—lurid-like, ye see, all
|
||
else pitch black.
|
||
|
||
DAGGOO. What of that? Who’s afraid of black’s afraid of me! I’m quarried out of
|
||
it!
|
||
|
||
SPANISH SAILOR. (Aside.) He wants to bully, ah!—the old grudge makes me touchy
|
||
(Advancing.) Aye, harpooneer, thy race is the undeniable dark side of
|
||
mankind—devilish dark at that. No offence.
|
||
|
||
DAGGOO (grimly). None.
|
||
|
||
ST. JAGO’S SAILOR. That Spaniard’s mad or drunk. But that can’t be, or else in
|
||
his one case our old Mogul’s fire-waters are somewhat long in working.
|
||
|
||
5TH NANTUCKET SAILOR. What’s that I saw—lightning? Yes.
|
||
|
||
SPANISH SAILOR. No; Daggoo showing his teeth.
|
||
|
||
DAGGOO (springing). Swallow thine, mannikin! White skin, white liver!
|
||
|
||
SPANISH SAILOR (meeting him). Knife thee heartily! big frame, small spirit!
|
||
|
||
ALL. A row! a row! a row!
|
||
|
||
TASHTEGO (with a whiff). A row a’low, and a row aloft—Gods and men—both
|
||
brawlers! Humph!
|
||
|
||
BELFAST SAILOR. A row! arrah a row! The Virgin be blessed, a row! Plunge in with
|
||
ye!
|
||
|
||
ENGLISH SAILOR. Fair play! Snatch the Spaniard’s knife! A ring, a ring!
|
||
|
||
OLD MANX SAILOR. Ready formed. There! the ringed horizon. In that ring Cain
|
||
struck Abel. Sweet work, right work! No? Why then, God, mad’st thou the ring?
|
||
|
||
MATE’S VOICE FROM THE QUARTER-DECK. Hands by the halyards! in top-gallant sails!
|
||
Stand by to reef topsails!
|
||
|
||
ALL. The squall! the squall! jump, my jollies! (They scatter.)
|
||
|
||
PIP (shrinking under the windlass). Jollies? Lord help such jollies! Crish,
|
||
crash! there goes the jib-stay! Blang-whang! God! Duck lower, Pip, here comes
|
||
the royal yard! It’s worse than being in the whirled woods, the last day of the
|
||
year! Who’d go climbing after chestnuts now? But there they go, all cursing, and
|
||
here I don’t. Fine prospects to ’em; they’re on the road to heaven. Hold on
|
||
hard! Jimmini, what a squall! But those chaps there are worse yet—they are your
|
||
white squalls, they. White squalls? white whale, shirr! shirr! Here have I heard
|
||
all their chat just now, and the white whale—shirr! shirr!—but spoken of once!
|
||
and only this evening—it makes me jingle all over like my tambourine—that
|
||
anaconda of an old man swore ’em in to hunt him! Oh, thou big white God aloft
|
||
there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on this small black boy down here;
|
||
preserve him from all men that have no bowels to feel fear!
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 41. Moby Dick.
|
||
|
||
I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath
|
||
had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and
|
||
clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetical
|
||
feeling was in me; Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed mine. With greedy ears I
|
||
learned the history of that murderous monster against whom I and all the others
|
||
had taken our oaths of violence and revenge.
|
||
|
||
For some time past, though at intervals only, the unaccompanied, secluded White
|
||
Whale had haunted those uncivilized seas mostly frequented by the Sperm Whale
|
||
fishermen. But not all of them knew of his existence; only a few of them,
|
||
comparatively, had knowingly seen him; while the number who as yet had actually
|
||
and knowingly given battle to him, was small indeed. For, owing to the large
|
||
number of whale-cruisers; the disorderly way they were sprinkled over the entire
|
||
watery circumference, many of them adventurously pushing their quest along
|
||
solitary latitudes, so as seldom or never for a whole twelvemonth or more on a
|
||
stretch, to encounter a single news-telling sail of any sort; the inordinate
|
||
length of each separate voyage; the irregularity of the times of sailing from
|
||
home; all these, with other circumstances, direct and indirect, long obstructed
|
||
the spread through the whole world-wide whaling-fleet of the special
|
||
individualizing tidings concerning Moby Dick. It was hardly to be doubted, that
|
||
several vessels reported to have encountered, at such or such a time, or on such
|
||
or such a meridian, a Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude and malignity, which
|
||
whale, after doing great mischief to his assailants, had completely escaped
|
||
them; to some minds it was not an unfair presumption, I say, that the whale in
|
||
question must have been no other than Moby Dick. Yet as of late the Sperm Whale
|
||
fishery had been marked by various and not unfrequent instances of great
|
||
ferocity, cunning, and malice in the monster attacked; therefore it was, that
|
||
those who by accident ignorantly gave battle to Moby Dick; such hunters,
|
||
perhaps, for the most part, were content to ascribe the peculiar terror he bred,
|
||
more, as it were, to the perils of the Sperm Whale fishery at large, than to the
|
||
individual cause. In that way, mostly, the disastrous encounter between Ahab and
|
||
the whale had hitherto been popularly regarded.
|
||
|
||
And as for those who, previously hearing of the White Whale, by chance caught
|
||
sight of him; in the beginning of the thing they had every one of them, almost,
|
||
as boldly and fearlessly lowered for him, as for any other whale of that
|
||
species. But at length, such calamities did ensue in these assaults—not
|
||
restricted to sprained wrists and ankles, broken limbs, or devouring
|
||
amputations—but fatal to the last degree of fatality; those repeated disastrous
|
||
repulses, all accumulating and piling their terrors upon Moby Dick; those things
|
||
had gone far to shake the fortitude of many brave hunters, to whom the story of
|
||
the White Whale had eventually come.
|
||
|
||
Nor did wild rumors of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and still the more horrify
|
||
the true histories of these deadly encounters. For not only do fabulous rumors
|
||
naturally grow out of the very body of all surprising terrible events,—as the
|
||
smitten tree gives birth to its fungi; but, in maritime life, far more than in
|
||
that of terra firma, wild rumors abound, wherever there is any adequate reality
|
||
for them to cling to. And as the sea surpasses the land in this matter, so the
|
||
whale fishery surpasses every other sort of maritime life, in the wonderfulness
|
||
and fearfulness of the rumors which sometimes circulate there. For not only are
|
||
whalemen as a body unexempt from that ignorance and superstitiousness hereditary
|
||
to all sailors; but of all sailors, they are by all odds the most directly
|
||
brought into contact with whatever is appallingly astonishing in the sea; face
|
||
to face they not only eye its greatest marvels, but, hand to jaw, give battle to
|
||
them. Alone, in such remotest waters, that though you sailed a thousand miles,
|
||
and passed a thousand shores, you would not come to any chiseled hearth-stone,
|
||
or aught hospitable beneath that part of the sun; in such latitudes and
|
||
longitudes, pursuing too such a calling as he does, the whaleman is wrapped by
|
||
influences all tending to make his fancy pregnant with many a mighty birth.
|
||
|
||
No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit over the
|
||
widest watery spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Whale did in the end
|
||
incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints, and half-formed fœtal
|
||
suggestions of supernatural agencies, which eventually invested Moby Dick with
|
||
new terrors unborrowed from anything that visibly appears. So that in many cases
|
||
such a panic did he finally strike, that few who by those rumors, at least, had
|
||
heard of the White Whale, few of those hunters were willing to encounter the
|
||
perils of his jaw.
|
||
|
||
But there were still other and more vital practical influences at work. Not even
|
||
at the present day has the original prestige of the Sperm Whale, as fearfully
|
||
distinguished from all other species of the leviathan, died out of the minds of
|
||
the whalemen as a body. There are those this day among them, who, though
|
||
intelligent and courageous enough in offering battle to the Greenland or Right
|
||
whale, would perhaps—either from professional inexperience, or incompetency, or
|
||
timidity, decline a contest with the Sperm Whale; at any rate, there are plenty
|
||
of whalemen, especially among those whaling nations not sailing under the
|
||
American flag, who have never hostilely encountered the Sperm Whale, but whose
|
||
sole knowledge of the leviathan is restricted to the ignoble monster primitively
|
||
pursued in the North; seated on their hatches, these men will hearken with a
|
||
childish fireside interest and awe, to the wild, strange tales of Southern
|
||
whaling. Nor is the pre-eminent tremendousness of the great Sperm Whale anywhere
|
||
more feelingly comprehended, than on board of those prows which stem him.
|
||
|
||
And as if the now tested reality of his might had in former legendary times
|
||
thrown its shadow before it; we find some book naturalists—Olassen and
|
||
Povelson—declaring the Sperm Whale not only to be a consternation to every other
|
||
creature in the sea, but also to be so incredibly ferocious as continually to be
|
||
athirst for human blood. Nor even down to so late a time as Cuvier’s, were these
|
||
or almost similar impressions effaced. For in his Natural History, the Baron
|
||
himself affirms that at sight of the Sperm Whale, all fish (sharks included) are
|
||
“struck with the most lively terrors,” and “often in the precipitancy of their
|
||
flight dash themselves against the rocks with such violence as to cause
|
||
instantaneous death.” And however the general experiences in the fishery may
|
||
amend such reports as these; yet in their full terribleness, even to the
|
||
bloodthirsty item of Povelson, the superstitious belief in them is, in some
|
||
vicissitudes of their vocation, revived in the minds of the hunters.
|
||
|
||
So that overawed by the rumors and portents concerning him, not a few of the
|
||
fishermen recalled, in reference to Moby Dick, the earlier days of the Sperm
|
||
Whale fishery, when it was oftentimes hard to induce long practised Right
|
||
whalemen to embark in the perils of this new and daring warfare; such men
|
||
protesting that although other leviathans might be hopefully pursued, yet to
|
||
chase and point lance at such an apparition as the Sperm Whale was not for
|
||
mortal man. That to attempt it, would be inevitably to be torn into a quick
|
||
eternity. On this head, there are some remarkable documents that may be
|
||
consulted.
|
||
|
||
Nevertheless, some there were, who even in the face of these things were ready
|
||
to give chase to Moby Dick; and a still greater number who, chancing only to
|
||
hear of him distantly and vaguely, without the specific details of any certain
|
||
calamity, and without superstitious accompaniments, were sufficiently hardy not
|
||
to flee from the battle if offered.
|
||
|
||
One of the wild suggestions referred to, as at last coming to be linked with the
|
||
White Whale in the minds of the superstitiously inclined, was the unearthly
|
||
conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous; that he had actually been encountered in
|
||
opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time.
|
||
|
||
Nor, credulous as such minds must have been, was this conceit altogether without
|
||
some faint show of superstitious probability. For as the secrets of the currents
|
||
in the seas have never yet been divulged, even to the most erudite research; so
|
||
the hidden ways of the Sperm Whale when beneath the surface remain, in great
|
||
part, unaccountable to his pursuers; and from time to time have originated the
|
||
most curious and contradictory speculations regarding them, especially
|
||
concerning the mystic modes whereby, after sounding to a great depth, he
|
||
transports himself with such vast swiftness to the most widely distant points.
|
||
|
||
It is a thing well known to both American and English whale-ships, and as well a
|
||
thing placed upon authoritative record years ago by Scoresby, that some whales
|
||
have been captured far north in the Pacific, in whose bodies have been found the
|
||
barbs of harpoons darted in the Greenland seas. Nor is it to be gainsaid, that
|
||
in some of these instances it has been declared that the interval of time
|
||
between the two assaults could not have exceeded very many days. Hence, by
|
||
inference, it has been believed by some whalemen, that the Nor’ West Passage, so
|
||
long a problem to man, was never a problem to the whale. So that here, in the
|
||
real living experience of living men, the prodigies related in old times of the
|
||
inland Strello mountain in Portugal (near whose top there was said to be a lake
|
||
in which the wrecks of ships floated up to the surface); and that still more
|
||
wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain near Syracuse (whose waters were
|
||
believed to have come from the Holy Land by an underground passage); these
|
||
fabulous narrations are almost fully equalled by the realities of the whalemen.
|
||
|
||
Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these; and knowing that
|
||
after repeated, intrepid assaults, the White Whale had escaped alive; it cannot
|
||
be much matter of surprise that some whalemen should go still further in their
|
||
superstitions; declaring Moby Dick not only ubiquitous, but immortal (for
|
||
immortality is but ubiquity in time); that though groves of spears should be
|
||
planted in his flanks, he would still swim away unharmed; or if indeed he should
|
||
ever be made to spout thick blood, such a sight would be but a ghastly
|
||
deception; for again in unensanguined billows hundreds of leagues away, his
|
||
unsullied jet would once more be seen.
|
||
|
||
But even stripped of these supernatural surmisings, there was enough in the
|
||
earthly make and incontestable character of the monster to strike the
|
||
imagination with unwonted power. For, it was not so much his uncommon bulk that
|
||
so much distinguished him from other sperm whales, but, as was elsewhere thrown
|
||
out—a peculiar snow-white wrinkled forehead, and a high, pyramidical white hump.
|
||
These were his prominent features; the tokens whereby, even in the limitless,
|
||
uncharted seas, he revealed his identity, at a long distance, to those who knew
|
||
him.
|
||
|
||
The rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled with the same
|
||
shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had gained his distinctive appellation of the
|
||
White Whale; a name, indeed, literally justified by his vivid aspect, when seen
|
||
gliding at high noon through a dark blue sea, leaving a milky-way wake of creamy
|
||
foam, all spangled with golden gleamings.
|
||
|
||
Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable hue, nor yet his deformed
|
||
lower jaw, that so much invested the whale with natural terror, as that
|
||
unexampled, intelligent malignity which, according to specific accounts, he had
|
||
over and over again evinced in his assaults. More than all, his treacherous
|
||
retreats struck more of dismay than perhaps aught else. For, when swimming
|
||
before his exulting pursuers, with every apparent symptom of alarm, he had
|
||
several times been known to turn round suddenly, and, bearing down upon them,
|
||
either stave their boats to splinters, or drive them back in consternation to
|
||
their ship.
|
||
|
||
Already several fatalities had attended his chase. But though similar disasters,
|
||
however little bruited ashore, were by no means unusual in the fishery; yet, in
|
||
most instances, such seemed the White Whale’s infernal aforethought of ferocity,
|
||
that every dismembering or death that he caused, was not wholly regarded as
|
||
having been inflicted by an unintelligent agent.
|
||
|
||
Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of his more
|
||
desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of chewed boats, and the
|
||
sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the white curds of the whale’s
|
||
direful wrath into the serene, exasperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a
|
||
birth or a bridal.
|
||
|
||
His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies;
|
||
one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the
|
||
whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade
|
||
to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it
|
||
was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick
|
||
had reaped away Ahab’s leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No
|
||
turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more
|
||
seeming malice. Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that
|
||
almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the
|
||
whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to
|
||
identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and
|
||
spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac
|
||
incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in
|
||
them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That
|
||
intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even
|
||
the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites
|
||
of the east reverenced in their statue devil;—Ahab did not fall down and worship
|
||
it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale,
|
||
he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and
|
||
torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all
|
||
that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and
|
||
thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically
|
||
assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the
|
||
general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his
|
||
chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.
|
||
|
||
It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise at the
|
||
precise time of his bodily dismemberment. Then, in darting at the monster, knife
|
||
in hand, he had but given loose to a sudden, passionate, corporal animosity; and
|
||
when he received the stroke that tore him, he probably but felt the agonizing
|
||
bodily laceration, but nothing more. Yet, when by this collision forced to turn
|
||
towards home, and for long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay
|
||
stretched together in one hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling
|
||
Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one
|
||
another; and so interfusing, made him mad. That it was only then, on the
|
||
homeward voyage, after the encounter, that the final monomania seized him, seems
|
||
all but certain from the fact that, at intervals during the passage, he was a
|
||
raving lunatic; and, though unlimbed of a leg, yet such vital strength yet
|
||
lurked in his Egyptian chest, and was moreover intensified by his delirium, that
|
||
his mates were forced to lace him fast, even there, as he sailed, raving in his
|
||
hammock. In a strait-jacket, he swung to the mad rockings of the gales. And,
|
||
when running into more sufferable latitudes, the ship, with mild stun’sails
|
||
spread, floated across the tranquil tropics, and, to all appearances, the old
|
||
man’s delirium seemed left behind him with the Cape Horn swells, and he came
|
||
forth from his dark den into the blessed light and air; even then, when he bore
|
||
that firm, collected front, however pale, and issued his calm orders once again;
|
||
and his mates thanked God the direful madness was now gone; even then, Ahab, in
|
||
his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline
|
||
thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some
|
||
still subtler form. Ahab’s full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted;
|
||
like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but
|
||
unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing
|
||
monomania, not one jot of Ahab’s broad madness had been left behind; so in that
|
||
broad madness, not one jot of his great natural intellect had perished. That
|
||
before living agent, now became the living instrument. If such a furious trope
|
||
may stand, his special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and
|
||
turned all its concentred cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from having
|
||
lost his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a thousand fold more
|
||
potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable object.
|
||
|
||
This is much; yet Ahab’s larger, darker, deeper part remains unhinted. But vain
|
||
to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound. Winding far down from
|
||
within the very heart of this spiked Hotel de Cluny where we here stand—however
|
||
grand and wonderful, now quit it;—and take your way, ye nobler, sadder souls, to
|
||
those vast Roman halls of Thermes; where far beneath the fantastic towers of
|
||
man’s upper earth, his root of grandeur, his whole awful essence sits in bearded
|
||
state; an antique buried beneath antiquities, and throned on torsoes! So with a
|
||
broken throne, the great gods mock that captive king; so like a Caryatid, he
|
||
patient sits, upholding on his frozen brow the piled entablatures of ages. Wind
|
||
ye down there, ye prouder, sadder souls! question that proud, sad king! A family
|
||
likeness! aye, he did beget ye, ye young exiled royalties; and from your grim
|
||
sire only will the old State-secret come.
|
||
|
||
Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely: all my means are sane,
|
||
my motive and my object mad. Yet without power to kill, or change, or shun the
|
||
fact; he likewise knew that to mankind he did long dissemble; in some sort, did
|
||
still. But that thing of his dissembling was only subject to his perceptibility,
|
||
not to his will determinate. Nevertheless, so well did he succeed in that
|
||
dissembling, that when with ivory leg he stepped ashore at last, no Nantucketer
|
||
thought him otherwise than but naturally grieved, and that to the quick, with
|
||
the terrible casualty which had overtaken him.
|
||
|
||
The report of his undeniable delirium at sea was likewise popularly ascribed to
|
||
a kindred cause. And so too, all the added moodiness which always afterwards, to
|
||
the very day of sailing in the Pequod on the present voyage, sat brooding on his
|
||
brow. Nor is it so very unlikely, that far from distrusting his fitness for
|
||
another whaling voyage, on account of such dark symptoms, the calculating people
|
||
of that prudent isle were inclined to harbor the conceit, that for those very
|
||
reasons he was all the better qualified and set on edge, for a pursuit so full
|
||
of rage and wildness as the bloody hunt of whales. Gnawed within and scorched
|
||
without, with the infixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable idea; such an
|
||
one, could he be found, would seem the very man to dart his iron and lift his
|
||
lance against the most appalling of all brutes. Or, if for any reason thought to
|
||
be corporeally incapacitated for that, yet such an one would seem superlatively
|
||
competent to cheer and howl on his underlings to the attack. But be all this as
|
||
it may, certain it is, that with the mad secret of his unabated rage bolted up
|
||
and keyed in him, Ahab had purposely sailed upon the present voyage with the one
|
||
only and all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any one of his
|
||
old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking in him then, how
|
||
soon would their aghast and righteous souls have wrenched the ship from such a
|
||
fiendish man! They were bent on profitable cruises, the profit to be counted
|
||
down in dollars from the mint. He was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and
|
||
supernatural revenge.
|
||
|
||
Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a Job’s
|
||
whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel
|
||
renegades, and castaways, and cannibals—morally enfeebled also, by the
|
||
incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the
|
||
invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and the
|
||
pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a crew, so officered, seemed specially
|
||
picked and packed by some infernal fatality to help him to his monomaniac
|
||
revenge. How it was that they so aboundingly responded to the old man’s ire—by
|
||
what evil magic their souls were possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost
|
||
theirs; the White Whale as much their insufferable foe as his; how all this came
|
||
to be—what the White Whale was to them, or how to their unconscious
|
||
understandings, also, in some dim, unsuspected way, he might have seemed the
|
||
gliding great demon of the seas of life,—all this to explain, would be to dive
|
||
deeper than Ishmael can go. The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can
|
||
one tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his
|
||
pick? Who does not feel the irresistible arm drag? What skiff in tow of a
|
||
seventy-four can stand still? For one, I gave myself up to the abandonment of
|
||
the time and the place; but while yet all a-rush to encounter the whale, could
|
||
see naught in that brute but the deadliest ill.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of the Whale.
|
||
|
||
What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me,
|
||
as yet remains unsaid.
|
||
|
||
Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which could not
|
||
but occasionally awaken in any man’s soul some alarm, there was another thought,
|
||
or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times by its intensity
|
||
completely overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable
|
||
was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the
|
||
whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to
|
||
explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must,
|
||
else all these chapters might be naught.
|
||
|
||
Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if
|
||
imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls;
|
||
and though various nations have in some way recognised a certain royal
|
||
preeminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu placing the
|
||
title “Lord of the White Elephants” above all their other magniloquent
|
||
ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of Siam unfurling the same
|
||
snow-white quadruped in the royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag bearing the
|
||
one figure of a snow-white charger; and the great Austrian Empire, Cæsarian,
|
||
heir to overlording Rome, having for the imperial colour the same imperial hue;
|
||
and though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the
|
||
white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; and though, besides, all
|
||
this, whiteness has been even made significant of gladness, for among the Romans
|
||
a white stone marked a joyful day; and though in other mortal sympathies and
|
||
symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of many touching, noble
|
||
things—the innocence of brides, the benignity of age; though among the Red Men
|
||
of America the giving of the white belt of wampum was the deepest pledge of
|
||
honor; though in many climes, whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the
|
||
ermine of the Judge, and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens
|
||
drawn by milk-white steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of the most
|
||
august religions it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness and
|
||
power; by the Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame being held the
|
||
holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself being
|
||
made incarnate in a snow-white bull; and though to the noble Iroquois, the
|
||
midwinter sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was by far the holiest festival of
|
||
their theology, that spotless, faithful creature being held the purest envoy
|
||
they could send to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of their own
|
||
fidelity; and though directly from the Latin word for white, all Christian
|
||
priests derive the name of one part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic,
|
||
worn beneath the cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith,
|
||
white is specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of our Lord;
|
||
though in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the redeemed, and the
|
||
four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the great white throne, and
|
||
the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet for all these accumulated
|
||
associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet
|
||
lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more
|
||
of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.
|
||
|
||
This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced
|
||
from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself,
|
||
to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds. Witness the white bear of the
|
||
poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky
|
||
whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are? That ghastly whiteness
|
||
it is which imparts such an abhorrent mildness, even more loathsome than
|
||
terrific, to the dumb gloating of their aspect. So that not the fierce-fanged
|
||
tiger in his heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded bear or
|
||
shark.*
|
||
|
||
*With reference to the Polar bear, it may possibly be urged by him who would
|
||
fain go still deeper into this matter, that it is not the whiteness, separately
|
||
regarded, which heightens the intolerable hideousness of that brute; for,
|
||
analysed, that heightened hideousness, it might be said, only rises from the
|
||
circumstance, that the irresponsible ferociousness of the creature stands
|
||
invested in the fleece of celestial innocence and love; and hence, by bringing
|
||
together two such opposite emotions in our minds, the Polar bear frightens us
|
||
with so unnatural a contrast. But even assuming all this to be true; yet, were
|
||
it not for the whiteness, you would not have that intensified terror.
|
||
|
||
As for the white shark, the white gliding ghostliness of repose in that
|
||
creature, when beheld in his ordinary moods, strangely tallies with the same
|
||
quality in the Polar quadruped. This peculiarity is most vividly hit by the
|
||
French in the name they bestow upon that fish. The Romish mass for the dead
|
||
begins with “Requiem eternam” (eternal rest), whence Requiem denominating the
|
||
mass itself, and any other funeral music. Now, in allusion to the white, silent
|
||
stillness of death in this shark, and the mild deadliness of his habits, the
|
||
French call him Requin.
|
||
|
||
Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those clouds of spiritual wonderment
|
||
and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all imaginations? Not
|
||
Coleridge first threw that spell; but God’s great, unflattering laureate,
|
||
Nature.*
|
||
|
||
*I remember the first albatross I ever saw. It was during a prolonged gale, in
|
||
waters hard upon the Antarctic seas. From my forenoon watch below, I ascended
|
||
to the overclouded deck; and there, dashed upon the main hatches, I saw a
|
||
regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and with a hooked, Roman bill
|
||
sublime. At intervals, it arched forth its vast archangel wings, as if to
|
||
embrace some holy ark. Wondrous flutterings and throbbings shook it. Though
|
||
bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some king’s ghost in supernatural
|
||
distress. Through its inexpressible, strange eyes, methought I peeped to
|
||
secrets which took hold of God. As Abraham before the angels, I bowed myself;
|
||
the white thing was so white, its wings so wide, and in those for ever exiled
|
||
waters, I had lost the miserable warping memories of traditions and of towns.
|
||
Long I gazed at that prodigy of plumage. I cannot tell, can only hint, the
|
||
things that darted through me then. But at last I awoke; and turning, asked a
|
||
sailor what bird was this. A goney, he replied. Goney! never had heard that
|
||
name before; is it conceivable that this glorious thing is utterly unknown to
|
||
men ashore! never! But some time after, I learned that goney was some seaman’s
|
||
name for albatross. So that by no possibility could Coleridge’s wild Rhyme have
|
||
had aught to do with those mystical impressions which were mine, when I saw
|
||
that bird upon our deck. For neither had I then read the Rhyme, nor knew the
|
||
bird to be an albatross. Yet, in saying this, I do but indirectly burnish a
|
||
little brighter the noble merit of the poem and the poet.
|
||
|
||
I assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird chiefly lurks
|
||
the secret of the spell; a truth the more evinced in this, that by a solecism of
|
||
terms there are birds called grey albatrosses; and these I have frequently seen,
|
||
but never with such emotions as when I beheld the Antarctic fowl.
|
||
|
||
But how had the mystic thing been caught? Whisper it not, and I will tell; with
|
||
a treacherous hook and line, as the fowl floated on the sea. At last the Captain
|
||
made a postman of it; tying a lettered, leathern tally round its neck, with the
|
||
ship’s time and place; and then letting it escape. But I doubt not, that
|
||
leathern tally, meant for man, was taken off in Heaven, when the white fowl flew
|
||
to join the wing-folding, the invoking, and adoring cherubim!
|
||
|
||
Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that of the White
|
||
Steed of the Prairies; a magnificent milk-white charger, large-eyed,
|
||
small-headed, bluff-chested, and with the dignity of a thousand monarchs in his
|
||
lofty, overscorning carriage. He was the elected Xerxes of vast herds of wild
|
||
horses, whose pastures in those days were only fenced by the Rocky Mountains and
|
||
the Alleghanies. At their flaming head he westward trooped it like that chosen
|
||
star which every evening leads on the hosts of light. The flashing cascade of
|
||
his mane, the curving comet of his tail, invested him with housings more
|
||
resplendent than gold and silver-beaters could have furnished him. A most
|
||
imperial and archangelical apparition of that unfallen, western world, which to
|
||
the eyes of the old trappers and hunters revived the glories of those primeval
|
||
times when Adam walked majestic as a god, bluff-browed and fearless as this
|
||
mighty steed. Whether marching amid his aides and marshals in the van of
|
||
countless cohorts that endlessly streamed it over the plains, like an Ohio; or
|
||
whether with his circumambient subjects browsing all around at the horizon, the
|
||
White Steed gallopingly reviewed them with warm nostrils reddening through his
|
||
cool milkiness; in whatever aspect he presented himself, always to the bravest
|
||
Indians he was the object of trembling reverence and awe. Nor can it be
|
||
questioned from what stands on legendary record of this noble horse, that it was
|
||
his spiritual whiteness chiefly, which so clothed him with divineness; and that
|
||
this divineness had that in it which, though commanding worship, at the same
|
||
time enforced a certain nameless terror.
|
||
|
||
But there are other instances where this whiteness loses all that accessory and
|
||
strange glory which invests it in the White Steed and Albatross.
|
||
|
||
What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks the eye,
|
||
as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin! It is that whiteness
|
||
which invests him, a thing expressed by the name he bears. The Albino is as well
|
||
made as other men—has no substantive deformity—and yet this mere aspect of
|
||
all-pervading whiteness makes him more strangely hideous than the ugliest
|
||
abortion. Why should this be so?
|
||
|
||
Nor, in quite other aspects, does Nature in her least palpable but not the less
|
||
malicious agencies, fail to enlist among her forces this crowning attribute of
|
||
the terrible. From its snowy aspect, the gauntleted ghost of the Southern Seas
|
||
has been denominated the White Squall. Nor, in some historic instances, has the
|
||
art of human malice omitted so potent an auxiliary. How wildly it heightens the
|
||
effect of that passage in Froissart, when, masked in the snowy symbol of their
|
||
faction, the desperate White Hoods of Ghent murder their bailiff in the
|
||
market-place!
|
||
|
||
Nor, in some things, does the common, hereditary experience of all mankind fail
|
||
to bear witness to the supernaturalism of this hue. It cannot well be doubted,
|
||
that the one visible quality in the aspect of the dead which most appals the
|
||
gazer, is the marble pallor lingering there; as if indeed that pallor were as
|
||
much like the badge of consternation in the other world, as of mortal
|
||
trepidation here. And from that pallor of the dead, we borrow the expressive hue
|
||
of the shroud in which we wrap them. Nor even in our superstitions do we fail to
|
||
throw the same snowy mantle round our phantoms; all ghosts rising in a
|
||
milk-white fog—Yea, while these terrors seize us, let us add, that even the king
|
||
of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on his pallid horse.
|
||
|
||
Therefore, in his other moods, symbolize whatever grand or gracious thing he
|
||
will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest idealized
|
||
significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul.
|
||
|
||
But though without dissent this point be fixed, how is mortal man to account for
|
||
it? To analyse it, would seem impossible. Can we, then, by the citation of some
|
||
of those instances wherein this thing of whiteness—though for the time either
|
||
wholly or in great part stripped of all direct associations calculated to impart
|
||
to it aught fearful, but nevertheless, is found to exert over us the same
|
||
sorcery, however modified;—can we thus hope to light upon some chance clue to
|
||
conduct us to the hidden cause we seek?
|
||
|
||
Let us try. But in a matter like this, subtlety appeals to subtlety, and without
|
||
imagination no man can follow another into these halls. And though, doubtless,
|
||
some at least of the imaginative impressions about to be presented may have been
|
||
shared by most men, yet few perhaps were entirely conscious of them at the time,
|
||
and therefore may not be able to recall them now.
|
||
|
||
Why to the man of untutored ideality, who happens to be but loosely acquainted
|
||
with the peculiar character of the day, does the bare mention of Whitsuntide
|
||
marshal in the fancy such long, dreary, speechless processions of slow-pacing
|
||
pilgrims, down-cast and hooded with new-fallen snow? Or, to the unread,
|
||
unsophisticated Protestant of the Middle American States, why does the passing
|
||
mention of a White Friar or a White Nun, evoke such an eyeless statue in the
|
||
soul?
|
||
|
||
Or what is there apart from the traditions of dungeoned warriors and kings
|
||
(which will not wholly account for it) that makes the White Tower of London tell
|
||
so much more strongly on the imagination of an untravelled American, than those
|
||
other storied structures, its neighbors—the Byward Tower, or even the Bloody?
|
||
And those sublimer towers, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, whence, in
|
||
peculiar moods, comes that gigantic ghostliness over the soul at the bare
|
||
mention of that name, while the thought of Virginia’s Blue Ridge is full of a
|
||
soft, dewy, distant dreaminess? Or why, irrespective of all latitudes and
|
||
longitudes, does the name of the White Sea exert such a spectralness over the
|
||
fancy, while that of the Yellow Sea lulls us with mortal thoughts of long
|
||
lacquered mild afternoons on the waves, followed by the gaudiest and yet
|
||
sleepiest of sunsets? Or, to choose a wholly unsubstantial instance, purely
|
||
addressed to the fancy, why, in reading the old fairy tales of Central Europe,
|
||
does “the tall pale man” of the Hartz forests, whose changeless pallor
|
||
unrustlingly glides through the green of the groves—why is this phantom more
|
||
terrible than all the whooping imps of the Blocksburg?
|
||
|
||
Nor is it, altogether, the remembrance of her cathedral-toppling earthquakes;
|
||
nor the stampedoes of her frantic seas; nor the tearlessness of arid skies that
|
||
never rain; nor the sight of her wide field of leaning spires, wrenched
|
||
cope-stones, and crosses all adroop (like canted yards of anchored fleets); and
|
||
her suburban avenues of house-walls lying over upon each other, as a tossed pack
|
||
of cards;—it is not these things alone which make tearless Lima, the strangest,
|
||
saddest city thou can’st see. For Lima has taken the white veil; and there is a
|
||
higher horror in this whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro, this whiteness keeps
|
||
her ruins for ever new; admits not the cheerful greenness of complete decay;
|
||
spreads over her broken ramparts the rigid pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its
|
||
own distortions.
|
||
|
||
I know that, to the common apprehension, this phenomenon of whiteness is not
|
||
confessed to be the prime agent in exaggerating the terror of objects otherwise
|
||
terrible; nor to the unimaginative mind is there aught of terror in those
|
||
appearances whose awfulness to another mind almost solely consists in this one
|
||
phenomenon, especially when exhibited under any form at all approaching to
|
||
muteness or universality. What I mean by these two statements may perhaps be
|
||
respectively elucidated by the following examples.
|
||
|
||
First: The mariner, when drawing nigh the coasts of foreign lands, if by night
|
||
he hear the roar of breakers, starts to vigilance, and feels just enough of
|
||
trepidation to sharpen all his faculties; but under precisely similar
|
||
circumstances, let him be called from his hammock to view his ship sailing
|
||
through a midnight sea of milky whiteness—as if from encircling headlands shoals
|
||
of combed white bears were swimming round him, then he feels a silent,
|
||
superstitious dread; the shrouded phantom of the whitened waters is horrible to
|
||
him as a real ghost; in vain the lead assures him he is still off soundings;
|
||
heart and helm they both go down; he never rests till blue water is under him
|
||
again. Yet where is the mariner who will tell thee, “Sir, it was not so much the
|
||
fear of striking hidden rocks, as the fear of that hideous whiteness that so
|
||
stirred me?”
|
||
|
||
Second: To the native Indian of Peru, the continual sight of the snow-howdahed
|
||
Andes conveys naught of dread, except, perhaps, in the mere fancying of the
|
||
eternal frosted desolateness reigning at such vast altitudes, and the natural
|
||
conceit of what a fearfulness it would be to lose oneself in such inhuman
|
||
solitudes. Much the same is it with the backwoodsman of the West, who with
|
||
comparative indifference views an unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow, no
|
||
shadow of tree or twig to break the fixed trance of whiteness. Not so the
|
||
sailor, beholding the scenery of the Antarctic seas; where at times, by some
|
||
infernal trick of legerdemain in the powers of frost and air, he, shivering and
|
||
half shipwrecked, instead of rainbows speaking hope and solace to his misery,
|
||
views what seems a boundless churchyard grinning upon him with its lean ice
|
||
monuments and splintered crosses.
|
||
|
||
But thou sayest, methinks that white-lead chapter about whiteness is but a white
|
||
flag hung out from a craven soul; thou surrenderest to a hypo, Ishmael.
|
||
|
||
Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled in some peaceful valley of Vermont,
|
||
far removed from all beasts of prey—why is it that upon the sunniest day, if you
|
||
but shake a fresh buffalo robe behind him, so that he cannot even see it, but
|
||
only smells its wild animal muskiness—why will he start, snort, and with
|
||
bursting eyes paw the ground in phrensies of affright? There is no remembrance
|
||
in him of any gorings of wild creatures in his green northern home, so that the
|
||
strange muskiness he smells cannot recall to him anything associated with the
|
||
experience of former perils; for what knows he, this New England colt, of the
|
||
black bisons of distant Oregon?
|
||
|
||
No: but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the instinct of the knowledge
|
||
of the demonism in the world. Though thousands of miles from Oregon, still when
|
||
he smells that savage musk, the rending, goring bison herds are as present as to
|
||
the deserted wild foal of the prairies, which this instant they may be trampling
|
||
into dust.
|
||
|
||
Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak rustlings of the
|
||
festooned frosts of mountains; the desolate shiftings of the windrowed snows of
|
||
prairies; all these, to Ishmael, are as the shaking of that buffalo robe to the
|
||
frightened colt!
|
||
|
||
Though neither knows where lie the nameless things of which the mystic sign
|
||
gives forth such hints; yet with me, as with the colt, somewhere those things
|
||
must exist. Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in
|
||
love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.
|
||
|
||
But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it
|
||
appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more
|
||
portentous—why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of
|
||
spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and yet should be
|
||
as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.
|
||
|
||
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and
|
||
immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of
|
||
annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that
|
||
as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of
|
||
colour; and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these
|
||
reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide
|
||
landscape of snows—a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink? And
|
||
when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other
|
||
earthly hues—every stately or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset
|
||
skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly
|
||
cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent
|
||
in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature
|
||
absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the
|
||
charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the
|
||
mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of
|
||
light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without
|
||
medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own
|
||
blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and
|
||
like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring
|
||
glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the
|
||
monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these
|
||
things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 43. Hark!
|
||
|
||
“HIST! Did you hear that noise, Cabaco?”
|
||
|
||
It was the middle-watch: a fair moonlight; the seamen were standing in a cordon,
|
||
extending from one of the fresh-water butts in the waist, to the scuttle-butt
|
||
near the taffrail. In this manner, they passed the buckets to fill the
|
||
scuttle-butt. Standing, for the most part, on the hallowed precincts of the
|
||
quarter-deck, they were careful not to speak or rustle their feet. From hand to
|
||
hand, the buckets went in the deepest silence, only broken by the occasional
|
||
flap of a sail, and the steady hum of the unceasingly advancing keel.
|
||
|
||
It was in the midst of this repose, that Archy, one of the cordon, whose post
|
||
was near the after-hatches, whispered to his neighbor, a Cholo, the words above.
|
||
|
||
“Hist! did you hear that noise, Cabaco?”
|
||
|
||
“Take the bucket, will ye, Archy? what noise d’ye mean?”
|
||
|
||
“There it is again—under the hatches—don’t you hear it—a cough—it sounded like a
|
||
cough.”
|
||
|
||
“Cough be damned! Pass along that return bucket.”
|
||
|
||
“There again—there it is!—it sounds like two or three sleepers turning over,
|
||
now!”
|
||
|
||
“Caramba! have done, shipmate, will ye? It’s the three soaked biscuits ye eat
|
||
for supper turning over inside of ye—nothing else. Look to the bucket!”
|
||
|
||
“Say what ye will, shipmate; I’ve sharp ears.”
|
||
|
||
“Aye, you are the chap, ain’t ye, that heard the hum of the old Quakeress’s
|
||
knitting-needles fifty miles at sea from Nantucket; you’re the chap.”
|
||
|
||
“Grin away; we’ll see what turns up. Hark ye, Cabaco, there is somebody down in
|
||
the after-hold that has not yet been seen on deck; and I suspect our old Mogul
|
||
knows something of it too. I heard Stubb tell Flask, one morning watch, that
|
||
there was something of that sort in the wind.”
|
||
|
||
“Tish! the bucket!”
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 44. The Chart.
|
||
|
||
Had you followed Captain Ahab down into his cabin after the squall that took
|
||
place on the night succeeding that wild ratification of his purpose with his
|
||
crew, you would have seen him go to a locker in the transom, and bringing out a
|
||
large wrinkled roll of yellowish sea charts, spread them before him on his
|
||
screwed-down table. Then seating himself before it, you would have seen him
|
||
intently study the various lines and shadings which there met his eye; and with
|
||
slow but steady pencil trace additional courses over spaces that before were
|
||
blank. At intervals, he would refer to piles of old log-books beside him,
|
||
wherein were set down the seasons and places in which, on various former voyages
|
||
of various ships, sperm whales had been captured or seen.
|
||
|
||
While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in chains over his head,
|
||
continually rocked with the motion of the ship, and for ever threw shifting
|
||
gleams and shadows of lines upon his wrinkled brow, till it almost seemed that
|
||
while he himself was marking out lines and courses on the wrinkled charts, some
|
||
invisible pencil was also tracing lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart
|
||
of his forehead.
|
||
|
||
But it was not this night in particular that, in the solitude of his cabin, Ahab
|
||
thus pondered over his charts. Almost every night they were brought out; almost
|
||
every night some pencil marks were effaced, and others were substituted. For
|
||
with the charts of all four oceans before him, Ahab was threading a maze of
|
||
currents and eddies, with a view to the more certain accomplishment of that
|
||
monomaniac thought of his soul.
|
||
|
||
Now, to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans, it might
|
||
seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek out one solitary creature in the
|
||
unhooped oceans of this planet. But not so did it seem to Ahab, who knew the
|
||
sets of all tides and currents; and thereby calculating the driftings of the
|
||
sperm whale’s food; and, also, calling to mind the regular, ascertained seasons
|
||
for hunting him in particular latitudes; could arrive at reasonable surmises,
|
||
almost approaching to certainties, concerning the timeliest day to be upon this
|
||
or that ground in search of his prey.
|
||
|
||
So assured, indeed, is the fact concerning the periodicalness of the sperm
|
||
whale’s resorting to given waters, that many hunters believe that, could he be
|
||
closely observed and studied throughout the world; were the logs for one voyage
|
||
of the entire whale fleet carefully collated, then the migrations of the sperm
|
||
whale would be found to correspond in invariability to those of the
|
||
herring-shoals or the flights of swallows. On this hint, attempts have been made
|
||
to construct elaborate migratory charts of the sperm whale.*
|
||
|
||
*Since the above was written, the statement is happily borne out by an
|
||
official circular, issued by Lieutenant Maury, of the National Observatory,
|
||
Washington, April 16th, 1851. By that circular, it appears that precisely
|
||
such a chart is in course of completion; and portions of it are presented
|
||
in the circular. “This chart divides the ocean into districts of five
|
||
degrees of latitude by five degrees of longitude; perpendicularly through
|
||
each of which districts are twelve columns for the twelve months; and
|
||
horizontally through each of which districts are three lines; one to show
|
||
the number of days that have been spent in each month in every district,
|
||
and the two others to show the number of days in which whales, sperm or
|
||
right, have been seen.”
|
||
|
||
|
||
Besides, when making a passage from one feeding-ground to another, the sperm
|
||
whales, guided by some infallible instinct—say, rather, secret intelligence from
|
||
the Deity—mostly swim in veins, as they are called; continuing their way along a
|
||
given ocean-line with such undeviating exactitude, that no ship ever sailed her
|
||
course, by any chart, with one tithe of such marvellous precision. Though, in
|
||
these cases, the direction taken by any one whale be straight as a surveyor’s
|
||
parallel, and though the line of advance be strictly confined to its own
|
||
unavoidable, straight wake, yet the arbitrary vein in which at these times he is
|
||
said to swim, generally embraces some few miles in width (more or less, as the
|
||
vein is presumed to expand or contract); but never exceeds the visual sweep from
|
||
the whale-ship’s mast-heads, when circumspectly gliding along this magic zone.
|
||
The sum is, that at particular seasons within that breadth and along that path,
|
||
migrating whales may with great confidence be looked for.
|
||
|
||
And hence not only at substantiated times, upon well known separate
|
||
feeding-grounds, could Ahab hope to encounter his prey; but in crossing the
|
||
widest expanses of water between those grounds he could, by his art, so place
|
||
and time himself on his way, as even then not to be wholly without prospect of a
|
||
meeting.
|
||
|
||
There was a circumstance which at first sight seemed to entangle his delirious
|
||
but still methodical scheme. But not so in the reality, perhaps. Though the
|
||
gregarious sperm whales have their regular seasons for particular grounds, yet
|
||
in general you cannot conclude that the herds which haunted such and such a
|
||
latitude or longitude this year, say, will turn out to be identically the same
|
||
with those that were found there the preceding season; though there are peculiar
|
||
and unquestionable instances where the contrary of this has proved true. In
|
||
general, the same remark, only within a less wide limit, applies to the
|
||
solitaries and hermits among the matured, aged sperm whales. So that though Moby
|
||
Dick had in a former year been seen, for example, on what is called the
|
||
Seychelle ground in the Indian ocean, or Volcano Bay on the Japanese Coast; yet
|
||
it did not follow, that were the Pequod to visit either of those spots at any
|
||
subsequent corresponding season, she would infallibly encounter him there. So,
|
||
too, with some other feeding grounds, where he had at times revealed himself.
|
||
But all these seemed only his casual stopping-places and ocean-inns, so to
|
||
speak, not his places of prolonged abode. And where Ahab’s chances of
|
||
accomplishing his object have hitherto been spoken of, allusion has only been
|
||
made to whatever way-side, antecedent, extra prospects were his, ere a
|
||
particular set time or place were attained, when all possibilities would become
|
||
probabilities, and, as Ahab fondly thought, every possibility the next thing to
|
||
a certainty. That particular set time and place were conjoined in the one
|
||
technical phrase—the Season-on-the-Line. For there and then, for several
|
||
consecutive years, Moby Dick had been periodically descried, lingering in those
|
||
waters for awhile, as the sun, in its annual round, loiters for a predicted
|
||
interval in any one sign of the Zodiac. There it was, too, that most of the
|
||
deadly encounters with the white whale had taken place; there the waves were
|
||
storied with his deeds; there also was that tragic spot where the monomaniac old
|
||
man had found the awful motive to his vengeance. But in the cautious
|
||
comprehensiveness and unloitering vigilance with which Ahab threw his brooding
|
||
soul into this unfaltering hunt, he would not permit himself to rest all his
|
||
hopes upon the one crowning fact above mentioned, however flattering it might be
|
||
to those hopes; nor in the sleeplessness of his vow could he so tranquillize his
|
||
unquiet heart as to postpone all intervening quest.
|
||
|
||
Now, the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginning of the
|
||
Season-on-the-Line. No possible endeavor then could enable her commander to make
|
||
the great passage southwards, double Cape Horn, and then running down sixty
|
||
degrees of latitude arrive in the equatorial Pacific in time to cruise there.
|
||
Therefore, he must wait for the next ensuing season. Yet the premature hour of
|
||
the Pequod’s sailing had, perhaps, been correctly selected by Ahab, with a view
|
||
to this very complexion of things. Because, an interval of three hundred and
|
||
sixty-five days and nights was before him; an interval which, instead of
|
||
impatiently enduring ashore, he would spend in a miscellaneous hunt; if by
|
||
chance the White Whale, spending his vacation in seas far remote from his
|
||
periodical feeding-grounds, should turn up his wrinkled brow off the Persian
|
||
Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay, or China Seas, or in any other waters haunted by his
|
||
race. So that Monsoons, Pampas, Nor’-Westers, Harmattans, Trades; any wind but
|
||
the Levanter and Simoon, might blow Moby Dick into the devious zig-zag
|
||
world-circle of the Pequod’s circumnavigating wake.
|
||
|
||
But granting all this; yet, regarded discreetly and coolly, seems it not but a
|
||
mad idea, this; that in the broad boundless ocean, one solitary whale, even if
|
||
encountered, should be thought capable of individual recognition from his
|
||
hunter, even as a white-bearded Mufti in the thronged thoroughfares of
|
||
Constantinople? Yes. For the peculiar snow-white brow of Moby Dick, and his
|
||
snow-white hump, could not but be unmistakable. And have I not tallied the
|
||
whale, Ahab would mutter to himself, as after poring over his charts till long
|
||
after midnight he would throw himself back in reveries—tallied him, and shall he
|
||
escape? His broad fins are bored, and scalloped out like a lost sheep’s ear! And
|
||
here, his mad mind would run on in a breathless race; till a weariness and
|
||
faintness of pondering came over him; and in the open air of the deck he would
|
||
seek to recover his strength. Ah, God! what trances of torments does that man
|
||
endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps with
|
||
clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms.
|
||
|
||
Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably vivid dreams
|
||
of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts through the day, carried
|
||
them on amid a clashing of phrensies, and whirled them round and round and round
|
||
in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing of his life-spot became
|
||
insufferable anguish; and when, as was sometimes the case, these spiritual
|
||
throes in him heaved his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in
|
||
him, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends
|
||
beckoned him to leap down among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath
|
||
him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab
|
||
would burst from his state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on fire.
|
||
Yet these, perhaps, instead of being the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent
|
||
weakness, or fright at his own resolve, were but the plainest tokens of its
|
||
intensity. For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast
|
||
hunter of the white whale; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock, was not the
|
||
agent that so caused him to burst from it in horror again. The latter was the
|
||
eternal, living principle or soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time
|
||
dissociated from the characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for
|
||
its outer vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching
|
||
contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no longer an
|
||
integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore
|
||
it must have been that, in Ahab’s case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies
|
||
to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will,
|
||
forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent
|
||
being of its own. Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to
|
||
which it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered
|
||
birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what
|
||
seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a
|
||
formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an
|
||
object to colour, and therefore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old man,
|
||
thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus
|
||
makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture
|
||
the very creature he creates.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 45. The Affidavit.
|
||
|
||
So far as what there may be of a narrative in this book; and, indeed, as
|
||
indirectly touching one or two very interesting and curious particulars in the
|
||
habits of sperm whales, the foregoing chapter, in its earlier part, is as
|
||
important a one as will be found in this volume; but the leading matter of it
|
||
requires to be still further and more familiarly enlarged upon, in order to be
|
||
adequately understood, and moreover to take away any incredulity which a
|
||
profound ignorance of the entire subject may induce in some minds, as to the
|
||
natural verity of the main points of this affair.
|
||
|
||
I care not to perform this part of my task methodically; but shall be content to
|
||
produce the desired impression by separate citations of items, practically or
|
||
reliably known to me as a whaleman; and from these citations, I take it—the
|
||
conclusion aimed at will naturally follow of itself.
|
||
|
||
First: I have personally known three instances where a whale, after receiving a
|
||
harpoon, has effected a complete escape; and, after an interval (in one instance
|
||
of three years), has been again struck by the same hand, and slain; when the two
|
||
irons, both marked by the same private cypher, have been taken from the body. In
|
||
the instance where three years intervened between the flinging of the two
|
||
harpoons; and I think it may have been something more than that; the man who
|
||
darted them happening, in the interval, to go in a trading ship on a voyage to
|
||
Africa, went ashore there, joined a discovery party, and penetrated far into the
|
||
interior, where he travelled for a period of nearly two years, often endangered
|
||
by serpents, savages, tigers, poisonous miasmas, with all the other common
|
||
perils incident to wandering in the heart of unknown regions. Meanwhile, the
|
||
whale he had struck must also have been on its travels; no doubt it had thrice
|
||
circumnavigated the globe, brushing with its flanks all the coasts of Africa;
|
||
but to no purpose. This man and this whale again came together, and the one
|
||
vanquished the other. I say I, myself, have known three instances similar to
|
||
this; that is in two of them I saw the whales struck; and, upon the second
|
||
attack, saw the two irons with the respective marks cut in them, afterwards
|
||
taken from the dead fish. In the three-year instance, it so fell out that I was
|
||
in the boat both times, first and last, and the last time distinctly recognised
|
||
a peculiar sort of huge mole under the whale’s eye, which I had observed there
|
||
three years previous. I say three years, but I am pretty sure it was more than
|
||
that. Here are three instances, then, which I personally know the truth of; but
|
||
I have heard of many other instances from persons whose veracity in the matter
|
||
there is no good ground to impeach.
|
||
|
||
Secondly: It is well known in the Sperm Whale Fishery, however ignorant the
|
||
world ashore may be of it, that there have been several memorable historical
|
||
instances where a particular whale in the ocean has been at distant times and
|
||
places popularly cognisable. Why such a whale became thus marked was not
|
||
altogether and originally owing to his bodily peculiarities as distinguished
|
||
from other whales; for however peculiar in that respect any chance whale may be,
|
||
they soon put an end to his peculiarities by killing him, and boiling him down
|
||
into a peculiarly valuable oil. No: the reason was this: that from the fatal
|
||
experiences of the fishery there hung a terrible prestige of perilousness about
|
||
such a whale as there did about Rinaldo Rinaldini, insomuch that most fishermen
|
||
were content to recognise him by merely touching their tarpaulins when he would
|
||
be discovered lounging by them on the sea, without seeking to cultivate a more
|
||
intimate acquaintance. Like some poor devils ashore that happen to know an
|
||
irascible great man, they make distant unobtrusive salutations to him in the
|
||
street, lest if they pursued the acquaintance further, they might receive a
|
||
summary thump for their presumption.
|
||
|
||
But not only did each of these famous whales enjoy great individual
|
||
celebrity—Nay, you may call it an ocean-wide renown; not only was he famous in
|
||
life and now is immortal in forecastle stories after death, but he was admitted
|
||
into all the rights, privileges, and distinctions of a name; had as much a name
|
||
indeed as Cambyses or Cæsar. Was it not so, O Timor Tom! thou famed leviathan,
|
||
scarred like an iceberg, who so long did’st lurk in the Oriental straits of that
|
||
name, whose spout was oft seen from the palmy beach of Ombay? Was it not so, O
|
||
New Zealand Jack! thou terror of all cruisers that crossed their wakes in the
|
||
vicinity of the Tattoo Land? Was it not so, O Morquan! King of Japan, whose
|
||
lofty jet they say at times assumed the semblance of a snow-white cross against
|
||
the sky? Was it not so, O Don Miguel! thou Chilian whale, marked like an old
|
||
tortoise with mystic hieroglyphics upon the back! In plain prose, here are four
|
||
whales as well known to the students of Cetacean History as Marius or Sylla to
|
||
the classic scholar.
|
||
|
||
But this is not all. New Zealand Tom and Don Miguel, after at various times
|
||
creating great havoc among the boats of different vessels, were finally gone in
|
||
quest of, systematically hunted out, chased and killed by valiant whaling
|
||
captains, who heaved up their anchors with that express object as much in view,
|
||
as in setting out through the Narragansett Woods, Captain Butler of old had it
|
||
in his mind to capture that notorious murderous savage Annawon, the headmost
|
||
warrior of the Indian King Philip.
|
||
|
||
I do not know where I can find a better place than just here, to make mention of
|
||
one or two other things, which to me seem important, as in printed form
|
||
establishing in all respects the reasonableness of the whole story of the White
|
||
Whale, more especially the catastrophe. For this is one of those disheartening
|
||
instances where truth requires full as much bolstering as error. So ignorant are
|
||
most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world,
|
||
that without some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of
|
||
the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse
|
||
and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.
|
||
|
||
First: Though most men have some vague flitting ideas of the general perils of
|
||
the grand fishery, yet they have nothing like a fixed, vivid conception of those
|
||
perils, and the frequency with which they recur. One reason perhaps is, that not
|
||
one in fifty of the actual disasters and deaths by casualties in the fishery,
|
||
ever finds a public record at home, however transient and immediately forgotten
|
||
that record. Do you suppose that that poor fellow there, who this moment perhaps
|
||
caught by the whale-line off the coast of New Guinea, is being carried down to
|
||
the bottom of the sea by the sounding leviathan—do you suppose that that poor
|
||
fellow’s name will appear in the newspaper obituary you will read to-morrow at
|
||
your breakfast? No: because the mails are very irregular between here and New
|
||
Guinea. In fact, did you ever hear what might be called regular news direct or
|
||
indirect from New Guinea? Yet I tell you that upon one particular voyage which I
|
||
made to the Pacific, among many others we spoke thirty different ships, every
|
||
one of which had had a death by a whale, some of them more than one, and three
|
||
that had each lost a boat’s crew. For God’s sake, be economical with your lamps
|
||
and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man’s blood was
|
||
spilled for it.
|
||
|
||
Secondly: People ashore have indeed some indefinite idea that a whale is an
|
||
enormous creature of enormous power; but I have ever found that when narrating
|
||
to them some specific example of this two-fold enormousness, they have
|
||
significantly complimented me upon my facetiousness; when, I declare upon my
|
||
soul, I had no more idea of being facetious than Moses, when he wrote the
|
||
history of the plagues of Egypt.
|
||
|
||
But fortunately the special point I here seek can be established upon testimony
|
||
entirely independent of my own. That point is this: The Sperm Whale is in some
|
||
cases sufficiently powerful, knowing, and judiciously malicious, as with direct
|
||
aforethought to stave in, utterly destroy, and sink a large ship; and what is
|
||
more, the Sperm Whale has done it.
|
||
|
||
First: In the year 1820 the ship Essex, Captain Pollard, of Nantucket, was
|
||
cruising in the Pacific Ocean. One day she saw spouts, lowered her boats, and
|
||
gave chase to a shoal of sperm whales. Ere long, several of the whales were
|
||
wounded; when, suddenly, a very large whale escaping from the boats, issued from
|
||
the shoal, and bore directly down upon the ship. Dashing his forehead against
|
||
her hull, he so stove her in, that in less than “ten minutes” she settled down
|
||
and fell over. Not a surviving plank of her has been seen since. After the
|
||
severest exposure, part of the crew reached the land in their boats. Being
|
||
returned home at last, Captain Pollard once more sailed for the Pacific in
|
||
command of another ship, but the gods shipwrecked him again upon unknown rocks
|
||
and breakers; for the second time his ship was utterly lost, and forthwith
|
||
forswearing the sea, he has never tempted it since. At this day Captain Pollard
|
||
is a resident of Nantucket. I have seen Owen Chace, who was chief mate of the
|
||
Essex at the time of the tragedy; I have read his plain and faithful narrative;
|
||
I have conversed with his son; and all this within a few miles of the scene of
|
||
the catastrophe.*
|
||
|
||
*The following are extracts from Chace’s narrative: “Every fact seemed to
|
||
warrant me in concluding that it was anything but chance which directed his
|
||
operations; he made two several attacks upon the ship, at a short interval
|
||
between them, both of which, according to their direction, were calculated to
|
||
do us the most injury, by being made ahead, and thereby combining the speed of
|
||
the two objects for the shock; to effect which, the exact manœuvres which he
|
||
made were necessary. His aspect was most horrible, and such as indicated
|
||
resentment and fury. He came directly from the shoal which we had just before
|
||
entered, and in which we had struck three of his companions, as if fired with
|
||
revenge for their sufferings.” Again: “At all events, the whole circumstances
|
||
taken together, all happening before my own eyes, and producing, at the time,
|
||
impressions in my mind of decided, calculating mischief, on the part of the
|
||
whale (many of which impressions I cannot now recall), induce me to be
|
||
satisfied that I am correct in my opinion.”
|
||
|
||
Here are his reflections some time after quitting the ship, during a black night
|
||
in an open boat, when almost despairing of reaching any hospitable shore. “The
|
||
dark ocean and swelling waters were nothing; the fears of being swallowed up by
|
||
some dreadful tempest, or dashed upon hidden rocks, with all the other ordinary
|
||
subjects of fearful contemplation, seemed scarcely entitled to a moment’s
|
||
thought; the dismal looking wreck, and the horrid aspect and revenge of the
|
||
whale, wholly engrossed my reflections, until day again made its appearance.”
|
||
|
||
In another place—p. 45,—he speaks of “the mysterious and mortal attack of the
|
||
animal.”
|
||
|
||
Secondly: The ship Union, also of Nantucket, was in the year 1807 totally lost
|
||
off the Azores by a similar onset, but the authentic particulars of this
|
||
catastrophe I have never chanced to encounter, though from the whale hunters I
|
||
have now and then heard casual allusions to it.
|
||
|
||
Thirdly: Some eighteen or twenty years ago Commodore J——, then commanding an
|
||
American sloop-of-war of the first class, happened to be dining with a party of
|
||
whaling captains, on board a Nantucket ship in the harbor of Oahu, Sandwich
|
||
Islands. Conversation turning upon whales, the Commodore was pleased to be
|
||
sceptical touching the amazing strength ascribed to them by the professional
|
||
gentlemen present. He peremptorily denied for example, that any whale could so
|
||
smite his stout sloop-of-war as to cause her to leak so much as a thimbleful.
|
||
Very good; but there is more coming. Some weeks after, the Commodore set sail in
|
||
this impregnable craft for Valparaiso. But he was stopped on the way by a portly
|
||
sperm whale, that begged a few moments’ confidential business with him. That
|
||
business consisted in fetching the Commodore’s craft such a thwack, that with
|
||
all his pumps going he made straight for the nearest port to heave down and
|
||
repair. I am not superstitious, but I consider the Commodore’s interview with
|
||
that whale as providential. Was not Saul of Tarsus converted from unbelief by a
|
||
similar fright? I tell you, the sperm whale will stand no nonsense.
|
||
|
||
I will now refer you to Langsdorff’s Voyages for a little circumstance in point,
|
||
peculiarly interesting to the writer hereof. Langsdorff, you must know by the
|
||
way, was attached to the Russian Admiral Krusenstern’s famous Discovery
|
||
Expedition in the beginning of the present century. Captain Langsdorff thus
|
||
begins his seventeenth chapter:
|
||
|
||
“By the thirteenth of May our ship was ready to sail, and the next day we were
|
||
out in the open sea, on our way to Ochotsh. The weather was very clear and fine,
|
||
but so intolerably cold that we were obliged to keep on our fur clothing. For
|
||
some days we had very little wind; it was not till the nineteenth that a brisk
|
||
gale from the northwest sprang up. An uncommon large whale, the body of which
|
||
was larger than the ship itself, lay almost at the surface of the water, but was
|
||
not perceived by any one on board till the moment when the ship, which was in
|
||
full sail, was almost upon him, so that it was impossible to prevent its
|
||
striking against him. We were thus placed in the most imminent danger, as this
|
||
gigantic creature, setting up its back, raised the ship three feet at least out
|
||
of the water. The masts reeled, and the sails fell altogether, while we who were
|
||
below all sprang instantly upon the deck, concluding that we had struck upon
|
||
some rock; instead of this we saw the monster sailing off with the utmost
|
||
gravity and solemnity. Captain D’Wolf applied immediately to the pumps to
|
||
examine whether or not the vessel had received any damage from the shock, but we
|
||
found that very happily it had escaped entirely uninjured.”
|
||
|
||
Now, the Captain D’Wolf here alluded to as commanding the ship in question, is a
|
||
New Englander, who, after a long life of unusual adventures as a sea-captain,
|
||
this day resides in the village of Dorchester near Boston. I have the honor of
|
||
being a nephew of his. I have particularly questioned him concerning this
|
||
passage in Langsdorff. He substantiates every word. The ship, however, was by no
|
||
means a large one: a Russian craft built on the Siberian coast, and purchased by
|
||
my uncle after bartering away the vessel in which he sailed from home.
|
||
|
||
In that up and down manly book of old-fashioned adventure, so full, too, of
|
||
honest wonders—the voyage of Lionel Wafer, one of ancient Dampier’s old chums—I
|
||
found a little matter set down so like that just quoted from Langsdorff, that I
|
||
cannot forbear inserting it here for a corroborative example, if such be needed.
|
||
|
||
Lionel, it seems, was on his way to “John Ferdinando,” as he calls the modern
|
||
Juan Fernandes. “In our way thither,” he says, “about four o’clock in the
|
||
morning, when we were about one hundred and fifty leagues from the Main of
|
||
America, our ship felt a terrible shock, which put our men in such consternation
|
||
that they could hardly tell where they were or what to think; but every one
|
||
began to prepare for death. And, indeed, the shock was so sudden and violent,
|
||
that we took it for granted the ship had struck against a rock; but when the
|
||
amazement was a little over, we cast the lead, and sounded, but found no ground.
|
||
* * * * * The suddenness of the shock made the guns leap in their carriages, and
|
||
several of the men were shaken out of their hammocks. Captain Davis, who lay
|
||
with his head on a gun, was thrown out of his cabin!” Lionel then goes on to
|
||
impute the shock to an earthquake, and seems to substantiate the imputation by
|
||
stating that a great earthquake, somewhere about that time, did actually do
|
||
great mischief along the Spanish land. But I should not much wonder if, in the
|
||
darkness of that early hour of the morning, the shock was after all caused by an
|
||
unseen whale vertically bumping the hull from beneath.
|
||
|
||
I might proceed with several more examples, one way or another known to me, of
|
||
the great power and malice at times of the sperm whale. In more than one
|
||
instance, he has been known, not only to chase the assailing boats back to their
|
||
ships, but to pursue the ship itself, and long withstand all the lances hurled
|
||
at him from its decks. The English ship Pusie Hall can tell a story on that
|
||
head; and, as for his strength, let me say, that there have been examples where
|
||
the lines attached to a running sperm whale have, in a calm, been transferred to
|
||
the ship, and secured there; the whale towing her great hull through the water,
|
||
as a horse walks off with a cart. Again, it is very often observed that, if the
|
||
sperm whale, once struck, is allowed time to rally, he then acts, not so often
|
||
with blind rage, as with wilful, deliberate designs of destruction to his
|
||
pursuers; nor is it without conveying some eloquent indication of his character,
|
||
that upon being attacked he will frequently open his mouth, and retain it in
|
||
that dread expansion for several consecutive minutes. But I must be content with
|
||
only one more and a concluding illustration; a remarkable and most significant
|
||
one, by which you will not fail to see, that not only is the most marvellous
|
||
event in this book corroborated by plain facts of the present day, but that
|
||
these marvels (like all marvels) are mere repetitions of the ages; so that for
|
||
the millionth time we say amen with Solomon—Verily there is nothing new under
|
||
the sun.
|
||
|
||
In the sixth Christian century lived Procopius, a Christian magistrate of
|
||
Constantinople, in the days when Justinian was Emperor and Belisarius general.
|
||
As many know, he wrote the history of his own times, a work every way of
|
||
uncommon value. By the best authorities, he has always been considered a most
|
||
trustworthy and unexaggerating historian, except in some one or two particulars,
|
||
not at all affecting the matter presently to be mentioned.
|
||
|
||
Now, in this history of his, Procopius mentions that, during the term of his
|
||
prefecture at Constantinople, a great sea-monster was captured in the
|
||
neighboring Propontis, or Sea of Marmora, after having destroyed vessels at
|
||
intervals in those waters for a period of more than fifty years. A fact thus set
|
||
down in substantial history cannot easily be gainsaid. Nor is there any reason
|
||
it should be. Of what precise species this sea-monster was, is not mentioned.
|
||
But as he destroyed ships, as well as for other reasons, he must have been a
|
||
whale; and I am strongly inclined to think a sperm whale. And I will tell you
|
||
why. For a long time I fancied that the sperm whale had been always unknown in
|
||
the Mediterranean and the deep waters connecting with it. Even now I am certain
|
||
that those seas are not, and perhaps never can be, in the present constitution
|
||
of things, a place for his habitual gregarious resort. But further
|
||
investigations have recently proved to me, that in modern times there have been
|
||
isolated instances of the presence of the sperm whale in the Mediterranean. I am
|
||
told, on good authority, that on the Barbary coast, a Commodore Davis of the
|
||
British navy found the skeleton of a sperm whale. Now, as a vessel of war
|
||
readily passes through the Dardanelles, hence a sperm whale could, by the same
|
||
route, pass out of the Mediterranean into the Propontis.
|
||
|
||
In the Propontis, as far as I can learn, none of that peculiar substance called
|
||
brit is to be found, the aliment of the right whale. But I have every reason to
|
||
believe that the food of the sperm whale—squid or cuttle-fish—lurks at the
|
||
bottom of that sea, because large creatures, but by no means the largest of that
|
||
sort, have been found at its surface. If, then, you properly put these
|
||
statements together, and reason upon them a bit, you will clearly perceive that,
|
||
according to all human reasoning, Procopius’s sea-monster, that for half a
|
||
century stove the ships of a Roman Emperor, must in all probability have been a
|
||
sperm whale.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 46. Surmises.
|
||
|
||
Though, consumed with the hot fire of his purpose, Ahab in all his thoughts and
|
||
actions ever had in view the ultimate capture of Moby Dick; though he seemed
|
||
ready to sacrifice all mortal interests to that one passion; nevertheless it may
|
||
have been that he was by nature and long habituation far too wedded to a fiery
|
||
whaleman’s ways, altogether to abandon the collateral prosecution of the voyage.
|
||
Or at least if this were otherwise, there were not wanting other motives much
|
||
more influential with him. It would be refining too much, perhaps, even
|
||
considering his monomania, to hint that his vindictiveness towards the White
|
||
Whale might have possibly extended itself in some degree to all sperm whales,
|
||
and that the more monsters he slew by so much the more he multiplied the chances
|
||
that each subsequently encountered whale would prove to be the hated one he
|
||
hunted. But if such an hypothesis be indeed exceptionable, there were still
|
||
additional considerations which, though not so strictly according with the
|
||
wildness of his ruling passion, yet were by no means incapable of swaying him.
|
||
|
||
To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used in the
|
||
shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order. He knew, for example,
|
||
that however magnetic his ascendency in some respects was over Starbuck, yet
|
||
that ascendency did not cover the complete spiritual man any more than mere
|
||
corporeal superiority involves intellectual mastership; for to the purely
|
||
spiritual, the intellectual but stand in a sort of corporeal relation.
|
||
Starbuck’s body and Starbuck’s coerced will were Ahab’s, so long as Ahab kept
|
||
his magnet at Starbuck’s brain; still he knew that for all this the chief mate,
|
||
in his soul, abhorred his captain’s quest, and could he, would joyfully
|
||
disintegrate himself from it, or even frustrate it. It might be that a long
|
||
interval would elapse ere the White Whale was seen. During that long interval
|
||
Starbuck would ever be apt to fall into open relapses of rebellion against his
|
||
captain’s leadership, unless some ordinary, prudential, circumstantial
|
||
influences were brought to bear upon him. Not only that, but the subtle insanity
|
||
of Ahab respecting Moby Dick was noways more significantly manifested than in
|
||
his superlative sense and shrewdness in foreseeing that, for the present, the
|
||
hunt should in some way be stripped of that strange imaginative impiousness
|
||
which naturally invested it; that the full terror of the voyage must be kept
|
||
withdrawn into the obscure background (for few men’s courage is proof against
|
||
protracted meditation unrelieved by action); that when they stood their long
|
||
night watches, his officers and men must have some nearer things to think of
|
||
than Moby Dick. For however eagerly and impetuously the savage crew had hailed
|
||
the announcement of his quest; yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less
|
||
capricious and unreliable—they live in the varying outer weather, and they
|
||
inhale its fickleness—and when retained for any object remote and blank in the
|
||
pursuit, however promissory of life and passion in the end, it is above all
|
||
things requisite that temporary interests and employments should intervene and
|
||
hold them healthily suspended for the final dash.
|
||
|
||
Nor was Ahab unmindful of another thing. In times of strong emotion mankind
|
||
disdain all base considerations; but such times are evanescent. The permanent
|
||
constitutional condition of the manufactured man, thought Ahab, is sordidness.
|
||
Granting that the White Whale fully incites the hearts of this my savage crew,
|
||
and playing round their savageness even breeds a certain generous
|
||
knight-errantism in them, still, while for the love of it they give chase to
|
||
Moby Dick, they must also have food for their more common, daily appetites. For
|
||
even the high lifted and chivalric Crusaders of old times were not content to
|
||
traverse two thousand miles of land to fight for their holy sepulchre, without
|
||
committing burglaries, picking pockets, and gaining other pious perquisites by
|
||
the way. Had they been strictly held to their one final and romantic object—that
|
||
final and romantic object, too many would have turned from in disgust. I will
|
||
not strip these men, thought Ahab, of all hopes of cash—aye, cash. They may
|
||
scorn cash now; but let some months go by, and no perspective promise of it to
|
||
them, and then this same quiescent cash all at once mutinying in them, this same
|
||
cash would soon cashier Ahab.
|
||
|
||
Nor was there wanting still another precautionary motive more related to Ahab
|
||
personally. Having impulsively, it is probable, and perhaps somewhat prematurely
|
||
revealed the prime but private purpose of the Pequod’s voyage, Ahab was now
|
||
entirely conscious that, in so doing, he had indirectly laid himself open to the
|
||
unanswerable charge of usurpation; and with perfect impunity, both moral and
|
||
legal, his crew if so disposed, and to that end competent, could refuse all
|
||
further obedience to him, and even violently wrest from him the command. From
|
||
even the barely hinted imputation of usurpation, and the possible consequences
|
||
of such a suppressed impression gaining ground, Ahab must of course have been
|
||
most anxious to protect himself. That protection could only consist in his own
|
||
predominating brain and heart and hand, backed by a heedful, closely calculating
|
||
attention to every minute atmospheric influence which it was possible for his
|
||
crew to be subjected to.
|
||
|
||
For all these reasons then, and others perhaps too analytic to be verbally
|
||
developed here, Ahab plainly saw that he must still in a good degree continue
|
||
true to the natural, nominal purpose of the Pequod’s voyage; observe all
|
||
customary usages; and not only that, but force himself to evince all his well
|
||
known passionate interest in the general pursuit of his profession.
|
||
|
||
Be all this as it may, his voice was now often heard hailing the three
|
||
mast-heads and admonishing them to keep a bright look-out, and not omit
|
||
reporting even a porpoise. This vigilance was not long without reward.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 47. The Mat-Maker.
|
||
|
||
It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon; the seamen were lazily lounging about the
|
||
decks, or vacantly gazing over into the lead-coloured waters. Queequeg and I
|
||
were mildly employed weaving what is called a sword-mat, for an additional
|
||
lashing to our boat. So still and subdued and yet somehow preluding was all the
|
||
scene, and such an incantation of reverie lurked in the air, that each silent
|
||
sailor seemed resolved into his own invisible self.
|
||
|
||
I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat. As I kept
|
||
passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline between the long yarns of
|
||
the warp, using my own hand for the shuttle, and as Queequeg, standing sideways,
|
||
ever and anon slid his heavy oaken sword between the threads, and idly looking
|
||
off upon the water, carelessly and unthinkingly drove home every yarn: I say so
|
||
strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the
|
||
sea, only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as
|
||
if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving
|
||
and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject
|
||
to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration
|
||
merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its
|
||
own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my
|
||
own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads. Meantime,
|
||
Queequeg’s impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly,
|
||
or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be; and by this
|
||
difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding contrast in the
|
||
final aspect of the completed fabric; this savage’s sword, thought I, which thus
|
||
finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this easy, indifferent sword
|
||
must be chance—aye, chance, free will, and necessity—nowise incompatible—all
|
||
interweavingly working together. The straight warp of necessity, not to be
|
||
swerved from its ultimate course—its every alternating vibration, indeed, only
|
||
tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads;
|
||
and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity,
|
||
and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus prescribed to by
|
||
both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events.
|
||
|
||
Thus we were weaving and weaving away when I started at a sound so strange, long
|
||
drawn, and musically wild and unearthly, that the ball of free will dropped from
|
||
my hand, and I stood gazing up at the clouds whence that voice dropped like a
|
||
wing. High aloft in the cross-trees was that mad Gay-Header, Tashtego. His body
|
||
was reaching eagerly forward, his hand stretched out like a wand, and at brief
|
||
sudden intervals he continued his cries. To be sure the same sound was that very
|
||
moment perhaps being heard all over the seas, from hundreds of whalemen’s
|
||
look-outs perched as high in the air; but from few of those lungs could that
|
||
accustomed old cry have derived such a marvellous cadence as from Tashtego the
|
||
Indian’s.
|
||
|
||
As he stood hovering over you half suspended in air, so wildly and eagerly
|
||
peering towards the horizon, you would have thought him some prophet or seer
|
||
beholding the shadows of Fate, and by those wild cries announcing their coming.
|
||
|
||
“There she blows! there! there! there! she blows! she blows!”
|
||
|
||
“Where-away?”
|
||
|
||
“On the lee-beam, about two miles off! a school of them!”
|
||
|
||
Instantly all was commotion.
|
||
|
||
The Sperm Whale blows as a clock ticks, with the same undeviating and reliable
|
||
uniformity. And thereby whalemen distinguish this fish from other tribes of his
|
||
genus.
|
||
|
||
“There go flukes!” was now the cry from Tashtego; and the whales disappeared.
|
||
|
||
“Quick, steward!” cried Ahab. “Time! time!”
|
||
|
||
Dough-Boy hurried below, glanced at the watch, and reported the exact minute to
|
||
Ahab.
|
||
|
||
The ship was now kept away from the wind, and she went gently rolling before it.
|
||
Tashtego reporting that the whales had gone down heading to leeward, we
|
||
confidently looked to see them again directly in advance of our bows. For that
|
||
singular craft at times evinced by the Sperm Whale when, sounding with his head
|
||
in one direction, he nevertheless, while concealed beneath the surface, mills
|
||
round, and swiftly swims off in the opposite quarter—this deceitfulness of his
|
||
could not now be in action; for there was no reason to suppose that the fish
|
||
seen by Tashtego had been in any way alarmed, or indeed knew at all of our
|
||
vicinity. One of the men selected for shipkeepers—that is, those not appointed
|
||
to the boats, by this time relieved the Indian at the main-mast head. The
|
||
sailors at the fore and mizzen had come down; the line tubs were fixed in their
|
||
places; the cranes were thrust out; the mainyard was backed, and the three boats
|
||
swung over the sea like three samphire baskets over high cliffs. Outside of the
|
||
bulwarks their eager crews with one hand clung to the rail, while one foot was
|
||
expectantly poised on the gunwale. So look the long line of man-of-war’s men
|
||
about to throw themselves on board an enemy’s ship.
|
||
|
||
But at this critical instant a sudden exclamation was heard that took every eye
|
||
from the whale. With a start all glared at dark Ahab, who was surrounded by five
|
||
dusky phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 48. The First Lowering.
|
||
|
||
The phantoms, for so they then seemed, were flitting on the other side of the
|
||
deck, and, with a noiseless celerity, were casting loose the tackles and bands
|
||
of the boat which swung there. This boat had always been deemed one of the spare
|
||
boats, though technically called the captain’s, on account of its hanging from
|
||
the starboard quarter. The figure that now stood by its bows was tall and swart,
|
||
with one white tooth evilly protruding from its steel-like lips. A rumpled
|
||
Chinese jacket of black cotton funereally invested him, with wide black trowsers
|
||
of the same dark stuff. But strangely crowning this ebonness was a glistening
|
||
white plaited turban, the living hair braided and coiled round and round upon
|
||
his head. Less swart in aspect, the companions of this figure were of that
|
||
vivid, tiger-yellow complexion peculiar to some of the aboriginal natives of the
|
||
Manillas;—a race notorious for a certain diabolism of subtilty, and by some
|
||
honest white mariners supposed to be the paid spies and secret confidential
|
||
agents on the water of the devil, their lord, whose counting-room they suppose
|
||
to be elsewhere.
|
||
|
||
While yet the wondering ship’s company were gazing upon these strangers, Ahab
|
||
cried out to the white-turbaned old man at their head, “All ready there,
|
||
Fedallah?”
|
||
|
||
“Ready,” was the half-hissed reply.
|
||
|
||
“Lower away then; d’ye hear?” shouting across the deck. “Lower away there, I
|
||
say.”
|
||
|
||
Such was the thunder of his voice, that spite of their amazement the men sprang
|
||
over the rail; the sheaves whirled round in the blocks; with a wallow, the three
|
||
boats dropped into the sea; while, with a dexterous, off-handed daring, unknown
|
||
in any other vocation, the sailors, goat-like, leaped down the rolling ship’s
|
||
side into the tossed boats below.
|
||
|
||
Hardly had they pulled out from under the ship’s lee, when a fourth keel, coming
|
||
from the windward side, pulled round under the stern, and showed the five
|
||
strangers rowing Ahab, who, standing erect in the stern, loudly hailed Starbuck,
|
||
Stubb, and Flask, to spread themselves widely, so as to cover a large expanse of
|
||
water. But with all their eyes again riveted upon the swart Fedallah and his
|
||
crew, the inmates of the other boats obeyed not the command.
|
||
|
||
“Captain Ahab?—” said Starbuck.
|
||
|
||
“Spread yourselves,” cried Ahab; “give way, all four boats. Thou, Flask, pull
|
||
out more to leeward!”
|
||
|
||
“Aye, aye, sir,” cheerily cried little King-Post, sweeping round his great
|
||
steering oar. “Lay back!” addressing his crew. “There!—there!—there again! There
|
||
she blows right ahead, boys!—lay back!”
|
||
|
||
“Never heed yonder yellow boys, Archy.”
|
||
|
||
“Oh, I don’t mind ’em, sir,” said Archy; “I knew it all before now. Didn’t I
|
||
hear ’em in the hold? And didn’t I tell Cabaco here of it? What say ye, Cabaco?
|
||
They are stowaways, Mr. Flask.”
|
||
|
||
“Pull, pull, my fine hearts-alive; pull, my children; pull, my little ones,”
|
||
drawlingly and soothingly sighed Stubb to his crew, some of whom still showed
|
||
signs of uneasiness. “Why don’t you break your backbones, my boys? What is it
|
||
you stare at? Those chaps in yonder boat? Tut! They are only five more hands
|
||
come to help us—never mind from where—the more the merrier. Pull, then, do pull;
|
||
never mind the brimstone—devils are good fellows enough. So, so; there you are
|
||
now; that’s the stroke for a thousand pounds; that’s the stroke to sweep the
|
||
stakes! Hurrah for the gold cup of sperm oil, my heroes! Three cheers, men—all
|
||
hearts alive! Easy, easy; don’t be in a hurry—don’t be in a hurry. Why don’t you
|
||
snap your oars, you rascals? Bite something, you dogs! So, so, so, then:—softly,
|
||
softly! That’s it—that’s it! long and strong. Give way there, give way! The
|
||
devil fetch ye, ye ragamuffin rapscallions; ye are all asleep. Stop snoring, ye
|
||
sleepers, and pull. Pull, will ye? pull, can’t ye? pull, won’t ye? Why in the
|
||
name of gudgeons and ginger-cakes don’t ye pull?—pull and break something! pull,
|
||
and start your eyes out! Here!” whipping out the sharp knife from his girdle;
|
||
“every mother’s son of ye draw his knife, and pull with the blade between his
|
||
teeth. That’s it—that’s it. Now ye do something; that looks like it, my
|
||
steel-bits. Start her—start her, my silver-spoons! Start her, marling-spikes!”
|
||
|
||
Stubb’s exordium to his crew is given here at large, because he had rather a
|
||
peculiar way of talking to them in general, and especially in inculcating the
|
||
religion of rowing. But you must not suppose from this specimen of his
|
||
sermonizings that he ever flew into downright passions with his congregation.
|
||
Not at all; and therein consisted his chief peculiarity. He would say the most
|
||
terrific things to his crew, in a tone so strangely compounded of fun and fury,
|
||
and the fury seemed so calculated merely as a spice to the fun, that no oarsman
|
||
could hear such queer invocations without pulling for dear life, and yet pulling
|
||
for the mere joke of the thing. Besides he all the time looked so easy and
|
||
indolent himself, so loungingly managed his steering-oar, and so broadly
|
||
gaped—open-mouthed at times—that the mere sight of such a yawning commander, by
|
||
sheer force of contrast, acted like a charm upon the crew. Then again, Stubb was
|
||
one of those odd sort of humorists, whose jollity is sometimes so curiously
|
||
ambiguous, as to put all inferiors on their guard in the matter of obeying them.
|
||
|
||
In obedience to a sign from Ahab, Starbuck was now pulling obliquely across
|
||
Stubb’s bow; and when for a minute or so the two boats were pretty near to each
|
||
other, Stubb hailed the mate.
|
||
|
||
“Mr. Starbuck! larboard boat there, ahoy! a word with ye, sir, if ye please!”
|
||
|
||
“Halloa!” returned Starbuck, turning round not a single inch as he spoke; still
|
||
earnestly but whisperingly urging his crew; his face set like a flint from
|
||
Stubb’s.
|
||
|
||
“What think ye of those yellow boys, sir!”
|
||
|
||
“Smuggled on board, somehow, before the ship sailed. (Strong, strong, boys!)” in
|
||
a whisper to his crew, then speaking out loud again: “A sad business, Mr. Stubb!
|
||
(seethe her, seethe her, my lads!) but never mind, Mr. Stubb, all for the best.
|
||
Let all your crew pull strong, come what will. (Spring, my men, spring!) There’s
|
||
hogsheads of sperm ahead, Mr. Stubb, and that’s what ye came for. (Pull, my
|
||
boys!) Sperm, sperm’s the play! This at least is duty; duty and profit hand in
|
||
hand.”
|
||
|
||
“Aye, aye, I thought as much,” soliloquized Stubb, when the boats diverged, “as
|
||
soon as I clapt eye on ’em, I thought so. Aye, and that’s what he went into the
|
||
after hold for, so often, as Dough-Boy long suspected. They were hidden down
|
||
there. The White Whale’s at the bottom of it. Well, well, so be it! Can’t be
|
||
helped! All right! Give way, men! It ain’t the White Whale to-day! Give way!”
|
||
|
||
Now the advent of these outlandish strangers at such a critical instant as the
|
||
lowering of the boats from the deck, this had not unreasonably awakened a sort
|
||
of superstitious amazement in some of the ship’s company; but Archy’s fancied
|
||
discovery having some time previous got abroad among them, though indeed not
|
||
credited then, this had in some small measure prepared them for the event. It
|
||
took off the extreme edge of their wonder; and so what with all this and Stubb’s
|
||
confident way of accounting for their appearance, they were for the time freed
|
||
from superstitious surmisings; though the affair still left abundant room for
|
||
all manner of wild conjectures as to dark Ahab’s precise agency in the matter
|
||
from the beginning. For me, I silently recalled the mysterious shadows I had
|
||
seen creeping on board the Pequod during the dim Nantucket dawn, as well as the
|
||
enigmatical hintings of the unaccountable Elijah.
|
||
|
||
Meantime, Ahab, out of hearing of his officers, having sided the furthest to
|
||
windward, was still ranging ahead of the other boats; a circumstance bespeaking
|
||
how potent a crew was pulling him. Those tiger yellow creatures of his seemed
|
||
all steel and whalebone; like five trip-hammers they rose and fell with regular
|
||
strokes of strength, which periodically started the boat along the water like a
|
||
horizontal burst boiler out of a Mississippi steamer. As for Fedallah, who was
|
||
seen pulling the harpooneer oar, he had thrown aside his black jacket, and
|
||
displayed his naked chest with the whole part of his body above the gunwale,
|
||
clearly cut against the alternating depressions of the watery horizon; while at
|
||
the other end of the boat Ahab, with one arm, like a fencer’s, thrown half
|
||
backward into the air, as if to counterbalance any tendency to trip; Ahab was
|
||
seen steadily managing his steering oar as in a thousand boat lowerings ere the
|
||
White Whale had torn him. All at once the outstretched arm gave a peculiar
|
||
motion and then remained fixed, while the boat’s five oars were seen
|
||
simultaneously peaked. Boat and crew sat motionless on the sea. Instantly the
|
||
three spread boats in the rear paused on their way. The whales had irregularly
|
||
settled bodily down into the blue, thus giving no distantly discernible token of
|
||
the movement, though from his closer vicinity Ahab had observed it.
|
||
|
||
“Every man look out along his oars!” cried Starbuck. “Thou, Queequeg, stand up!”
|
||
|
||
Nimbly springing up on the triangular raised box in the bow, the savage stood
|
||
erect there, and with intensely eager eyes gazed off towards the spot where the
|
||
chase had last been descried. Likewise upon the extreme stern of the boat where
|
||
it was also triangularly platformed level with the gunwale, Starbuck himself was
|
||
seen coolly and adroitly balancing himself to the jerking tossings of his chip
|
||
of a craft, and silently eyeing the vast blue eye of the sea.
|
||
|
||
Not very far distant Flask’s boat was also lying breathlessly still; its
|
||
commander recklessly standing upon the top of the loggerhead, a stout sort of
|
||
post rooted in the keel, and rising some two feet above the level of the stern
|
||
platform. It is used for catching turns with the whale line. Its top is not more
|
||
spacious than the palm of a man’s hand, and standing upon such a base as that,
|
||
Flask seemed perched at the mast-head of some ship which had sunk to all but her
|
||
trucks. But little King-Post was small and short, and at the same time little
|
||
King-Post was full of a large and tall ambition, so that this loggerhead
|
||
stand-point of his did by no means satisfy King-Post.
|
||
|
||
“I can’t see three seas off; tip us up an oar there, and let me on to that.”
|
||
|
||
Upon this, Daggoo, with either hand upon the gunwale to steady his way, swiftly
|
||
slid aft, and then erecting himself volunteered his lofty shoulders for a
|
||
pedestal.
|
||
|
||
“Good a mast-head as any, sir. Will you mount?”
|
||
|
||
“That I will, and thank ye very much, my fine fellow; only I wish you fifty feet
|
||
taller.”
|
||
|
||
Whereupon planting his feet firmly against two opposite planks of the boat, the
|
||
gigantic negro, stooping a little, presented his flat palm to Flask’s foot, and
|
||
then putting Flask’s hand on his hearse-plumed head and bidding him spring as he
|
||
himself should toss, with one dexterous fling landed the little man high and dry
|
||
on his shoulders. And here was Flask now standing, Daggoo with one lifted arm
|
||
furnishing him with a breastband to lean against and steady himself by.
|
||
|
||
At any time it is a strange sight to the tyro to see with what wondrous habitude
|
||
of unconscious skill the whaleman will maintain an erect posture in his boat,
|
||
even when pitched about by the most riotously perverse and cross-running seas.
|
||
Still more strange to see him giddily perched upon the loggerhead itself, under
|
||
such circumstances. But the sight of little Flask mounted upon gigantic Daggoo
|
||
was yet more curious; for sustaining himself with a cool, indifferent, easy,
|
||
unthought of, barbaric majesty, the noble negro to every roll of the sea
|
||
harmoniously rolled his fine form. On his broad back, flaxen-haired Flask seemed
|
||
a snow-flake. The bearer looked nobler than the rider. Though truly vivacious,
|
||
tumultuous, ostentatious little Flask would now and then stamp with impatience;
|
||
but not one added heave did he thereby give to the negro’s lordly chest. So have
|
||
I seen Passion and Vanity stamping the living magnanimous earth, but the earth
|
||
did not alter her tides and her seasons for that.
|
||
|
||
Meanwhile Stubb, the third mate, betrayed no such far-gazing solicitudes. The
|
||
whales might have made one of their regular soundings, not a temporary dive from
|
||
mere fright; and if that were the case, Stubb, as his wont in such cases, it
|
||
seems, was resolved to solace the languishing interval with his pipe. He
|
||
withdrew it from his hatband, where he always wore it aslant like a feather. He
|
||
loaded it, and rammed home the loading with his thumb-end; but hardly had he
|
||
ignited his match across the rough sandpaper of his hand, when Tashtego, his
|
||
harpooneer, whose eyes had been setting to windward like two fixed stars,
|
||
suddenly dropped like light from his erect attitude to his seat, crying out in a
|
||
quick phrensy of hurry, “Down, down all, and give way!—there they are!”
|
||
|
||
To a landsman, no whale, nor any sign of a herring, would have been visible at
|
||
that moment; nothing but a troubled bit of greenish white water, and thin
|
||
scattered puffs of vapor hovering over it, and suffusingly blowing off to
|
||
leeward, like the confused scud from white rolling billows. The air around
|
||
suddenly vibrated and tingled, as it were, like the air over intensely heated
|
||
plates of iron. Beneath this atmospheric waving and curling, and partially
|
||
beneath a thin layer of water, also, the whales were swimming. Seen in advance
|
||
of all the other indications, the puffs of vapor they spouted, seemed their
|
||
forerunning couriers and detached flying outriders.
|
||
|
||
All four boats were now in keen pursuit of that one spot of troubled water and
|
||
air. But it bade fair to outstrip them; it flew on and on, as a mass of
|
||
interblending bubbles borne down a rapid stream from the hills.
|
||
|
||
“Pull, pull, my good boys,” said Starbuck, in the lowest possible but intensest
|
||
concentrated whisper to his men; while the sharp fixed glance from his eyes
|
||
darted straight ahead of the bow, almost seemed as two visible needles in two
|
||
unerring binnacle compasses. He did not say much to his crew, though, nor did
|
||
his crew say anything to him. Only the silence of the boat was at intervals
|
||
startlingly pierced by one of his peculiar whispers, now harsh with command, now
|
||
soft with entreaty.
|
||
|
||
How different the loud little King-Post. “Sing out and say something, my
|
||
hearties. Roar and pull, my thunderbolts! Beach me, beach me on their black
|
||
backs, boys; only do that for me, and I’ll sign over to you my Martha’s Vineyard
|
||
plantation, boys; including wife and children, boys. Lay me on—lay me on! O
|
||
Lord, Lord! but I shall go stark, staring mad! See! see that white water!” And
|
||
so shouting, he pulled his hat from his head, and stamped up and down on it;
|
||
then picking it up, flirted it far off upon the sea; and finally fell to rearing
|
||
and plunging in the boat’s stern like a crazed colt from the prairie.
|
||
|
||
“Look at that chap now,” philosophically drawled Stubb, who, with his unlighted
|
||
short pipe, mechanically retained between his teeth, at a short distance,
|
||
followed after—“He’s got fits, that Flask has. Fits? yes, give him fits—that’s
|
||
the very word—pitch fits into ’em. Merrily, merrily, hearts-alive. Pudding for
|
||
supper, you know;—merry’s the word. Pull, babes—pull, sucklings—pull, all. But
|
||
what the devil are you hurrying about? Softly, softly, and steadily, my men.
|
||
Only pull, and keep pulling; nothing more. Crack all your backbones, and bite
|
||
your knives in two—that’s all. Take it easy—why don’t ye take it easy, I say,
|
||
and burst all your livers and lungs!”
|
||
|
||
But what it was that inscrutable Ahab said to that tiger-yellow crew of
|
||
his—these were words best omitted here; for you live under the blessed light of
|
||
the evangelical land. Only the infidel sharks in the audacious seas may give ear
|
||
to such words, when, with tornado brow, and eyes of red murder, and foam-glued
|
||
lips, Ahab leaped after his prey.
|
||
|
||
Meanwhile, all the boats tore on. The repeated specific allusions of Flask to
|
||
“that whale,” as he called the fictitious monster which he declared to be
|
||
incessantly tantalizing his boat’s bow with its tail—these allusions of his were
|
||
at times so vivid and life-like, that they would cause some one or two of his
|
||
men to snatch a fearful look over the shoulder. But this was against all rule;
|
||
for the oarsmen must put out their eyes, and ram a skewer through their necks;
|
||
usage pronouncing that they must have no organs but ears, and no limbs but arms,
|
||
in these critical moments.
|
||
|
||
It was a sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast swells of the omnipotent
|
||
sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along the eight
|
||
gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green; the brief suspended
|
||
agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knife-like edge of the
|
||
sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening to cut it in two; the sudden
|
||
profound dip into the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings
|
||
to gain the top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its
|
||
other side;—all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooneers, and the
|
||
shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod
|
||
bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her
|
||
screaming brood;—all this was thrilling.
|
||
|
||
Not the raw recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever heat of
|
||
his first battle; not the dead man’s ghost encountering the first unknown
|
||
phantom in the other world;—neither of these can feel stranger and stronger
|
||
emotions than that man does, who for the first time finds himself pulling into
|
||
the charmed, churned circle of the hunted sperm whale.
|
||
|
||
The dancing white water made by the chase was now becoming more and more
|
||
visible, owing to the increasing darkness of the dun cloud-shadows flung upon
|
||
the sea. The jets of vapor no longer blended, but tilted everywhere to right and
|
||
left; the whales seemed separating their wakes. The boats were pulled more
|
||
apart; Starbuck giving chase to three whales running dead to leeward. Our sail
|
||
was now set, and, with the still rising wind, we rushed along; the boat going
|
||
with such madness through the water, that the lee oars could scarcely be worked
|
||
rapidly enough to escape being torn from the row-locks.
|
||
|
||
Soon we were running through a suffusing wide veil of mist; neither ship nor
|
||
boat to be seen.
|
||
|
||
“Give way, men,” whispered Starbuck, drawing still further aft the sheet of his
|
||
sail; “there is time to kill a fish yet before the squall comes. There’s white
|
||
water again!—close to! Spring!”
|
||
|
||
Soon after, two cries in quick succession on each side of us denoted that the
|
||
other boats had got fast; but hardly were they overheard, when with a
|
||
lightning-like hurtling whisper Starbuck said: “Stand up!” and Queequeg, harpoon
|
||
in hand, sprang to his feet.
|
||
|
||
Though not one of the oarsmen was then facing the life and death peril so close
|
||
to them ahead, yet with their eyes on the intense countenance of the mate in the
|
||
stern of the boat, they knew that the imminent instant had come; they heard,
|
||
too, an enormous wallowing sound as of fifty elephants stirring in their litter.
|
||
Meanwhile the boat was still booming through the mist, the waves curling and
|
||
hissing around us like the erected crests of enraged serpents.
|
||
|
||
“That’s his hump. There, there, give it to him!” whispered Starbuck.
|
||
|
||
A short rushing sound leaped out of the boat; it was the darted iron of
|
||
Queequeg. Then all in one welded commotion came an invisible push from astern,
|
||
while forward the boat seemed striking on a ledge; the sail collapsed and
|
||
exploded; a gush of scalding vapor shot up near by; something rolled and tumbled
|
||
like an earthquake beneath us. The whole crew were half suffocated as they were
|
||
tossed helter-skelter into the white curdling cream of the squall. Squall,
|
||
whale, and harpoon had all blended together; and the whale, merely grazed by the
|
||
iron, escaped.
|
||
|
||
Though completely swamped, the boat was nearly unharmed. Swimming round it we
|
||
picked up the floating oars, and lashing them across the gunwale, tumbled back
|
||
to our places. There we sat up to our knees in the sea, the water covering every
|
||
rib and plank, so that to our downward gazing eyes the suspended craft seemed a
|
||
coral boat grown up to us from the bottom of the ocean.
|
||
|
||
The wind increased to a howl; the waves dashed their bucklers together; the
|
||
whole squall roared, forked, and crackled around us like a white fire upon the
|
||
prairie, in which, unconsumed, we were burning; immortal in these jaws of death!
|
||
In vain we hailed the other boats; as well roar to the live coals down the
|
||
chimney of a flaming furnace as hail those boats in that storm. Meanwhile the
|
||
driving scud, rack, and mist, grew darker with the shadows of night; no sign of
|
||
the ship could be seen. The rising sea forbade all attempts to bale out the
|
||
boat. The oars were useless as propellers, performing now the office of
|
||
life-preservers. So, cutting the lashing of the waterproof match keg, after many
|
||
failures Starbuck contrived to ignite the lamp in the lantern; then stretching
|
||
it on a waif pole, handed it to Queequeg as the standard-bearer of this forlorn
|
||
hope. There, then, he sat, holding up that imbecile candle in the heart of that
|
||
almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without
|
||
faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair.
|
||
|
||
Wet, drenched through, and shivering cold, despairing of ship or boat, we lifted
|
||
up our eyes as the dawn came on. The mist still spread over the sea, the empty
|
||
lantern lay crushed in the bottom of the boat. Suddenly Queequeg started to his
|
||
feet, hollowing his hand to his ear. We all heard a faint creaking, as of ropes
|
||
and yards hitherto muffled by the storm. The sound came nearer and nearer; the
|
||
thick mists were dimly parted by a huge, vague form. Affrighted, we all sprang
|
||
into the sea as the ship at last loomed into view, bearing right down upon us
|
||
within a distance of not much more than its length.
|
||
|
||
Floating on the waves we saw the abandoned boat, as for one instant it tossed
|
||
and gaped beneath the ship’s bows like a chip at the base of a cataract; and
|
||
then the vast hull rolled over it, and it was seen no more till it came up
|
||
weltering astern. Again we swam for it, were dashed against it by the seas, and
|
||
were at last taken up and safely landed on board. Ere the squall came close to,
|
||
the other boats had cut loose from their fish and returned to the ship in good
|
||
time. The ship had given us up, but was still cruising, if haply it might light
|
||
upon some token of our perishing,—an oar or a lance pole.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 49. The Hyena.
|
||
|
||
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call
|
||
life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the
|
||
wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at
|
||
nobody’s expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems
|
||
worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and
|
||
persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an
|
||
ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for
|
||
small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life
|
||
and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits,
|
||
and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old
|
||
joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man only in
|
||
some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness,
|
||
so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now
|
||
seems but a part of the general joke. There is nothing like the perils of
|
||
whaling to breed this free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and
|
||
with it I now regarded this whole voyage of the Pequod, and the great White
|
||
Whale its object.
|
||
|
||
“Queequeg,” said I, when they had dragged me, the last man, to the deck, and I
|
||
was still shaking myself in my jacket to fling off the water; “Queequeg, my fine
|
||
friend, does this sort of thing often happen?” Without much emotion, though
|
||
soaked through just like me, he gave me to understand that such things did often
|
||
happen.
|
||
|
||
“Mr. Stubb,” said I, turning to that worthy, who, buttoned up in his oil-jacket,
|
||
was now calmly smoking his pipe in the rain; “Mr. Stubb, I think I have heard
|
||
you say that of all whalemen you ever met, our chief mate, Mr. Starbuck, is by
|
||
far the most careful and prudent. I suppose then, that going plump on a flying
|
||
whale with your sail set in a foggy squall is the height of a whaleman’s
|
||
discretion?”
|
||
|
||
“Certain. I’ve lowered for whales from a leaking ship in a gale off Cape Horn.”
|
||
|
||
“Mr. Flask,” said I, turning to little King-Post, who was standing close by;
|
||
“you are experienced in these things, and I am not. Will you tell me whether it
|
||
is an unalterable law in this fishery, Mr. Flask, for an oarsman to break his
|
||
own back pulling himself back-foremost into death’s jaws?”
|
||
|
||
“Can’t you twist that smaller?” said Flask. “Yes, that’s the law. I should like
|
||
to see a boat’s crew backing water up to a whale face foremost. Ha, ha! the
|
||
whale would give them squint for squint, mind that!”
|
||
|
||
Here then, from three impartial witnesses, I had a deliberate statement of the
|
||
entire case. Considering, therefore, that squalls and capsizings in the water
|
||
and consequent bivouacks on the deep, were matters of common occurrence in this
|
||
kind of life; considering that at the superlatively critical instant of going on
|
||
to the whale I must resign my life into the hands of him who steered the
|
||
boat—oftentimes a fellow who at that very moment is in his impetuousness upon
|
||
the point of scuttling the craft with his own frantic stampings; considering
|
||
that the particular disaster to our own particular boat was chiefly to be
|
||
imputed to Starbuck’s driving on to his whale almost in the teeth of a squall,
|
||
and considering that Starbuck, notwithstanding, was famous for his great
|
||
heedfulness in the fishery; considering that I belonged to this uncommonly
|
||
prudent Starbuck’s boat; and finally considering in what a devil’s chase I was
|
||
implicated, touching the White Whale: taking all things together, I say, I
|
||
thought I might as well go below and make a rough draft of my will. “Queequeg,”
|
||
said I, “come along, you shall be my lawyer, executor, and legatee.”
|
||
|
||
It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at their last
|
||
wills and testaments, but there are no people in the world more fond of that
|
||
diversion. This was the fourth time in my nautical life that I had done the same
|
||
thing. After the ceremony was concluded upon the present occasion, I felt all
|
||
the easier; a stone was rolled away from my heart. Besides, all the days I
|
||
should now live would be as good as the days that Lazarus lived after his
|
||
resurrection; a supplementary clean gain of so many months or weeks as the case
|
||
might be. I survived myself; my death and burial were locked up in my chest. I
|
||
looked round me tranquilly and contentedly, like a quiet ghost with a clean
|
||
conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug family vault.
|
||
|
||
Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock, here goes
|
||
for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the
|
||
hindmost.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 50. Ahab’s Boat and Crew. Fedallah.
|
||
|
||
“Who would have thought it, Flask!” cried Stubb; “if I had but one leg you would
|
||
not catch me in a boat, unless maybe to stop the plug-hole with my timber toe.
|
||
Oh! he’s a wonderful old man!”
|
||
|
||
“I don’t think it so strange, after all, on that account,” said Flask. “If his
|
||
leg were off at the hip, now, it would be a different thing. That would disable
|
||
him; but he has one knee, and good part of the other left, you know.”
|
||
|
||
“I don’t know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel.”
|
||
|
||
Among whale-wise people it has often been argued whether, considering the
|
||
paramount importance of his life to the success of the voyage, it is right for a
|
||
whaling captain to jeopardize that life in the active perils of the chase. So
|
||
Tamerlane’s soldiers often argued with tears in their eyes, whether that
|
||
invaluable life of his ought to be carried into the thickest of the fight.
|
||
|
||
But with Ahab the question assumed a modified aspect. Considering that with two
|
||
legs man is but a hobbling wight in all times of danger; considering that the
|
||
pursuit of whales is always under great and extraordinary difficulties; that
|
||
every individual moment, indeed, then comprises a peril; under these
|
||
circumstances is it wise for any maimed man to enter a whale-boat in the hunt?
|
||
As a general thing, the joint-owners of the Pequod must have plainly thought
|
||
not.
|
||
|
||
Ahab well knew that although his friends at home would think little of his
|
||
entering a boat in certain comparatively harmless vicissitudes of the chase, for
|
||
the sake of being near the scene of action and giving his orders in person, yet
|
||
for Captain Ahab to have a boat actually apportioned to him as a regular
|
||
headsman in the hunt—above all for Captain Ahab to be supplied with five extra
|
||
men, as that same boat’s crew, he well knew that such generous conceits never
|
||
entered the heads of the owners of the Pequod. Therefore he had not solicited a
|
||
boat’s crew from them, nor had he in any way hinted his desires on that head.
|
||
Nevertheless he had taken private measures of his own touching all that matter.
|
||
Until Cabaco’s published discovery, the sailors had little foreseen it, though
|
||
to be sure when, after being a little while out of port, all hands had concluded
|
||
the customary business of fitting the whaleboats for service; when some time
|
||
after this Ahab was now and then found bestirring himself in the matter of
|
||
making thole-pins with his own hands for what was thought to be one of the spare
|
||
boats, and even solicitously cutting the small wooden skewers, which when the
|
||
line is running out are pinned over the groove in the bow: when all this was
|
||
observed in him, and particularly his solicitude in having an extra coat of
|
||
sheathing in the bottom of the boat, as if to make it better withstand the
|
||
pointed pressure of his ivory limb; and also the anxiety he evinced in exactly
|
||
shaping the thigh board, or clumsy cleat, as it is sometimes called, the
|
||
horizontal piece in the boat’s bow for bracing the knee against in darting or
|
||
stabbing at the whale; when it was observed how often he stood up in that boat
|
||
with his solitary knee fixed in the semi-circular depression in the cleat, and
|
||
with the carpenter’s chisel gouged out a little here and straightened it a
|
||
little there; all these things, I say, had awakened much interest and curiosity
|
||
at the time. But almost everybody supposed that this particular preparative
|
||
heedfulness in Ahab must only be with a view to the ultimate chase of Moby Dick;
|
||
for he had already revealed his intention to hunt that mortal monster in person.
|
||
But such a supposition did by no means involve the remotest suspicion as to any
|
||
boat’s crew being assigned to that boat.
|
||
|
||
Now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soon waned away; for in
|
||
a whaler wonders soon wane. Besides, now and then such unaccountable odds and
|
||
ends of strange nations come up from the unknown nooks and ash-holes of the
|
||
earth to man these floating outlaws of whalers; and the ships themselves often
|
||
pick up such queer castaway creatures found tossing about the open sea on
|
||
planks, bits of wreck, oars, whaleboats, canoes, blown-off Japanese junks, and
|
||
what not; that Beelzebub himself might climb up the side and step down into the
|
||
cabin to chat with the captain, and it would not create any unsubduable
|
||
excitement in the forecastle.
|
||
|
||
But be all this as it may, certain it is that while the subordinate phantoms
|
||
soon found their place among the crew, though still as it were somehow distinct
|
||
from them, yet that hair-turbaned Fedallah remained a muffled mystery to the
|
||
last. Whence he came in a mannerly world like this, by what sort of
|
||
unaccountable tie he soon evinced himself to be linked with Ahab’s peculiar
|
||
fortunes; nay, so far as to have some sort of a half-hinted influence; Heaven
|
||
knows, but it might have been even authority over him; all this none knew. But
|
||
one cannot sustain an indifferent air concerning Fedallah. He was such a
|
||
creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their
|
||
dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide among the
|
||
unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles to the east of the
|
||
continent—those insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in
|
||
these modern days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth’s
|
||
primal generations, when the memory of the first man was a distinct
|
||
recollection, and all men his descendants, unknowing whence he came, eyed each
|
||
other as real phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moon why they were created
|
||
and to what end; when though, according to Genesis, the angels indeed consorted
|
||
with the daughters of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins,
|
||
indulged in mundane amours.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 51. The Spirit-Spout.
|
||
|
||
Days, weeks passed, and under easy sail, the ivory Pequod had slowly swept
|
||
across four several cruising-grounds; that off the Azores; off the Cape de
|
||
Verdes; on the Plate (so called), being off the mouth of the Rio de la Plata;
|
||
and the Carrol Ground, an unstaked, watery locality, southerly from St. Helena.
|
||
|
||
It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight
|
||
night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft,
|
||
suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude; on such
|
||
a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the
|
||
bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering
|
||
god uprising from the sea. Fedallah first descried this jet. For of these
|
||
moonlight nights, it was his wont to mount to the main-mast head, and stand a
|
||
look-out there, with the same precision as if it had been day. And yet, though
|
||
herds of whales were seen by night, not one whaleman in a hundred would venture
|
||
a lowering for them. You may think with what emotions, then, the seamen beheld
|
||
this old Oriental perched aloft at such unusual hours; his turban and the moon,
|
||
companions in one sky. But when, after spending his uniform interval there for
|
||
several successive nights without uttering a single sound; when, after all this
|
||
silence, his unearthly voice was heard announcing that silvery, moon-lit jet,
|
||
every reclining mariner started to his feet as if some winged spirit had lighted
|
||
in the rigging, and hailed the mortal crew. “There she blows!” Had the trump of
|
||
judgment blown, they could not have quivered more; yet still they felt no
|
||
terror; rather pleasure. For though it was a most unwonted hour, yet so
|
||
impressive was the cry, and so deliriously exciting, that almost every soul on
|
||
board instinctively desired a lowering.
|
||
|
||
Walking the deck with quick, side-lunging strides, Ahab commanded the t’gallant
|
||
sails and royals to be set, and every stunsail spread. The best man in the ship
|
||
must take the helm. Then, with every mast-head manned, the piled-up craft rolled
|
||
down before the wind. The strange, upheaving, lifting tendency of the taffrail
|
||
breeze filling the hollows of so many sails, made the buoyant, hovering deck to
|
||
feel like air beneath the feet; while still she rushed along, as if two
|
||
antagonistic influences were struggling in her—one to mount direct to heaven,
|
||
the other to drive yawingly to some horizontal goal. And had you watched Ahab’s
|
||
face that night, you would have thought that in him also two different things
|
||
were warring. While his one live leg made lively echoes along the deck, every
|
||
stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. On life and death this old
|
||
man walked. But though the ship so swiftly sped, and though from every eye, like
|
||
arrows, the eager glances shot, yet the silvery jet was no more seen that night.
|
||
Every sailor swore he saw it once, but not a second time.
|
||
|
||
This midnight-spout had almost grown a forgotten thing, when, some days after,
|
||
lo! at the same silent hour, it was again announced: again it was descried by
|
||
all; but upon making sail to overtake it, once more it disappeared as if it had
|
||
never been. And so it served us night after night, till no one heeded it but to
|
||
wonder at it. Mysteriously jetted into the clear moonlight, or starlight, as the
|
||
case might be; disappearing again for one whole day, or two days, or three; and
|
||
somehow seeming at every distinct repetition to be advancing still further and
|
||
further in our van, this solitary jet seemed for ever alluring us on.
|
||
|
||
Nor with the immemorial superstition of their race, and in accordance with the
|
||
preternaturalness, as it seemed, which in many things invested the Pequod, were
|
||
there wanting some of the seamen who swore that whenever and wherever descried;
|
||
at however remote times, or in however far apart latitudes and longitudes, that
|
||
unnearable spout was cast by one self-same whale; and that whale, Moby Dick. For
|
||
a time, there reigned, too, a sense of peculiar dread at this flitting
|
||
apparition, as if it were treacherously beckoning us on and on, in order that
|
||
the monster might turn round upon us, and rend us at last in the remotest and
|
||
most savage seas.
|
||
|
||
These temporary apprehensions, so vague but so awful, derived a wondrous potency
|
||
from the contrasting serenity of the weather, in which, beneath all its blue
|
||
blandness, some thought there lurked a devilish charm, as for days and days we
|
||
voyaged along, through seas so wearily, lonesomely mild, that all space, in
|
||
repugnance to our vengeful errand, seemed vacating itself of life before our
|
||
urn-like prow.
|
||
|
||
But, at last, when turning to the eastward, the Cape winds began howling around
|
||
us, and we rose and fell upon the long, troubled seas that are there; when the
|
||
ivory-tusked Pequod sharply bowed to the blast, and gored the dark waves in her
|
||
madness, till, like showers of silver chips, the foam-flakes flew over her
|
||
bulwarks; then all this desolate vacuity of life went away, but gave place to
|
||
sights more dismal than before.
|
||
|
||
Close to our bows, strange forms in the water darted hither and thither before
|
||
us; while thick in our rear flew the inscrutable sea-ravens. And every morning,
|
||
perched on our stays, rows of these birds were seen; and spite of our hootings,
|
||
for a long time obstinately clung to the hemp, as though they deemed our ship
|
||
some drifting, uninhabited craft; a thing appointed to desolation, and therefore
|
||
fit roosting-place for their homeless selves. And heaved and heaved, still
|
||
unrestingly heaved the black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and
|
||
the great mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and
|
||
suffering it had bred.
|
||
|
||
Cape of Good Hope, do they call ye? Rather Cape Tormentoso, as called of yore;
|
||
for long allured by the perfidious silences that before had attended us, we
|
||
found ourselves launched into this tormented sea, where guilty beings
|
||
transformed into those fowls and these fish, seemed condemned to swim on
|
||
everlastingly without any haven in store, or beat that black air without any
|
||
horizon. But calm, snow-white, and unvarying; still directing its fountain of
|
||
feathers to the sky; still beckoning us on from before, the solitary jet would
|
||
at times be descried.
|
||
|
||
During all this blackness of the elements, Ahab, though assuming for the time
|
||
the almost continual command of the drenched and dangerous deck, manifested the
|
||
gloomiest reserve; and more seldom than ever addressed his mates. In tempestuous
|
||
times like these, after everything above and aloft has been secured, nothing
|
||
more can be done but passively to await the issue of the gale. Then Captain and
|
||
crew become practical fatalists. So, with his ivory leg inserted into its
|
||
accustomed hole, and with one hand firmly grasping a shroud, Ahab for hours and
|
||
hours would stand gazing dead to windward, while an occasional squall of sleet
|
||
or snow would all but congeal his very eyelashes together. Meantime, the crew
|
||
driven from the forward part of the ship by the perilous seas that burstingly
|
||
broke over its bows, stood in a line along the bulwarks in the waist; and the
|
||
better to guard against the leaping waves, each man had slipped himself into a
|
||
sort of bowline secured to the rail, in which he swung as in a loosened belt.
|
||
Few or no words were spoken; and the silent ship, as if manned by painted
|
||
sailors in wax, day after day tore on through all the swift madness and gladness
|
||
of the demoniac waves. By night the same muteness of humanity before the shrieks
|
||
of the ocean prevailed; still in silence the men swung in the bowlines; still
|
||
wordless Ahab stood up to the blast. Even when wearied nature seemed demanding
|
||
repose he would not seek that repose in his hammock. Never could Starbuck forget
|
||
the old man’s aspect, when one night going down into the cabin to mark how the
|
||
barometer stood, he saw him with closed eyes sitting straight in his
|
||
floor-screwed chair; the rain and half-melted sleet of the storm from which he
|
||
had some time before emerged, still slowly dripping from the unremoved hat and
|
||
coat. On the table beside him lay unrolled one of those charts of tides and
|
||
currents which have previously been spoken of. His lantern swung from his
|
||
tightly clenched hand. Though the body was erect, the head was thrown back so
|
||
that the closed eyes were pointed towards the needle of the tell-tale that swung
|
||
from a beam in the ceiling.*
|
||
|
||
*The cabin-compass is called the tell-tale, because without going to the compass
|
||
at the helm, the Captain, while below, can inform himself of the course of the
|
||
ship.
|
||
|
||
Terrible old man! thought Starbuck with a shudder, sleeping in this gale, still
|
||
thou steadfastly eyest thy purpose.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 52. The Albatross.
|
||
|
||
South-eastward from the Cape, off the distant Crozetts, a good cruising ground
|
||
for Right Whalemen, a sail loomed ahead, the Goney (Albatross) by name. As she
|
||
slowly drew nigh, from my lofty perch at the fore-mast-head, I had a good view
|
||
of that sight so remarkable to a tyro in the far ocean fisheries—a whaler at
|
||
sea, and long absent from home.
|
||
|
||
As if the waves had been fullers, this craft was bleached like the skeleton of a
|
||
stranded walrus. All down her sides, this spectral appearance was traced with
|
||
long channels of reddened rust, while all her spars and her rigging were like
|
||
the thick branches of trees furred over with hoar-frost. Only her lower sails
|
||
were set. A wild sight it was to see her long-bearded look-outs at those three
|
||
mast-heads. They seemed clad in the skins of beasts, so torn and bepatched the
|
||
raiment that had survived nearly four years of cruising. Standing in iron hoops
|
||
nailed to the mast, they swayed and swung over a fathomless sea; and though,
|
||
when the ship slowly glided close under our stern, we six men in the air came so
|
||
nigh to each other that we might almost have leaped from the mast-heads of one
|
||
ship to those of the other; yet, those forlorn-looking fishermen, mildly eyeing
|
||
us as they passed, said not one word to our own look-outs, while the
|
||
quarter-deck hail was being heard from below.
|
||
|
||
“Ship ahoy! Have ye seen the White Whale?”
|
||
|
||
But as the strange captain, leaning over the pallid bulwarks, was in the act of
|
||
putting his trumpet to his mouth, it somehow fell from his hand into the sea;
|
||
and the wind now rising amain, he in vain strove to make himself heard without
|
||
it. Meantime his ship was still increasing the distance between. While in
|
||
various silent ways the seamen of the Pequod were evincing their observance of
|
||
this ominous incident at the first mere mention of the White Whale’s name to
|
||
another ship, Ahab for a moment paused; it almost seemed as though he would have
|
||
lowered a boat to board the stranger, had not the threatening wind forbade. But
|
||
taking advantage of his windward position, he again seized his trumpet, and
|
||
knowing by her aspect that the stranger vessel was a Nantucketer and shortly
|
||
bound home, he loudly hailed—“Ahoy there! This is the Pequod, bound round the
|
||
world! Tell them to address all future letters to the Pacific ocean! and this
|
||
time three years, if I am not at home, tell them to address them to ——”
|
||
|
||
At that moment the two wakes were fairly crossed, and instantly, then, in
|
||
accordance with their singular ways, shoals of small harmless fish, that for
|
||
some days before had been placidly swimming by our side, darted away with what
|
||
seemed shuddering fins, and ranged themselves fore and aft with the stranger’s
|
||
flanks. Though in the course of his continual voyagings Ahab must often before
|
||
have noticed a similar sight, yet, to any monomaniac man, the veriest trifles
|
||
capriciously carry meanings.
|
||
|
||
“Swim away from me, do ye?” murmured Ahab, gazing over into the water. There
|
||
seemed but little in the words, but the tone conveyed more of deep helpless
|
||
sadness than the insane old man had ever before evinced. But turning to the
|
||
steersman, who thus far had been holding the ship in the wind to diminish her
|
||
headway, he cried out in his old lion voice,—“Up helm! Keep her off round the
|
||
world!”
|
||
|
||
Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings; but
|
||
whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through numberless perils
|
||
to the very point whence we started, where those that we left behind secure,
|
||
were all the time before us.
|
||
|
||
Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for ever
|
||
reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any
|
||
Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But
|
||
in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that
|
||
demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while
|
||
chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or
|
||
midway leave us whelmed.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 53. The Gam.
|
||
|
||
The ostensible reason why Ahab did not go on board of the whaler we had spoken
|
||
was this: the wind and sea betokened storms. But even had this not been the
|
||
case, he would not after all, perhaps, have boarded her—judging by his
|
||
subsequent conduct on similar occasions—if so it had been that, by the process
|
||
of hailing, he had obtained a negative answer to the question he put. For, as it
|
||
eventually turned out, he cared not to consort, even for five minutes, with any
|
||
stranger captain, except he could contribute some of that information he so
|
||
absorbingly sought. But all this might remain inadequately estimated, were not
|
||
something said here of the peculiar usages of whaling-vessels when meeting each
|
||
other in foreign seas, and especially on a common cruising-ground.
|
||
|
||
If two strangers crossing the Pine Barrens in New York State, or the equally
|
||
desolate Salisbury Plain in England; if casually encountering each other in such
|
||
inhospitable wilds, these twain, for the life of them, cannot well avoid a
|
||
mutual salutation; and stopping for a moment to interchange the news; and,
|
||
perhaps, sitting down for a while and resting in concert: then, how much more
|
||
natural that upon the illimitable Pine Barrens and Salisbury Plains of the sea,
|
||
two whaling vessels descrying each other at the ends of the earth—off lone
|
||
Fanning’s Island, or the far away King’s Mills; how much more natural, I say,
|
||
that under such circumstances these ships should not only interchange hails, but
|
||
come into still closer, more friendly and sociable contact. And especially would
|
||
this seem to be a matter of course, in the case of vessels owned in one seaport,
|
||
and whose captains, officers, and not a few of the men are personally known to
|
||
each other; and consequently, have all sorts of dear domestic things to talk
|
||
about.
|
||
|
||
For the long absent ship, the outward-bounder, perhaps, has letters on board; at
|
||
any rate, she will be sure to let her have some papers of a date a year or two
|
||
later than the last one on her blurred and thumb-worn files. And in return for
|
||
that courtesy, the outward-bound ship would receive the latest whaling
|
||
intelligence from the cruising-ground to which she may be destined, a thing of
|
||
the utmost importance to her. And in degree, all this will hold true concerning
|
||
whaling vessels crossing each other’s track on the cruising-ground itself, even
|
||
though they are equally long absent from home. For one of them may have received
|
||
a transfer of letters from some third, and now far remote vessel; and some of
|
||
those letters may be for the people of the ship she now meets. Besides, they
|
||
would exchange the whaling news, and have an agreeable chat. For not only would
|
||
they meet with all the sympathies of sailors, but likewise with all the peculiar
|
||
congenialities arising from a common pursuit and mutually shared privations and
|
||
perils.
|
||
|
||
Nor would difference of country make any very essential difference; that is, so
|
||
long as both parties speak one language, as is the case with Americans and
|
||
English. Though, to be sure, from the small number of English whalers, such
|
||
meetings do not very often occur, and when they do occur there is too apt to be
|
||
a sort of shyness between them; for your Englishman is rather reserved, and your
|
||
Yankee, he does not fancy that sort of thing in anybody but himself. Besides,
|
||
the English whalers sometimes affect a kind of metropolitan superiority over the
|
||
American whalers; regarding the long, lean Nantucketer, with his nondescript
|
||
provincialisms, as a sort of sea-peasant. But where this superiority in the
|
||
English whalemen does really consist, it would be hard to say, seeing that the
|
||
Yankees in one day, collectively, kill more whales than all the English,
|
||
collectively, in ten years. But this is a harmless little foible in the English
|
||
whale-hunters, which the Nantucketer does not take much to heart; probably,
|
||
because he knows that he has a few foibles himself.
|
||
|
||
So, then, we see that of all ships separately sailing the sea, the whalers have
|
||
most reason to be sociable—and they are so. Whereas, some merchant ships
|
||
crossing each other’s wake in the mid-Atlantic, will oftentimes pass on without
|
||
so much as a single word of recognition, mutually cutting each other on the high
|
||
seas, like a brace of dandies in Broadway; and all the time indulging, perhaps,
|
||
in finical criticism upon each other’s rig. As for Men-of-War, when they chance
|
||
to meet at sea, they first go through such a string of silly bowings and
|
||
scrapings, such a ducking of ensigns, that there does not seem to be much
|
||
right-down hearty good-will and brotherly love about it at all. As touching
|
||
Slave-ships meeting, why, they are in such a prodigious hurry, they run away
|
||
from each other as soon as possible. And as for Pirates, when they chance to
|
||
cross each other’s cross-bones, the first hail is—“How many skulls?”—the same
|
||
way that whalers hail—“How many barrels?” And that question once answered,
|
||
pirates straightway steer apart, for they are infernal villains on both sides,
|
||
and don’t like to see overmuch of each other’s villanous likenesses.
|
||
|
||
But look at the godly, honest, unostentatious, hospitable, sociable,
|
||
free-and-easy whaler! What does the whaler do when she meets another whaler in
|
||
any sort of decent weather? She has a “Gam,” a thing so utterly unknown to all
|
||
other ships that they never heard of the name even; and if by chance they should
|
||
hear of it, they only grin at it, and repeat gamesome stuff about “spouters” and
|
||
“blubber-boilers,” and such like pretty exclamations. Why it is that all
|
||
Merchant-seamen, and also all Pirates and Man-of-War’s men, and Slave-ship
|
||
sailors, cherish such a scornful feeling towards Whale-ships; this is a question
|
||
it would be hard to answer. Because, in the case of pirates, say, I should like
|
||
to know whether that profession of theirs has any peculiar glory about it. It
|
||
sometimes ends in uncommon elevation, indeed; but only at the gallows. And
|
||
besides, when a man is elevated in that odd fashion, he has no proper foundation
|
||
for his superior altitude. Hence, I conclude, that in boasting himself to be
|
||
high lifted above a whaleman, in that assertion the pirate has no solid basis to
|
||
stand on.
|
||
|
||
But what is a Gam? You might wear out your index-finger running up and down the
|
||
columns of dictionaries, and never find the word. Dr. Johnson never attained to
|
||
that erudition; Noah Webster’s ark does not hold it. Nevertheless, this same
|
||
expressive word has now for many years been in constant use among some fifteen
|
||
thousand true born Yankees. Certainly, it needs a definition, and should be
|
||
incorporated into the Lexicon. With that view, let me learnedly define it.
|
||
|
||
GAM. NOUN—A social meeting of two (or more) Whaleships, generally on a
|
||
cruising-ground; when, after exchanging hails, they exchange visits by boats’
|
||
crews: the two captains remaining, for the time, on board of one ship, and the
|
||
two chief mates on the other.
|
||
|
||
There is another little item about Gamming which must not be forgotten here. All
|
||
professions have their own little peculiarities of detail; so has the whale
|
||
fishery. In a pirate, man-of-war, or slave ship, when the captain is rowed
|
||
anywhere in his boat, he always sits in the stern sheets on a comfortable,
|
||
sometimes cushioned seat there, and often steers himself with a pretty little
|
||
milliner’s tiller decorated with gay cords and ribbons. But the whale-boat has
|
||
no seat astern, no sofa of that sort whatever, and no tiller at all. High times
|
||
indeed, if whaling captains were wheeled about the water on castors like gouty
|
||
old aldermen in patent chairs. And as for a tiller, the whale-boat never admits
|
||
of any such effeminacy; and therefore as in gamming a complete boat’s crew must
|
||
leave the ship, and hence as the boat steerer or harpooneer is of the number,
|
||
that subordinate is the steersman upon the occasion, and the captain, having no
|
||
place to sit in, is pulled off to his visit all standing like a pine tree. And
|
||
often you will notice that being conscious of the eyes of the whole visible
|
||
world resting on him from the sides of the two ships, this standing captain is
|
||
all alive to the importance of sustaining his dignity by maintaining his legs.
|
||
Nor is this any very easy matter; for in his rear is the immense projecting
|
||
steering oar hitting him now and then in the small of his back, the after-oar
|
||
reciprocating by rapping his knees in front. He is thus completely wedged before
|
||
and behind, and can only expand himself sideways by settling down on his
|
||
stretched legs; but a sudden, violent pitch of the boat will often go far to
|
||
topple him, because length of foundation is nothing without corresponding
|
||
breadth. Merely make a spread angle of two poles, and you cannot stand them up.
|
||
Then, again, it would never do in plain sight of the world’s riveted eyes, it
|
||
would never do, I say, for this straddling captain to be seen steadying himself
|
||
the slightest particle by catching hold of anything with his hands; indeed, as
|
||
token of his entire, buoyant self-command, he generally carries his hands in his
|
||
trowsers’ pockets; but perhaps being generally very large, heavy hands, he
|
||
carries them there for ballast. Nevertheless there have occurred instances, well
|
||
authenticated ones too, where the captain has been known for an uncommonly
|
||
critical moment or two, in a sudden squall say—to seize hold of the nearest
|
||
oarsman’s hair, and hold on there like grim death.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 54. The Town-Ho’s Story.
|
||
|
||
(As told at the Golden Inn.)
|
||
|
||
The Cape of Good Hope, and all the watery region round about there, is much like
|
||
some noted four corners of a great highway, where you meet more travellers than
|
||
in any other part.
|
||
|
||
It was not very long after speaking the Goney that another homeward-bound
|
||
whaleman, the Town-Ho,* was encountered. She was manned almost wholly by
|
||
Polynesians. In the short gam that ensued she gave us strong news of Moby Dick.
|
||
To some the general interest in the White Whale was now wildly heightened by a
|
||
circumstance of the Town-Ho’s story, which seemed obscurely to involve with the
|
||
whale a certain wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called
|
||
judgments of God which at times are said to overtake some men. This latter
|
||
circumstance, with its own particular accompaniments, forming what may be called
|
||
the secret part of the tragedy about to be narrated, never reached the ears of
|
||
Captain Ahab or his mates. For that secret part of the story was unknown to the
|
||
captain of the Town-Ho himself. It was the private property of three confederate
|
||
white seamen of that ship, one of whom, it seems, communicated it to Tashtego
|
||
with Romish injunctions of secrecy, but the following night Tashtego rambled in
|
||
his sleep, and revealed so much of it in that way, that when he was wakened he
|
||
could not well withhold the rest. Nevertheless, so potent an influence did this
|
||
thing have on those seamen in the Pequod who came to the full knowledge of it,
|
||
and by such a strange delicacy, to call it so, were they governed in this
|
||
matter, that they kept the secret among themselves so that it never transpired
|
||
abaft the Pequod’s main-mast. Interweaving in its proper place this darker
|
||
thread with the story as publicly narrated on the ship, the whole of this
|
||
strange affair I now proceed to put on lasting record.
|
||
|
||
*The ancient whale-cry upon first sighting a whale from the mast-head, still
|
||
used by whalemen in hunting the famous Gallipagos terrapin.
|
||
|
||
For my humor’s sake, I shall preserve the style in which I once narrated it at
|
||
Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish friends, one saint’s eve, smoking upon
|
||
the thick-gilt tiled piazza of the Golden Inn. Of those fine cavaliers, the
|
||
young Dons, Pedro and Sebastian, were on the closer terms with me; and hence the
|
||
interluding questions they occasionally put, and which are duly answered at the
|
||
time.
|
||
|
||
“Some two years prior to my first learning the events which I am about
|
||
rehearsing to you, gentlemen, the Town-Ho, Sperm Whaler of Nantucket, was
|
||
cruising in your Pacific here, not very many days’ sail eastward from the eaves
|
||
of this good Golden Inn. She was somewhere to the northward of the Line. One
|
||
morning upon handling the pumps, according to daily usage, it was observed that
|
||
she made more water in her hold than common. They supposed a sword-fish had
|
||
stabbed her, gentlemen. But the captain, having some unusual reason for
|
||
believing that rare good luck awaited him in those latitudes; and therefore
|
||
being very averse to quit them, and the leak not being then considered at all
|
||
dangerous, though, indeed, they could not find it after searching the hold as
|
||
low down as was possible in rather heavy weather, the ship still continued her
|
||
cruisings, the mariners working at the pumps at wide and easy intervals; but no
|
||
good luck came; more days went by, and not only was the leak yet undiscovered,
|
||
but it sensibly increased. So much so, that now taking some alarm, the captain,
|
||
making all sail, stood away for the nearest harbor among the islands, there to
|
||
have his hull hove out and repaired.
|
||
|
||
“Though no small passage was before her, yet, if the commonest chance favoured,
|
||
he did not at all fear that his ship would founder by the way, because his pumps
|
||
were of the best, and being periodically relieved at them, those six-and-thirty
|
||
men of his could easily keep the ship free; never mind if the leak should double
|
||
on her. In truth, well nigh the whole of this passage being attended by very
|
||
prosperous breezes, the Town-Ho had all but certainly arrived in perfect safety
|
||
at her port without the occurrence of the least fatality, had it not been for
|
||
the brutal overbearing of Radney, the mate, a Vineyarder, and the bitterly
|
||
provoked vengeance of Steelkilt, a Lakeman and desperado from Buffalo.
|
||
|
||
“‘Lakeman!—Buffalo! Pray, what is a Lakeman, and where is Buffalo?’ said Don
|
||
Sebastian, rising in his swinging mat of grass.
|
||
|
||
“On the eastern shore of our Lake Erie, Don; but—I crave your courtesy—may be,
|
||
you shall soon hear further of all that. Now, gentlemen, in square-sail brigs
|
||
and three-masted ships, well-nigh as large and stout as any that ever sailed out
|
||
of your old Callao to far Manilla; this Lakeman, in the land-locked heart of our
|
||
America, had yet been nurtured by all those agrarian freebooting impressions
|
||
popularly connected with the open ocean. For in their interflowing aggregate,
|
||
those grand fresh-water seas of ours,—Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and
|
||
Superior, and Michigan,—possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the
|
||
ocean’s noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of races and of
|
||
climes. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles, even as the
|
||
Polynesian waters do; in large part, are shored by two great contrasting
|
||
nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long maritime approaches to our
|
||
numerous territorial colonies from the East, dotted all round their banks; here
|
||
and there are frowned upon by batteries, and by the goat-like craggy guns of
|
||
lofty Mackinaw; they have heard the fleet thunderings of naval victories; at
|
||
intervals, they yield their beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted faces
|
||
flash from out their peltry wigwams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by
|
||
ancient and unentered forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of
|
||
kings in Gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of
|
||
prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs give robes to Tartar Emperors;
|
||
they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as Winnebago
|
||
villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of
|
||
the State, the steamer, and the beech canoe; they are swept by Borean and
|
||
dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what
|
||
shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full
|
||
many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew. Thus, gentlemen, though an
|
||
inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean born, and wild-ocean nurtured; as much of an
|
||
audacious mariner as any. And for Radney, though in his infancy he may have laid
|
||
him down on the lone Nantucket beach, to nurse at his maternal sea; though in
|
||
after life he had long followed our austere Atlantic and your contemplative
|
||
Pacific; yet was he quite as vengeful and full of social quarrel as the
|
||
backwoods seaman, fresh from the latitudes of buck-horn handled Bowie-knives.
|
||
Yet was this Nantucketer a man with some good-hearted traits; and this Lakeman,
|
||
a mariner, who though a sort of devil indeed, might yet by inflexible firmness,
|
||
only tempered by that common decency of human recognition which is the meanest
|
||
slave’s right; thus treated, this Steelkilt had long been retained harmless and
|
||
docile. At all events, he had proved so thus far; but Radney was doomed and made
|
||
mad, and Steelkilt—but, gentlemen, you shall hear.
|
||
|
||
“It was not more than a day or two at the furthest after pointing her prow for
|
||
her island haven, that the Town-Ho’s leak seemed again increasing, but only so
|
||
as to require an hour or more at the pumps every day. You must know that in a
|
||
settled and civilized ocean like our Atlantic, for example, some skippers think
|
||
little of pumping their whole way across it; though of a still, sleepy night,
|
||
should the officer of the deck happen to forget his duty in that respect, the
|
||
probability would be that he and his shipmates would never again remember it, on
|
||
account of all hands gently subsiding to the bottom. Nor in the solitary and
|
||
savage seas far from you to the westward, gentlemen, is it altogether unusual
|
||
for ships to keep clanging at their pump-handles in full chorus even for a
|
||
voyage of considerable length; that is, if it lie along a tolerably accessible
|
||
coast, or if any other reasonable retreat is afforded them. It is only when a
|
||
leaky vessel is in some very out of the way part of those waters, some really
|
||
landless latitude, that her captain begins to feel a little anxious.
|
||
|
||
“Much this way had it been with the Town-Ho; so when her leak was found gaining
|
||
once more, there was in truth some small concern manifested by several of her
|
||
company; especially by Radney the mate. He commanded the upper sails to be well
|
||
hoisted, sheeted home anew, and every way expanded to the breeze. Now this
|
||
Radney, I suppose, was as little of a coward, and as little inclined to any sort
|
||
of nervous apprehensiveness touching his own person as any fearless, unthinking
|
||
creature on land or on sea that you can conveniently imagine, gentlemen.
|
||
Therefore when he betrayed this solicitude about the safety of the ship, some of
|
||
the seamen declared that it was only on account of his being a part owner in
|
||
her. So when they were working that evening at the pumps, there was on this head
|
||
no small gamesomeness slily going on among them, as they stood with their feet
|
||
continually overflowed by the rippling clear water; clear as any mountain
|
||
spring, gentlemen—that bubbling from the pumps ran across the deck, and poured
|
||
itself out in steady spouts at the lee scupper-holes.
|
||
|
||
“Now, as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this conventional world of
|
||
ours—watery or otherwise; that when a person placed in command over his
|
||
fellow-men finds one of them to be very significantly his superior in general
|
||
pride of manhood, straightway against that man he conceives an unconquerable
|
||
dislike and bitterness; and if he have a chance he will pull down and pulverize
|
||
that subaltern’s tower, and make a little heap of dust of it. Be this conceit of
|
||
mine as it may, gentlemen, at all events Steelkilt was a tall and noble animal
|
||
with a head like a Roman, and a flowing golden beard like the tasseled housings
|
||
of your last viceroy’s snorting charger; and a brain, and a heart, and a soul in
|
||
him, gentlemen, which had made Steelkilt Charlemagne, had he been born son to
|
||
Charlemagne’s father. But Radney, the mate, was ugly as a mule; yet as hardy, as
|
||
stubborn, as malicious. He did not love Steelkilt, and Steelkilt knew it.
|
||
|
||
“Espying the mate drawing near as he was toiling at the pump with the rest, the
|
||
Lakeman affected not to notice him, but unawed, went on with his gay banterings.
|
||
|
||
“‘Aye, aye, my merry lads, it’s a lively leak this; hold a cannikin, one of ye,
|
||
and let’s have a taste. By the Lord, it’s worth bottling! I tell ye what, men,
|
||
old Rad’s investment must go for it! he had best cut away his part of the hull
|
||
and tow it home. The fact is, boys, that sword-fish only began the job; he’s
|
||
come back again with a gang of ship-carpenters, saw-fish, and file-fish, and
|
||
what not; and the whole posse of ’em are now hard at work cutting and slashing
|
||
at the bottom; making improvements, I suppose. If old Rad were here now, I’d
|
||
tell him to jump overboard and scatter ’em. They’re playing the devil with his
|
||
estate, I can tell him. But he’s a simple old soul,—Rad, and a beauty too. Boys,
|
||
they say the rest of his property is invested in looking-glasses. I wonder if
|
||
he’d give a poor devil like me the model of his nose.’
|
||
|
||
“‘Damn your eyes! what’s that pump stopping for?’ roared Radney, pretending not
|
||
to have heard the sailors’ talk. ‘Thunder away at it!’
|
||
|
||
“‘Aye, aye, sir,’ said Steelkilt, merry as a cricket. ‘Lively, boys, lively,
|
||
now!’ And with that the pump clanged like fifty fire-engines; the men tossed
|
||
their hats off to it, and ere long that peculiar gasping of the lungs was heard
|
||
which denotes the fullest tension of life’s utmost energies.
|
||
|
||
“Quitting the pump at last, with the rest of his band, the Lakeman went forward
|
||
all panting, and sat himself down on the windlass; his face fiery red, his eyes
|
||
bloodshot, and wiping the profuse sweat from his brow. Now what cozening fiend
|
||
it was, gentlemen, that possessed Radney to meddle with such a man in that
|
||
corporeally exasperated state, I know not; but so it happened. Intolerably
|
||
striding along the deck, the mate commanded him to get a broom and sweep down
|
||
the planks, and also a shovel, and remove some offensive matters consequent upon
|
||
allowing a pig to run at large.
|
||
|
||
“Now, gentlemen, sweeping a ship’s deck at sea is a piece of household work
|
||
which in all times but raging gales is regularly attended to every evening; it
|
||
has been known to be done in the case of ships actually foundering at the time.
|
||
Such, gentlemen, is the inflexibility of sea-usages and the instinctive love of
|
||
neatness in seamen; some of whom would not willingly drown without first washing
|
||
their faces. But in all vessels this broom business is the prescriptive province
|
||
of the boys, if boys there be aboard. Besides, it was the stronger men in the
|
||
Town-Ho that had been divided into gangs, taking turns at the pumps; and being
|
||
the most athletic seaman of them all, Steelkilt had been regularly assigned
|
||
captain of one of the gangs; consequently he should have been freed from any
|
||
trivial business not connected with truly nautical duties, such being the case
|
||
with his comrades. I mention all these particulars so that you may understand
|
||
exactly how this affair stood between the two men.
|
||
|
||
“But there was more than this: the order about the shovel was almost as plainly
|
||
meant to sting and insult Steelkilt, as though Radney had spat in his face. Any
|
||
man who has gone sailor in a whale-ship will understand this; and all this and
|
||
doubtless much more, the Lakeman fully comprehended when the mate uttered his
|
||
command. But as he sat still for a moment, and as he steadfastly looked into the
|
||
mate’s malignant eye and perceived the stacks of powder-casks heaped up in him
|
||
and the slow-match silently burning along towards them; as he instinctively saw
|
||
all this, that strange forbearance and unwillingness to stir up the deeper
|
||
passionateness in any already ireful being—a repugnance most felt, when felt at
|
||
all, by really valiant men even when aggrieved—this nameless phantom feeling,
|
||
gentlemen, stole over Steelkilt.
|
||
|
||
“Therefore, in his ordinary tone, only a little broken by the bodily exhaustion
|
||
he was temporarily in, he answered him saying that sweeping the deck was not his
|
||
business, and he would not do it. And then, without at all alluding to the
|
||
shovel, he pointed to three lads as the customary sweepers; who, not being
|
||
billeted at the pumps, had done little or nothing all day. To this, Radney
|
||
replied with an oath, in a most domineering and outrageous manner
|
||
unconditionally reiterating his command; meanwhile advancing upon the still
|
||
seated Lakeman, with an uplifted cooper’s club hammer which he had snatched from
|
||
a cask near by.
|
||
|
||
“Heated and irritated as he was by his spasmodic toil at the pumps, for all his
|
||
first nameless feeling of forbearance the sweating Steelkilt could but ill brook
|
||
this bearing in the mate; but somehow still smothering the conflagration within
|
||
him, without speaking he remained doggedly rooted to his seat, till at last the
|
||
incensed Radney shook the hammer within a few inches of his face, furiously
|
||
commanding him to do his bidding.
|
||
|
||
“Steelkilt rose, and slowly retreating round the windlass, steadily followed by
|
||
the mate with his menacing hammer, deliberately repeated his intention not to
|
||
obey. Seeing, however, that his forbearance had not the slightest effect, by an
|
||
awful and unspeakable intimation with his twisted hand he warned off the foolish
|
||
and infatuated man; but it was to no purpose. And in this way the two went once
|
||
slowly round the windlass; when, resolved at last no longer to retreat,
|
||
bethinking him that he had now forborne as much as comported with his humor, the
|
||
Lakeman paused on the hatches and thus spoke to the officer:
|
||
|
||
“‘Mr. Radney, I will not obey you. Take that hammer away, or look to yourself.’
|
||
But the predestinated mate coming still closer to him, where the Lakeman stood
|
||
fixed, now shook the heavy hammer within an inch of his teeth; meanwhile
|
||
repeating a string of insufferable maledictions. Retreating not the thousandth
|
||
part of an inch; stabbing him in the eye with the unflinching poniard of his
|
||
glance, Steelkilt, clenching his right hand behind him and creepingly drawing it
|
||
back, told his persecutor that if the hammer but grazed his cheek he (Steelkilt)
|
||
would murder him. But, gentlemen, the fool had been branded for the slaughter by
|
||
the gods. Immediately the hammer touched the cheek; the next instant the lower
|
||
jaw of the mate was stove in his head; he fell on the hatch spouting blood like
|
||
a whale.
|
||
|
||
“Ere the cry could go aft Steelkilt was shaking one of the backstays leading far
|
||
aloft to where two of his comrades were standing their mastheads. They were both
|
||
Canallers.
|
||
|
||
“‘Canallers!’ cried Don Pedro. ‘We have seen many whale-ships in our harbours,
|
||
but never heard of your Canallers. Pardon: who and what are they?’
|
||
|
||
“‘Canallers, Don, are the boatmen belonging to our grand Erie Canal. You must
|
||
have heard of it.’
|
||
|
||
“‘Nay, Senor; hereabouts in this dull, warm, most lazy, and hereditary land, we
|
||
know but little of your vigorous North.’
|
||
|
||
“‘Aye? Well then, Don, refill my cup. Your chicha’s very fine; and ere
|
||
proceeding further I will tell ye what our Canallers are; for such information
|
||
may throw side-light upon my story.’
|
||
|
||
“For three hundred and sixty miles, gentlemen, through the entire breadth of the
|
||
state of New York; through numerous populous cities and most thriving villages;
|
||
through long, dismal, uninhabited swamps, and affluent, cultivated fields,
|
||
unrivalled for fertility; by billiard-room and bar-room; through the
|
||
holy-of-holies of great forests; on Roman arches over Indian rivers; through sun
|
||
and shade; by happy hearts or broken; through all the wide contrasting scenery
|
||
of those noble Mohawk counties; and especially, by rows of snow-white chapels,
|
||
whose spires stand almost like milestones, flows one continual stream of
|
||
Venetianly corrupt and often lawless life. There’s your true Ashantee,
|
||
gentlemen; there howl your pagans; where you ever find them, next door to you;
|
||
under the long-flung shadow, and the snug patronising lee of churches. For by
|
||
some curious fatality, as it is often noted of your metropolitan freebooters
|
||
that they ever encamp around the halls of justice, so sinners, gentlemen, most
|
||
abound in holiest vicinities.
|
||
|
||
“‘Is that a friar passing?’ said Don Pedro, looking downwards into the crowded
|
||
plazza, with humorous concern.
|
||
|
||
“‘Well for our northern friend, Dame Isabella’s Inquisition wanes in Lima,’
|
||
laughed Don Sebastian. ‘Proceed, Senor.’
|
||
|
||
“‘A moment! Pardon!’ cried another of the company. ‘In the name of all us
|
||
Limeese, I but desire to express to you, sir sailor, that we have by no means
|
||
overlooked your delicacy in not substituting present Lima for distant Venice in
|
||
your corrupt comparison. Oh! do not bow and look surprised; you know the proverb
|
||
all along this coast—“Corrupt as Lima.” It but bears out your saying, too;
|
||
churches more plentiful than billiard-tables, and for ever open—and “Corrupt as
|
||
Lima.” So, too, Venice; I have been there; the holy city of the blessed
|
||
evangelist, St. Mark!—St. Dominic, purge it! Your cup! Thanks: here I refill;
|
||
now, you pour out again.’
|
||
|
||
“Freely depicted in his own vocation, gentlemen, the Canaller would make a fine
|
||
dramatic hero, so abundantly and picturesquely wicked is he. Like Mark Antony,
|
||
for days and days along his green-turfed, flowery Nile, he indolently floats,
|
||
openly toying with his red-cheeked Cleopatra, ripening his apricot thigh upon
|
||
the sunny deck. But ashore, all this effeminacy is dashed. The brigandish guise
|
||
which the Canaller so proudly sports; his slouched and gaily-ribboned hat
|
||
betoken his grand features. A terror to the smiling innocence of the villages
|
||
through which he floats; his swart visage and bold swagger are not unshunned in
|
||
cities. Once a vagabond on his own canal, I have received good turns from one of
|
||
these Canallers; I thank him heartily; would fain be not ungrateful; but it is
|
||
often one of the prime redeeming qualities of your man of violence, that at
|
||
times he has as stiff an arm to back a poor stranger in a strait, as to plunder
|
||
a wealthy one. In sum, gentlemen, what the wildness of this canal life is, is
|
||
emphatically evinced by this; that our wild whale-fishery contains so many of
|
||
its most finished graduates, and that scarce any race of mankind, except Sydney
|
||
men, are so much distrusted by our whaling captains. Nor does it at all diminish
|
||
the curiousness of this matter, that to many thousands of our rural boys and
|
||
young men born along its line, the probationary life of the Grand Canal
|
||
furnishes the sole transition between quietly reaping in a Christian corn-field,
|
||
and recklessly ploughing the waters of the most barbaric seas.
|
||
|
||
“‘I see! I see!’ impetuously exclaimed Don Pedro, spilling his chicha upon his
|
||
silvery ruffles. ‘No need to travel! The world’s one Lima. I had thought, now,
|
||
that at your temperate North the generations were cold and holy as the
|
||
hills.—But the story.’
|
||
|
||
“I left off, gentlemen, where the Lakeman shook the backstay. Hardly had he done
|
||
so, when he was surrounded by the three junior mates and the four harpooneers,
|
||
who all crowded him to the deck. But sliding down the ropes like baleful comets,
|
||
the two Canallers rushed into the uproar, and sought to drag their man out of it
|
||
towards the forecastle. Others of the sailors joined with them in this attempt,
|
||
and a twisted turmoil ensued; while standing out of harm’s way, the valiant
|
||
captain danced up and down with a whale-pike, calling upon his officers to
|
||
manhandle that atrocious scoundrel, and smoke him along to the quarter-deck. At
|
||
intervals, he ran close up to the revolving border of the confusion, and prying
|
||
into the heart of it with his pike, sought to prick out the object of his
|
||
resentment. But Steelkilt and his desperadoes were too much for them all; they
|
||
succeeded in gaining the forecastle deck, where, hastily slewing about three or
|
||
four large casks in a line with the windlass, these sea-Parisians entrenched
|
||
themselves behind the barricade.
|
||
|
||
“‘Come out of that, ye pirates!’ roared the captain, now menacing them with a
|
||
pistol in each hand, just brought to him by the steward. ‘Come out of that, ye
|
||
cut-throats!’
|
||
|
||
“Steelkilt leaped on the barricade, and striding up and down there, defied the
|
||
worst the pistols could do; but gave the captain to understand distinctly, that
|
||
his (Steelkilt’s) death would be the signal for a murderous mutiny on the part
|
||
of all hands. Fearing in his heart lest this might prove but too true, the
|
||
captain a little desisted, but still commanded the insurgents instantly to
|
||
return to their duty.
|
||
|
||
“‘Will you promise not to touch us, if we do?’ demanded their ringleader.
|
||
|
||
“‘Turn to! turn to!—I make no promise;—to your duty! Do you want to sink the
|
||
ship, by knocking off at a time like this? Turn to!’ and he once more raised a
|
||
pistol.
|
||
|
||
“‘Sink the ship?’ cried Steelkilt. ‘Aye, let her sink. Not a man of us turns to,
|
||
unless you swear not to raise a rope-yarn against us. What say ye, men?’ turning
|
||
to his comrades. A fierce cheer was their response.
|
||
|
||
“The Lakeman now patrolled the barricade, all the while keeping his eye on the
|
||
Captain, and jerking out such sentences as these:—‘It’s not our fault; we didn’t
|
||
want it; I told him to take his hammer away; it was boy’s business; he might
|
||
have known me before this; I told him not to prick the buffalo; I believe I have
|
||
broken a finger here against his cursed jaw; ain’t those mincing knives down in
|
||
the forecastle there, men? look to those handspikes, my hearties. Captain, by
|
||
God, look to yourself; say the word; don’t be a fool; forget it all; we are
|
||
ready to turn to; treat us decently, and we’re your men; but we won’t be
|
||
flogged.’
|
||
|
||
“‘Turn to! I make no promises, turn to, I say!’
|
||
|
||
“‘Look ye, now,’ cried the Lakeman, flinging out his arm towards him, ‘there are
|
||
a few of us here (and I am one of them) who have shipped for the cruise, d’ye
|
||
see; now as you well know, sir, we can claim our discharge as soon as the anchor
|
||
is down; so we don’t want a row; it’s not our interest; we want to be peaceable;
|
||
we are ready to work, but we won’t be flogged.’
|
||
|
||
“‘Turn to!’ roared the Captain.
|
||
|
||
“Steelkilt glanced round him a moment, and then said:—‘I tell you what it is
|
||
now, Captain, rather than kill ye, and be hung for such a shabby rascal, we
|
||
won’t lift a hand against ye unless ye attack us; but till you say the word
|
||
about not flogging us, we don’t do a hand’s turn.’
|
||
|
||
“‘Down into the forecastle then, down with ye, I’ll keep ye there till ye’re
|
||
sick of it. Down ye go.’
|
||
|
||
“‘Shall we?’ cried the ringleader to his men. Most of them were against it; but
|
||
at length, in obedience to Steelkilt, they preceded him down into their dark
|
||
den, growlingly disappearing, like bears into a cave.
|
||
|
||
“As the Lakeman’s bare head was just level with the planks, the Captain and his
|
||
posse leaped the barricade, and rapidly drawing over the slide of the scuttle,
|
||
planted their group of hands upon it, and loudly called for the steward to bring
|
||
the heavy brass padlock belonging to the companionway. Then opening the slide a
|
||
little, the Captain whispered something down the crack, closed it, and turned
|
||
the key upon them—ten in number—leaving on deck some twenty or more, who thus
|
||
far had remained neutral.
|
||
|
||
“All night a wide-awake watch was kept by all the officers, forward and aft,
|
||
especially about the forecastle scuttle and fore hatchway; at which last place
|
||
it was feared the insurgents might emerge, after breaking through the bulkhead
|
||
below. But the hours of darkness passed in peace; the men who still remained at
|
||
their duty toiling hard at the pumps, whose clinking and clanking at intervals
|
||
through the dreary night dismally resounded through the ship.
|
||
|
||
“At sunrise the Captain went forward, and knocking on the deck, summoned the
|
||
prisoners to work; but with a yell they refused. Water was then lowered down to
|
||
them, and a couple of handfuls of biscuit were tossed after it; when again
|
||
turning the key upon them and pocketing it, the Captain returned to the
|
||
quarter-deck. Twice every day for three days this was repeated; but on the
|
||
fourth morning a confused wrangling, and then a scuffling was heard, as the
|
||
customary summons was delivered; and suddenly four men burst up from the
|
||
forecastle, saying they were ready to turn to. The fetid closeness of the air,
|
||
and a famishing diet, united perhaps to some fears of ultimate retribution, had
|
||
constrained them to surrender at discretion. Emboldened by this, the Captain
|
||
reiterated his demand to the rest, but Steelkilt shouted up to him a terrific
|
||
hint to stop his babbling and betake himself where he belonged. On the fifth
|
||
morning three others of the mutineers bolted up into the air from the desperate
|
||
arms below that sought to restrain them. Only three were left.
|
||
|
||
“‘Better turn to, now?’ said the Captain with a heartless jeer.
|
||
|
||
“‘Shut us up again, will ye!’ cried Steelkilt.
|
||
|
||
“‘Oh certainly,’ said the Captain, and the key clicked.
|
||
|
||
“It was at this point, gentlemen, that enraged by the defection of seven of his
|
||
former associates, and stung by the mocking voice that had last hailed him, and
|
||
maddened by his long entombment in a place as black as the bowels of despair; it
|
||
was then that Steelkilt proposed to the two Canallers, thus far apparently of
|
||
one mind with him, to burst out of their hole at the next summoning of the
|
||
garrison; and armed with their keen mincing knives (long, crescentic, heavy
|
||
implements with a handle at each end) run amuck from the bowsprit to the
|
||
taffrail; and if by any devilishness of desperation possible, seize the ship.
|
||
For himself, he would do this, he said, whether they joined him or not. That was
|
||
the last night he should spend in that den. But the scheme met with no
|
||
opposition on the part of the other two; they swore they were ready for that, or
|
||
for any other mad thing, for anything in short but a surrender. And what was
|
||
more, they each insisted upon being the first man on deck, when the time to make
|
||
the rush should come. But to this their leader as fiercely objected, reserving
|
||
that priority for himself; particularly as his two comrades would not yield, the
|
||
one to the other, in the matter; and both of them could not be first, for the
|
||
ladder would but admit one man at a time. And here, gentlemen, the foul play of
|
||
these miscreants must come out.
|
||
|
||
“Upon hearing the frantic project of their leader, each in his own separate soul
|
||
had suddenly lighted, it would seem, upon the same piece of treachery, namely:
|
||
to be foremost in breaking out, in order to be the first of the three, though
|
||
the last of the ten, to surrender; and thereby secure whatever small chance of
|
||
pardon such conduct might merit. But when Steelkilt made known his determination
|
||
still to lead them to the last, they in some way, by some subtle chemistry of
|
||
villany, mixed their before secret treacheries together; and when their leader
|
||
fell into a doze, verbally opened their souls to each other in three sentences;
|
||
and bound the sleeper with cords, and gagged him with cords; and shrieked out
|
||
for the Captain at midnight.
|
||
|
||
“Thinking murder at hand, and smelling in the dark for the blood, he and all his
|
||
armed mates and harpooneers rushed for the forecastle. In a few minutes the
|
||
scuttle was opened, and, bound hand and foot, the still struggling ringleader
|
||
was shoved up into the air by his perfidious allies, who at once claimed the
|
||
honor of securing a man who had been fully ripe for murder. But all these were
|
||
collared, and dragged along the deck like dead cattle; and, side by side, were
|
||
seized up into the mizzen rigging, like three quarters of meat, and there they
|
||
hung till morning. ‘Damn ye,’ cried the Captain, pacing to and fro before them,
|
||
‘the vultures would not touch ye, ye villains!’
|
||
|
||
“At sunrise he summoned all hands; and separating those who had rebelled from
|
||
those who had taken no part in the mutiny, he told the former that he had a good
|
||
mind to flog them all round—thought, upon the whole, he would do so—he ought
|
||
to—justice demanded it; but for the present, considering their timely surrender,
|
||
he would let them go with a reprimand, which he accordingly administered in the
|
||
vernacular.
|
||
|
||
“‘But as for you, ye carrion rogues,’ turning to the three men in the
|
||
rigging—‘for you, I mean to mince ye up for the try-pots;’ and, seizing a rope,
|
||
he applied it with all his might to the backs of the two traitors, till they
|
||
yelled no more, but lifelessly hung their heads sideways, as the two crucified
|
||
thieves are drawn.
|
||
|
||
“‘My wrist is sprained with ye!’ he cried, at last; ‘but there is still rope
|
||
enough left for you, my fine bantam, that wouldn’t give up. Take that gag from
|
||
his mouth, and let us hear what he can say for himself.’
|
||
|
||
“For a moment the exhausted mutineer made a tremulous motion of his cramped
|
||
jaws, and then painfully twisting round his head, said in a sort of hiss, ‘What
|
||
I say is this—and mind it well—if you flog me, I murder you!’
|
||
|
||
“‘Say ye so? then see how ye frighten me’—and the Captain drew off with the rope
|
||
to strike.
|
||
|
||
“‘Best not,’ hissed the Lakeman.
|
||
|
||
“‘But I must,’—and the rope was once more drawn back for the stroke.
|
||
|
||
“Steelkilt here hissed out something, inaudible to all but the Captain; who, to
|
||
the amazement of all hands, started back, paced the deck rapidly two or three
|
||
times, and then suddenly throwing down his rope, said, ‘I won’t do it—let him
|
||
go—cut him down: d’ye hear?’
|
||
|
||
“But as the junior mates were hurrying to execute the order, a pale man, with a
|
||
bandaged head, arrested them—Radney the chief mate. Ever since the blow, he had
|
||
lain in his berth; but that morning, hearing the tumult on the deck, he had
|
||
crept out, and thus far had watched the whole scene. Such was the state of his
|
||
mouth, that he could hardly speak; but mumbling something about his being
|
||
willing and able to do what the captain dared not attempt, he snatched the rope
|
||
and advanced to his pinioned foe.
|
||
|
||
“‘You are a coward!’ hissed the Lakeman.
|
||
|
||
“‘So I am, but take that.’ The mate was in the very act of striking, when
|
||
another hiss stayed his uplifted arm. He paused: and then pausing no more, made
|
||
good his word, spite of Steelkilt’s threat, whatever that might have been. The
|
||
three men were then cut down, all hands were turned to, and, sullenly worked by
|
||
the moody seamen, the iron pumps clanged as before.
|
||
|
||
“Just after dark that day, when one watch had retired below, a clamor was heard
|
||
in the forecastle; and the two trembling traitors running up, besieged the cabin
|
||
door, saying they durst not consort with the crew. Entreaties, cuffs, and kicks
|
||
could not drive them back, so at their own instance they were put down in the
|
||
ship’s run for salvation. Still, no sign of mutiny reappeared among the rest. On
|
||
the contrary, it seemed, that mainly at Steelkilt’s instigation, they had
|
||
resolved to maintain the strictest peacefulness, obey all orders to the last,
|
||
and, when the ship reached port, desert her in a body. But in order to insure
|
||
the speediest end to the voyage, they all agreed to another thing—namely, not to
|
||
sing out for whales, in case any should be discovered. For, spite of her leak,
|
||
and spite of all her other perils, the Town-Ho still maintained her mast-heads,
|
||
and her captain was just as willing to lower for a fish that moment, as on the
|
||
day his craft first struck the cruising ground; and Radney the mate was quite as
|
||
ready to change his berth for a boat, and with his bandaged mouth seek to gag in
|
||
death the vital jaw of the whale.
|
||
|
||
“But though the Lakeman had induced the seamen to adopt this sort of passiveness
|
||
in their conduct, he kept his own counsel (at least till all was over)
|
||
concerning his own proper and private revenge upon the man who had stung him in
|
||
the ventricles of his heart. He was in Radney the chief mate’s watch; and as if
|
||
the infatuated man sought to run more than half way to meet his doom, after the
|
||
scene at the rigging, he insisted, against the express counsel of the captain,
|
||
upon resuming the head of his watch at night. Upon this, and one or two other
|
||
circumstances, Steelkilt systematically built the plan of his revenge.
|
||
|
||
“During the night, Radney had an unseamanlike way of sitting on the bulwarks of
|
||
the quarter-deck, and leaning his arm upon the gunwale of the boat which was
|
||
hoisted up there, a little above the ship’s side. In this attitude, it was well
|
||
known, he sometimes dozed. There was a considerable vacancy between the boat and
|
||
the ship, and down between this was the sea. Steelkilt calculated his time, and
|
||
found that his next trick at the helm would come round at two o’clock, in the
|
||
morning of the third day from that in which he had been betrayed. At his
|
||
leisure, he employed the interval in braiding something very carefully in his
|
||
watches below.
|
||
|
||
“‘What are you making there?’ said a shipmate.
|
||
|
||
“‘What do you think? what does it look like?’
|
||
|
||
“‘Like a lanyard for your bag; but it’s an odd one, seems to me.’
|
||
|
||
“‘Yes, rather oddish,’ said the Lakeman, holding it at arm’s length before him;
|
||
‘but I think it will answer. Shipmate, I haven’t enough twine,—have you any?’
|
||
|
||
“But there was none in the forecastle.
|
||
|
||
“‘Then I must get some from old Rad;’ and he rose to go aft.
|
||
|
||
“‘You don’t mean to go a begging to him!’ said a sailor.
|
||
|
||
“‘Why not? Do you think he won’t do me a turn, when it’s to help himself in the
|
||
end, shipmate?’ and going to the mate, he looked at him quietly, and asked him
|
||
for some twine to mend his hammock. It was given him—neither twine nor lanyard
|
||
were seen again; but the next night an iron ball, closely netted, partly rolled
|
||
from the pocket of the Lakeman’s monkey jacket, as he was tucking the coat into
|
||
his hammock for a pillow. Twenty-four hours after, his trick at the silent
|
||
helm—nigh to the man who was apt to doze over the grave always ready dug to the
|
||
seaman’s hand—that fatal hour was then to come; and in the fore-ordaining soul
|
||
of Steelkilt, the mate was already stark and stretched as a corpse, with his
|
||
forehead crushed in.
|
||
|
||
“But, gentlemen, a fool saved the would-be murderer from the bloody deed he had
|
||
planned. Yet complete revenge he had, and without being the avenger. For by a
|
||
mysterious fatality, Heaven itself seemed to step in to take out of his hands
|
||
into its own the damning thing he would have done.
|
||
|
||
“It was just between daybreak and sunrise of the morning of the second day, when
|
||
they were washing down the decks, that a stupid Teneriffe man, drawing water in
|
||
the main-chains, all at once shouted out, ‘There she rolls! there she rolls!’
|
||
Jesu, what a whale! It was Moby Dick.
|
||
|
||
“‘Moby Dick!’ cried Don Sebastian; ‘St. Dominic! Sir sailor, but do whales have
|
||
christenings? Whom call you Moby Dick?’
|
||
|
||
“‘A very white, and famous, and most deadly immortal monster, Don;—but that
|
||
would be too long a story.’
|
||
|
||
“‘How? how?’ cried all the young Spaniards, crowding.
|
||
|
||
“‘Nay, Dons, Dons—nay, nay! I cannot rehearse that now. Let me get more into the
|
||
air, Sirs.’
|
||
|
||
“‘The chicha! the chicha!’ cried Don Pedro; ‘our vigorous friend looks
|
||
faint;—fill up his empty glass!’
|
||
|
||
“No need, gentlemen; one moment, and I proceed.—Now, gentlemen, so suddenly
|
||
perceiving the snowy whale within fifty yards of the ship—forgetful of the
|
||
compact among the crew—in the excitement of the moment, the Teneriffe man had
|
||
instinctively and involuntarily lifted his voice for the monster, though for
|
||
some little time past it had been plainly beheld from the three sullen
|
||
mast-heads. All was now a phrensy. ‘The White Whale—the White Whale!’ was the
|
||
cry from captain, mates, and harpooneers, who, undeterred by fearful rumours,
|
||
were all anxious to capture so famous and precious a fish; while the dogged crew
|
||
eyed askance, and with curses, the appalling beauty of the vast milky mass, that
|
||
lit up by a horizontal spangling sun, shifted and glistened like a living opal
|
||
in the blue morning sea. Gentlemen, a strange fatality pervades the whole career
|
||
of these events, as if verily mapped out before the world itself was charted.
|
||
The mutineer was the bowsman of the mate, and when fast to a fish, it was his
|
||
duty to sit next him, while Radney stood up with his lance in the prow, and haul
|
||
in or slacken the line, at the word of command. Moreover, when the four boats
|
||
were lowered, the mate’s got the start; and none howled more fiercely with
|
||
delight than did Steelkilt, as he strained at his oar. After a stiff pull, their
|
||
harpooneer got fast, and, spear in hand, Radney sprang to the bow. He was always
|
||
a furious man, it seems, in a boat. And now his bandaged cry was, to beach him
|
||
on the whale’s topmost back. Nothing loath, his bowsman hauled him up and up,
|
||
through a blinding foam that blent two whitenesses together; till of a sudden
|
||
the boat struck as against a sunken ledge, and keeling over, spilled out the
|
||
standing mate. That instant, as he fell on the whale’s slippery back, the boat
|
||
righted, and was dashed aside by the swell, while Radney was tossed over into
|
||
the sea, on the other flank of the whale. He struck out through the spray, and,
|
||
for an instant, was dimly seen through that veil, wildly seeking to remove
|
||
himself from the eye of Moby Dick. But the whale rushed round in a sudden
|
||
maelstrom; seized the swimmer between his jaws; and rearing high up with him,
|
||
plunged headlong again, and went down.
|
||
|
||
“Meantime, at the first tap of the boat’s bottom, the Lakeman had slackened the
|
||
line, so as to drop astern from the whirlpool; calmly looking on, he thought his
|
||
own thoughts. But a sudden, terrific, downward jerking of the boat, quickly
|
||
brought his knife to the line. He cut it; and the whale was free. But, at some
|
||
distance, Moby Dick rose again, with some tatters of Radney’s red woollen shirt,
|
||
caught in the teeth that had destroyed him. All four boats gave chase again; but
|
||
the whale eluded them, and finally wholly disappeared.
|
||
|
||
“In good time, the Town-Ho reached her port—a savage, solitary place—where no
|
||
civilized creature resided. There, headed by the Lakeman, all but five or six of
|
||
the foremastmen deliberately deserted among the palms; eventually, as it turned
|
||
out, seizing a large double war-canoe of the savages, and setting sail for some
|
||
other harbor.
|
||
|
||
“The ship’s company being reduced to but a handful, the captain called upon the
|
||
Islanders to assist him in the laborious business of heaving down the ship to
|
||
stop the leak. But to such unresting vigilance over their dangerous allies was
|
||
this small band of whites necessitated, both by night and by day, and so extreme
|
||
was the hard work they underwent, that upon the vessel being ready again for
|
||
sea, they were in such a weakened condition that the captain durst not put off
|
||
with them in so heavy a vessel. After taking counsel with his officers, he
|
||
anchored the ship as far off shore as possible; loaded and ran out his two
|
||
cannon from the bows; stacked his muskets on the poop; and warning the Islanders
|
||
not to approach the ship at their peril, took one man with him, and setting the
|
||
sail of his best whale-boat, steered straight before the wind for Tahiti, five
|
||
hundred miles distant, to procure a reinforcement to his crew.
|
||
|
||
“On the fourth day of the sail, a large canoe was descried, which seemed to have
|
||
touched at a low isle of corals. He steered away from it; but the savage craft
|
||
bore down on him; and soon the voice of Steelkilt hailed him to heave to, or he
|
||
would run him under water. The captain presented a pistol. With one foot on each
|
||
prow of the yoked war-canoes, the Lakeman laughed him to scorn; assuring him
|
||
that if the pistol so much as clicked in the lock, he would bury him in bubbles
|
||
and foam.
|
||
|
||
“‘What do you want of me?’ cried the captain.
|
||
|
||
“‘Where are you bound? and for what are you bound?’ demanded Steelkilt; ‘no
|
||
lies.’
|
||
|
||
“‘I am bound to Tahiti for more men.’
|
||
|
||
“‘Very good. Let me board you a moment—I come in peace.’ With that he leaped
|
||
from the canoe, swam to the boat; and climbing the gunwale, stood face to face
|
||
with the captain.
|
||
|
||
“‘Cross your arms, sir; throw back your head. Now, repeat after me. As soon as
|
||
Steelkilt leaves me, I swear to beach this boat on yonder island, and remain
|
||
there six days. If I do not, may lightnings strike me!’
|
||
|
||
“‘A pretty scholar,’ laughed the Lakeman. ‘Adios, Senor!’ and leaping into the
|
||
sea, he swam back to his comrades.
|
||
|
||
“Watching the boat till it was fairly beached, and drawn up to the roots of the
|
||
cocoa-nut trees, Steelkilt made sail again, and in due time arrived at Tahiti,
|
||
his own place of destination. There, luck befriended him; two ships were about
|
||
to sail for France, and were providentially in want of precisely that number of
|
||
men which the sailor headed. They embarked; and so for ever got the start of
|
||
their former captain, had he been at all minded to work them legal retribution.
|
||
|
||
“Some ten days after the French ships sailed, the whale-boat arrived, and the
|
||
captain was forced to enlist some of the more civilized Tahitians, who had been
|
||
somewhat used to the sea. Chartering a small native schooner, he returned with
|
||
them to his vessel; and finding all right there, again resumed his cruisings.
|
||
|
||
“Where Steelkilt now is, gentlemen, none know; but upon the island of Nantucket,
|
||
the widow of Radney still turns to the sea which refuses to give up its dead;
|
||
still in dreams sees the awful white whale that destroyed him. * * * *
|
||
|
||
“‘Are you through?’ said Don Sebastian, quietly.
|
||
|
||
“‘I am, Don.’
|
||
|
||
“‘Then I entreat you, tell me if to the best of your own convictions, this your
|
||
story is in substance really true? It is so passing wonderful! Did you get it
|
||
from an unquestionable source? Bear with me if I seem to press.’
|
||
|
||
“‘Also bear with all of us, sir sailor; for we all join in Don Sebastian’s
|
||
suit,’ cried the company, with exceeding interest.
|
||
|
||
“‘Is there a copy of the Holy Evangelists in the Golden Inn, gentlemen?’
|
||
|
||
“‘Nay,’ said Don Sebastian; ‘but I know a worthy priest near by, who will
|
||
quickly procure one for me. I go for it; but are you well advised? this may grow
|
||
too serious.’
|
||
|
||
“‘Will you be so good as to bring the priest also, Don?’
|
||
|
||
“‘Though there are no Auto-da-Fés in Lima now,’ said one of the company to
|
||
another; ‘I fear our sailor friend runs risk of the archiepiscopacy. Let us
|
||
withdraw more out of the moonlight. I see no need of this.’
|
||
|
||
“‘Excuse me for running after you, Don Sebastian; but may I also beg that you
|
||
will be particular in procuring the largest sized Evangelists you can.’
|
||
|
||
* * * * * *
|
||
|
||
“‘This is the priest, he brings you the Evangelists,’ said Don Sebastian,
|
||
gravely, returning with a tall and solemn figure.
|
||
|
||
“‘Let me remove my hat. Now, venerable priest, further into the light, and hold
|
||
the Holy Book before me that I may touch it.
|
||
|
||
“‘So help me Heaven, and on my honor the story I have told ye, gentlemen, is in
|
||
substance and its great items, true. I know it to be true; it happened on this
|
||
ball; I trod the ship; I knew the crew; I have seen and talked with Steelkilt
|
||
since the death of Radney.’”
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 55. Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales.
|
||
|
||
I shall ere long paint to you as well as one can without canvas, something like
|
||
the true form of the whale as he actually appears to the eye of the whaleman
|
||
when in his own absolute body the whale is moored alongside the whale-ship so
|
||
that he can be fairly stepped upon there. It may be worth while, therefore,
|
||
previously to advert to those curious imaginary portraits of him which even down
|
||
to the present day confidently challenge the faith of the landsman. It is time
|
||
to set the world right in this matter, by proving such pictures of the whale all
|
||
wrong.
|
||
|
||
It may be that the primal source of all those pictorial delusions will be found
|
||
among the oldest Hindoo, Egyptian, and Grecian sculptures. For ever since those
|
||
inventive but unscrupulous times when on the marble panellings of temples, the
|
||
pedestals of statues, and on shields, medallions, cups, and coins, the dolphin
|
||
was drawn in scales of chain-armor like Saladin’s, and a helmeted head like St.
|
||
George’s; ever since then has something of the same sort of license prevailed,
|
||
not only in most popular pictures of the whale, but in many scientific
|
||
presentations of him.
|
||
|
||
Now, by all odds, the most ancient extant portrait anyways purporting to be the
|
||
whale’s, is to be found in the famous cavern-pagoda of Elephanta, in India. The
|
||
Brahmins maintain that in the almost endless sculptures of that immemorial
|
||
pagoda, all the trades and pursuits, every conceivable avocation of man, were
|
||
prefigured ages before any of them actually came into being. No wonder then,
|
||
that in some sort our noble profession of whaling should have been there
|
||
shadowed forth. The Hindoo whale referred to, occurs in a separate department of
|
||
the wall, depicting the incarnation of Vishnu in the form of leviathan,
|
||
learnedly known as the Matse Avatar. But though this sculpture is half man and
|
||
half whale, so as only to give the tail of the latter, yet that small section of
|
||
him is all wrong. It looks more like the tapering tail of an anaconda, than the
|
||
broad palms of the true whale’s majestic flukes.
|
||
|
||
But go to the old Galleries, and look now at a great Christian painter’s
|
||
portrait of this fish; for he succeeds no better than the antediluvian Hindoo.
|
||
It is Guido’s picture of Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the sea-monster or
|
||
whale. Where did Guido get the model of such a strange creature as that? Nor
|
||
does Hogarth, in painting the same scene in his own “Perseus Descending,” make
|
||
out one whit better. The huge corpulence of that Hogarthian monster undulates on
|
||
the surface, scarcely drawing one inch of water. It has a sort of howdah on its
|
||
back, and its distended tusked mouth into which the billows are rolling, might
|
||
be taken for the Traitors’ Gate leading from the Thames by water into the Tower.
|
||
Then, there are the Prodromus whales of old Scotch Sibbald, and Jonah’s whale,
|
||
as depicted in the prints of old Bibles and the cuts of old primers. What shall
|
||
be said of these? As for the book-binder’s whale winding like a vine-stalk round
|
||
the stock of a descending anchor—as stamped and gilded on the backs and
|
||
title-pages of many books both old and new—that is a very picturesque but purely
|
||
fabulous creature, imitated, I take it, from the like figures on antique vases.
|
||
Though universally denominated a dolphin, I nevertheless call this book-binder’s
|
||
fish an attempt at a whale; because it was so intended when the device was first
|
||
introduced. It was introduced by an old Italian publisher somewhere about the
|
||
15th century, during the Revival of Learning; and in those days, and even down
|
||
to a comparatively late period, dolphins were popularly supposed to be a species
|
||
of the Leviathan.
|
||
|
||
In the vignettes and other embellishments of some ancient books you will at
|
||
times meet with very curious touches at the whale, where all manner of spouts,
|
||
jets d’eau, hot springs and cold, Saratoga and Baden-Baden, come bubbling up
|
||
from his unexhausted brain. In the title-page of the original edition of the
|
||
“Advancement of Learning” you will find some curious whales.
|
||
|
||
But quitting all these unprofessional attempts, let us glance at those pictures
|
||
of leviathan purporting to be sober, scientific delineations, by those who know.
|
||
In old Harris’s collection of voyages there are some plates of whales extracted
|
||
from a Dutch book of voyages, A.D. 1671, entitled “A Whaling Voyage to
|
||
Spitzbergen in the ship Jonas in the Whale, Peter Peterson of Friesland,
|
||
master.” In one of those plates the whales, like great rafts of logs, are
|
||
represented lying among ice-isles, with white bears running over their living
|
||
backs. In another plate, the prodigious blunder is made of representing the
|
||
whale with perpendicular flukes.
|
||
|
||
Then again, there is an imposing quarto, written by one Captain Colnett, a Post
|
||
Captain in the English navy, entitled “A Voyage round Cape Horn into the South
|
||
Seas, for the purpose of extending the Spermaceti Whale Fisheries.” In this book
|
||
is an outline purporting to be a “Picture of a Physeter or Spermaceti whale,
|
||
drawn by scale from one killed on the coast of Mexico, August, 1793, and hoisted
|
||
on deck.” I doubt not the captain had this veracious picture taken for the
|
||
benefit of his marines. To mention but one thing about it, let me say that it
|
||
has an eye which applied, according to the accompanying scale, to a full grown
|
||
sperm whale, would make the eye of that whale a bow-window some five feet long.
|
||
Ah, my gallant captain, why did ye not give us Jonah looking out of that eye!
|
||
|
||
Nor are the most conscientious compilations of Natural History for the benefit
|
||
of the young and tender, free from the same heinousness of mistake. Look at that
|
||
popular work “Goldsmith’s Animated Nature.” In the abridged London edition of
|
||
1807, there are plates of an alleged “whale” and a “narwhale.” I do not wish to
|
||
seem inelegant, but this unsightly whale looks much like an amputated sow; and,
|
||
as for the narwhale, one glimpse at it is enough to amaze one, that in this
|
||
nineteenth century such a hippogriff could be palmed for genuine upon any
|
||
intelligent public of schoolboys.
|
||
|
||
Then, again, in 1825, Bernard Germain, Count de Lacépède, a great naturalist,
|
||
published a scientific systemized whale book, wherein are several pictures of
|
||
the different species of the Leviathan. All these are not only incorrect, but
|
||
the picture of the Mysticetus or Greenland whale (that is to say, the Right
|
||
whale), even Scoresby, a long experienced man as touching that species, declares
|
||
not to have its counterpart in nature.
|
||
|
||
But the placing of the cap-sheaf to all this blundering business was reserved
|
||
for the scientific Frederick Cuvier, brother to the famous Baron. In 1836, he
|
||
published a Natural History of Whales, in which he gives what he calls a picture
|
||
of the Sperm Whale. Before showing that picture to any Nantucketer, you had best
|
||
provide for your summary retreat from Nantucket. In a word, Frederick Cuvier’s
|
||
Sperm Whale is not a Sperm Whale, but a squash. Of course, he never had the
|
||
benefit of a whaling voyage (such men seldom have), but whence he derived that
|
||
picture, who can tell? Perhaps he got it as his scientific predecessor in the
|
||
same field, Desmarest, got one of his authentic abortions; that is, from a
|
||
Chinese drawing. And what sort of lively lads with the pencil those Chinese are,
|
||
many queer cups and saucers inform us.
|
||
|
||
As for the sign-painters’ whales seen in the streets hanging over the shops of
|
||
oil-dealers, what shall be said of them? They are generally Richard III. whales,
|
||
with dromedary humps, and very savage; breakfasting on three or four sailor
|
||
tarts, that is whaleboats full of mariners: their deformities floundering in
|
||
seas of blood and blue paint.
|
||
|
||
But these manifold mistakes in depicting the whale are not so very surprising
|
||
after all. Consider! Most of the scientific drawings have been taken from the
|
||
stranded fish; and these are about as correct as a drawing of a wrecked ship,
|
||
with broken back, would correctly represent the noble animal itself in all its
|
||
undashed pride of hull and spars. Though elephants have stood for their
|
||
full-lengths, the living Leviathan has never yet fairly floated himself for his
|
||
portrait. The living whale, in his full majesty and significance, is only to be
|
||
seen at sea in unfathomable waters; and afloat the vast bulk of him is out of
|
||
sight, like a launched line-of-battle ship; and out of that element it is a
|
||
thing eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist him bodily into the air, so
|
||
as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations. And, not to speak of the
|
||
highly presumable difference of contour between a young sucking whale and a
|
||
full-grown Platonian Leviathan; yet, even in the case of one of those young
|
||
sucking whales hoisted to a ship’s deck, such is then the outlandish, eel-like,
|
||
limbered, varying shape of him, that his precise expression the devil himself
|
||
could not catch.
|
||
|
||
But it may be fancied, that from the naked skeleton of the stranded whale,
|
||
accurate hints may be derived touching his true form. Not at all. For it is one
|
||
of the more curious things about this Leviathan, that his skeleton gives very
|
||
little idea of his general shape. Though Jeremy Bentham’s skeleton, which hangs
|
||
for candelabra in the library of one of his executors, correctly conveys the
|
||
idea of a burly-browed utilitarian old gentleman, with all Jeremy’s other
|
||
leading personal characteristics; yet nothing of this kind could be inferred
|
||
from any leviathan’s articulated bones. In fact, as the great Hunter says, the
|
||
mere skeleton of the whale bears the same relation to the fully invested and
|
||
padded animal as the insect does to the chrysalis that so roundingly envelopes
|
||
it. This peculiarity is strikingly evinced in the head, as in some part of this
|
||
book will be incidentally shown. It is also very curiously displayed in the side
|
||
fin, the bones of which almost exactly answer to the bones of the human hand,
|
||
minus only the thumb. This fin has four regular bone-fingers, the index, middle,
|
||
ring, and little finger. But all these are permanently lodged in their fleshy
|
||
covering, as the human fingers in an artificial covering. “However recklessly
|
||
the whale may sometimes serve us,” said humorous Stubb one day, “he can never be
|
||
truly said to handle us without mittens.”
|
||
|
||
For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs conclude
|
||
that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain
|
||
unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit the mark much nearer than
|
||
another, but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness. So
|
||
there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks
|
||
like. And the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his
|
||
living contour, is by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no
|
||
small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me
|
||
you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 56. Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True Pictures of
|
||
Whaling Scenes.
|
||
|
||
In connexion with the monstrous pictures of whales, I am strongly tempted here
|
||
to enter upon those still more monstrous stories of them which are to be found
|
||
in certain books, both ancient and modern, especially in Pliny, Purchas,
|
||
Hackluyt, Harris, Cuvier, etc. But I pass that matter by.
|
||
|
||
I know of only four published outlines of the great Sperm Whale; Colnett’s,
|
||
Huggins’s, Frederick Cuvier’s, and Beale’s. In the previous chapter Colnett and
|
||
Cuvier have been referred to. Huggins’s is far better than theirs; but, by great
|
||
odds, Beale’s is the best. All Beale’s drawings of this whale are good,
|
||
excepting the middle figure in the picture of three whales in various attitudes,
|
||
capping his second chapter. His frontispiece, boats attacking Sperm Whales,
|
||
though no doubt calculated to excite the civil scepticism of some parlor men, is
|
||
admirably correct and life-like in its general effect. Some of the Sperm Whale
|
||
drawings in J. Ross Browne are pretty correct in contour; but they are
|
||
wretchedly engraved. That is not his fault though.
|
||
|
||
Of the Right Whale, the best outline pictures are in Scoresby; but they are
|
||
drawn on too small a scale to convey a desirable impression. He has but one
|
||
picture of whaling scenes, and this is a sad deficiency, because it is by such
|
||
pictures only, when at all well done, that you can derive anything like a
|
||
truthful idea of the living whale as seen by his living hunters.
|
||
|
||
But, taken for all in all, by far the finest, though in some details not the
|
||
most correct, presentations of whales and whaling scenes to be anywhere found,
|
||
are two large French engravings, well executed, and taken from paintings by one
|
||
Garnery. Respectively, they represent attacks on the Sperm and Right Whale. In
|
||
the first engraving a noble Sperm Whale is depicted in full majesty of might,
|
||
just risen beneath the boat from the profundities of the ocean, and bearing high
|
||
in the air upon his back the terrific wreck of the stoven planks. The prow of
|
||
the boat is partially unbroken, and is drawn just balancing upon the monster’s
|
||
spine; and standing in that prow, for that one single incomputable flash of
|
||
time, you behold an oarsman, half shrouded by the incensed boiling spout of the
|
||
whale, and in the act of leaping, as if from a precipice. The action of the
|
||
whole thing is wonderfully good and true. The half-emptied line-tub floats on
|
||
the whitened sea; the wooden poles of the spilled harpoons obliquely bob in it;
|
||
the heads of the swimming crew are scattered about the whale in contrasting
|
||
expressions of affright; while in the black stormy distance the ship is bearing
|
||
down upon the scene. Serious fault might be found with the anatomical details of
|
||
this whale, but let that pass; since, for the life of me, I could not draw so
|
||
good a one.
|
||
|
||
In the second engraving, the boat is in the act of drawing alongside the
|
||
barnacled flank of a large running Right Whale, that rolls his black weedy bulk
|
||
in the sea like some mossy rock-slide from the Patagonian cliffs. His jets are
|
||
erect, full, and black like soot; so that from so abounding a smoke in the
|
||
chimney, you would think there must be a brave supper cooking in the great
|
||
bowels below. Sea fowls are pecking at the small crabs, shell-fish, and other
|
||
sea candies and maccaroni, which the Right Whale sometimes carries on his
|
||
pestilent back. And all the while the thick-lipped leviathan is rushing through
|
||
the deep, leaving tons of tumultuous white curds in his wake, and causing the
|
||
slight boat to rock in the swells like a skiff caught nigh the paddle-wheels of
|
||
an ocean steamer. Thus, the foreground is all raging commotion; but behind, in
|
||
admirable artistic contrast, is the glassy level of a sea becalmed, the drooping
|
||
unstarched sails of the powerless ship, and the inert mass of a dead whale, a
|
||
conquered fortress, with the flag of capture lazily hanging from the whale-pole
|
||
inserted into his spout-hole.
|
||
|
||
Who Garnery the painter is, or was, I know not. But my life for it he was either
|
||
practically conversant with his subject, or else marvellously tutored by some
|
||
experienced whaleman. The French are the lads for painting action. Go and gaze
|
||
upon all the paintings of Europe, and where will you find such a gallery of
|
||
living and breathing commotion on canvas, as in that triumphal hall at
|
||
Versailles; where the beholder fights his way, pell-mell, through the
|
||
consecutive great battles of France; where every sword seems a flash of the
|
||
Northern Lights, and the successive armed kings and Emperors dash by, like a
|
||
charge of crowned centaurs? Not wholly unworthy of a place in that gallery, are
|
||
these sea battle-pieces of Garnery.
|
||
|
||
The natural aptitude of the French for seizing the picturesqueness of things
|
||
seems to be peculiarly evinced in what paintings and engravings they have of
|
||
their whaling scenes. With not one tenth of England’s experience in the fishery,
|
||
and not the thousandth part of that of the Americans, they have nevertheless
|
||
furnished both nations with the only finished sketches at all capable of
|
||
conveying the real spirit of the whale hunt. For the most part, the English and
|
||
American whale draughtsmen seem entirely content with presenting the mechanical
|
||
outline of things, such as the vacant profile of the whale; which, so far as
|
||
picturesqueness of effect is concerned, is about tantamount to sketching the
|
||
profile of a pyramid. Even Scoresby, the justly renowned Right whaleman, after
|
||
giving us a stiff full length of the Greenland whale, and three or four delicate
|
||
miniatures of narwhales and porpoises, treats us to a series of classical
|
||
engravings of boat hooks, chopping knives, and grapnels; and with the
|
||
microscopic diligence of a Leuwenhoeck submits to the inspection of a shivering
|
||
world ninety-six fac-similes of magnified Arctic snow crystals. I mean no
|
||
disparagement to the excellent voyager (I honor him for a veteran), but in so
|
||
important a matter it was certainly an oversight not to have procured for every
|
||
crystal a sworn affidavit taken before a Greenland Justice of the Peace.
|
||
|
||
In addition to those fine engravings from Garnery, there are two other French
|
||
engravings worthy of note, by some one who subscribes himself “H. Durand.” One
|
||
of them, though not precisely adapted to our present purpose, nevertheless
|
||
deserves mention on other accounts. It is a quiet noon-scene among the isles of
|
||
the Pacific; a French whaler anchored, inshore, in a calm, and lazily taking
|
||
water on board; the loosened sails of the ship, and the long leaves of the palms
|
||
in the background, both drooping together in the breezeless air. The effect is
|
||
very fine, when considered with reference to its presenting the hardy fishermen
|
||
under one of their few aspects of oriental repose. The other engraving is quite
|
||
a different affair: the ship hove-to upon the open sea, and in the very heart of
|
||
the Leviathanic life, with a Right Whale alongside; the vessel (in the act of
|
||
cutting-in) hove over to the monster as if to a quay; and a boat, hurriedly
|
||
pushing off from this scene of activity, is about giving chase to whales in the
|
||
distance. The harpoons and lances lie levelled for use; three oarsmen are just
|
||
setting the mast in its hole; while from a sudden roll of the sea, the little
|
||
craft stands half-erect out of the water, like a rearing horse. From the ship,
|
||
the smoke of the torments of the boiling whale is going up like the smoke over a
|
||
village of smithies; and to windward, a black cloud, rising up with earnest of
|
||
squalls and rains, seems to quicken the activity of the excited seamen.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 57. Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in
|
||
Mountains; in Stars.
|
||
|
||
On Tower-hill, as you go down to the London docks, you may have seen a crippled
|
||
beggar (or kedger, as the sailors say) holding a painted board before him,
|
||
representing the tragic scene in which he lost his leg. There are three whales
|
||
and three boats; and one of the boats (presumed to contain the missing leg in
|
||
all its original integrity) is being crunched by the jaws of the foremost whale.
|
||
Any time these ten years, they tell me, has that man held up that picture, and
|
||
exhibited that stump to an incredulous world. But the time of his justification
|
||
has now come. His three whales are as good whales as were ever published in
|
||
Wapping, at any rate; and his stump as unquestionable a stump as any you will
|
||
find in the western clearings. But, though for ever mounted on that stump, never
|
||
a stump-speech does the poor whaleman make; but, with downcast eyes, stands
|
||
ruefully contemplating his own amputation.
|
||
|
||
Throughout the Pacific, and also in Nantucket, and New Bedford, and Sag Harbor,
|
||
you will come across lively sketches of whales and whaling-scenes, graven by the
|
||
fishermen themselves on Sperm Whale-teeth, or ladies’ busks wrought out of the
|
||
Right Whale-bone, and other like skrimshander articles, as the whalemen call the
|
||
numerous little ingenious contrivances they elaborately carve out of the rough
|
||
material, in their hours of ocean leisure. Some of them have little boxes of
|
||
dentistical-looking implements, specially intended for the skrimshandering
|
||
business. But, in general, they toil with their jack-knives alone; and, with
|
||
that almost omnipotent tool of the sailor, they will turn you out anything you
|
||
please, in the way of a mariner’s fancy.
|
||
|
||
Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that
|
||
condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery. Your true
|
||
whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. I myself am a savage, owning no
|
||
allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready at any moment to rebel
|
||
against him.
|
||
|
||
Now, one of the peculiar characteristics of the savage in his domestic hours, is
|
||
his wonderful patience of industry. An ancient Hawaiian war-club or
|
||
spear-paddle, in its full multiplicity and elaboration of carving, is as great a
|
||
trophy of human perseverance as a Latin lexicon. For, with but a bit of broken
|
||
sea-shell or a shark’s tooth, that miraculous intricacy of wooden net-work has
|
||
been achieved; and it has cost steady years of steady application.
|
||
|
||
As with the Hawaiian savage, so with the white sailor-savage. With the same
|
||
marvellous patience, and with the same single shark’s tooth, of his one poor
|
||
jack-knife, he will carve you a bit of bone sculpture, not quite as workmanlike,
|
||
but as close packed in its maziness of design, as the Greek savage, Achilles’s
|
||
shield; and full of barbaric spirit and suggestiveness, as the prints of that
|
||
fine old Dutch savage, Albert Durer.
|
||
|
||
Wooden whales, or whales cut in profile out of the small dark slabs of the noble
|
||
South Sea war-wood, are frequently met with in the forecastles of American
|
||
whalers. Some of them are done with much accuracy.
|
||
|
||
At some old gable-roofed country houses you will see brass whales hung by the
|
||
tail for knockers to the road-side door. When the porter is sleepy, the
|
||
anvil-headed whale would be best. But these knocking whales are seldom
|
||
remarkable as faithful essays. On the spires of some old-fashioned churches you
|
||
will see sheet-iron whales placed there for weather-cocks; but they are so
|
||
elevated, and besides that are to all intents and purposes so labelled with
|
||
“Hands off!” you cannot examine them closely enough to decide upon their merit.
|
||
|
||
In bony, ribby regions of the earth, where at the base of high broken cliffs
|
||
masses of rock lie strewn in fantastic groupings upon the plain, you will often
|
||
discover images as of the petrified forms of the Leviathan partly merged in
|
||
grass, which of a windy day breaks against them in a surf of green surges.
|
||
|
||
Then, again, in mountainous countries where the traveller is continually girdled
|
||
by amphitheatrical heights; here and there from some lucky point of view you
|
||
will catch passing glimpses of the profiles of whales defined along the
|
||
undulating ridges. But you must be a thorough whaleman, to see these sights; and
|
||
not only that, but if you wish to return to such a sight again, you must be sure
|
||
and take the exact intersecting latitude and longitude of your first
|
||
stand-point, else so chance-like are such observations of the hills, that your
|
||
precise, previous stand-point would require a laborious re-discovery; like the
|
||
Soloma Islands, which still remain incognita, though once high-ruffed Mendanna
|
||
trod them and old Figuera chronicled them.
|
||
|
||
Nor when expandingly lifted by your subject, can you fail to trace out great
|
||
whales in the starry heavens, and boats in pursuit of them; as when long filled
|
||
with thoughts of war the Eastern nations saw armies locked in battle among the
|
||
clouds. Thus at the North have I chased Leviathan round and round the Pole with
|
||
the revolutions of the bright points that first defined him to me. And beneath
|
||
the effulgent Antarctic skies I have boarded the Argo-Navis, and joined the
|
||
chase against the starry Cetus far beyond the utmost stretch of Hydrus and the
|
||
Flying Fish.
|
||
|
||
With a frigate’s anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons for spurs,
|
||
would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies, to see whether the
|
||
fabled heavens with all their countless tents really lie encamped beyond my
|
||
mortal sight!
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 58. Brit.
|
||
|
||
Steering north-eastward from the Crozetts, we fell in with vast meadows of brit,
|
||
the minute, yellow substance, upon which the Right Whale largely feeds. For
|
||
leagues and leagues it undulated round us, so that we seemed to be sailing
|
||
through boundless fields of ripe and golden wheat.
|
||
|
||
On the second day, numbers of Right Whales were seen, who, secure from the
|
||
attack of a Sperm Whaler like the Pequod, with open jaws sluggishly swam through
|
||
the brit, which, adhering to the fringing fibres of that wondrous Venetian blind
|
||
in their mouths, was in that manner separated from the water that escaped at the
|
||
lip.
|
||
|
||
As morning mowers, who side by side slowly and seethingly advance their scythes
|
||
through the long wet grass of marshy meads; even so these monsters swam, making
|
||
a strange, grassy, cutting sound; and leaving behind them endless swaths of blue
|
||
upon the yellow sea.*
|
||
|
||
*That part of the sea known among whalemen as the “Brazil Banks” does not bear
|
||
that name as the Banks of Newfoundland do, because of there being shallows and
|
||
soundings there, but because of this remarkable meadow-like appearance, caused
|
||
by the vast drifts of brit continually floating in those latitudes, where the
|
||
Right Whale is often chased.
|
||
|
||
But it was only the sound they made as they parted the brit which at all
|
||
reminded one of mowers. Seen from the mast-heads, especially when they paused
|
||
and were stationary for a while, their vast black forms looked more like
|
||
lifeless masses of rock than anything else. And as in the great hunting
|
||
countries of India, the stranger at a distance will sometimes pass on the plains
|
||
recumbent elephants without knowing them to be such, taking them for bare,
|
||
blackened elevations of the soil; even so, often, with him, who for the first
|
||
time beholds this species of the leviathans of the sea. And even when recognised
|
||
at last, their immense magnitude renders it very hard really to believe that
|
||
such bulky masses of overgrowth can possibly be instinct, in all parts, with the
|
||
same sort of life that lives in a dog or a horse.
|
||
|
||
Indeed, in other respects, you can hardly regard any creatures of the deep with
|
||
the same feelings that you do those of the shore. For though some old
|
||
naturalists have maintained that all creatures of the land are of their kind in
|
||
the sea; and though taking a broad general view of the thing, this may very well
|
||
be; yet coming to specialties, where, for example, does the ocean furnish any
|
||
fish that in disposition answers to the sagacious kindness of the dog? The
|
||
accursed shark alone can in any generic respect be said to bear comparative
|
||
analogy to him.
|
||
|
||
But though, to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the seas have ever
|
||
been regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and repelling; though we know
|
||
the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita, so that Columbus sailed over
|
||
numberless unknown worlds to discover his one superficial western one; though,
|
||
by vast odds, the most terrific of all mortal disasters have immemorially and
|
||
indiscriminately befallen tens and hundreds of thousands of those who have gone
|
||
upon the waters; though but a moment’s consideration will teach, that however
|
||
baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering
|
||
future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the
|
||
crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest,
|
||
stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these
|
||
very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which
|
||
aboriginally belongs to it.
|
||
|
||
The first boat we read of, floated on an ocean, that with Portuguese vengeance
|
||
had whelmed a whole world without leaving so much as a widow. That same ocean
|
||
rolls now; that same ocean destroyed the wrecked ships of last year. Yea,
|
||
foolish mortals, Noah’s flood is not yet subsided; two thirds of the fair world
|
||
it yet covers.
|
||
|
||
Wherein differ the sea and the land, that a miracle upon one is not a miracle
|
||
upon the other? Preternatural terrors rested upon the Hebrews, when under the
|
||
feet of Korah and his company the live ground opened and swallowed them up for
|
||
ever; yet not a modern sun ever sets, but in precisely the same manner the live
|
||
sea swallows up ships and crews.
|
||
|
||
But not only is the sea such a foe to man who is an alien to it, but it is also
|
||
a fiend to its own off-spring; worse than the Persian host who murdered his own
|
||
guests; sparing not the creatures which itself hath spawned. Like a savage
|
||
tigress that tossing in the jungle overlays her own cubs, so the sea dashes even
|
||
the mightiest whales against the rocks, and leaves them there side by side with
|
||
the split wrecks of ships. No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting
|
||
and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless
|
||
ocean overruns the globe.
|
||
|
||
Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under
|
||
water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the
|
||
loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of
|
||
many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many
|
||
species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea;
|
||
all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the
|
||
world began.
|
||
|
||
Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth;
|
||
consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy
|
||
to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant
|
||
land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and
|
||
joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee!
|
||
Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 59. Squid.
|
||
|
||
Slowly wading through the meadows of brit, the Pequod still held on her way
|
||
north-eastward towards the island of Java; a gentle air impelling her keel, so
|
||
that in the surrounding serenity her three tall tapering masts mildly waved to
|
||
that languid breeze, as three mild palms on a plain. And still, at wide
|
||
intervals in the silvery night, the lonely, alluring jet would be seen.
|
||
|
||
But one transparent blue morning, when a stillness almost preternatural spread
|
||
over the sea, however unattended with any stagnant calm; when the long burnished
|
||
sun-glade on the waters seemed a golden finger laid across them, enjoining some
|
||
secrecy; when the slippered waves whispered together as they softly ran on; in
|
||
this profound hush of the visible sphere a strange spectre was seen by Daggoo
|
||
from the main-mast-head.
|
||
|
||
In the distance, a great white mass lazily rose, and rising higher and higher,
|
||
and disentangling itself from the azure, at last gleamed before our prow like a
|
||
snow-slide, new slid from the hills. Thus glistening for a moment, as slowly it
|
||
subsided, and sank. Then once more arose, and silently gleamed. It seemed not a
|
||
whale; and yet is this Moby Dick? thought Daggoo. Again the phantom went down,
|
||
but on re-appearing once more, with a stiletto-like cry that startled every man
|
||
from his nod, the negro yelled out—“There! there again! there she breaches!
|
||
right ahead! The White Whale, the White Whale!”
|
||
|
||
Upon this, the seamen rushed to the yard-arms, as in swarming-time the bees rush
|
||
to the boughs. Bare-headed in the sultry sun, Ahab stood on the bowsprit, and
|
||
with one hand pushed far behind in readiness to wave his orders to the helmsman,
|
||
cast his eager glance in the direction indicated aloft by the outstretched
|
||
motionless arm of Daggoo.
|
||
|
||
Whether the flitting attendance of the one still and solitary jet had gradually
|
||
worked upon Ahab, so that he was now prepared to connect the ideas of mildness
|
||
and repose with the first sight of the particular whale he pursued; however this
|
||
was, or whether his eagerness betrayed him; whichever way it might have been, no
|
||
sooner did he distinctly perceive the white mass, than with a quick intensity he
|
||
instantly gave orders for lowering.
|
||
|
||
The four boats were soon on the water; Ahab’s in advance, and all swiftly
|
||
pulling towards their prey. Soon it went down, and while, with oars suspended,
|
||
we were awaiting its reappearance, lo! in the same spot where it sank, once more
|
||
it slowly rose. Almost forgetting for the moment all thoughts of Moby Dick, we
|
||
now gazed at the most wondrous phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto
|
||
revealed to mankind. A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a
|
||
glancing cream-colour, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms
|
||
radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as
|
||
if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach. No perceptible face or
|
||
front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but
|
||
undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition
|
||
of life.
|
||
|
||
As with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck still gazing
|
||
at the agitated waters where it had sunk, with a wild voice exclaimed—“Almost
|
||
rather had I seen Moby Dick and fought him, than to have seen thee, thou white
|
||
ghost!”
|
||
|
||
“What was it, Sir?” said Flask.
|
||
|
||
“The great live squid, which, they say, few whale-ships ever beheld, and
|
||
returned to their ports to tell of it.”
|
||
|
||
But Ahab said nothing; turning his boat, he sailed back to the vessel; the rest
|
||
as silently following.
|
||
|
||
Whatever superstitions the sperm whalemen in general have connected with the
|
||
sight of this object, certain it is, that a glimpse of it being so very unusual,
|
||
that circumstance has gone far to invest it with portentousness. So rarely is it
|
||
beheld, that though one and all of them declare it to be the largest animated
|
||
thing in the ocean, yet very few of them have any but the most vague ideas
|
||
concerning its true nature and form; notwithstanding, they believe it to furnish
|
||
to the sperm whale his only food. For though other species of whales find their
|
||
food above water, and may be seen by man in the act of feeding, the spermaceti
|
||
whale obtains his whole food in unknown zones below the surface; and only by
|
||
inference is it that any one can tell of what, precisely, that food consists. At
|
||
times, when closely pursued, he will disgorge what are supposed to be the
|
||
detached arms of the squid; some of them thus exhibited exceeding twenty and
|
||
thirty feet in length. They fancy that the monster to which these arms belonged
|
||
ordinarily clings by them to the bed of the ocean; and that the sperm whale,
|
||
unlike other species, is supplied with teeth in order to attack and tear it.
|
||
|
||
There seems some ground to imagine that the great Kraken of Bishop Pontoppodan
|
||
may ultimately resolve itself into Squid. The manner in which the Bishop
|
||
describes it, as alternately rising and sinking, with some other particulars he
|
||
narrates, in all this the two correspond. But much abatement is necessary with
|
||
respect to the incredible bulk he assigns it.
|
||
|
||
By some naturalists who have vaguely heard rumors of the mysterious creature,
|
||
here spoken of, it is included among the class of cuttle-fish, to which, indeed,
|
||
in certain external respects it would seem to belong, but only as the Anak of
|
||
the tribe.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 60. The Line.
|
||
|
||
With reference to the whaling scene shortly to be described, as well as for the
|
||
better understanding of all similar scenes elsewhere presented, I have here to
|
||
speak of the magical, sometimes horrible whale-line.
|
||
|
||
The line originally used in the fishery was of the best hemp, slightly vapored
|
||
with tar, not impregnated with it, as in the case of ordinary ropes; for while
|
||
tar, as ordinarily used, makes the hemp more pliable to the rope-maker, and also
|
||
renders the rope itself more convenient to the sailor for common ship use; yet,
|
||
not only would the ordinary quantity too much stiffen the whale-line for the
|
||
close coiling to which it must be subjected; but as most seamen are beginning to
|
||
learn, tar in general by no means adds to the rope’s durability or strength,
|
||
however much it may give it compactness and gloss.
|
||
|
||
Of late years the Manilla rope has in the American fishery almost entirely
|
||
superseded hemp as a material for whale-lines; for, though not so durable as
|
||
hemp, it is stronger, and far more soft and elastic; and I will add (since there
|
||
is an æsthetics in all things), is much more handsome and becoming to the boat,
|
||
than hemp. Hemp is a dusky, dark fellow, a sort of Indian; but Manilla is as a
|
||
golden-haired Circassian to behold.
|
||
|
||
The whale-line is only two-thirds of an inch in thickness. At first sight, you
|
||
would not think it so strong as it really is. By experiment its one and fifty
|
||
yarns will each suspend a weight of one hundred and twenty pounds; so that the
|
||
whole rope will bear a strain nearly equal to three tons. In length, the common
|
||
sperm whale-line measures something over two hundred fathoms. Towards the stern
|
||
of the boat it is spirally coiled away in the tub, not like the worm-pipe of a
|
||
still though, but so as to form one round, cheese-shaped mass of densely bedded
|
||
“sheaves,” or layers of concentric spiralizations, without any hollow but the
|
||
“heart,” or minute vertical tube formed at the axis of the cheese. As the least
|
||
tangle or kink in the coiling would, in running out, infallibly take somebody’s
|
||
arm, leg, or entire body off, the utmost precaution is used in stowing the line
|
||
in its tub. Some harpooneers will consume almost an entire morning in this
|
||
business, carrying the line high aloft and then reeving it downwards through a
|
||
block towards the tub, so as in the act of coiling to free it from all possible
|
||
wrinkles and twists.
|
||
|
||
In the English boats two tubs are used instead of one; the same line being
|
||
continuously coiled in both tubs. There is some advantage in this; because these
|
||
twin-tubs being so small they fit more readily into the boat, and do not strain
|
||
it so much; whereas, the American tub, nearly three feet in diameter and of
|
||
proportionate depth, makes a rather bulky freight for a craft whose planks are
|
||
but one half-inch in thickness; for the bottom of the whale-boat is like
|
||
critical ice, which will bear up a considerable distributed weight, but not very
|
||
much of a concentrated one. When the painted canvas cover is clapped on the
|
||
American line-tub, the boat looks as if it were pulling off with a prodigious
|
||
great wedding-cake to present to the whales.
|
||
|
||
Both ends of the line are exposed; the lower end terminating in an eye-splice or
|
||
loop coming up from the bottom against the side of the tub, and hanging over its
|
||
edge completely disengaged from everything. This arrangement of the lower end is
|
||
necessary on two accounts. First: In order to facilitate the fastening to it of
|
||
an additional line from a neighboring boat, in case the stricken whale should
|
||
sound so deep as to threaten to carry off the entire line originally attached to
|
||
the harpoon. In these instances, the whale of course is shifted like a mug of
|
||
ale, as it were, from the one boat to the other; though the first boat always
|
||
hovers at hand to assist its consort. Second: This arrangement is indispensable
|
||
for common safety’s sake; for were the lower end of the line in any way attached
|
||
to the boat, and were the whale then to run the line out to the end almost in a
|
||
single, smoking minute as he sometimes does, he would not stop there, for the
|
||
doomed boat would infallibly be dragged down after him into the profundity of
|
||
the sea; and in that case no town-crier would ever find her again.
|
||
|
||
Before lowering the boat for the chase, the upper end of the line is taken aft
|
||
from the tub, and passing round the loggerhead there, is again carried forward
|
||
the entire length of the boat, resting crosswise upon the loom or handle of
|
||
every man’s oar, so that it jogs against his wrist in rowing; and also passing
|
||
between the men, as they alternately sit at the opposite gunwales, to the leaded
|
||
chocks or grooves in the extreme pointed prow of the boat, where a wooden pin or
|
||
skewer the size of a common quill, prevents it from slipping out. From the
|
||
chocks it hangs in a slight festoon over the bows, and is then passed inside the
|
||
boat again; and some ten or twenty fathoms (called box-line) being coiled upon
|
||
the box in the bows, it continues its way to the gunwale still a little further
|
||
aft, and is then attached to the short-warp—the rope which is immediately
|
||
connected with the harpoon; but previous to that connexion, the short-warp goes
|
||
through sundry mystifications too tedious to detail.
|
||
|
||
Thus the whale-line folds the whole boat in its complicated coils, twisting and
|
||
writhing around it in almost every direction. All the oarsmen are involved in
|
||
its perilous contortions; so that to the timid eye of the landsman, they seem as
|
||
Indian jugglers, with the deadliest snakes sportively festooning their limbs.
|
||
Nor can any son of mortal woman, for the first time, seat himself amid those
|
||
hempen intricacies, and while straining his utmost at the oar, bethink him that
|
||
at any unknown instant the harpoon may be darted, and all these horrible
|
||
contortions be put in play like ringed lightnings; he cannot be thus
|
||
circumstanced without a shudder that makes the very marrow in his bones to
|
||
quiver in him like a shaken jelly. Yet habit—strange thing! what cannot habit
|
||
accomplish?—Gayer sallies, more merry mirth, better jokes, and brighter
|
||
repartees, you never heard over your mahogany, than you will hear over the
|
||
half-inch white cedar of the whale-boat, when thus hung in hangman’s nooses;
|
||
and, like the six burghers of Calais before King Edward, the six men composing
|
||
the crew pull into the jaws of death, with a halter around every neck, as you
|
||
may say.
|
||
|
||
Perhaps a very little thought will now enable you to account for those repeated
|
||
whaling disasters—some few of which are casually chronicled—of this man or that
|
||
man being taken out of the boat by the line, and lost. For, when the line is
|
||
darting out, to be seated then in the boat, is like being seated in the midst of
|
||
the manifold whizzings of a steam-engine in full play, when every flying beam,
|
||
and shaft, and wheel, is grazing you. It is worse; for you cannot sit motionless
|
||
in the heart of these perils, because the boat is rocking like a cradle, and you
|
||
are pitched one way and the other, without the slightest warning; and only by a
|
||
certain self-adjusting buoyancy and simultaneousness of volition and action, can
|
||
you escape being made a Mazeppa of, and run away with where the all-seeing sun
|
||
himself could never pierce you out.
|
||
|
||
Again: as the profound calm which only apparently precedes and prophesies of the
|
||
storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself; for, indeed, the calm is but
|
||
the wrapper and envelope of the storm; and contains it in itself, as the
|
||
seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal powder, and the ball, and the
|
||
explosion; so the graceful repose of the line, as it silently serpentines about
|
||
the oarsmen before being brought into actual play—this is a thing which carries
|
||
more of true terror than any other aspect of this dangerous affair. But why say
|
||
more? All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round
|
||
their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that
|
||
mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a
|
||
philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one
|
||
whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker,
|
||
and not a harpoon, by your side.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 61. Stubb Kills a Whale.
|
||
|
||
If to Starbuck the apparition of the Squid was a thing of portents, to Queequeg
|
||
it was quite a different object.
|
||
|
||
“When you see him ’quid,” said the savage, honing his harpoon in the bow of his
|
||
hoisted boat, “then you quick see him ’parm whale.”
|
||
|
||
The next day was exceedingly still and sultry, and with nothing special to
|
||
engage them, the Pequod’s crew could hardly resist the spell of sleep induced by
|
||
such a vacant sea. For this part of the Indian Ocean through which we then were
|
||
voyaging is not what whalemen call a lively ground; that is, it affords fewer
|
||
glimpses of porpoises, dolphins, flying-fish, and other vivacious denizens of
|
||
more stirring waters, than those off the Rio de la Plata, or the in-shore ground
|
||
off Peru.
|
||
|
||
It was my turn to stand at the foremast-head; and with my shoulders leaning
|
||
against the slackened royal shrouds, to and fro I idly swayed in what seemed an
|
||
enchanted air. No resolution could withstand it; in that dreamy mood losing all
|
||
consciousness, at last my soul went out of my body; though my body still
|
||
continued to sway as a pendulum will, long after the power which first moved it
|
||
is withdrawn.
|
||
|
||
Ere forgetfulness altogether came over me, I had noticed that the seamen at the
|
||
main and mizzen-mast-heads were already drowsy. So that at last all three of us
|
||
lifelessly swung from the spars, and for every swing that we made there was a
|
||
nod from below from the slumbering helmsman. The waves, too, nodded their
|
||
indolent crests; and across the wide trance of the sea, east nodded to west, and
|
||
the sun over all.
|
||
|
||
Suddenly bubbles seemed bursting beneath my closed eyes; like vices my hands
|
||
grasped the shrouds; some invisible, gracious agency preserved me; with a shock
|
||
I came back to life. And lo! close under our lee, not forty fathoms off, a
|
||
gigantic Sperm Whale lay rolling in the water like the capsized hull of a
|
||
frigate, his broad, glossy back, of an Ethiopian hue, glistening in the sun’s
|
||
rays like a mirror. But lazily undulating in the trough of the sea, and ever and
|
||
anon tranquilly spouting his vapory jet, the whale looked like a portly burgher
|
||
smoking his pipe of a warm afternoon. But that pipe, poor whale, was thy last.
|
||
As if struck by some enchanter’s wand, the sleepy ship and every sleeper in it
|
||
all at once started into wakefulness; and more than a score of voices from all
|
||
parts of the vessel, simultaneously with the three notes from aloft, shouted
|
||
forth the accustomed cry, as the great fish slowly and regularly spouted the
|
||
sparkling brine into the air.
|
||
|
||
“Clear away the boats! Luff!” cried Ahab. And obeying his own order, he dashed
|
||
the helm down before the helmsman could handle the spokes.
|
||
|
||
The sudden exclamations of the crew must have alarmed the whale; and ere the
|
||
boats were down, majestically turning, he swam away to the leeward, but with
|
||
such a steady tranquillity, and making so few ripples as he swam, that thinking
|
||
after all he might not as yet be alarmed, Ahab gave orders that not an oar
|
||
should be used, and no man must speak but in whispers. So seated like Ontario
|
||
Indians on the gunwales of the boats, we swiftly but silently paddled along; the
|
||
calm not admitting of the noiseless sails being set. Presently, as we thus
|
||
glided in chase, the monster perpendicularly flitted his tail forty feet into
|
||
the air, and then sank out of sight like a tower swallowed up.
|
||
|
||
“There go flukes!” was the cry, an announcement immediately followed by Stubb’s
|
||
producing his match and igniting his pipe, for now a respite was granted. After
|
||
the full interval of his sounding had elapsed, the whale rose again, and being
|
||
now in advance of the smoker’s boat, and much nearer to it than to any of the
|
||
others, Stubb counted upon the honor of the capture. It was obvious, now, that
|
||
the whale had at length become aware of his pursuers. All silence of
|
||
cautiousness was therefore no longer of use. Paddles were dropped, and oars came
|
||
loudly into play. And still puffing at his pipe, Stubb cheered on his crew to
|
||
the assault.
|
||
|
||
Yes, a mighty change had come over the fish. All alive to his jeopardy, he was
|
||
going “head out”; that part obliquely projecting from the mad yeast which he
|
||
brewed.*
|
||
|
||
*It will be seen in some other place of what a very light substance the entire
|
||
interior of the sperm whale’s enormous head consists. Though apparently the
|
||
most massive, it is by far the most buoyant part about him. So that with ease
|
||
he elevates it in the air, and invariably does so when going at his utmost
|
||
speed. Besides, such is the breadth of the upper part of the front of his head,
|
||
and such the tapering cut-water formation of the lower part, that by obliquely
|
||
elevating his head, he thereby may be said to transform himself from a
|
||
bluff-bowed sluggish galliot into a sharppointed New York pilot-boat.
|
||
|
||
“Start her, start her, my men! Don’t hurry yourselves; take plenty of time—but
|
||
start her; start her like thunder-claps, that’s all,” cried Stubb, spluttering
|
||
out the smoke as he spoke. “Start her, now; give ’em the long and strong stroke,
|
||
Tashtego. Start her, Tash, my boy—start her, all; but keep cool, keep
|
||
cool—cucumbers is the word—easy, easy—only start her like grim death and
|
||
grinning devils, and raise the buried dead perpendicular out of their graves,
|
||
boys—that’s all. Start her!”
|
||
|
||
“Woo-hoo! Wa-hee!” screamed the Gay-Header in reply, raising some old war-whoop
|
||
to the skies; as every oarsman in the strained boat involuntarily bounced
|
||
forward with the one tremendous leading stroke which the eager Indian gave.
|
||
|
||
But his wild screams were answered by others quite as wild. “Kee-hee! Kee-hee!”
|
||
yelled Daggoo, straining forwards and backwards on his seat, like a pacing tiger
|
||
in his cage.
|
||
|
||
“Ka-la! Koo-loo!” howled Queequeg, as if smacking his lips over a mouthful of
|
||
Grenadier’s steak. And thus with oars and yells the keels cut the sea.
|
||
Meanwhile, Stubb retaining his place in the van, still encouraged his men to the
|
||
onset, all the while puffing the smoke from his mouth. Like desperadoes they
|
||
tugged and they strained, till the welcome cry was heard—“Stand up,
|
||
Tashtego!—give it to him!” The harpoon was hurled. “Stern all!” The oarsmen
|
||
backed water; the same moment something went hot and hissing along every one of
|
||
their wrists. It was the magical line. An instant before, Stubb had swiftly
|
||
caught two additional turns with it round the loggerhead, whence, by reason of
|
||
its increased rapid circlings, a hempen blue smoke now jetted up and mingled
|
||
with the steady fumes from his pipe. As the line passed round and round the
|
||
loggerhead; so also, just before reaching that point, it blisteringly passed
|
||
through and through both of Stubb’s hands, from which the hand-cloths, or
|
||
squares of quilted canvas sometimes worn at these times, had accidentally
|
||
dropped. It was like holding an enemy’s sharp two-edged sword by the blade, and
|
||
that enemy all the time striving to wrest it out of your clutch.
|
||
|
||
“Wet the line! wet the line!” cried Stubb to the tub oarsman (him seated by the
|
||
tub) who, snatching off his hat, dashed sea-water into it.* More turns were
|
||
taken, so that the line began holding its place. The boat now flew through the
|
||
boiling water like a shark all fins. Stubb and Tashtego here changed places—stem
|
||
for stern—a staggering business truly in that rocking commotion.
|
||
|
||
*Partly to show the indispensableness of this act, it may here be stated, that,
|
||
in the old Dutch fishery, a mop was used to dash the running line with water;
|
||
in many other ships, a wooden piggin, or bailer, is set apart for that purpose.
|
||
Your hat, however, is the most convenient.
|
||
|
||
From the vibrating line extending the entire length of the upper part of the
|
||
boat, and from its now being more tight than a harpstring, you would have
|
||
thought the craft had two keels—one cleaving the water, the other the air—as the
|
||
boat churned on through both opposing elements at once. A continual cascade
|
||
played at the bows; a ceaseless whirling eddy in her wake; and, at the slightest
|
||
motion from within, even but of a little finger, the vibrating, cracking craft
|
||
canted over her spasmodic gunwale into the sea. Thus they rushed; each man with
|
||
might and main clinging to his seat, to prevent being tossed to the foam; and
|
||
the tall form of Tashtego at the steering oar crouching almost double, in order
|
||
to bring down his centre of gravity. Whole Atlantics and Pacifics seemed passed
|
||
as they shot on their way, till at length the whale somewhat slackened his
|
||
flight.
|
||
|
||
“Haul in—haul in!” cried Stubb to the bowsman! and, facing round towards the
|
||
whale, all hands began pulling the boat up to him, while yet the boat was being
|
||
towed on. Soon ranging up by his flank, Stubb, firmly planting his knee in the
|
||
clumsy cleat, darted dart after dart into the flying fish; at the word of
|
||
command, the boat alternately sterning out of the way of the whale’s horrible
|
||
wallow, and then ranging up for another fling.
|
||
|
||
The red tide now poured from all sides of the monster like brooks down a hill.
|
||
His tormented body rolled not in brine but in blood, which bubbled and seethed
|
||
for furlongs behind in their wake. The slanting sun playing upon this crimson
|
||
pond in the sea, sent back its reflection into every face, so that they all
|
||
glowed to each other like red men. And all the while, jet after jet of white
|
||
smoke was agonizingly shot from the spiracle of the whale, and vehement puff
|
||
after puff from the mouth of the excited headsman; as at every dart, hauling in
|
||
upon his crooked lance (by the line attached to it), Stubb straightened it again
|
||
and again, by a few rapid blows against the gunwale, then again and again sent
|
||
it into the whale.
|
||
|
||
“Pull up—pull up!” he now cried to the bowsman, as the waning whale relaxed in
|
||
his wrath. “Pull up!—close to!” and the boat ranged along the fish’s flank. When
|
||
reaching far over the bow, Stubb slowly churned his long sharp lance into the
|
||
fish, and kept it there, carefully churning and churning, as if cautiously
|
||
seeking to feel after some gold watch that the whale might have swallowed, and
|
||
which he was fearful of breaking ere he could hook it out. But that gold watch
|
||
he sought was the innermost life of the fish. And now it is struck; for,
|
||
starting from his trance into that unspeakable thing called his “flurry,” the
|
||
monster horribly wallowed in his blood, overwrapped himself in impenetrable,
|
||
mad, boiling spray, so that the imperilled craft, instantly dropping astern, had
|
||
much ado blindly to struggle out from that phrensied twilight into the clear air
|
||
of the day.
|
||
|
||
And now abating in his flurry, the whale once more rolled out into view; surging
|
||
from side to side; spasmodically dilating and contracting his spout-hole, with
|
||
sharp, cracking, agonized respirations. At last, gush after gush of clotted red
|
||
gore, as if it had been the purple lees of red wine, shot into the frighted air;
|
||
and falling back again, ran dripping down his motionless flanks into the sea.
|
||
His heart had burst!
|
||
|
||
“He’s dead, Mr. Stubb,” said Daggoo.
|
||
|
||
“Yes; both pipes smoked out!” and withdrawing his own from his mouth, Stubb
|
||
scattered the dead ashes over the water; and, for a moment, stood thoughtfully
|
||
eyeing the vast corpse he had made.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 62. The Dart.
|
||
|
||
A word concerning an incident in the last chapter.
|
||
|
||
According to the invariable usage of the fishery, the whale-boat pushes off from
|
||
the ship, with the headsman or whale-killer as temporary steersman, and the
|
||
harpooneer or whale-fastener pulling the foremost oar, the one known as the
|
||
harpooneer-oar. Now it needs a strong, nervous arm to strike the first iron into
|
||
the fish; for often, in what is called a long dart, the heavy implement has to
|
||
be flung to the distance of twenty or thirty feet. But however prolonged and
|
||
exhausting the chase, the harpooneer is expected to pull his oar meanwhile to
|
||
the uttermost; indeed, he is expected to set an example of superhuman activity
|
||
to the rest, not only by incredible rowing, but by repeated loud and intrepid
|
||
exclamations; and what it is to keep shouting at the top of one’s compass, while
|
||
all the other muscles are strained and half started—what that is none know but
|
||
those who have tried it. For one, I cannot bawl very heartily and work very
|
||
recklessly at one and the same time. In this straining, bawling state, then,
|
||
with his back to the fish, all at once the exhausted harpooneer hears the
|
||
exciting cry—“Stand up, and give it to him!” He now has to drop and secure his
|
||
oar, turn round on his centre half way, seize his harpoon from the crotch, and
|
||
with what little strength may remain, he essays to pitch it somehow into the
|
||
whale. No wonder, taking the whole fleet of whalemen in a body, that out of
|
||
fifty fair chances for a dart, not five are successful; no wonder that so many
|
||
hapless harpooneers are madly cursed and disrated; no wonder that some of them
|
||
actually burst their blood-vessels in the boat; no wonder that some sperm
|
||
whalemen are absent four years with four barrels; no wonder that to many ship
|
||
owners, whaling is but a losing concern; for it is the harpooneer that makes the
|
||
voyage, and if you take the breath out of his body how can you expect to find it
|
||
there when most wanted!
|
||
|
||
Again, if the dart be successful, then at the second critical instant, that is,
|
||
when the whale starts to run, the boatheader and harpooneer likewise start to
|
||
running fore and aft, to the imminent jeopardy of themselves and every one else.
|
||
It is then they change places; and the headsman, the chief officer of the little
|
||
craft, takes his proper station in the bows of the boat.
|
||
|
||
Now, I care not who maintains the contrary, but all this is both foolish and
|
||
unnecessary. The headsman should stay in the bows from first to last; he should
|
||
both dart the harpoon and the lance, and no rowing whatever should be expected
|
||
of him, except under circumstances obvious to any fisherman. I know that this
|
||
would sometimes involve a slight loss of speed in the chase; but long experience
|
||
in various whalemen of more than one nation has convinced me that in the vast
|
||
majority of failures in the fishery, it has not by any means been so much the
|
||
speed of the whale as the before described exhaustion of the harpooneer that has
|
||
caused them.
|
||
|
||
To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooneers of this world
|
||
must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from out of toil.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 63. The Crotch.
|
||
|
||
Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive
|
||
subjects, grow the chapters.
|
||
|
||
The crotch alluded to on a previous page deserves independent mention. It is a
|
||
notched stick of a peculiar form, some two feet in length, which is
|
||
perpendicularly inserted into the starboard gunwale near the bow, for the
|
||
purpose of furnishing a rest for the wooden extremity of the harpoon, whose
|
||
other naked, barbed end slopingly projects from the prow. Thereby the weapon is
|
||
instantly at hand to its hurler, who snatches it up as readily from its rest as
|
||
a backwoodsman swings his rifle from the wall. It is customary to have two
|
||
harpoons reposing in the crotch, respectively called the first and second irons.
|
||
|
||
But these two harpoons, each by its own cord, are both connected with the line;
|
||
the object being this: to dart them both, if possible, one instantly after the
|
||
other into the same whale; so that if, in the coming drag, one should draw out,
|
||
the other may still retain a hold. It is a doubling of the chances. But it very
|
||
often happens that owing to the instantaneous, violent, convulsive running of
|
||
the whale upon receiving the first iron, it becomes impossible for the
|
||
harpooneer, however lightning-like in his movements, to pitch the second iron
|
||
into him. Nevertheless, as the second iron is already connected with the line,
|
||
and the line is running, hence that weapon must, at all events, be
|
||
anticipatingly tossed out of the boat, somehow and somewhere; else the most
|
||
terrible jeopardy would involve all hands. Tumbled into the water, it
|
||
accordingly is in such cases; the spare coils of box line (mentioned in a
|
||
preceding chapter) making this feat, in most instances, prudently practicable.
|
||
But this critical act is not always unattended with the saddest and most fatal
|
||
casualties.
|
||
|
||
Furthermore: you must know that when the second iron is thrown overboard, it
|
||
thenceforth becomes a dangling, sharp-edged terror, skittishly curvetting about
|
||
both boat and whale, entangling the lines, or cutting them, and making a
|
||
prodigious sensation in all directions. Nor, in general, is it possible to
|
||
secure it again until the whale is fairly captured and a corpse.
|
||
|
||
Consider, now, how it must be in the case of four boats all engaging one
|
||
unusually strong, active, and knowing whale; when owing to these qualities in
|
||
him, as well as to the thousand concurring accidents of such an audacious
|
||
enterprise, eight or ten loose second irons may be simultaneously dangling about
|
||
him. For, of course, each boat is supplied with several harpoons to bend on to
|
||
the line should the first one be ineffectually darted without recovery. All
|
||
these particulars are faithfully narrated here, as they will not fail to
|
||
elucidate several most important, however intricate passages, in scenes
|
||
hereafter to be painted.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 64. Stubb’s Supper.
|
||
|
||
Stubb’s whale had been killed some distance from the ship. It was a calm; so,
|
||
forming a tandem of three boats, we commenced the slow business of towing the
|
||
trophy to the Pequod. And now, as we eighteen men with our thirty-six arms, and
|
||
one hundred and eighty thumbs and fingers, slowly toiled hour after hour upon
|
||
that inert, sluggish corpse in the sea; and it seemed hardly to budge at all,
|
||
except at long intervals; good evidence was hereby furnished of the enormousness
|
||
of the mass we moved. For, upon the great canal of Hang-Ho, or whatever they
|
||
call it, in China, four or five laborers on the foot-path will draw a bulky
|
||
freighted junk at the rate of a mile an hour; but this grand argosy we towed
|
||
heavily forged along, as if laden with pig-lead in bulk.
|
||
|
||
Darkness came on; but three lights up and down in the Pequod’s main-rigging
|
||
dimly guided our way; till drawing nearer we saw Ahab dropping one of several
|
||
more lanterns over the bulwarks. Vacantly eyeing the heaving whale for a moment,
|
||
he issued the usual orders for securing it for the night, and then handing his
|
||
lantern to a seaman, went his way into the cabin, and did not come forward again
|
||
until morning.
|
||
|
||
Though, in overseeing the pursuit of this whale, Captain Ahab had evinced his
|
||
customary activity, to call it so; yet now that the creature was dead, some
|
||
vague dissatisfaction, or impatience, or despair, seemed working in him; as if
|
||
the sight of that dead body reminded him that Moby Dick was yet to be slain; and
|
||
though a thousand other whales were brought to his ship, all that would not one
|
||
jot advance his grand, monomaniac object. Very soon you would have thought from
|
||
the sound on the Pequod’s decks, that all hands were preparing to cast anchor in
|
||
the deep; for heavy chains are being dragged along the deck, and thrust rattling
|
||
out of the port-holes. But by those clanking links, the vast corpse itself, not
|
||
the ship, is to be moored. Tied by the head to the stern, and by the tail to the
|
||
bows, the whale now lies with its black hull close to the vessel’s and seen
|
||
through the darkness of the night, which obscured the spars and rigging aloft,
|
||
the two—ship and whale, seemed yoked together like colossal bullocks, whereof
|
||
one reclines while the other remains standing.*
|
||
|
||
*A little item may as well be related here. The strongest and most reliable hold
|
||
which the ship has upon the whale when moored alongside, is by the flukes or
|
||
tail; and as from its greater density that part is relatively heavier than any
|
||
other (excepting the side-fins), its flexibility even in death, causes it to
|
||
sink low beneath the surface; so that with the hand you cannot get at it from
|
||
the boat, in order to put the chain round it. But this difficulty is
|
||
ingeniously overcome: a small, strong line is prepared with a wooden float at
|
||
its outer end, and a weight in its middle, while the other end is secured to
|
||
the ship. By adroit management the wooden float is made to rise on the other
|
||
side of the mass, so that now having girdled the whale, the chain is readily
|
||
made to follow suit; and being slipped along the body, is at last locked fast
|
||
round the smallest part of the tail, at the point of junction with its broad
|
||
flukes or lobes.
|
||
|
||
If moody Ahab was now all quiescence, at least so far as could be known on deck,
|
||
Stubb, his second mate, flushed with conquest, betrayed an unusual but still
|
||
good-natured excitement. Such an unwonted bustle was he in that the staid
|
||
Starbuck, his official superior, quietly resigned to him for the time the sole
|
||
management of affairs. One small, helping cause of all this liveliness in Stubb,
|
||
was soon made strangely manifest. Stubb was a high liver; he was somewhat
|
||
intemperately fond of the whale as a flavorish thing to his palate.
|
||
|
||
“A steak, a steak, ere I sleep! You, Daggoo! overboard you go, and cut me one
|
||
from his small!”
|
||
|
||
Here be it known, that though these wild fishermen do not, as a general thing,
|
||
and according to the great military maxim, make the enemy defray the current
|
||
expenses of the war (at least before realizing the proceeds of the voyage), yet
|
||
now and then you find some of these Nantucketers who have a genuine relish for
|
||
that particular part of the Sperm Whale designated by Stubb; comprising the
|
||
tapering extremity of the body.
|
||
|
||
About midnight that steak was cut and cooked; and lighted by two lanterns of
|
||
sperm oil, Stubb stoutly stood up to his spermaceti supper at the capstan-head,
|
||
as if that capstan were a sideboard. Nor was Stubb the only banqueter on whale’s
|
||
flesh that night. Mingling their mumblings with his own mastications, thousands
|
||
on thousands of sharks, swarming round the dead leviathan, smackingly feasted on
|
||
its fatness. The few sleepers below in their bunks were often startled by the
|
||
sharp slapping of their tails against the hull, within a few inches of the
|
||
sleepers’ hearts. Peering over the side you could just see them (as before you
|
||
heard them) wallowing in the sullen, black waters, and turning over on their
|
||
backs as they scooped out huge globular pieces of the whale of the bigness of a
|
||
human head. This particular feat of the shark seems all but miraculous. How at
|
||
such an apparently unassailable surface, they contrive to gouge out such
|
||
symmetrical mouthfuls, remains a part of the universal problem of all things.
|
||
The mark they thus leave on the whale, may best be likened to the hollow made by
|
||
a carpenter in countersinking for a screw.
|
||
|
||
Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks will be
|
||
seen longingly gazing up to the ship’s decks, like hungry dogs round a table
|
||
where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down every killed man that is
|
||
tossed to them; and though, while the valiant butchers over the deck-table are
|
||
thus cannibally carving each other’s live meat with carving-knives all gilded
|
||
and tasselled, the sharks, also, with their jewel-hilted mouths, are
|
||
quarrelsomely carving away under the table at the dead meat; and though, were
|
||
you to turn the whole affair upside down, it would still be pretty much the same
|
||
thing, that is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough for all parties; and
|
||
though sharks also are the invariable outriders of all slave ships crossing the
|
||
Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be handy in case a parcel is to
|
||
be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently buried; and though one or
|
||
two other like instances might be set down, touching the set terms, places, and
|
||
occasions, when sharks do most socially congregate, and most hilariously feast;
|
||
yet is there no conceivable time or occasion when you will find them in such
|
||
countless numbers, and in gayer or more jovial spirits, than around a dead sperm
|
||
whale, moored by night to a whaleship at sea. If you have never seen that sight,
|
||
then suspend your decision about the propriety of devil-worship, and the
|
||
expediency of conciliating the devil.
|
||
|
||
But, as yet, Stubb heeded not the mumblings of the banquet that was going on so
|
||
nigh him, no more than the sharks heeded the smacking of his own epicurean lips.
|
||
|
||
“Cook, cook!—where’s that old Fleece?” he cried at length, widening his legs
|
||
still further, as if to form a more secure base for his supper; and, at the same
|
||
time darting his fork into the dish, as if stabbing with his lance; “cook, you
|
||
cook!—sail this way, cook!”
|
||
|
||
The old black, not in any very high glee at having been previously roused from
|
||
his warm hammock at a most unseasonable hour, came shambling along from his
|
||
galley, for, like many old blacks, there was something the matter with his
|
||
knee-pans, which he did not keep well scoured like his other pans; this old
|
||
Fleece, as they called him, came shuffling and limping along, assisting his step
|
||
with his tongs, which, after a clumsy fashion, were made of straightened iron
|
||
hoops; this old Ebony floundered along, and in obedience to the word of command,
|
||
came to a dead stop on the opposite side of Stubb’s sideboard; when, with both
|
||
hands folded before him, and resting on his two-legged cane, he bowed his arched
|
||
back still further over, at the same time sideways inclining his head, so as to
|
||
bring his best ear into play.
|
||
|
||
“Cook,” said Stubb, rapidly lifting a rather reddish morsel to his mouth, “don’t
|
||
you think this steak is rather overdone? You’ve been beating this steak too
|
||
much, cook; it’s too tender. Don’t I always say that to be good, a whale-steak
|
||
must be tough? There are those sharks now over the side, don’t you see they
|
||
prefer it tough and rare? What a shindy they are kicking up! Cook, go and talk
|
||
to ’em; tell ’em they are welcome to help themselves civilly, and in moderation,
|
||
but they must keep quiet. Blast me, if I can hear my own voice. Away, cook, and
|
||
deliver my message. Here, take this lantern,” snatching one from his sideboard;
|
||
“now then, go and preach to ’em!”
|
||
|
||
Sullenly taking the offered lantern, old Fleece limped across the deck to the
|
||
bulwarks; and then, with one hand dropping his light low over the sea, so as to
|
||
get a good view of his congregation, with the other hand he solemnly flourished
|
||
his tongs, and leaning far over the side in a mumbling voice began addressing
|
||
the sharks, while Stubb, softly crawling behind, overheard all that was said.
|
||
|
||
“Fellow-critters: I’se ordered here to say dat you must stop dat dam noise dare.
|
||
You hear? Stop dat dam smackin’ ob de lip! Massa Stubb say dat you can fill your
|
||
dam bellies up to de hatchings, but by Gor! you must stop dat dam racket!”
|
||
|
||
“Cook,” here interposed Stubb, accompanying the word with a sudden slap on the
|
||
shoulder,—“Cook! why, damn your eyes, you mustn’t swear that way when you’re
|
||
preaching. That’s no way to convert sinners, cook!”
|
||
|
||
“Who dat? Den preach to him yourself,” sullenly turning to go.
|
||
|
||
“No, cook; go on, go on.”
|
||
|
||
“Well, den, Belubed fellow-critters:”—
|
||
|
||
“Right!” exclaimed Stubb, approvingly, “coax ’em to it; try that,” and Fleece
|
||
continued.
|
||
|
||
“Do you is all sharks, and by natur wery woracious, yet I zay to you,
|
||
fellow-critters, dat dat woraciousness—’top dat dam slappin’ ob de tail! How you
|
||
tink to hear, spose you keep up such a dam slappin’ and bitin’ dare?”
|
||
|
||
“Cook,” cried Stubb, collaring him, “I won’t have that swearing. Talk to ’em
|
||
gentlemanly.”
|
||
|
||
Once more the sermon proceeded.
|
||
|
||
“Your woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don’t blame ye so much for; dat is
|
||
natur, and can’t be helped; but to gobern dat wicked natur, dat is de pint. You
|
||
is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you, why den you be angel; for
|
||
all angel is not’ing more dan de shark well goberned. Now, look here, bred’ren,
|
||
just try wonst to be cibil, a helping yourselbs from dat whale. Don’t be tearin’
|
||
de blubber out your neighbour’s mout, I say. Is not one shark dood right as
|
||
toder to dat whale? And, by Gor, none on you has de right to dat whale; dat
|
||
whale belong to some one else. I know some o’ you has berry brig mout, brigger
|
||
dan oders; but den de brig mouts sometimes has de small bellies; so dat de
|
||
brigness of de mout is not to swaller wid, but to bit off de blubber for de
|
||
small fry ob sharks, dat can’t get into de scrouge to help demselves.”
|
||
|
||
“Well done, old Fleece!” cried Stubb, “that’s Christianity; go on.”
|
||
|
||
“No use goin’ on; de dam willains will keep a scougin’ and slappin’ each oder,
|
||
Massa Stubb; dey don’t hear one word; no use a-preachin’ to such dam g’uttons as
|
||
you call ’em, till dare bellies is full, and dare bellies is bottomless; and
|
||
when dey do get ’em full, dey wont hear you den; for den dey sink in de sea, go
|
||
fast to sleep on de coral, and can’t hear not’ing at all, no more, for eber and
|
||
eber.”
|
||
|
||
“Upon my soul, I am about of the same opinion; so give the benediction, Fleece,
|
||
and I’ll away to my supper.”
|
||
|
||
Upon this, Fleece, holding both hands over the fishy mob, raised his shrill
|
||
voice, and cried—
|
||
|
||
“Cussed fellow-critters! Kick up de damndest row as ever you can; fill your dam’
|
||
bellies ’till dey bust—and den die.”
|
||
|
||
“Now, cook,” said Stubb, resuming his supper at the capstan; “stand just where
|
||
you stood before, there, over against me, and pay particular attention.”
|
||
|
||
“All dention,” said Fleece, again stooping over upon his tongs in the desired
|
||
position.
|
||
|
||
“Well,” said Stubb, helping himself freely meanwhile; “I shall now go back to
|
||
the subject of this steak. In the first place, how old are you, cook?”
|
||
|
||
“What dat do wid de ’teak,” said the old black, testily.
|
||
|
||
“Silence! How old are you, cook?”
|
||
|
||
“’Bout ninety, dey say,” he gloomily muttered.
|
||
|
||
“And you have lived in this world hard upon one hundred years, cook, and don’t
|
||
know yet how to cook a whale-steak?” rapidly bolting another mouthful at the
|
||
last word, so that morsel seemed a continuation of the question. “Where were you
|
||
born, cook?”
|
||
|
||
“’Hind de hatchway, in ferry-boat, goin’ ober de Roanoke.”
|
||
|
||
“Born in a ferry-boat! That’s queer, too. But I want to know what country you
|
||
were born in, cook!”
|
||
|
||
“Didn’t I say de Roanoke country?” he cried sharply.
|
||
|
||
“No, you didn’t, cook; but I’ll tell you what I’m coming to, cook. You must go
|
||
home and be born over again; you don’t know how to cook a whale-steak yet.”
|
||
|
||
“Bress my soul, if I cook noder one,” he growled, angrily, turning round to
|
||
depart.
|
||
|
||
“Come back, cook;—here, hand me those tongs;—now take that bit of steak there,
|
||
and tell me if you think that steak cooked as it should be? Take it, I
|
||
say”—holding the tongs towards him—“take it, and taste it.”
|
||
|
||
Faintly smacking his withered lips over it for a moment, the old negro muttered,
|
||
“Best cooked ’teak I eber taste; joosy, berry joosy.”
|
||
|
||
“Cook,” said Stubb, squaring himself once more; “do you belong to the church?”
|
||
|
||
“Passed one once in Cape-Down,” said the old man sullenly.
|
||
|
||
“And you have once in your life passed a holy church in Cape-Town, where you
|
||
doubtless overheard a holy parson addressing his hearers as his beloved
|
||
fellow-creatures, have you, cook! And yet you come here, and tell me such a
|
||
dreadful lie as you did just now, eh?” said Stubb. “Where do you expect to go
|
||
to, cook?”
|
||
|
||
“Go to bed berry soon,” he mumbled, half-turning as he spoke.
|
||
|
||
“Avast! heave to! I mean when you die, cook. It’s an awful question. Now what’s
|
||
your answer?”
|
||
|
||
“When dis old brack man dies,” said the negro slowly, changing his whole air and
|
||
demeanor, “he hisself won’t go nowhere; but some bressed angel will come and
|
||
fetch him.”
|
||
|
||
“Fetch him? How? In a coach and four, as they fetched Elijah? And fetch him
|
||
where?”
|
||
|
||
“Up dere,” said Fleece, holding his tongs straight over his head, and keeping it
|
||
there very solemnly.
|
||
|
||
“So, then, you expect to go up into our main-top, do you, cook, when you are
|
||
dead? But don’t you know the higher you climb, the colder it gets? Main-top,
|
||
eh?”
|
||
|
||
“Didn’t say dat t’all,” said Fleece, again in the sulks.
|
||
|
||
“You said up there, didn’t you? and now look yourself, and see where your tongs
|
||
are pointing. But, perhaps you expect to get into heaven by crawling through the
|
||
lubber’s hole, cook; but, no, no, cook, you don’t get there, except you go the
|
||
regular way, round by the rigging. It’s a ticklish business, but must be done,
|
||
or else it’s no go. But none of us are in heaven yet. Drop your tongs, cook, and
|
||
hear my orders. Do ye hear? Hold your hat in one hand, and clap t’other a’top of
|
||
your heart, when I’m giving my orders, cook. What! that your heart,
|
||
there?—that’s your gizzard! Aloft! aloft!—that’s it—now you have it. Hold it
|
||
there now, and pay attention.”
|
||
|
||
“All ’dention,” said the old black, with both hands placed as desired, vainly
|
||
wriggling his grizzled head, as if to get both ears in front at one and the same
|
||
time.
|
||
|
||
“Well then, cook, you see this whale-steak of yours was so very bad, that I have
|
||
put it out of sight as soon as possible; you see that, don’t you? Well, for the
|
||
future, when you cook another whale-steak for my private table here, the
|
||
capstan, I’ll tell you what to do so as not to spoil it by overdoing. Hold the
|
||
steak in one hand, and show a live coal to it with the other; that done, dish
|
||
it; d’ye hear? And now to-morrow, cook, when we are cutting in the fish, be sure
|
||
you stand by to get the tips of his fins; have them put in pickle. As for the
|
||
ends of the flukes, have them soused, cook. There, now ye may go.”
|
||
|
||
But Fleece had hardly got three paces off, when he was recalled.
|
||
|
||
“Cook, give me cutlets for supper to-morrow night in the mid-watch. D’ye hear?
|
||
away you sail, then.—Halloa! stop! make a bow before you go.—Avast heaving
|
||
again! Whale-balls for breakfast—don’t forget.”
|
||
|
||
“Wish, by gor! whale eat him, ’stead of him eat whale. I’m bressed if he ain’t
|
||
more of shark dan Massa Shark hisself,” muttered the old man, limping away; with
|
||
which sage ejaculation he went to his hammock.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 65. The Whale as a Dish.
|
||
|
||
That mortal man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp, and, like
|
||
Stubb, eat him by his own light, as you may say; this seems so outlandish a
|
||
thing that one must needs go a little into the history and philosophy of it.
|
||
|
||
It is upon record, that three centuries ago the tongue of the Right Whale was
|
||
esteemed a great delicacy in France, and commanded large prices there. Also,
|
||
that in Henry VIIIth’s time, a certain cook of the court obtained a handsome
|
||
reward for inventing an admirable sauce to be eaten with barbacued porpoises,
|
||
which, you remember, are a species of whale. Porpoises, indeed, are to this day
|
||
considered fine eating. The meat is made into balls about the size of billiard
|
||
balls, and being well seasoned and spiced might be taken for turtle-balls or
|
||
veal balls. The old monks of Dunfermline were very fond of them. They had a
|
||
great porpoise grant from the crown.
|
||
|
||
The fact is, that among his hunters at least, the whale would by all hands be
|
||
considered a noble dish, were there not so much of him; but when you come to sit
|
||
down before a meat-pie nearly one hundred feet long, it takes away your
|
||
appetite. Only the most unprejudiced of men like Stubb, nowadays partake of
|
||
cooked whales; but the Esquimaux are not so fastidious. We all know how they
|
||
live upon whales, and have rare old vintages of prime old train oil. Zogranda,
|
||
one of their most famous doctors, recommends strips of blubber for infants, as
|
||
being exceedingly juicy and nourishing. And this reminds me that certain
|
||
Englishmen, who long ago were accidentally left in Greenland by a whaling
|
||
vessel—that these men actually lived for several months on the mouldy scraps of
|
||
whales which had been left ashore after trying out the blubber. Among the Dutch
|
||
whalemen these scraps are called “fritters”; which, indeed, they greatly
|
||
resemble, being brown and crisp, and smelling something like old Amsterdam
|
||
housewives’ dough-nuts or oly-cooks, when fresh. They have such an eatable look
|
||
that the most self-denying stranger can hardly keep his hands off.
|
||
|
||
But what further depreciates the whale as a civilized dish, is his exceeding
|
||
richness. He is the great prize ox of the sea, too fat to be delicately good.
|
||
Look at his hump, which would be as fine eating as the buffalo’s (which is
|
||
esteemed a rare dish), were it not such a solid pyramid of fat. But the
|
||
spermaceti itself, how bland and creamy that is; like the transparent,
|
||
half-jellied, white meat of a cocoanut in the third month of its growth, yet far
|
||
too rich to supply a substitute for butter. Nevertheless, many whalemen have a
|
||
method of absorbing it into some other substance, and then partaking of it. In
|
||
the long try watches of the night it is a common thing for the seamen to dip
|
||
their ship-biscuit into the huge oil-pots and let them fry there awhile. Many a
|
||
good supper have I thus made.
|
||
|
||
In the case of a small Sperm Whale the brains are accounted a fine dish. The
|
||
casket of the skull is broken into with an axe, and the two plump, whitish lobes
|
||
being withdrawn (precisely resembling two large puddings), they are then mixed
|
||
with flour, and cooked into a most delectable mess, in flavor somewhat
|
||
resembling calves’ head, which is quite a dish among some epicures; and every
|
||
one knows that some young bucks among the epicures, by continually dining upon
|
||
calves’ brains, by and by get to have a little brains of their own, so as to be
|
||
able to tell a calf’s head from their own heads; which, indeed, requires
|
||
uncommon discrimination. And that is the reason why a young buck with an
|
||
intelligent looking calf’s head before him, is somehow one of the saddest sights
|
||
you can see. The head looks a sort of reproachfully at him, with an “Et tu
|
||
Brute!” expression.
|
||
|
||
It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively unctuous that
|
||
landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with abhorrence; that appears to
|
||
result, in some way, from the consideration before mentioned: i.e. that a man
|
||
should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea, and eat it too by its own light.
|
||
But no doubt the first man that ever murdered an ox was regarded as a murderer;
|
||
perhaps he was hung; and if he had been put on his trial by oxen, he certainly
|
||
would have been; and he certainly deserved it if any murderer does. Go to the
|
||
meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at
|
||
the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the
|
||
cannibal’s jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more
|
||
tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against
|
||
a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in
|
||
the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who
|
||
nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy
|
||
paté-de-foie-gras.
|
||
|
||
But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he? and that is adding
|
||
insult to injury, is it? Look at your knife-handle, there, my civilized and
|
||
enlightened gourmand dining off that roast beef, what is that handle made
|
||
of?—what but the bones of the brother of the very ox you are eating? And what do
|
||
you pick your teeth with, after devouring that fat goose? With a feather of the
|
||
same fowl. And with what quill did the Secretary of the Society for the
|
||
Suppression of Cruelty to Ganders formally indite his circulars? It is only
|
||
within the last month or two that that society passed a resolution to patronize
|
||
nothing but steel pens.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 66. The Shark Massacre.
|
||
|
||
When in the Southern Fishery, a captured Sperm Whale, after long and weary toil,
|
||
is brought alongside late at night, it is not, as a general thing at least,
|
||
customary to proceed at once to the business of cutting him in. For that
|
||
business is an exceedingly laborious one; is not very soon completed; and
|
||
requires all hands to set about it. Therefore, the common usage is to take in
|
||
all sail; lash the helm a’lee; and then send every one below to his hammock till
|
||
daylight, with the reservation that, until that time, anchor-watches shall be
|
||
kept; that is, two and two for an hour, each couple, the crew in rotation shall
|
||
mount the deck to see that all goes well.
|
||
|
||
But sometimes, especially upon the Line in the Pacific, this plan will not
|
||
answer at all; because such incalculable hosts of sharks gather round the moored
|
||
carcase, that were he left so for six hours, say, on a stretch, little more than
|
||
the skeleton would be visible by morning. In most other parts of the ocean,
|
||
however, where these fish do not so largely abound, their wondrous voracity can
|
||
be at times considerably diminished, by vigorously stirring them up with sharp
|
||
whaling-spades, a procedure notwithstanding, which, in some instances, only
|
||
seems to tickle them into still greater activity. But it was not thus in the
|
||
present case with the Pequod’s sharks; though, to be sure, any man unaccustomed
|
||
to such sights, to have looked over her side that night, would have almost
|
||
thought the whole round sea was one huge cheese, and those sharks the maggots in
|
||
it.
|
||
|
||
Nevertheless, upon Stubb setting the anchor-watch after his supper was
|
||
concluded; and when, accordingly, Queequeg and a forecastle seaman came on deck,
|
||
no small excitement was created among the sharks; for immediately suspending the
|
||
cutting stages over the side, and lowering three lanterns, so that they cast
|
||
long gleams of light over the turbid sea, these two mariners, darting their long
|
||
whaling-spades, kept up an incessant murdering of the sharks,* by striking the
|
||
keen steel deep into their skulls, seemingly their only vital part. But in the
|
||
foamy confusion of their mixed and struggling hosts, the marksmen could not
|
||
always hit their mark; and this brought about new revelations of the incredible
|
||
ferocity of the foe. They viciously snapped, not only at each other’s
|
||
disembowelments, but like flexible bows, bent round, and bit their own; till
|
||
those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to be
|
||
oppositely voided by the gaping wound. Nor was this all. It was unsafe to meddle
|
||
with the corpses and ghosts of these creatures. A sort of generic or Pantheistic
|
||
vitality seemed to lurk in their very joints and bones, after what might be
|
||
called the individual life had departed. Killed and hoisted on deck for the sake
|
||
of his skin, one of these sharks almost took poor Queequeg’s hand off, when he
|
||
tried to shut down the dead lid of his murderous jaw.
|
||
|
||
*The whaling-spade used for cutting-in is made of the very best steel; is about
|
||
the bigness of a man’s spread hand; and in general shape, corresponds to the
|
||
garden implement after which it is named; only its sides are perfectly flat,
|
||
and its upper end considerably narrower than the lower. This weapon is always
|
||
kept as sharp as possible; and when being used is occasionally honed, just like
|
||
a razor. In its socket, a stiff pole, from twenty to thirty feet long, is
|
||
inserted for a handle.
|
||
|
||
“Queequeg no care what god made him shark,” said the savage, agonizingly lifting
|
||
his hand up and down; “wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; but de god wat made
|
||
shark must be one dam Ingin.”
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 67. Cutting In.
|
||
|
||
It was a Saturday night, and such a Sabbath as followed! Ex officio professors
|
||
of Sabbath breaking are all whalemen. The ivory Pequod was turned into what
|
||
seemed a shamble; every sailor a butcher. You would have thought we were
|
||
offering up ten thousand red oxen to the sea gods.
|
||
|
||
In the first place, the enormous cutting tackles, among other ponderous things
|
||
comprising a cluster of blocks generally painted green, and which no single man
|
||
can possibly lift—this vast bunch of grapes was swayed up to the main-top and
|
||
firmly lashed to the lower mast-head, the strongest point anywhere above a
|
||
ship’s deck. The end of the hawser-like rope winding through these intricacies,
|
||
was then conducted to the windlass, and the huge lower block of the tackles was
|
||
swung over the whale; to this block the great blubber hook, weighing some one
|
||
hundred pounds, was attached. And now suspended in stages over the side,
|
||
Starbuck and Stubb, the mates, armed with their long spades, began cutting a
|
||
hole in the body for the insertion of the hook just above the nearest of the two
|
||
side-fins. This done, a broad, semicircular line is cut round the hole, the hook
|
||
is inserted, and the main body of the crew striking up a wild chorus, now
|
||
commence heaving in one dense crowd at the windlass. When instantly, the entire
|
||
ship careens over on her side; every bolt in her starts like the nail-heads of
|
||
an old house in frosty weather; she trembles, quivers, and nods her frighted
|
||
mast-heads to the sky. More and more she leans over to the whale, while every
|
||
gasping heave of the windlass is answered by a helping heave from the billows;
|
||
till at last, a swift, startling snap is heard; with a great swash the ship
|
||
rolls upwards and backwards from the whale, and the triumphant tackle rises into
|
||
sight dragging after it the disengaged semicircular end of the first strip of
|
||
blubber. Now as the blubber envelopes the whale precisely as the rind does an
|
||
orange, so is it stripped off from the body precisely as an orange is sometimes
|
||
stripped by spiralizing it. For the strain constantly kept up by the windlass
|
||
continually keeps the whale rolling over and over in the water, and as the
|
||
blubber in one strip uniformly peels off along the line called the “scarf,”
|
||
simultaneously cut by the spades of Starbuck and Stubb, the mates; and just as
|
||
fast as it is thus peeled off, and indeed by that very act itself, it is all the
|
||
time being hoisted higher and higher aloft till its upper end grazes the
|
||
main-top; the men at the windlass then cease heaving, and for a moment or two
|
||
the prodigious blood-dripping mass sways to and fro as if let down from the sky,
|
||
and every one present must take good heed to dodge it when it swings, else it
|
||
may box his ears and pitch him headlong overboard.
|
||
|
||
One of the attending harpooneers now advances with a long, keen weapon called a
|
||
boarding-sword, and watching his chance he dexterously slices out a considerable
|
||
hole in the lower part of the swaying mass. Into this hole, the end of the
|
||
second alternating great tackle is then hooked so as to retain a hold upon the
|
||
blubber, in order to prepare for what follows. Whereupon, this accomplished
|
||
swordsman, warning all hands to stand off, once more makes a scientific dash at
|
||
the mass, and with a few sidelong, desperate, lunging slicings, severs it
|
||
completely in twain; so that while the short lower part is still fast, the long
|
||
upper strip, called a blanket-piece, swings clear, and is all ready for
|
||
lowering. The heavers forward now resume their song, and while the one tackle is
|
||
peeling and hoisting a second strip from the whale, the other is slowly
|
||
slackened away, and down goes the first strip through the main hatchway right
|
||
beneath, into an unfurnished parlor called the blubber-room. Into this twilight
|
||
apartment sundry nimble hands keep coiling away the long blanket-piece as if it
|
||
were a great live mass of plaited serpents. And thus the work proceeds; the two
|
||
tackles hoisting and lowering simultaneously; both whale and windlass heaving,
|
||
the heavers singing, the blubber-room gentlemen coiling, the mates scarfing, the
|
||
ship straining, and all hands swearing occasionally, by way of assuaging the
|
||
general friction.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 68. The Blanket.
|
||
|
||
I have given no small attention to that not unvexed subject, the skin of the
|
||
whale. I have had controversies about it with experienced whalemen afloat, and
|
||
learned naturalists ashore. My original opinion remains unchanged; but it is
|
||
only an opinion.
|
||
|
||
The question is, what and where is the skin of the whale? Already you know what
|
||
his blubber is. That blubber is something of the consistence of firm,
|
||
close-grained beef, but tougher, more elastic and compact, and ranges from eight
|
||
or ten to twelve and fifteen inches in thickness.
|
||
|
||
Now, however preposterous it may at first seem to talk of any creature’s skin as
|
||
being of that sort of consistence and thickness, yet in point of fact these are
|
||
no arguments against such a presumption; because you cannot raise any other
|
||
dense enveloping layer from the whale’s body but that same blubber; and the
|
||
outermost enveloping layer of any animal, if reasonably dense, what can that be
|
||
but the skin? True, from the unmarred dead body of the whale, you may scrape off
|
||
with your hand an infinitely thin, transparent substance, somewhat resembling
|
||
the thinnest shreds of isinglass, only it is almost as flexible and soft as
|
||
satin; that is, previous to being dried, when it not only contracts and
|
||
thickens, but becomes rather hard and brittle. I have several such dried bits,
|
||
which I use for marks in my whale-books. It is transparent, as I said before;
|
||
and being laid upon the printed page, I have sometimes pleased myself with
|
||
fancying it exerted a magnifying influence. At any rate, it is pleasant to read
|
||
about whales through their own spectacles, as you may say. But what I am driving
|
||
at here is this. That same infinitely thin, isinglass substance, which, I admit,
|
||
invests the entire body of the whale, is not so much to be regarded as the skin
|
||
of the creature, as the skin of the skin, so to speak; for it were simply
|
||
ridiculous to say, that the proper skin of the tremendous whale is thinner and
|
||
more tender than the skin of a new-born child. But no more of this.
|
||
|
||
Assuming the blubber to be the skin of the whale; then, when this skin, as in
|
||
the case of a very large Sperm Whale, will yield the bulk of one hundred barrels
|
||
of oil; and, when it is considered that, in quantity, or rather weight, that
|
||
oil, in its expressed state, is only three fourths, and not the entire substance
|
||
of the coat; some idea may hence be had of the enormousness of that animated
|
||
mass, a mere part of whose mere integument yields such a lake of liquid as that.
|
||
Reckoning ten barrels to the ton, you have ten tons for the net weight of only
|
||
three quarters of the stuff of the whale’s skin.
|
||
|
||
In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among the many
|
||
marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over obliquely crossed and
|
||
re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array, something like those
|
||
in the finest Italian line engravings. But these marks do not seem to be
|
||
impressed upon the isinglass substance above mentioned, but seem to be seen
|
||
through it, as if they were engraved upon the body itself. Nor is this all. In
|
||
some instances, to the quick, observant eye, those linear marks, as in a
|
||
veritable engraving, but afford the ground for far other delineations. These are
|
||
hieroglyphical; that is, if you call those mysterious cyphers on the walls of
|
||
pyramids hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to use in the present
|
||
connexion. By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale in
|
||
particular, I was much struck with a plate representing the old Indian
|
||
characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the
|
||
Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains
|
||
undecipherable. This allusion to the Indian rocks reminds me of another thing.
|
||
Besides all the other phenomena which the exterior of the Sperm Whale presents,
|
||
he not seldom displays the back, and more especially his flanks, effaced in
|
||
great part of the regular linear appearance, by reason of numerous rude
|
||
scratches, altogether of an irregular, random aspect. I should say that those
|
||
New England rocks on the sea-coast, which Agassiz imagines to bear the marks of
|
||
violent scraping contact with vast floating icebergs—I should say, that those
|
||
rocks must not a little resemble the Sperm Whale in this particular. It also
|
||
seems to me that such scratches in the whale are probably made by hostile
|
||
contact with other whales; for I have most remarked them in the large,
|
||
full-grown bulls of the species.
|
||
|
||
A word or two more concerning this matter of the skin or blubber of the whale.
|
||
It has already been said, that it is stript from him in long pieces, called
|
||
blanket-pieces. Like most sea-terms, this one is very happy and significant. For
|
||
the whale is indeed wrapt up in his blubber as in a real blanket or counterpane;
|
||
or, still better, an Indian poncho slipt over his head, and skirting his
|
||
extremity. It is by reason of this cosy blanketing of his body, that the whale
|
||
is enabled to keep himself comfortable in all weathers, in all seas, times, and
|
||
tides. What would become of a Greenland whale, say, in those shuddering, icy
|
||
seas of the North, if unsupplied with his cosy surtout? True, other fish are
|
||
found exceedingly brisk in those Hyperborean waters; but these, be it observed,
|
||
are your cold-blooded, lungless fish, whose very bellies are refrigerators;
|
||
creatures, that warm themselves under the lee of an iceberg, as a traveller in
|
||
winter would bask before an inn fire; whereas, like man, the whale has lungs and
|
||
warm blood. Freeze his blood, and he dies. How wonderful is it then—except after
|
||
explanation—that this great monster, to whom corporeal warmth is as
|
||
indispensable as it is to man; how wonderful that he should be found at home,
|
||
immersed to his lips for life in those Arctic waters! where, when seamen fall
|
||
overboard, they are sometimes found, months afterwards, perpendicularly frozen
|
||
into the hearts of fields of ice, as a fly is found glued in amber. But more
|
||
surprising is it to know, as has been proved by experiment, that the blood of a
|
||
Polar whale is warmer than that of a Borneo negro in summer.
|
||
|
||
It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual
|
||
vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior
|
||
spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too,
|
||
remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be
|
||
cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of
|
||
St. Peter’s, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a
|
||
temperature of thine own.
|
||
|
||
But how easy and how hopeless to teach these fine things! Of erections, how few
|
||
are domed like St. Peter’s! of creatures, how few vast as the whale!
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 69. The Funeral.
|
||
|
||
“Haul in the chains! Let the carcase go astern!”
|
||
|
||
The vast tackles have now done their duty. The peeled white body of the beheaded
|
||
whale flashes like a marble sepulchre; though changed in hue, it has not
|
||
perceptibly lost anything in bulk. It is still colossal. Slowly it floats more
|
||
and more away, the water round it torn and splashed by the insatiate sharks, and
|
||
the air above vexed with rapacious flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are
|
||
like so many insulting poniards in the whale. The vast white headless phantom
|
||
floats further and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats, what
|
||
seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls, augment the murderous din.
|
||
For hours and hours from the almost stationary ship that hideous sight is seen.
|
||
Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair face of the pleasant
|
||
sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that great mass of death floats on and on,
|
||
till lost in infinite perspectives.
|
||
|
||
There’s a most doleful and most mocking funeral! The sea-vultures all in pious
|
||
mourning, the air-sharks all punctiliously in black or speckled. In life but few
|
||
of them would have helped the whale, I ween, if peradventure he had needed it;
|
||
but upon the banquet of his funeral they most piously do pounce. Oh, horrible
|
||
vultureism of earth! from which not the mightiest whale is free.
|
||
|
||
Nor is this the end. Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful ghost survives and
|
||
hovers over it to scare. Espied by some timid man-of-war or blundering
|
||
discovery-vessel from afar, when the distance obscuring the swarming fowls,
|
||
nevertheless still shows the white mass floating in the sun, and the white spray
|
||
heaving high against it; straightway the whale’s unharming corpse, with
|
||
trembling fingers is set down in the log—shoals, rocks, and breakers hereabouts:
|
||
beware! And for years afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it
|
||
as silly sheep leap over a vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there
|
||
when a stick was held. There’s your law of precedents; there’s your utility of
|
||
traditions; there’s the story of your obstinate survival of old beliefs never
|
||
bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in the air! There’s orthodoxy!
|
||
|
||
Thus, while in life the great whale’s body may have been a real terror to his
|
||
foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a world.
|
||
|
||
Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend? There are other ghosts than the
|
||
Cock-Lane one, and far deeper men than Doctor Johnson who believe in them.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 70. The Sphynx.
|
||
|
||
It should not have been omitted that previous to completely stripping the body
|
||
of the leviathan, he was beheaded. Now, the beheading of the Sperm Whale is a
|
||
scientific anatomical feat, upon which experienced whale surgeons very much
|
||
pride themselves: and not without reason.
|
||
|
||
Consider that the whale has nothing that can properly be called a neck; on the
|
||
contrary, where his head and body seem to join, there, in that very place, is
|
||
the thickest part of him. Remember, also, that the surgeon must operate from
|
||
above, some eight or ten feet intervening between him and his subject, and that
|
||
subject almost hidden in a discoloured, rolling, and oftentimes tumultuous and
|
||
bursting sea. Bear in mind, too, that under these untoward circumstances he has
|
||
to cut many feet deep in the flesh; and in that subterraneous manner, without so
|
||
much as getting one single peep into the ever-contracting gash thus made, he
|
||
must skilfully steer clear of all adjacent, interdicted parts, and exactly
|
||
divide the spine at a critical point hard by its insertion into the skull. Do
|
||
you not marvel, then, at Stubb’s boast, that he demanded but ten minutes to
|
||
behead a sperm whale?
|
||
|
||
When first severed, the head is dropped astern and held there by a cable till
|
||
the body is stripped. That done, if it belong to a small whale it is hoisted on
|
||
deck to be deliberately disposed of. But, with a full grown leviathan this is
|
||
impossible; for the sperm whale’s head embraces nearly one third of his entire
|
||
bulk, and completely to suspend such a burden as that, even by the immense
|
||
tackles of a whaler, this were as vain a thing as to attempt weighing a Dutch
|
||
barn in jewellers’ scales.
|
||
|
||
The Pequod’s whale being decapitated and the body stripped, the head was hoisted
|
||
against the ship’s side—about half way out of the sea, so that it might yet in
|
||
great part be buoyed up by its native element. And there with the strained craft
|
||
steeply leaning over to it, by reason of the enormous downward drag from the
|
||
lower mast-head, and every yard-arm on that side projecting like a crane over
|
||
the waves; there, that blood-dripping head hung to the Pequod’s waist like the
|
||
giant Holofernes’s from the girdle of Judith.
|
||
|
||
When this last task was accomplished it was noon, and the seamen went below to
|
||
their dinner. Silence reigned over the before tumultuous but now deserted deck.
|
||
An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more
|
||
unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea.
|
||
|
||
A short space elapsed, and up into this noiselessness came Ahab alone from his
|
||
cabin. Taking a few turns on the quarter-deck, he paused to gaze over the side,
|
||
then slowly getting into the main-chains he took Stubb’s long spade—still
|
||
remaining there after the whale’s decapitation—and striking it into the lower
|
||
part of the half-suspended mass, placed its other end crutch-wise under one arm,
|
||
and so stood leaning over with eyes attentively fixed on this head.
|
||
|
||
It was a black and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so intense a
|
||
calm, it seemed the Sphynx’s in the desert. “Speak, thou vast and venerable
|
||
head,” muttered Ahab, “which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and
|
||
there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret
|
||
thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head
|
||
upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world’s foundations.
|
||
Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where
|
||
in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of
|
||
the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home.
|
||
Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor’s
|
||
side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou
|
||
saw’st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart
|
||
they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed
|
||
false to them. Thou saw’st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the
|
||
midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw;
|
||
and his murderers still sailed on unharmed—while swift lightnings shivered the
|
||
neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched,
|
||
longing arms. O head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an
|
||
infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!”
|
||
|
||
“Sail ho!” cried a triumphant voice from the main-mast-head.
|
||
|
||
“Aye? Well, now, that’s cheering,” cried Ahab, suddenly erecting himself, while
|
||
whole thunder-clouds swept aside from his brow. “That lively cry upon this
|
||
deadly calm might almost convert a better man.—Where away?”
|
||
|
||
“Three points on the starboard bow, sir, and bringing down her breeze to us!
|
||
|
||
“Better and better, man. Would now St. Paul would come along that way, and to my
|
||
breezelessness bring his breeze! O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all
|
||
utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives on
|
||
matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.”
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 71. The Jeroboam’s Story.
|
||
|
||
Hand in hand, ship and breeze blew on; but the breeze came faster than the ship,
|
||
and soon the Pequod began to rock.
|
||
|
||
By and by, through the glass the stranger’s boats and manned mast-heads proved
|
||
her a whale-ship. But as she was so far to windward, and shooting by, apparently
|
||
making a passage to some other ground, the Pequod could not hope to reach her.
|
||
So the signal was set to see what response would be made.
|
||
|
||
Here be it said, that like the vessels of military marines, the ships of the
|
||
American Whale Fleet have each a private signal; all which signals being
|
||
collected in a book with the names of the respective vessels attached, every
|
||
captain is provided with it. Thereby, the whale commanders are enabled to
|
||
recognise each other upon the ocean, even at considerable distances and with no
|
||
small facility.
|
||
|
||
The Pequod’s signal was at last responded to by the stranger’s setting her own;
|
||
which proved the ship to be the Jeroboam of Nantucket. Squaring her yards, she
|
||
bore down, ranged abeam under the Pequod’s lee, and lowered a boat; it soon drew
|
||
nigh; but, as the side-ladder was being rigged by Starbuck’s order to
|
||
accommodate the visiting captain, the stranger in question waved his hand from
|
||
his boat’s stern in token of that proceeding being entirely unnecessary. It
|
||
turned out that the Jeroboam had a malignant epidemic on board, and that Mayhew,
|
||
her captain, was fearful of infecting the Pequod’s company. For, though himself
|
||
and boat’s crew remained untainted, and though his ship was half a rifle-shot
|
||
off, and an incorruptible sea and air rolling and flowing between; yet
|
||
conscientiously adhering to the timid quarantine of the land, he peremptorily
|
||
refused to come into direct contact with the Pequod.
|
||
|
||
But this did by no means prevent all communications. Preserving an interval of
|
||
some few yards between itself and the ship, the Jeroboam’s boat by the
|
||
occasional use of its oars contrived to keep parallel to the Pequod, as she
|
||
heavily forged through the sea (for by this time it blew very fresh), with her
|
||
main-topsail aback; though, indeed, at times by the sudden onset of a large
|
||
rolling wave, the boat would be pushed some way ahead; but would be soon
|
||
skilfully brought to her proper bearings again. Subject to this, and other the
|
||
like interruptions now and then, a conversation was sustained between the two
|
||
parties; but at intervals not without still another interruption of a very
|
||
different sort.
|
||
|
||
Pulling an oar in the Jeroboam’s boat, was a man of a singular appearance, even
|
||
in that wild whaling life where individual notabilities make up all totalities.
|
||
He was a small, short, youngish man, sprinkled all over his face with freckles,
|
||
and wearing redundant yellow hair. A long-skirted, cabalistically-cut coat of a
|
||
faded walnut tinge enveloped him; the overlapping sleeves of which were rolled
|
||
up on his wrists. A deep, settled, fanatic delirium was in his eyes.
|
||
|
||
So soon as this figure had been first descried, Stubb had exclaimed—“That’s he!
|
||
that’s he!—the long-togged scaramouch the Town-Ho’s company told us of!” Stubb
|
||
here alluded to a strange story told of the Jeroboam, and a certain man among
|
||
her crew, some time previous when the Pequod spoke the Town-Ho. According to
|
||
this account and what was subsequently learned, it seemed that the scaramouch in
|
||
question had gained a wonderful ascendency over almost everybody in the
|
||
Jeroboam. His story was this:
|
||
|
||
He had been originally nurtured among the crazy society of Neskyeuna Shakers,
|
||
where he had been a great prophet; in their cracked, secret meetings having
|
||
several times descended from heaven by the way of a trap-door, announcing the
|
||
speedy opening of the seventh vial, which he carried in his vest-pocket; but,
|
||
which, instead of containing gunpowder, was supposed to be charged with
|
||
laudanum. A strange, apostolic whim having seized him, he had left Neskyeuna for
|
||
Nantucket, where, with that cunning peculiar to craziness, he assumed a steady,
|
||
common-sense exterior, and offered himself as a green-hand candidate for the
|
||
Jeroboam’s whaling voyage. They engaged him; but straightway upon the ship’s
|
||
getting out of sight of land, his insanity broke out in a freshet. He announced
|
||
himself as the archangel Gabriel, and commanded the captain to jump overboard.
|
||
He published his manifesto, whereby he set himself forth as the deliverer of the
|
||
isles of the sea and vicar-general of all Oceanica. The unflinching earnestness
|
||
with which he declared these things;—the dark, daring play of his sleepless,
|
||
excited imagination, and all the preternatural terrors of real delirium, united
|
||
to invest this Gabriel in the minds of the majority of the ignorant crew, with
|
||
an atmosphere of sacredness. Moreover, they were afraid of him. As such a man,
|
||
however, was not of much practical use in the ship, especially as he refused to
|
||
work except when he pleased, the incredulous captain would fain have been rid of
|
||
him; but apprised that that individual’s intention was to land him in the first
|
||
convenient port, the archangel forthwith opened all his seals and vials—devoting
|
||
the ship and all hands to unconditional perdition, in case this intention was
|
||
carried out. So strongly did he work upon his disciples among the crew, that at
|
||
last in a body they went to the captain and told him if Gabriel was sent from
|
||
the ship, not a man of them would remain. He was therefore forced to relinquish
|
||
his plan. Nor would they permit Gabriel to be any way maltreated, say or do what
|
||
he would; so that it came to pass that Gabriel had the complete freedom of the
|
||
ship. The consequence of all this was, that the archangel cared little or
|
||
nothing for the captain and mates; and since the epidemic had broken out, he
|
||
carried a higher hand than ever; declaring that the plague, as he called it, was
|
||
at his sole command; nor should it be stayed but according to his good pleasure.
|
||
The sailors, mostly poor devils, cringed, and some of them fawned before him; in
|
||
obedience to his instructions, sometimes rendering him personal homage, as to a
|
||
god. Such things may seem incredible; but, however wondrous, they are true. Nor
|
||
is the history of fanatics half so striking in respect to the measureless
|
||
self-deception of the fanatic himself, as his measureless power of deceiving and
|
||
bedevilling so many others. But it is time to return to the Pequod.
|
||
|
||
“I fear not thy epidemic, man,” said Ahab from the bulwarks, to Captain Mayhew,
|
||
who stood in the boat’s stern; “come on board.”
|
||
|
||
But now Gabriel started to his feet.
|
||
|
||
“Think, think of the fevers, yellow and bilious! Beware of the horrible plague!”
|
||
|
||
“Gabriel! Gabriel!” cried Captain Mayhew; “thou must either—” But that instant a
|
||
headlong wave shot the boat far ahead, and its seethings drowned all speech.
|
||
|
||
“Hast thou seen the White Whale?” demanded Ahab, when the boat drifted back.
|
||
|
||
“Think, think of thy whale-boat, stoven and sunk! Beware of the horrible tail!”
|
||
|
||
“I tell thee again, Gabriel, that—” But again the boat tore ahead as if dragged
|
||
by fiends. Nothing was said for some moments, while a succession of riotous
|
||
waves rolled by, which by one of those occasional caprices of the seas were
|
||
tumbling, not heaving it. Meantime, the hoisted sperm whale’s head jogged about
|
||
very violently, and Gabriel was seen eyeing it with rather more apprehensiveness
|
||
than his archangel nature seemed to warrant.
|
||
|
||
When this interlude was over, Captain Mayhew began a dark story concerning Moby
|
||
Dick; not, however, without frequent interruptions from Gabriel, whenever his
|
||
name was mentioned, and the crazy sea that seemed leagued with him.
|
||
|
||
It seemed that the Jeroboam had not long left home, when upon speaking a
|
||
whale-ship, her people were reliably apprised of the existence of Moby Dick, and
|
||
the havoc he had made. Greedily sucking in this intelligence, Gabriel solemnly
|
||
warned the captain against attacking the White Whale, in case the monster should
|
||
be seen; in his gibbering insanity, pronouncing the White Whale to be no less a
|
||
being than the Shaker God incarnated; the Shakers receiving the Bible. But when,
|
||
some year or two afterwards, Moby Dick was fairly sighted from the mast-heads,
|
||
Macey, the chief mate, burned with ardour to encounter him; and the captain
|
||
himself being not unwilling to let him have the opportunity, despite all the
|
||
archangel’s denunciations and forewarnings, Macey succeeded in persuading five
|
||
men to man his boat. With them he pushed off; and, after much weary pulling, and
|
||
many perilous, unsuccessful onsets, he at last succeeded in getting one iron
|
||
fast. Meantime, Gabriel, ascending to the main-royal mast-head, was tossing one
|
||
arm in frantic gestures, and hurling forth prophecies of speedy doom to the
|
||
sacrilegious assailants of his divinity. Now, while Macey, the mate, was
|
||
standing up in his boat’s bow, and with all the reckless energy of his tribe was
|
||
venting his wild exclamations upon the whale, and essaying to get a fair chance
|
||
for his poised lance, lo! a broad white shadow rose from the sea; by its quick,
|
||
fanning motion, temporarily taking the breath out of the bodies of the oarsmen.
|
||
Next instant, the luckless mate, so full of furious life, was smitten bodily
|
||
into the air, and making a long arc in his descent, fell into the sea at the
|
||
distance of about fifty yards. Not a chip of the boat was harmed, nor a hair of
|
||
any oarsman’s head; but the mate for ever sank.
|
||
|
||
It is well to parenthesize here, that of the fatal accidents in the Sperm-Whale
|
||
Fishery, this kind is perhaps almost as frequent as any. Sometimes, nothing is
|
||
injured but the man who is thus annihilated; oftener the boat’s bow is knocked
|
||
off, or the thigh-board, in which the headsman stands, is torn from its place
|
||
and accompanies the body. But strangest of all is the circumstance, that in more
|
||
instances than one, when the body has been recovered, not a single mark of
|
||
violence is discernible; the man being stark dead.
|
||
|
||
The whole calamity, with the falling form of Macey, was plainly descried from
|
||
the ship. Raising a piercing shriek—“The vial! the vial!” Gabriel called off the
|
||
terror-stricken crew from the further hunting of the whale. This terrible event
|
||
clothed the archangel with added influence; because his credulous disciples
|
||
believed that he had specifically fore-announced it, instead of only making a
|
||
general prophecy, which any one might have done, and so have chanced to hit one
|
||
of many marks in the wide margin allowed. He became a nameless terror to the
|
||
ship.
|
||
|
||
Mayhew having concluded his narration, Ahab put such questions to him, that the
|
||
stranger captain could not forbear inquiring whether he intended to hunt the
|
||
White Whale, if opportunity should offer. To which Ahab answered—“Aye.”
|
||
Straightway, then, Gabriel once more started to his feet, glaring upon the old
|
||
man, and vehemently exclaimed, with downward pointed finger—“Think, think of the
|
||
blasphemer—dead, and down there!—beware of the blasphemer’s end!”
|
||
|
||
Ahab stolidly turned aside; then said to Mayhew, “Captain, I have just bethought
|
||
me of my letter-bag; there is a letter for one of thy officers, if I mistake
|
||
not. Starbuck, look over the bag.”
|
||
|
||
Every whale-ship takes out a goodly number of letters for various ships, whose
|
||
delivery to the persons to whom they may be addressed, depends upon the mere
|
||
chance of encountering them in the four oceans. Thus, most letters never reach
|
||
their mark; and many are only received after attaining an age of two or three
|
||
years or more.
|
||
|
||
Soon Starbuck returned with a letter in his hand. It was sorely tumbled, damp,
|
||
and covered with a dull, spotted, green mould, in consequence of being kept in a
|
||
dark locker of the cabin. Of such a letter, Death himself might well have been
|
||
the post-boy.
|
||
|
||
“Can’st not read it?” cried Ahab. “Give it me, man. Aye, aye, it’s but a dim
|
||
scrawl;—what’s this?” As he was studying it out, Starbuck took a long
|
||
cutting-spade pole, and with his knife slightly split the end, to insert the
|
||
letter there, and in that way, hand it to the boat, without its coming any
|
||
closer to the ship.
|
||
|
||
Meantime, Ahab holding the letter, muttered, “Mr. Har—yes, Mr. Harry—(a woman’s
|
||
pinny hand,—the man’s wife, I’ll wager)—Aye—Mr. Harry Macey, Ship Jeroboam;—why
|
||
it’s Macey, and he’s dead!”
|
||
|
||
“Poor fellow! poor fellow! and from his wife,” sighed Mayhew; “but let me have
|
||
it.”
|
||
|
||
“Nay, keep it thyself,” cried Gabriel to Ahab; “thou art soon going that way.”
|
||
|
||
“Curses throttle thee!” yelled Ahab. “Captain Mayhew, stand by now to receive
|
||
it”; and taking the fatal missive from Starbuck’s hands, he caught it in the
|
||
slit of the pole, and reached it over towards the boat. But as he did so, the
|
||
oarsmen expectantly desisted from rowing; the boat drifted a little towards the
|
||
ship’s stern; so that, as if by magic, the letter suddenly ranged along with
|
||
Gabriel’s eager hand. He clutched it in an instant, seized the boat-knife, and
|
||
impaling the letter on it, sent it thus loaded back into the ship. It fell at
|
||
Ahab’s feet. Then Gabriel shrieked out to his comrades to give way with their
|
||
oars, and in that manner the mutinous boat rapidly shot away from the Pequod.
|
||
|
||
As, after this interlude, the seamen resumed their work upon the jacket of the
|
||
whale, many strange things were hinted in reference to this wild affair.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 72. The Monkey-Rope.
|
||
|
||
In the tumultuous business of cutting-in and attending to a whale, there is much
|
||
running backwards and forwards among the crew. Now hands are wanted here, and
|
||
then again hands are wanted there. There is no staying in any one place; for at
|
||
one and the same time everything has to be done everywhere. It is much the same
|
||
with him who endeavors the description of the scene. We must now retrace our way
|
||
a little. It was mentioned that upon first breaking ground in the whale’s back,
|
||
the blubber-hook was inserted into the original hole there cut by the spades of
|
||
the mates. But how did so clumsy and weighty a mass as that same hook get fixed
|
||
in that hole? It was inserted there by my particular friend Queequeg, whose duty
|
||
it was, as harpooneer, to descend upon the monster’s back for the special
|
||
purpose referred to. But in very many cases, circumstances require that the
|
||
harpooneer shall remain on the whale till the whole flensing or stripping
|
||
operation is concluded. The whale, be it observed, lies almost entirely
|
||
submerged, excepting the immediate parts operated upon. So down there, some ten
|
||
feet below the level of the deck, the poor harpooneer flounders about, half on
|
||
the whale and half in the water, as the vast mass revolves like a tread-mill
|
||
beneath him. On the occasion in question, Queequeg figured in the Highland
|
||
costume—a shirt and socks—in which to my eyes, at least, he appeared to uncommon
|
||
advantage; and no one had a better chance to observe him, as will presently be
|
||
seen.
|
||
|
||
Being the savage’s bowsman, that is, the person who pulled the bow-oar in his
|
||
boat (the second one from forward), it was my cheerful duty to attend upon him
|
||
while taking that hard-scrabble scramble upon the dead whale’s back. You have
|
||
seen Italian organ-boys holding a dancing-ape by a long cord. Just so, from the
|
||
ship’s steep side, did I hold Queequeg down there in the sea, by what is
|
||
technically called in the fishery a monkey-rope, attached to a strong strip of
|
||
canvas belted round his waist.
|
||
|
||
It was a humorously perilous business for both of us. For, before we proceed
|
||
further, it must be said that the monkey-rope was fast at both ends; fast to
|
||
Queequeg’s broad canvas belt, and fast to my narrow leather one. So that for
|
||
better or for worse, we two, for the time, were wedded; and should poor Queequeg
|
||
sink to rise no more, then both usage and honor demanded, that instead of
|
||
cutting the cord, it should drag me down in his wake. So, then, an elongated
|
||
Siamese ligature united us. Queequeg was my own inseparable twin brother; nor
|
||
could I any way get rid of the dangerous liabilities which the hempen bond
|
||
entailed.
|
||
|
||
So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then, that while
|
||
earnestly watching his motions, I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own
|
||
individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two; that my free will
|
||
had received a mortal wound; and that another’s mistake or misfortune might
|
||
plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster and death. Therefore, I saw that here
|
||
was a sort of interregnum in Providence; for its even-handed equity never could
|
||
have so gross an injustice. And yet still further pondering—while I jerked him
|
||
now and then from between the whale and ship, which would threaten to jam
|
||
him—still further pondering, I say, I saw that this situation of mine was the
|
||
precise situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in most cases, he, one
|
||
way or other, has this Siamese connexion with a plurality of other mortals. If
|
||
your banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by mistake sends you poison in
|
||
your pills, you die. True, you may say that, by exceeding caution, you may
|
||
possibly escape these and the multitudinous other evil chances of life. But
|
||
handle Queequeg’s monkey-rope heedfully as I would, sometimes he jerked it so,
|
||
that I came very near sliding overboard. Nor could I possibly forget that, do
|
||
what I would, I only had the management of one end of it.*
|
||
|
||
*The monkey-rope is found in all whalers; but it was only in the Pequod that the
|
||
monkey and his holder were ever tied together. This improvement upon the
|
||
original usage was introduced by no less a man than Stubb, in order to afford
|
||
the imperilled harpooneer the strongest possible guarantee for the faithfulness
|
||
and vigilance of his monkey-rope holder.
|
||
|
||
I have hinted that I would often jerk poor Queequeg from between the whale and
|
||
the ship—where he would occasionally fall, from the incessant rolling and
|
||
swaying of both. But this was not the only jamming jeopardy he was exposed to.
|
||
Unappalled by the massacre made upon them during the night, the sharks now
|
||
freshly and more keenly allured by the before pent blood which began to flow
|
||
from the carcass—the rabid creatures swarmed round it like bees in a beehive.
|
||
|
||
And right in among those sharks was Queequeg; who often pushed them aside with
|
||
his floundering feet. A thing altogether incredible were it not that attracted
|
||
by such prey as a dead whale, the otherwise miscellaneously carnivorous shark
|
||
will seldom touch a man.
|
||
|
||
Nevertheless, it may well be believed that since they have such a ravenous
|
||
finger in the pie, it is deemed but wise to look sharp to them. Accordingly,
|
||
besides the monkey-rope, with which I now and then jerked the poor fellow from
|
||
too close a vicinity to the maw of what seemed a peculiarly ferocious shark—he
|
||
was provided with still another protection. Suspended over the side in one of
|
||
the stages, Tashtego and Daggoo continually flourished over his head a couple of
|
||
keen whale-spades, wherewith they slaughtered as many sharks as they could
|
||
reach. This procedure of theirs, to be sure, was very disinterested and
|
||
benevolent of them. They meant Queequeg’s best happiness, I admit; but in their
|
||
hasty zeal to befriend him, and from the circumstance that both he and the
|
||
sharks were at times half hidden by the blood-muddled water, those indiscreet
|
||
spades of theirs would come nearer amputating a leg than a tail. But poor
|
||
Queequeg, I suppose, straining and gasping there with that great iron hook—poor
|
||
Queequeg, I suppose, only prayed to his Yojo, and gave up his life into the
|
||
hands of his gods.
|
||
|
||
Well, well, my dear comrade and twin-brother, thought I, as I drew in and then
|
||
slacked off the rope to every swell of the sea—what matters it, after all? Are
|
||
you not the precious image of each and all of us men in this whaling world? That
|
||
unsounded ocean you gasp in, is Life; those sharks, your foes; those spades,
|
||
your friends; and what between sharks and spades you are in a sad pickle and
|
||
peril, poor lad.
|
||
|
||
But courage! there is good cheer in store for you, Queequeg. For now, as with
|
||
blue lips and blood-shot eyes the exhausted savage at last climbs up the chains
|
||
and stands all dripping and involuntarily trembling over the side; the steward
|
||
advances, and with a benevolent, consolatory glance hands him—what? Some hot
|
||
Cognac? No! hands him, ye gods! hands him a cup of tepid ginger and water!
|
||
|
||
“Ginger? Do I smell ginger?” suspiciously asked Stubb, coming near. “Yes, this
|
||
must be ginger,” peering into the as yet untasted cup. Then standing as if
|
||
incredulous for a while, he calmly walked towards the astonished steward slowly
|
||
saying, “Ginger? ginger? and will you have the goodness to tell me, Mr.
|
||
Dough-Boy, where lies the virtue of ginger? Ginger! is ginger the sort of fuel
|
||
you use, Dough-boy, to kindle a fire in this shivering cannibal? Ginger!—what
|
||
the devil is ginger? Sea-coal? firewood?—lucifer
|
||
matches?—tinder?—gunpowder?—what the devil is ginger, I say, that you offer this
|
||
cup to our poor Queequeg here.”
|
||
|
||
“There is some sneaking Temperance Society movement about this business,” he
|
||
suddenly added, now approaching Starbuck, who had just come from forward. “Will
|
||
you look at that kannakin, sir: smell of it, if you please.” Then watching the
|
||
mate’s countenance, he added, “The steward, Mr. Starbuck, had the face to offer
|
||
that calomel and jalap to Queequeg, there, this instant off the whale. Is the
|
||
steward an apothecary, sir? and may I ask whether this is the sort of bitters by
|
||
which he blows back the life into a half-drowned man?”
|
||
|
||
“I trust not,” said Starbuck, “it is poor stuff enough.”
|
||
|
||
“Aye, aye, steward,” cried Stubb, “we’ll teach you to drug a harpooneer; none of
|
||
your apothecary’s medicine here; you want to poison us, do ye? You have got out
|
||
insurances on our lives and want to murder us all, and pocket the proceeds, do
|
||
ye?”
|
||
|
||
“It was not me,” cried Dough-Boy, “it was Aunt Charity that brought the ginger
|
||
on board; and bade me never give the harpooneers any spirits, but only this
|
||
ginger-jub—so she called it.”
|
||
|
||
“Ginger-jub! you gingerly rascal! take that! and run along with ye to the
|
||
lockers, and get something better. I hope I do no wrong, Mr. Starbuck. It is the
|
||
captain’s orders—grog for the harpooneer on a whale.”
|
||
|
||
“Enough,” replied Starbuck, “only don’t hit him again, but—”
|
||
|
||
“Oh, I never hurt when I hit, except when I hit a whale or something of that
|
||
sort; and this fellow’s a weazel. What were you about saying, sir?”
|
||
|
||
“Only this: go down with him, and get what thou wantest thyself.”
|
||
|
||
When Stubb reappeared, he came with a dark flask in one hand, and a sort of
|
||
tea-caddy in the other. The first contained strong spirits, and was handed to
|
||
Queequeg; the second was Aunt Charity’s gift, and that was freely given to the
|
||
waves.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 73. Stubb and Flask kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk over Him.
|
||
|
||
It must be borne in mind that all this time we have a Sperm Whale’s prodigious
|
||
head hanging to the Pequod’s side. But we must let it continue hanging there a
|
||
while till we can get a chance to attend to it. For the present other matters
|
||
press, and the best we can do now for the head, is to pray heaven the tackles
|
||
may hold.
|
||
|
||
Now, during the past night and forenoon, the Pequod had gradually drifted into a
|
||
sea, which, by its occasional patches of yellow brit, gave unusual tokens of the
|
||
vicinity of Right Whales, a species of the Leviathan that but few supposed to be
|
||
at this particular time lurking anywhere near. And though all hands commonly
|
||
disdained the capture of those inferior creatures; and though the Pequod was not
|
||
commissioned to cruise for them at all, and though she had passed numbers of
|
||
them near the Crozetts without lowering a boat; yet now that a Sperm Whale had
|
||
been brought alongside and beheaded, to the surprise of all, the announcement
|
||
was made that a Right Whale should be captured that day, if opportunity offered.
|
||
|
||
Nor was this long wanting. Tall spouts were seen to leeward; and two boats,
|
||
Stubb’s and Flask’s, were detached in pursuit. Pulling further and further away,
|
||
they at last became almost invisible to the men at the mast-head. But suddenly
|
||
in the distance, they saw a great heap of tumultuous white water, and soon after
|
||
news came from aloft that one or both the boats must be fast. An interval passed
|
||
and the boats were in plain sight, in the act of being dragged right towards the
|
||
ship by the towing whale. So close did the monster come to the hull, that at
|
||
first it seemed as if he meant it malice; but suddenly going down in a
|
||
maelstrom, within three rods of the planks, he wholly disappeared from view, as
|
||
if diving under the keel. “Cut, cut!” was the cry from the ship to the boats,
|
||
which, for one instant, seemed on the point of being brought with a deadly dash
|
||
against the vessel’s side. But having plenty of line yet in the tubs, and the
|
||
whale not sounding very rapidly, they paid out abundance of rope, and at the
|
||
same time pulled with all their might so as to get ahead of the ship. For a few
|
||
minutes the struggle was intensely critical; for while they still slacked out
|
||
the tightened line in one direction, and still plied their oars in another, the
|
||
contending strain threatened to take them under. But it was only a few feet
|
||
advance they sought to gain. And they stuck to it till they did gain it; when
|
||
instantly, a swift tremor was felt running like lightning along the keel, as the
|
||
strained line, scraping beneath the ship, suddenly rose to view under her bows,
|
||
snapping and quivering; and so flinging off its drippings, that the drops fell
|
||
like bits of broken glass on the water, while the whale beyond also rose to
|
||
sight, and once more the boats were free to fly. But the fagged whale abated his
|
||
speed, and blindly altering his course, went round the stern of the ship towing
|
||
the two boats after him, so that they performed a complete circuit.
|
||
|
||
Meantime, they hauled more and more upon their lines, till close flanking him on
|
||
both sides, Stubb answered Flask with lance for lance; and thus round and round
|
||
the Pequod the battle went, while the multitudes of sharks that had before swum
|
||
round the Sperm Whale’s body, rushed to the fresh blood that was spilled,
|
||
thirstily drinking at every new gash, as the eager Israelites did at the new
|
||
bursting fountains that poured from the smitten rock.
|
||
|
||
At last his spout grew thick, and with a frightful roll and vomit, he turned
|
||
upon his back a corpse.
|
||
|
||
While the two headsmen were engaged in making fast cords to his flukes, and in
|
||
other ways getting the mass in readiness for towing, some conversation ensued
|
||
between them.
|
||
|
||
“I wonder what the old man wants with this lump of foul lard,” said Stubb, not
|
||
without some disgust at the thought of having to do with so ignoble a leviathan.
|
||
|
||
“Wants with it?” said Flask, coiling some spare line in the boat’s bow, “did you
|
||
never hear that the ship which but once has a Sperm Whale’s head hoisted on her
|
||
starboard side, and at the same time a Right Whale’s on the larboard; did you
|
||
never hear, Stubb, that that ship can never afterwards capsize?”
|
||
|
||
“Why not?
|
||
|
||
“I don’t know, but I heard that gamboge ghost of a Fedallah saying so, and he
|
||
seems to know all about ships’ charms. But I sometimes think he’ll charm the
|
||
ship to no good at last. I don’t half like that chap, Stubb. Did you ever notice
|
||
how that tusk of his is a sort of carved into a snake’s head, Stubb?”
|
||
|
||
“Sink him! I never look at him at all; but if ever I get a chance of a dark
|
||
night, and he standing hard by the bulwarks, and no one by; look down there,
|
||
Flask”—pointing into the sea with a peculiar motion of both hands—“Aye, will I!
|
||
Flask, I take that Fedallah to be the devil in disguise. Do you believe that
|
||
cock and bull story about his having been stowed away on board ship? He’s the
|
||
devil, I say. The reason why you don’t see his tail, is because he tucks it up
|
||
out of sight; he carries it coiled away in his pocket, I guess. Blast him! now
|
||
that I think of it, he’s always wanting oakum to stuff into the toes of his
|
||
boots.”
|
||
|
||
“He sleeps in his boots, don’t he? He hasn’t got any hammock; but I’ve seen him
|
||
lay of nights in a coil of rigging.”
|
||
|
||
“No doubt, and it’s because of his cursed tail; he coils it down, do ye see, in
|
||
the eye of the rigging.”
|
||
|
||
“What’s the old man have so much to do with him for?”
|
||
|
||
“Striking up a swap or a bargain, I suppose.”
|
||
|
||
“Bargain?—about what?”
|
||
|
||
“Why, do ye see, the old man is hard bent after that White Whale, and the devil
|
||
there is trying to come round him, and get him to swap away his silver watch, or
|
||
his soul, or something of that sort, and then he’ll surrender Moby Dick.”
|
||
|
||
“Pooh! Stubb, you are skylarking; how can Fedallah do that?”
|
||
|
||
“I don’t know, Flask, but the devil is a curious chap, and a wicked one, I tell
|
||
ye. Why, they say as how he went a sauntering into the old flag-ship once,
|
||
switching his tail about devilish easy and gentlemanlike, and inquiring if the
|
||
old governor was at home. Well, he was at home, and asked the devil what he
|
||
wanted. The devil, switching his hoofs, up and says, ‘I want John.’ ‘What for?’
|
||
says the old governor. ‘What business is that of yours,’ says the devil, getting
|
||
mad,—‘I want to use him.’ ‘Take him,’ says the governor—and by the Lord, Flask,
|
||
if the devil didn’t give John the Asiatic cholera before he got through with
|
||
him, I’ll eat this whale in one mouthful. But look sharp—ain’t you all ready
|
||
there? Well, then, pull ahead, and let’s get the whale alongside.”
|
||
|
||
“I think I remember some such story as you were telling,” said Flask, when at
|
||
last the two boats were slowly advancing with their burden towards the ship,
|
||
“but I can’t remember where.”
|
||
|
||
“Three Spaniards? Adventures of those three bloody-minded soldadoes? Did ye read
|
||
it there, Flask? I guess ye did?”
|
||
|
||
“No: never saw such a book; heard of it, though. But now, tell me, Stubb, do you
|
||
suppose that that devil you was speaking of just now, was the same you say is
|
||
now on board the Pequod?”
|
||
|
||
“Am I the same man that helped kill this whale? Doesn’t the devil live for ever;
|
||
who ever heard that the devil was dead? Did you ever see any parson a wearing
|
||
mourning for the devil? And if the devil has a latch-key to get into the
|
||
admiral’s cabin, don’t you suppose he can crawl into a porthole? Tell me that,
|
||
Mr. Flask?”
|
||
|
||
“How old do you suppose Fedallah is, Stubb?”
|
||
|
||
“Do you see that mainmast there?” pointing to the ship; “well, that’s the figure
|
||
one; now take all the hoops in the Pequod’s hold, and string along in a row with
|
||
that mast, for oughts, do you see; well, that wouldn’t begin to be Fedallah’s
|
||
age. Nor all the coopers in creation couldn’t show hoops enough to make oughts
|
||
enough.”
|
||
|
||
“But see here, Stubb, I thought you a little boasted just now, that you meant to
|
||
give Fedallah a sea-toss, if you got a good chance. Now, if he’s so old as all
|
||
those hoops of yours come to, and if he is going to live for ever, what good
|
||
will it do to pitch him overboard—tell me that?
|
||
|
||
“Give him a good ducking, anyhow.”
|
||
|
||
“But he’d crawl back.”
|
||
|
||
“Duck him again; and keep ducking him.”
|
||
|
||
“Suppose he should take it into his head to duck you, though—yes, and drown
|
||
you—what then?”
|
||
|
||
“I should like to see him try it; I’d give him such a pair of black eyes that he
|
||
wouldn’t dare to show his face in the admiral’s cabin again for a long while,
|
||
let alone down in the orlop there, where he lives, and hereabouts on the upper
|
||
decks where he sneaks so much. Damn the devil, Flask; so you suppose I’m afraid
|
||
of the devil? Who’s afraid of him, except the old governor who daresn’t catch
|
||
him and put him in double-darbies, as he deserves, but lets him go about
|
||
kidnapping people; aye, and signed a bond with him, that all the people the
|
||
devil kidnapped, he’d roast for him? There’s a governor!”
|
||
|
||
“Do you suppose Fedallah wants to kidnap Captain Ahab?”
|
||
|
||
“Do I suppose it? You’ll know it before long, Flask. But I am going now to keep
|
||
a sharp look-out on him; and if I see anything very suspicious going on, I’ll
|
||
just take him by the nape of his neck, and say—Look here, Beelzebub, you don’t
|
||
do it; and if he makes any fuss, by the Lord I’ll make a grab into his pocket
|
||
for his tail, take it to the capstan, and give him such a wrenching and heaving,
|
||
that his tail will come short off at the stump—do you see; and then, I rather
|
||
guess when he finds himself docked in that queer fashion, he’ll sneak off
|
||
without the poor satisfaction of feeling his tail between his legs.”
|
||
|
||
“And what will you do with the tail, Stubb?”
|
||
|
||
“Do with it? Sell it for an ox whip when we get home;—what else?”
|
||
|
||
“Now, do you mean what you say, and have been saying all along, Stubb?”
|
||
|
||
“Mean or not mean, here we are at the ship.”
|
||
|
||
The boats were here hailed, to tow the whale on the larboard side, where fluke
|
||
chains and other necessaries were already prepared for securing him.
|
||
|
||
“Didn’t I tell you so?” said Flask; “yes, you’ll soon see this right whale’s
|
||
head hoisted up opposite that parmacetti’s.”
|
||
|
||
In good time, Flask’s saying proved true. As before, the Pequod steeply leaned
|
||
over towards the sperm whale’s head, now, by the counterpoise of both heads, she
|
||
regained her even keel; though sorely strained, you may well believe. So, when
|
||
on one side you hoist in Locke’s head, you go over that way; but now, on the
|
||
other side, hoist in Kant’s and you come back again; but in very poor plight.
|
||
Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! throw all these
|
||
thunder-heads overboard, and then you will float light and right.
|
||
|
||
In disposing of the body of a right whale, when brought alongside the ship, the
|
||
same preliminary proceedings commonly take place as in the case of a sperm
|
||
whale; only, in the latter instance, the head is cut off whole, but in the
|
||
former the lips and tongue are separately removed and hoisted on deck, with all
|
||
the well known black bone attached to what is called the crown-piece. But
|
||
nothing like this, in the present case, had been done. The carcases of both
|
||
whales had dropped astern; and the head-laden ship not a little resembled a mule
|
||
carrying a pair of overburdening panniers.
|
||
|
||
Meantime, Fedallah was calmly eyeing the right whale’s head, and ever and anon
|
||
glancing from the deep wrinkles there to the lines in his own hand. And Ahab
|
||
chanced so to stand, that the Parsee occupied his shadow; while, if the Parsee’s
|
||
shadow was there at all it seemed only to blend with, and lengthen Ahab’s. As
|
||
the crew toiled on, Laplandish speculations were bandied among them, concerning
|
||
all these passing things.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 74. The Sperm Whale’s Head—Contrasted View.
|
||
|
||
Here, now, are two great whales, laying their heads together; let us join them,
|
||
and lay together our own.
|
||
|
||
Of the grand order of folio leviathans, the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale are
|
||
by far the most noteworthy. They are the only whales regularly hunted by man. To
|
||
the Nantucketer, they present the two extremes of all the known varieties of the
|
||
whale. As the external difference between them is mainly observable in their
|
||
heads; and as a head of each is this moment hanging from the Pequod’s side; and
|
||
as we may freely go from one to the other, by merely stepping across the
|
||
deck:—where, I should like to know, will you obtain a better chance to study
|
||
practical cetology than here?
|
||
|
||
In the first place, you are struck by the general contrast between these heads.
|
||
Both are massive enough in all conscience; but there is a certain mathematical
|
||
symmetry in the Sperm Whale’s which the Right Whale’s sadly lacks. There is more
|
||
character in the Sperm Whale’s head. As you behold it, you involuntarily yield
|
||
the immense superiority to him, in point of pervading dignity. In the present
|
||
instance, too, this dignity is heightened by the pepper and salt colour of his
|
||
head at the summit, giving token of advanced age and large experience. In short,
|
||
he is what the fishermen technically call a “grey-headed whale.”
|
||
|
||
Let us now note what is least dissimilar in these heads—namely, the two most
|
||
important organs, the eye and the ear. Far back on the side of the head, and low
|
||
down, near the angle of either whale’s jaw, if you narrowly search, you will at
|
||
last see a lashless eye, which you would fancy to be a young colt’s eye; so out
|
||
of all proportion is it to the magnitude of the head.
|
||
|
||
Now, from this peculiar sideway position of the whale’s eyes, it is plain that
|
||
he can never see an object which is exactly ahead, no more than he can one
|
||
exactly astern. In a word, the position of the whale’s eyes corresponds to that
|
||
of a man’s ears; and you may fancy, for yourself, how it would fare with you,
|
||
did you sideways survey objects through your ears. You would find that you could
|
||
only command some thirty degrees of vision in advance of the straight side-line
|
||
of sight; and about thirty more behind it. If your bitterest foe were walking
|
||
straight towards you, with dagger uplifted in broad day, you would not be able
|
||
to see him, any more than if he were stealing upon you from behind. In a word,
|
||
you would have two backs, so to speak; but, at the same time, also, two fronts
|
||
(side fronts): for what is it that makes the front of a man—what, indeed, but
|
||
his eyes?
|
||
|
||
Moreover, while in most other animals that I can now think of, the eyes are so
|
||
planted as imperceptibly to blend their visual power, so as to produce one
|
||
picture and not two to the brain; the peculiar position of the whale’s eyes,
|
||
effectually divided as they are by many cubic feet of solid head, which towers
|
||
between them like a great mountain separating two lakes in valleys; this, of
|
||
course, must wholly separate the impressions which each independent organ
|
||
imparts. The whale, therefore, must see one distinct picture on this side, and
|
||
another distinct picture on that side; while all between must be profound
|
||
darkness and nothingness to him. Man may, in effect, be said to look out on the
|
||
world from a sentry-box with two joined sashes for his window. But with the
|
||
whale, these two sashes are separately inserted, making two distinct windows,
|
||
but sadly impairing the view. This peculiarity of the whale’s eyes is a thing
|
||
always to be borne in mind in the fishery; and to be remembered by the reader in
|
||
some subsequent scenes.
|
||
|
||
A curious and most puzzling question might be started concerning this visual
|
||
matter as touching the Leviathan. But I must be content with a hint. So long as
|
||
a man’s eyes are open in the light, the act of seeing is involuntary; that is,
|
||
he cannot then help mechanically seeing whatever objects are before him.
|
||
Nevertheless, any one’s experience will teach him, that though he can take in an
|
||
undiscriminating sweep of things at one glance, it is quite impossible for him,
|
||
attentively, and completely, to examine any two things—however large or however
|
||
small—at one and the same instant of time; never mind if they lie side by side
|
||
and touch each other. But if you now come to separate these two objects, and
|
||
surround each by a circle of profound darkness; then, in order to see one of
|
||
them, in such a manner as to bring your mind to bear on it, the other will be
|
||
utterly excluded from your contemporary consciousness. How is it, then, with the
|
||
whale? True, both his eyes, in themselves, must simultaneously act; but is his
|
||
brain so much more comprehensive, combining, and subtle than man’s, that he can
|
||
at the same moment of time attentively examine two distinct prospects, one on
|
||
one side of him, and the other in an exactly opposite direction? If he can, then
|
||
is it as marvellous a thing in him, as if a man were able simultaneously to go
|
||
through the demonstrations of two distinct problems in Euclid. Nor, strictly
|
||
investigated, is there any incongruity in this comparison.
|
||
|
||
It may be but an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the
|
||
extraordinary vacillations of movement displayed by some whales when beset by
|
||
three or four boats; the timidity and liability to queer frights, so common to
|
||
such whales; I think that all this indirectly proceeds from the helpless
|
||
perplexity of volition, in which their divided and diametrically opposite powers
|
||
of vision must involve them.
|
||
|
||
But the ear of the whale is full as curious as the eye. If you are an entire
|
||
stranger to their race, you might hunt over these two heads for hours, and never
|
||
discover that organ. The ear has no external leaf whatever; and into the hole
|
||
itself you can hardly insert a quill, so wondrously minute is it. It is lodged a
|
||
little behind the eye. With respect to their ears, this important difference is
|
||
to be observed between the sperm whale and the right. While the ear of the
|
||
former has an external opening, that of the latter is entirely and evenly
|
||
covered over with a membrane, so as to be quite imperceptible from without.
|
||
|
||
Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world
|
||
through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller
|
||
than a hare’s? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel’s great
|
||
telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would that make
|
||
him any longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Not at all.—Why then do you try
|
||
to “enlarge” your mind? Subtilize it.
|
||
|
||
Let us now with whatever levers and steam-engines we have at hand, cant over the
|
||
sperm whale’s head, that it may lie bottom up; then, ascending by a ladder to
|
||
the summit, have a peep down the mouth; and were it not that the body is now
|
||
completely separated from it, with a lantern we might descend into the great
|
||
Kentucky Mammoth Cave of his stomach. But let us hold on here by this tooth, and
|
||
look about us where we are. What a really beautiful and chaste-looking mouth!
|
||
from floor to ceiling, lined, or rather papered with a glistening white
|
||
membrane, glossy as bridal satins.
|
||
|
||
But come out now, and look at this portentous lower jaw, which seems like the
|
||
long narrow lid of an immense snuff-box, with the hinge at one end, instead of
|
||
one side. If you pry it up, so as to get it overhead, and expose its rows of
|
||
teeth, it seems a terrific portcullis; and such, alas! it proves to many a poor
|
||
wight in the fishery, upon whom these spikes fall with impaling force. But far
|
||
more terrible is it to behold, when fathoms down in the sea, you see some sulky
|
||
whale, floating there suspended, with his prodigious jaw, some fifteen feet
|
||
long, hanging straight down at right-angles with his body, for all the world
|
||
like a ship’s jib-boom. This whale is not dead; he is only dispirited; out of
|
||
sorts, perhaps; hypochondriac; and so supine, that the hinges of his jaw have
|
||
relaxed, leaving him there in that ungainly sort of plight, a reproach to all
|
||
his tribe, who must, no doubt, imprecate lock-jaws upon him.
|
||
|
||
In most cases this lower jaw—being easily unhinged by a practised artist—is
|
||
disengaged and hoisted on deck for the purpose of extracting the ivory teeth,
|
||
and furnishing a supply of that hard white whalebone with which the fishermen
|
||
fashion all sorts of curious articles, including canes, umbrella-stocks, and
|
||
handles to riding-whips.
|
||
|
||
With a long, weary hoist the jaw is dragged on board, as if it were an anchor;
|
||
and when the proper time comes—some few days after the other work—Queequeg,
|
||
Daggoo, and Tashtego, being all accomplished dentists, are set to drawing teeth.
|
||
With a keen cutting-spade, Queequeg lances the gums; then the jaw is lashed down
|
||
to ringbolts, and a tackle being rigged from aloft, they drag out these teeth,
|
||
as Michigan oxen drag stumps of old oaks out of wild wood lands. There are
|
||
generally forty-two teeth in all; in old whales, much worn down, but undecayed;
|
||
nor filled after our artificial fashion. The jaw is afterwards sawn into slabs,
|
||
and piled away like joists for building houses.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 75. The Right Whale’s Head—Contrasted View.
|
||
|
||
Crossing the deck, let us now have a good long look at the Right Whale’s head.
|
||
|
||
As in general shape the noble Sperm Whale’s head may be compared to a Roman
|
||
war-chariot (especially in front, where it is so broadly rounded); so, at a
|
||
broad view, the Right Whale’s head bears a rather inelegant resemblance to a
|
||
gigantic galliot-toed shoe. Two hundred years ago an old Dutch voyager likened
|
||
its shape to that of a shoemaker’s last. And in this same last or shoe, that old
|
||
woman of the nursery tale, with the swarming brood, might very comfortably be
|
||
lodged, she and all her progeny.
|
||
|
||
But as you come nearer to this great head it begins to assume different aspects,
|
||
according to your point of view. If you stand on its summit and look at these
|
||
two F-shaped spoutholes, you would take the whole head for an enormous
|
||
bass-viol, and these spiracles, the apertures in its sounding-board. Then,
|
||
again, if you fix your eye upon this strange, crested, comb-like incrustation on
|
||
the top of the mass—this green, barnacled thing, which the Greenlanders call the
|
||
“crown,” and the Southern fishers the “bonnet” of the Right Whale; fixing your
|
||
eyes solely on this, you would take the head for the trunk of some huge oak,
|
||
with a bird’s nest in its crotch. At any rate, when you watch those live crabs
|
||
that nestle here on this bonnet, such an idea will be almost sure to occur to
|
||
you; unless, indeed, your fancy has been fixed by the technical term “crown”
|
||
also bestowed upon it; in which case you will take great interest in thinking
|
||
how this mighty monster is actually a diademed king of the sea, whose green
|
||
crown has been put together for him in this marvellous manner. But if this whale
|
||
be a king, he is a very sulky looking fellow to grace a diadem. Look at that
|
||
hanging lower lip! what a huge sulk and pout is there! a sulk and pout, by
|
||
carpenter’s measurement, about twenty feet long and five feet deep; a sulk and
|
||
pout that will yield you some 500 gallons of oil and more.
|
||
|
||
A great pity, now, that this unfortunate whale should be hare-lipped. The
|
||
fissure is about a foot across. Probably the mother during an important interval
|
||
was sailing down the Peruvian coast, when earthquakes caused the beach to gape.
|
||
Over this lip, as over a slippery threshold, we now slide into the mouth. Upon
|
||
my word were I at Mackinaw, I should take this to be the inside of an Indian
|
||
wigwam. Good Lord! is this the road that Jonah went? The roof is about twelve
|
||
feet high, and runs to a pretty sharp angle, as if there were a regular
|
||
ridge-pole there; while these ribbed, arched, hairy sides, present us with those
|
||
wondrous, half vertical, scimetar-shaped slats of whalebone, say three hundred
|
||
on a side, which depending from the upper part of the head or crown bone, form
|
||
those Venetian blinds which have elsewhere been cursorily mentioned. The edges
|
||
of these bones are fringed with hairy fibres, through which the Right Whale
|
||
strains the water, and in whose intricacies he retains the small fish, when
|
||
openmouthed he goes through the seas of brit in feeding time. In the central
|
||
blinds of bone, as they stand in their natural order, there are certain curious
|
||
marks, curves, hollows, and ridges, whereby some whalemen calculate the
|
||
creature’s age, as the age of an oak by its circular rings. Though the certainty
|
||
of this criterion is far from demonstrable, yet it has the savor of analogical
|
||
probability. At any rate, if we yield to it, we must grant a far greater age to
|
||
the Right Whale than at first glance will seem reasonable.
|
||
|
||
In old times, there seem to have prevailed the most curious fancies concerning
|
||
these blinds. One voyager in Purchas calls them the wondrous “whiskers” inside
|
||
of the whale’s mouth;* another, “hogs’ bristles”; a third old gentleman in
|
||
Hackluyt uses the following elegant language: “There are about two hundred and
|
||
fifty fins growing on each side of his upper chop, which arch over his tongue on
|
||
each side of his mouth.”
|
||
|
||
*This reminds us that the Right Whale really has a sort of whisker, or rather a
|
||
moustache, consisting of a few scattered white hairs on the upper part of the
|
||
outer end of the lower jaw. Sometimes these tufts impart a rather brigandish
|
||
expression to his otherwise solemn countenance.
|
||
|
||
As every one knows, these same “hogs’ bristles,” “fins,” “whiskers,” “blinds,”
|
||
or whatever you please, furnish to the ladies their busks and other stiffening
|
||
contrivances. But in this particular, the demand has long been on the decline.
|
||
It was in Queen Anne’s time that the bone was in its glory, the farthingale
|
||
being then all the fashion. And as those ancient dames moved about gaily, though
|
||
in the jaws of the whale, as you may say; even so, in a shower, with the like
|
||
thoughtlessness, do we nowadays fly under the same jaws for protection; the
|
||
umbrella being a tent spread over the same bone.
|
||
|
||
But now forget all about blinds and whiskers for a moment, and, standing in the
|
||
Right Whale’s mouth, look around you afresh. Seeing all these colonnades of bone
|
||
so methodically ranged about, would you not think you were inside of the great
|
||
Haarlem organ, and gazing upon its thousand pipes? For a carpet to the organ we
|
||
have a rug of the softest Turkey—the tongue, which is glued, as it were, to the
|
||
floor of the mouth. It is very fat and tender, and apt to tear in pieces in
|
||
hoisting it on deck. This particular tongue now before us; at a passing glance I
|
||
should say it was a six-barreler; that is, it will yield you about that amount
|
||
of oil.
|
||
|
||
Ere this, you must have plainly seen the truth of what I started with—that the
|
||
Sperm Whale and the Right Whale have almost entirely different heads. To sum up,
|
||
then: in the Right Whale’s there is no great well of sperm; no ivory teeth at
|
||
all; no long, slender mandible of a lower jaw, like the Sperm Whale’s. Nor in
|
||
the Sperm Whale are there any of those blinds of bone; no huge lower lip; and
|
||
scarcely anything of a tongue. Again, the Right Whale has two external
|
||
spout-holes, the Sperm Whale only one.
|
||
|
||
Look your last, now, on these venerable hooded heads, while they yet lie
|
||
together; for one will soon sink, unrecorded, in the sea; the other will not be
|
||
very long in following.
|
||
|
||
Can you catch the expression of the Sperm Whale’s there? It is the same he died
|
||
with, only some of the longer wrinkles in the forehead seem now faded away. I
|
||
think his broad brow to be full of a prairie-like placidity, born of a
|
||
speculative indifference as to death. But mark the other head’s expression. See
|
||
that amazing lower lip, pressed by accident against the vessel’s side, so as
|
||
firmly to embrace the jaw. Does not this whole head seem to speak of an enormous
|
||
practical resolution in facing death? This Right Whale I take to have been a
|
||
Stoic; the Sperm Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his
|
||
latter years.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 76. The Battering-Ram.
|
||
|
||
Ere quitting, for the nonce, the Sperm Whale’s head, I would have you, as a
|
||
sensible physiologist, simply—particularly remark its front aspect, in all its
|
||
compacted collectedness. I would have you investigate it now with the sole view
|
||
of forming to yourself some unexaggerated, intelligent estimate of whatever
|
||
battering-ram power may be lodged there. Here is a vital point; for you must
|
||
either satisfactorily settle this matter with yourself, or for ever remain an
|
||
infidel as to one of the most appalling, but not the less true events, perhaps
|
||
anywhere to be found in all recorded history.
|
||
|
||
You observe that in the ordinary swimming position of the Sperm Whale, the front
|
||
of his head presents an almost wholly vertical plane to the water; you observe
|
||
that the lower part of that front slopes considerably backwards, so as to
|
||
furnish more of a retreat for the long socket which receives the boom-like lower
|
||
jaw; you observe that the mouth is entirely under the head, much in the same
|
||
way, indeed, as though your own mouth were entirely under your chin. Moreover
|
||
you observe that the whale has no external nose; and that what nose he has—his
|
||
spout hole—is on the top of his head; you observe that his eyes and ears are at
|
||
the sides of his head, nearly one third of his entire length from the front.
|
||
Wherefore, you must now have perceived that the front of the Sperm Whale’s head
|
||
is a dead, blind wall, without a single organ or tender prominence of any sort
|
||
whatsoever. Furthermore, you are now to consider that only in the extreme,
|
||
lower, backward sloping part of the front of the head, is there the slightest
|
||
vestige of bone; and not till you get near twenty feet from the forehead do you
|
||
come to the full cranial development. So that this whole enormous boneless mass
|
||
is as one wad. Finally, though, as will soon be revealed, its contents partly
|
||
comprise the most delicate oil; yet, you are now to be apprised of the nature of
|
||
the substance which so impregnably invests all that apparent effeminacy. In some
|
||
previous place I have described to you how the blubber wraps the body of the
|
||
whale, as the rind wraps an orange. Just so with the head; but with this
|
||
difference: about the head this envelope, though not so thick, is of a boneless
|
||
toughness, inestimable by any man who has not handled it. The severest pointed
|
||
harpoon, the sharpest lance darted by the strongest human arm, impotently
|
||
rebounds from it. It is as though the forehead of the Sperm Whale were paved
|
||
with horses’ hoofs. I do not think that any sensation lurks in it.
|
||
|
||
Bethink yourself also of another thing. When two large, loaded Indiamen chance
|
||
to crowd and crush towards each other in the docks, what do the sailors do? They
|
||
do not suspend between them, at the point of coming contact, any merely hard
|
||
substance, like iron or wood. No, they hold there a large, round wad of tow and
|
||
cork, enveloped in the thickest and toughest of ox-hide. That bravely and
|
||
uninjured takes the jam which would have snapped all their oaken handspikes and
|
||
iron crow-bars. By itself this sufficiently illustrates the obvious fact I drive
|
||
at. But supplementary to this, it has hypothetically occurred to me, that as
|
||
ordinary fish possess what is called a swimming bladder in them, capable, at
|
||
will, of distension or contraction; and as the Sperm Whale, as far as I know,
|
||
has no such provision in him; considering, too, the otherwise inexplicable
|
||
manner in which he now depresses his head altogether beneath the surface, and
|
||
anon swims with it high elevated out of the water; considering the unobstructed
|
||
elasticity of its envelope; considering the unique interior of his head; it has
|
||
hypothetically occurred to me, I say, that those mystical lung-celled honeycombs
|
||
there may possibly have some hitherto unknown and unsuspected connexion with the
|
||
outer air, so as to be susceptible to atmospheric distension and contraction. If
|
||
this be so, fancy the irresistibleness of that might, to which the most
|
||
impalpable and destructive of all elements contributes.
|
||
|
||
Now, mark. Unerringly impelling this dead, impregnable, uninjurable wall, and
|
||
this most buoyant thing within; there swims behind it all a mass of tremendous
|
||
life, only to be adequately estimated as piled wood is—by the cord; and all
|
||
obedient to one volition, as the smallest insect. So that when I shall hereafter
|
||
detail to you all the specialities and concentrations of potency everywhere
|
||
lurking in this expansive monster; when I shall show you some of his more
|
||
inconsiderable braining feats; I trust you will have renounced all ignorant
|
||
incredulity, and be ready to abide by this; that though the Sperm Whale stove a
|
||
passage through the Isthmus of Darien, and mixed the Atlantic with the Pacific,
|
||
you would not elevate one hair of your eye-brow. For unless you own the whale,
|
||
you are but a provincial and sentimentalist in Truth. But clear Truth is a thing
|
||
for salamander giants only to encounter; how small the chances for the
|
||
provincials then? What befell the weakling youth lifting the dread goddess’s
|
||
veil at Lais?
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 77. The Great Heidelburgh Tun.
|
||
|
||
Now comes the Baling of the Case. But to comprehend it aright, you must know
|
||
something of the curious internal structure of the thing operated upon.
|
||
|
||
Regarding the Sperm Whale’s head as a solid oblong, you may, on an inclined
|
||
plane, sideways divide it into two quoins,* whereof the lower is the bony
|
||
structure, forming the cranium and jaws, and the upper an unctuous mass wholly
|
||
free from bones; its broad forward end forming the expanded vertical apparent
|
||
forehead of the whale. At the middle of the forehead horizontally subdivide this
|
||
upper quoin, and then you have two almost equal parts, which before were
|
||
naturally divided by an internal wall of a thick tendinous substance.
|
||
|
||
*Quoin is not a Euclidean term. It belongs to the pure nautical mathematics. I
|
||
know not that it has been defined before. A quoin is a solid which differs from
|
||
a wedge in having its sharp end formed by the steep inclination of one side,
|
||
instead of the mutual tapering of both sides.
|
||
|
||
The lower subdivided part, called the junk, is one immense honeycomb of oil,
|
||
formed by the crossing and recrossing, into ten thousand infiltrated cells, of
|
||
tough elastic white fibres throughout its whole extent. The upper part, known as
|
||
the Case, may be regarded as the great Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale. And
|
||
as that famous great tierce is mystically carved in front, so the whale’s vast
|
||
plaited forehead forms innumerable strange devices for the emblematical
|
||
adornment of his wondrous tun. Moreover, as that of Heidelburgh was always
|
||
replenished with the most excellent of the wines of the Rhenish valleys, so the
|
||
tun of the whale contains by far the most precious of all his oily vintages;
|
||
namely, the highly-prized spermaceti, in its absolutely pure, limpid, and
|
||
odoriferous state. Nor is this precious substance found unalloyed in any other
|
||
part of the creature. Though in life it remains perfectly fluid, yet, upon
|
||
exposure to the air, after death, it soon begins to concrete; sending forth
|
||
beautiful crystalline shoots, as when the first thin delicate ice is just
|
||
forming in water. A large whale’s case generally yields about five hundred
|
||
gallons of sperm, though from unavoidable circumstances, considerable of it is
|
||
spilled, leaks, and dribbles away, or is otherwise irrevocably lost in the
|
||
ticklish business of securing what you can.
|
||
|
||
I know not with what fine and costly material the Heidelburgh Tun was coated
|
||
within, but in superlative richness that coating could not possibly have
|
||
compared with the silken pearl-coloured membrane, like the lining of a fine
|
||
pelisse, forming the inner surface of the Sperm Whale’s case.
|
||
|
||
It will have been seen that the Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale embraces the
|
||
entire length of the entire top of the head; and since—as has been elsewhere set
|
||
forth—the head embraces one third of the whole length of the creature, then
|
||
setting that length down at eighty feet for a good sized whale, you have more
|
||
than twenty-six feet for the depth of the tun, when it is lengthwise hoisted up
|
||
and down against a ship’s side.
|
||
|
||
As in decapitating the whale, the operator’s instrument is brought close to the
|
||
spot where an entrance is subsequently forced into the spermaceti magazine; he
|
||
has, therefore, to be uncommonly heedful, lest a careless, untimely stroke
|
||
should invade the sanctuary and wastingly let out its invaluable contents. It is
|
||
this decapitated end of the head, also, which is at last elevated out of the
|
||
water, and retained in that position by the enormous cutting tackles, whose
|
||
hempen combinations, on one side, make quite a wilderness of ropes in that
|
||
quarter.
|
||
|
||
Thus much being said, attend now, I pray you, to that marvellous and—in this
|
||
particular instance—almost fatal operation whereby the Sperm Whale’s great
|
||
Heidelburgh Tun is tapped.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 78. Cistern and Buckets.
|
||
|
||
Nimble as a cat, Tashtego mounts aloft; and without altering his erect posture,
|
||
runs straight out upon the overhanging mainyard-arm, to the part where it
|
||
exactly projects over the hoisted Tun. He has carried with him a light tackle
|
||
called a whip, consisting of only two parts, travelling through a single-sheaved
|
||
block. Securing this block, so that it hangs down from the yard-arm, he swings
|
||
one end of the rope, till it is caught and firmly held by a hand on deck. Then,
|
||
hand-over-hand, down the other part, the Indian drops through the air, till
|
||
dexterously he lands on the summit of the head. There—still high elevated above
|
||
the rest of the company, to whom he vivaciously cries—he seems some Turkish
|
||
Muezzin calling the good people to prayers from the top of a tower. A
|
||
short-handled sharp spade being sent up to him, he diligently searches for the
|
||
proper place to begin breaking into the Tun. In this business he proceeds very
|
||
heedfully, like a treasure-hunter in some old house, sounding the walls to find
|
||
where the gold is masoned in. By the time this cautious search is over, a stout
|
||
iron-bound bucket, precisely like a well-bucket, has been attached to one end of
|
||
the whip; while the other end, being stretched across the deck, is there held by
|
||
two or three alert hands. These last now hoist the bucket within grasp of the
|
||
Indian, to whom another person has reached up a very long pole. Inserting this
|
||
pole into the bucket, Tashtego downward guides the bucket into the Tun, till it
|
||
entirely disappears; then giving the word to the seamen at the whip, up comes
|
||
the bucket again, all bubbling like a dairy-maid’s pail of new milk. Carefully
|
||
lowered from its height, the full-freighted vessel is caught by an appointed
|
||
hand, and quickly emptied into a large tub. Then remounting aloft, it again goes
|
||
through the same round until the deep cistern will yield no more. Towards the
|
||
end, Tashtego has to ram his long pole harder and harder, and deeper and deeper
|
||
into the Tun, until some twenty feet of the pole have gone down.
|
||
|
||
Now, the people of the Pequod had been baling some time in this way; several
|
||
tubs had been filled with the fragrant sperm; when all at once a queer accident
|
||
happened. Whether it was that Tashtego, that wild Indian, was so heedless and
|
||
reckless as to let go for a moment his one-handed hold on the great cabled
|
||
tackles suspending the head; or whether the place where he stood was so
|
||
treacherous and oozy; or whether the Evil One himself would have it to fall out
|
||
so, without stating his particular reasons; how it was exactly, there is no
|
||
telling now; but, on a sudden, as the eightieth or ninetieth bucket came
|
||
suckingly up—my God! poor Tashtego—like the twin reciprocating bucket in a
|
||
veritable well, dropped head-foremost down into this great Tun of Heidelburgh,
|
||
and with a horrible oily gurgling, went clean out of sight!
|
||
|
||
“Man overboard!” cried Daggoo, who amid the general consternation first came to
|
||
his senses. “Swing the bucket this way!” and putting one foot into it, so as the
|
||
better to secure his slippery hand-hold on the whip itself, the hoisters ran him
|
||
high up to the top of the head, almost before Tashtego could have reached its
|
||
interior bottom. Meantime, there was a terrible tumult. Looking over the side,
|
||
they saw the before lifeless head throbbing and heaving just below the surface
|
||
of the sea, as if that moment seized with some momentous idea; whereas it was
|
||
only the poor Indian unconsciously revealing by those struggles the perilous
|
||
depth to which he had sunk.
|
||
|
||
At this instant, while Daggoo, on the summit of the head, was clearing the
|
||
whip—which had somehow got foul of the great cutting tackles—a sharp cracking
|
||
noise was heard; and to the unspeakable horror of all, one of the two enormous
|
||
hooks suspending the head tore out, and with a vast vibration the enormous mass
|
||
sideways swung, till the drunk ship reeled and shook as if smitten by an
|
||
iceberg. The one remaining hook, upon which the entire strain now depended,
|
||
seemed every instant to be on the point of giving way; an event still more
|
||
likely from the violent motions of the head.
|
||
|
||
“Come down, come down!” yelled the seamen to Daggoo, but with one hand holding
|
||
on to the heavy tackles, so that if the head should drop, he would still remain
|
||
suspended; the negro having cleared the foul line, rammed down the bucket into
|
||
the now collapsed well, meaning that the buried harpooneer should grasp it, and
|
||
so be hoisted out.
|
||
|
||
“In heaven’s name, man,” cried Stubb, “are you ramming home a cartridge
|
||
there?—Avast! How will that help him; jamming that iron-bound bucket on top of
|
||
his head? Avast, will ye!”
|
||
|
||
“Stand clear of the tackle!” cried a voice like the bursting of a rocket.
|
||
|
||
Almost in the same instant, with a thunder-boom, the enormous mass dropped into
|
||
the sea, like Niagara’s Table-Rock into the whirlpool; the suddenly relieved
|
||
hull rolled away from it, to far down her glittering copper; and all caught
|
||
their breath, as half swinging—now over the sailors’ heads, and now over the
|
||
water—Daggoo, through a thick mist of spray, was dimly beheld clinging to the
|
||
pendulous tackles, while poor, buried-alive Tashtego was sinking utterly down to
|
||
the bottom of the sea! But hardly had the blinding vapor cleared away, when a
|
||
naked figure with a boarding-sword in his hand, was for one swift moment seen
|
||
hovering over the bulwarks. The next, a loud splash announced that my brave
|
||
Queequeg had dived to the rescue. One packed rush was made to the side, and
|
||
every eye counted every ripple, as moment followed moment, and no sign of either
|
||
the sinker or the diver could be seen. Some hands now jumped into a boat
|
||
alongside, and pushed a little off from the ship.
|
||
|
||
“Ha! ha!” cried Daggoo, all at once, from his now quiet, swinging perch
|
||
overhead; and looking further off from the side, we saw an arm thrust upright
|
||
from the blue waves; a sight strange to see, as an arm thrust forth from the
|
||
grass over a grave.
|
||
|
||
“Both! both!—it is both!”—cried Daggoo again with a joyful shout; and soon
|
||
after, Queequeg was seen boldly striking out with one hand, and with the other
|
||
clutching the long hair of the Indian. Drawn into the waiting boat, they were
|
||
quickly brought to the deck; but Tashtego was long in coming to, and Queequeg
|
||
did not look very brisk.
|
||
|
||
Now, how had this noble rescue been accomplished? Why, diving after the slowly
|
||
descending head, Queequeg with his keen sword had made side lunges near its
|
||
bottom, so as to scuttle a large hole there; then dropping his sword, had thrust
|
||
his long arm far inwards and upwards, and so hauled out poor Tash by the head.
|
||
He averred, that upon first thrusting in for him, a leg was presented; but well
|
||
knowing that that was not as it ought to be, and might occasion great
|
||
trouble;—he had thrust back the leg, and by a dexterous heave and toss, had
|
||
wrought a somerset upon the Indian; so that with the next trial, he came forth
|
||
in the good old way—head foremost. As for the great head itself, that was doing
|
||
as well as could be expected.
|
||
|
||
And thus, through the courage and great skill in obstetrics of Queequeg, the
|
||
deliverance, or rather, delivery of Tashtego, was successfully accomplished, in
|
||
the teeth, too, of the most untoward and apparently hopeless impediments; which
|
||
is a lesson by no means to be forgotten. Midwifery should be taught in the same
|
||
course with fencing and boxing, riding and rowing.
|
||
|
||
I know that this queer adventure of the Gay-Header’s will be sure to seem
|
||
incredible to some landsmen, though they themselves may have either seen or
|
||
heard of some one’s falling into a cistern ashore; an accident which not seldom
|
||
happens, and with much less reason too than the Indian’s, considering the
|
||
exceeding slipperiness of the curb of the Sperm Whale’s well.
|
||
|
||
But, peradventure, it may be sagaciously urged, how is this? We thought the
|
||
tissued, infiltrated head of the Sperm Whale, was the lightest and most corky
|
||
part about him; and yet thou makest it sink in an element of a far greater
|
||
specific gravity than itself. We have thee there. Not at all, but I have ye; for
|
||
at the time poor Tash fell in, the case had been nearly emptied of its lighter
|
||
contents, leaving little but the dense tendinous wall of the well—a double
|
||
welded, hammered substance, as I have before said, much heavier than the sea
|
||
water, and a lump of which sinks in it like lead almost. But the tendency to
|
||
rapid sinking in this substance was in the present instance materially
|
||
counteracted by the other parts of the head remaining undetached from it, so
|
||
that it sank very slowly and deliberately indeed, affording Queequeg a fair
|
||
chance for performing his agile obstetrics on the run, as you may say. Yes, it
|
||
was a running delivery, so it was.
|
||
|
||
Now, had Tashtego perished in that head, it had been a very precious perishing;
|
||
smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of fragrant spermaceti; coffined,
|
||
hearsed, and tombed in the secret inner chamber and sanctum sanctorum of the
|
||
whale. Only one sweeter end can readily be recalled—the delicious death of an
|
||
Ohio honey-hunter, who seeking honey in the crotch of a hollow tree, found such
|
||
exceeding store of it, that leaning too far over, it sucked him in, so that he
|
||
died embalmed. How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato’s honey head,
|
||
and sweetly perished there?
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 79. The Prairie.
|
||
|
||
To scan the lines of his face, or feel the bumps on the head of this Leviathan;
|
||
this is a thing which no Physiognomist or Phrenologist has as yet undertaken.
|
||
Such an enterprise would seem almost as hopeful as for Lavater to have
|
||
scrutinized the wrinkles on the Rock of Gibraltar, or for Gall to have mounted a
|
||
ladder and manipulated the Dome of the Pantheon. Still, in that famous work of
|
||
his, Lavater not only treats of the various faces of men, but also attentively
|
||
studies the faces of horses, birds, serpents, and fish; and dwells in detail
|
||
upon the modifications of expression discernible therein. Nor have Gall and his
|
||
disciple Spurzheim failed to throw out some hints touching the phrenological
|
||
characteristics of other beings than man. Therefore, though I am but ill
|
||
qualified for a pioneer, in the application of these two semi-sciences to the
|
||
whale, I will do my endeavor. I try all things; I achieve what I can.
|
||
|
||
Physiognomically regarded, the Sperm Whale is an anomalous creature. He has no
|
||
proper nose. And since the nose is the central and most conspicuous of the
|
||
features; and since it perhaps most modifies and finally controls their combined
|
||
expression; hence it would seem that its entire absence, as an external
|
||
appendage, must very largely affect the countenance of the whale. For as in
|
||
landscape gardening, a spire, cupola, monument, or tower of some sort, is deemed
|
||
almost indispensable to the completion of the scene; so no face can be
|
||
physiognomically in keeping without the elevated open-work belfry of the nose.
|
||
Dash the nose from Phidias’s marble Jove, and what a sorry remainder!
|
||
Nevertheless, Leviathan is of so mighty a magnitude, all his proportions are so
|
||
stately, that the same deficiency which in the sculptured Jove were hideous, in
|
||
him is no blemish at all. Nay, it is an added grandeur. A nose to the whale
|
||
would have been impertinent. As on your physiognomical voyage you sail round his
|
||
vast head in your jolly-boat, your noble conceptions of him are never insulted
|
||
by the reflection that he has a nose to be pulled. A pestilent conceit, which so
|
||
often will insist upon obtruding even when beholding the mightiest royal beadle
|
||
on his throne.
|
||
|
||
In some particulars, perhaps the most imposing physiognomical view to be had of
|
||
the Sperm Whale, is that of the full front of his head. This aspect is sublime.
|
||
|
||
In thought, a fine human brow is like the East when troubled with the morning.
|
||
In the repose of the pasture, the curled brow of the bull has a touch of the
|
||
grand in it. Pushing heavy cannon up mountain defiles, the elephant’s brow is
|
||
majestic. Human or animal, the mystical brow is as that great golden seal
|
||
affixed by the German emperors to their decrees. It signifies—“God: done this
|
||
day by my hand.” But in most creatures, nay in man himself, very often the brow
|
||
is but a mere strip of alpine land lying along the snow line. Few are the
|
||
foreheads which like Shakespeare’s or Melancthon’s rise so high, and descend so
|
||
low, that the eyes themselves seem clear, eternal, tideless mountain lakes; and
|
||
all above them in the forehead’s wrinkles, you seem to track the antlered
|
||
thoughts descending there to drink, as the Highland hunters track the snow
|
||
prints of the deer. But in the great Sperm Whale, this high and mighty god-like
|
||
dignity inherent in the brow is so immensely amplified, that gazing on it, in
|
||
that full front view, you feel the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than
|
||
in beholding any other object in living nature. For you see no one point
|
||
precisely; not one distinct feature is revealed; no nose, eyes, ears, or mouth;
|
||
no face; he has none, proper; nothing but that one broad firmament of a
|
||
forehead, pleated with riddles; dumbly lowering with the doom of boats, and
|
||
ships, and men. Nor, in profile, does this wondrous brow diminish; though that
|
||
way viewed its grandeur does not domineer upon you so. In profile, you plainly
|
||
perceive that horizontal, semi-crescentic depression in the forehead’s middle,
|
||
which, in man, is Lavater’s mark of genius.
|
||
|
||
But how? Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written a book,
|
||
spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in his doing nothing
|
||
particular to prove it. It is moreover declared in his pyramidical silence. And
|
||
this reminds me that had the great Sperm Whale been known to the young Orient
|
||
World, he would have been deified by their child-magian thoughts. They deified
|
||
the crocodile of the Nile, because the crocodile is tongueless; and the Sperm
|
||
Whale has no tongue, or at least it is so exceedingly small, as to be incapable
|
||
of protrusion. If hereafter any highly cultured, poetical nation shall lure back
|
||
to their birth-right, the merry May-day gods of old; and livingly enthrone them
|
||
again in the now egotistical sky; in the now unhaunted hill; then be sure,
|
||
exalted to Jove’s high seat, the great Sperm Whale shall lord it.
|
||
|
||
Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is no
|
||
Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man’s and every being’s face.
|
||
Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a passing fable. If then,
|
||
Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest
|
||
peasant’s face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered
|
||
Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s brow? I but put that
|
||
brow before you. Read it if you can.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 80. The Nut.
|
||
|
||
If the Sperm Whale be physiognomically a Sphinx, to the phrenologist his brain
|
||
seems that geometrical circle which it is impossible to square.
|
||
|
||
In the full-grown creature the skull will measure at least twenty feet in
|
||
length. Unhinge the lower jaw, and the side view of this skull is as the side of
|
||
a moderately inclined plane resting throughout on a level base. But in life—as
|
||
we have elsewhere seen—this inclined plane is angularly filled up, and almost
|
||
squared by the enormous superincumbent mass of the junk and sperm. At the high
|
||
end the skull forms a crater to bed that part of the mass; while under the long
|
||
floor of this crater—in another cavity seldom exceeding ten inches in length and
|
||
as many in depth—reposes the mere handful of this monster’s brain. The brain is
|
||
at least twenty feet from his apparent forehead in life; it is hidden away
|
||
behind its vast outworks, like the innermost citadel within the amplified
|
||
fortifications of Quebec. So like a choice casket is it secreted in him, that I
|
||
have known some whalemen who peremptorily deny that the Sperm Whale has any
|
||
other brain than that palpable semblance of one formed by the cubic-yards of his
|
||
sperm magazine. Lying in strange folds, courses, and convolutions, to their
|
||
apprehensions, it seems more in keeping with the idea of his general might to
|
||
regard that mystic part of him as the seat of his intelligence.
|
||
|
||
It is plain, then, that phrenologically the head of this Leviathan, in the
|
||
creature’s living intact state, is an entire delusion. As for his true brain,
|
||
you can then see no indications of it, nor feel any. The whale, like all things
|
||
that are mighty, wears a false brow to the common world.
|
||
|
||
If you unload his skull of its spermy heaps and then take a rear view of its
|
||
rear end, which is the high end, you will be struck by its resemblance to the
|
||
human skull, beheld in the same situation, and from the same point of view.
|
||
Indeed, place this reversed skull (scaled down to the human magnitude) among a
|
||
plate of men’s skulls, and you would involuntarily confound it with them; and
|
||
remarking the depressions on one part of its summit, in phrenological phrase you
|
||
would say—This man had no self-esteem, and no veneration. And by those
|
||
negations, considered along with the affirmative fact of his prodigious bulk and
|
||
power, you can best form to yourself the truest, though not the most
|
||
exhilarating conception of what the most exalted potency is.
|
||
|
||
But if from the comparative dimensions of the whale’s proper brain, you deem it
|
||
incapable of being adequately charted, then I have another idea for you. If you
|
||
attentively regard almost any quadruped’s spine, you will be struck with the
|
||
resemblance of its vertebræ to a strung necklace of dwarfed skulls, all bearing
|
||
rudimental resemblance to the skull proper. It is a German conceit, that the
|
||
vertebræ are absolutely undeveloped skulls. But the curious external
|
||
resemblance, I take it the Germans were not the first men to perceive. A foreign
|
||
friend once pointed it out to me, in the skeleton of a foe he had slain, and
|
||
with the vertebræ of which he was inlaying, in a sort of basso-relievo, the
|
||
beaked prow of his canoe. Now, I consider that the phrenologists have omitted an
|
||
important thing in not pushing their investigations from the cerebellum through
|
||
the spinal canal. For I believe that much of a man’s character will be found
|
||
betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull,
|
||
whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul.
|
||
I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious staff of that flag which I fling
|
||
half out to the world.
|
||
|
||
Apply this spinal branch of phrenology to the Sperm Whale. His cranial cavity is
|
||
continuous with the first neck-vertebra; and in that vertebra the bottom of the
|
||
spinal canal will measure ten inches across, being eight in height, and of a
|
||
triangular figure with the base downwards. As it passes through the remaining
|
||
vertebræ the canal tapers in size, but for a considerable distance remains of
|
||
large capacity. Now, of course, this canal is filled with much the same
|
||
strangely fibrous substance—the spinal cord—as the brain; and directly
|
||
communicates with the brain. And what is still more, for many feet after
|
||
emerging from the brain’s cavity, the spinal cord remains of an undecreasing
|
||
girth, almost equal to that of the brain. Under all these circumstances, would
|
||
it be unreasonable to survey and map out the whale’s spine phrenologically? For,
|
||
viewed in this light, the wonderful comparative smallness of his brain proper is
|
||
more than compensated by the wonderful comparative magnitude of his spinal cord.
|
||
|
||
But leaving this hint to operate as it may with the phrenologists, I would
|
||
merely assume the spinal theory for a moment, in reference to the Sperm Whale’s
|
||
hump. This august hump, if I mistake not, rises over one of the larger vertebræ,
|
||
and is, therefore, in some sort, the outer convex mould of it. From its relative
|
||
situation then, I should call this high hump the organ of firmness or
|
||
indomitableness in the Sperm Whale. And that the great monster is indomitable,
|
||
you will yet have reason to know.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 81. The Pequod Meets The Virgin.
|
||
|
||
The predestinated day arrived, and we duly met the ship Jungfrau, Derick De
|
||
Deer, master, of Bremen.
|
||
|
||
At one time the greatest whaling people in the world, the Dutch and Germans are
|
||
now among the least; but here and there at very wide intervals of latitude and
|
||
longitude, you still occasionally meet with their flag in the Pacific.
|
||
|
||
For some reason, the Jungfrau seemed quite eager to pay her respects. While yet
|
||
some distance from the Pequod, she rounded to, and dropping a boat, her captain
|
||
was impelled towards us, impatiently standing in the bows instead of the stern.
|
||
|
||
“What has he in his hand there?” cried Starbuck, pointing to something wavingly
|
||
held by the German. “Impossible!—a lamp-feeder!”
|
||
|
||
“Not that,” said Stubb, “no, no, it’s a coffee-pot, Mr. Starbuck; he’s coming
|
||
off to make us our coffee, is the Yarman; don’t you see that big tin can there
|
||
alongside of him?—that’s his boiling water. Oh! he’s all right, is the Yarman.”
|
||
|
||
“Go along with you,” cried Flask, “it’s a lamp-feeder and an oil-can. He’s out
|
||
of oil, and has come a-begging.”
|
||
|
||
However curious it may seem for an oil-ship to be borrowing oil on the
|
||
whale-ground, and however much it may invertedly contradict the old proverb
|
||
about carrying coals to Newcastle, yet sometimes such a thing really happens;
|
||
and in the present case Captain Derick De Deer did indubitably conduct a
|
||
lamp-feeder as Flask did declare.
|
||
|
||
As he mounted the deck, Ahab abruptly accosted him, without at all heeding what
|
||
he had in his hand; but in his broken lingo, the German soon evinced his
|
||
complete ignorance of the White Whale; immediately turning the conversation to
|
||
his lamp-feeder and oil can, with some remarks touching his having to turn into
|
||
his hammock at night in profound darkness—his last drop of Bremen oil being
|
||
gone, and not a single flying-fish yet captured to supply the deficiency;
|
||
concluding by hinting that his ship was indeed what in the Fishery is
|
||
technically called a clean one (that is, an empty one), well deserving the name
|
||
of Jungfrau or the Virgin.
|
||
|
||
His necessities supplied, Derick departed; but he had not gained his ship’s
|
||
side, when whales were almost simultaneously raised from the mast-heads of both
|
||
vessels; and so eager for the chase was Derick, that without pausing to put his
|
||
oil-can and lamp-feeder aboard, he slewed round his boat and made after the
|
||
leviathan lamp-feeders.
|
||
|
||
Now, the game having risen to leeward, he and the other three German boats that
|
||
soon followed him, had considerably the start of the Pequod’s keels. There were
|
||
eight whales, an average pod. Aware of their danger, they were going all abreast
|
||
with great speed straight before the wind, rubbing their flanks as closely as so
|
||
many spans of horses in harness. They left a great, wide wake, as though
|
||
continually unrolling a great wide parchment upon the sea.
|
||
|
||
Full in this rapid wake, and many fathoms in the rear, swam a huge, humped old
|
||
bull, which by his comparatively slow progress, as well as by the unusual
|
||
yellowish incrustations overgrowing him, seemed afflicted with the jaundice, or
|
||
some other infirmity. Whether this whale belonged to the pod in advance, seemed
|
||
questionable; for it is not customary for such venerable leviathans to be at all
|
||
social. Nevertheless, he stuck to their wake, though indeed their back water
|
||
must have retarded him, because the white-bone or swell at his broad muzzle was
|
||
a dashed one, like the swell formed when two hostile currents meet. His spout
|
||
was short, slow, and laborious; coming forth with a choking sort of gush, and
|
||
spending itself in torn shreds, followed by strange subterranean commotions in
|
||
him, which seemed to have egress at his other buried extremity, causing the
|
||
waters behind him to upbubble.
|
||
|
||
“Who’s got some paregoric?” said Stubb, “he has the stomach-ache, I’m afraid.
|
||
Lord, think of having half an acre of stomach-ache! Adverse winds are holding
|
||
mad Christmas in him, boys. It’s the first foul wind I ever knew to blow from
|
||
astern; but look, did ever whale yaw so before? it must be, he’s lost his
|
||
tiller.”
|
||
|
||
As an overladen Indiaman bearing down the Hindostan coast with a deck load of
|
||
frightened horses, careens, buries, rolls, and wallows on her way; so did this
|
||
old whale heave his aged bulk, and now and then partly turning over on his
|
||
cumbrous rib-ends, expose the cause of his devious wake in the unnatural stump
|
||
of his starboard fin. Whether he had lost that fin in battle, or had been born
|
||
without it, it were hard to say.
|
||
|
||
“Only wait a bit, old chap, and I’ll give ye a sling for that wounded arm,”
|
||
cried cruel Flask, pointing to the whale-line near him.
|
||
|
||
“Mind he don’t sling thee with it,” cried Starbuck. “Give way, or the German
|
||
will have him.”
|
||
|
||
With one intent all the combined rival boats were pointed for this one fish,
|
||
because not only was he the largest, and therefore the most valuable whale, but
|
||
he was nearest to them, and the other whales were going with such great
|
||
velocity, moreover, as almost to defy pursuit for the time. At this juncture the
|
||
Pequod’s keels had shot by the three German boats last lowered; but from the
|
||
great start he had had, Derick’s boat still led the chase, though every moment
|
||
neared by his foreign rivals. The only thing they feared, was, that from being
|
||
already so nigh to his mark, he would be enabled to dart his iron before they
|
||
could completely overtake and pass him. As for Derick, he seemed quite confident
|
||
that this would be the case, and occasionally with a deriding gesture shook his
|
||
lamp-feeder at the other boats.
|
||
|
||
“The ungracious and ungrateful dog!” cried Starbuck; “he mocks and dares me with
|
||
the very poor-box I filled for him not five minutes ago!”—then in his old
|
||
intense whisper—“Give way, greyhounds! Dog to it!”
|
||
|
||
“I tell ye what it is, men”—cried Stubb to his crew—“it’s against my religion to
|
||
get mad; but I’d like to eat that villainous Yarman—Pull—won’t ye? Are ye going
|
||
to let that rascal beat ye? Do ye love brandy? A hogshead of brandy, then, to
|
||
the best man. Come, why don’t some of ye burst a blood-vessel? Who’s that been
|
||
dropping an anchor overboard—we don’t budge an inch—we’re becalmed. Halloo,
|
||
here’s grass growing in the boat’s bottom—and by the Lord, the mast there’s
|
||
budding. This won’t do, boys. Look at that Yarman! The short and long of it is,
|
||
men, will ye spit fire or not?”
|
||
|
||
“Oh! see the suds he makes!” cried Flask, dancing up and down—“What a hump—Oh,
|
||
do pile on the beef—lays like a log! Oh! my lads, do spring—slap-jacks and
|
||
quahogs for supper, you know, my lads—baked clams and muffins—oh, do, do,
|
||
spring,—he’s a hundred barreller—don’t lose him now—don’t oh, don’t!—see that
|
||
Yarman—Oh, won’t ye pull for your duff, my lads—such a sog! such a sogger! Don’t
|
||
ye love sperm? There goes three thousand dollars, men!—a bank!—a whole bank! The
|
||
bank of England!—Oh, do, do, do!—What’s that Yarman about now?”
|
||
|
||
At this moment Derick was in the act of pitching his lamp-feeder at the
|
||
advancing boats, and also his oil-can; perhaps with the double view of retarding
|
||
his rivals’ way, and at the same time economically accelerating his own by the
|
||
momentary impetus of the backward toss.
|
||
|
||
“The unmannerly Dutch dogger!” cried Stubb. “Pull now, men, like fifty thousand
|
||
line-of-battle-ship loads of red-haired devils. What d’ye say, Tashtego; are you
|
||
the man to snap your spine in two-and-twenty pieces for the honor of old
|
||
Gayhead? What d’ye say?”
|
||
|
||
“I say, pull like god-dam,”—cried the Indian.
|
||
|
||
Fiercely, but evenly incited by the taunts of the German, the Pequod’s three
|
||
boats now began ranging almost abreast; and, so disposed, momentarily neared
|
||
him. In that fine, loose, chivalrous attitude of the headsman when drawing near
|
||
to his prey, the three mates stood up proudly, occasionally backing the after
|
||
oarsman with an exhilarating cry of, “There she slides, now! Hurrah for the
|
||
white-ash breeze! Down with the Yarman! Sail over him!”
|
||
|
||
But so decided an original start had Derick had, that spite of all their
|
||
gallantry, he would have proved the victor in this race, had not a righteous
|
||
judgment descended upon him in a crab which caught the blade of his midship
|
||
oarsman. While this clumsy lubber was striving to free his white-ash, and while,
|
||
in consequence, Derick’s boat was nigh to capsizing, and he thundering away at
|
||
his men in a mighty rage;—that was a good time for Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask.
|
||
With a shout, they took a mortal start forwards, and slantingly ranged up on the
|
||
German’s quarter. An instant more, and all four boats were diagonically in the
|
||
whale’s immediate wake, while stretching from them, on both sides, was the
|
||
foaming swell that he made.
|
||
|
||
It was a terrific, most pitiable, and maddening sight. The whale was now going
|
||
head out, and sending his spout before him in a continual tormented jet; while
|
||
his one poor fin beat his side in an agony of fright. Now to this hand, now to
|
||
that, he yawed in his faltering flight, and still at every billow that he broke,
|
||
he spasmodically sank in the sea, or sideways rolled towards the sky his one
|
||
beating fin. So have I seen a bird with clipped wing making affrighted broken
|
||
circles in the air, vainly striving to escape the piratical hawks. But the bird
|
||
has a voice, and with plaintive cries will make known her fear; but the fear of
|
||
this vast dumb brute of the sea, was chained up and enchanted in him; he had no
|
||
voice, save that choking respiration through his spiracle, and this made the
|
||
sight of him unspeakably pitiable; while still, in his amazing bulk, portcullis
|
||
jaw, and omnipotent tail, there was enough to appal the stoutest man who so
|
||
pitied.
|
||
|
||
Seeing now that but a very few moments more would give the Pequod’s boats the
|
||
advantage, and rather than be thus foiled of his game, Derick chose to hazard
|
||
what to him must have seemed a most unusually long dart, ere the last chance
|
||
would for ever escape.
|
||
|
||
But no sooner did his harpooneer stand up for the stroke, than all three
|
||
tigers—Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo—instinctively sprang to their feet, and
|
||
standing in a diagonal row, simultaneously pointed their barbs; and darted over
|
||
the head of the German harpooneer, their three Nantucket irons entered the
|
||
whale. Blinding vapors of foam and white-fire! The three boats, in the first
|
||
fury of the whale’s headlong rush, bumped the German’s aside with such force,
|
||
that both Derick and his baffled harpooneer were spilled out, and sailed over by
|
||
the three flying keels.
|
||
|
||
“Don’t be afraid, my butter-boxes,” cried Stubb, casting a passing glance upon
|
||
them as he shot by; “ye’ll be picked up presently—all right—I saw some sharks
|
||
astern—St. Bernard’s dogs, you know—relieve distressed travellers. Hurrah! this
|
||
is the way to sail now. Every keel a sunbeam! Hurrah!—Here we go like three tin
|
||
kettles at the tail of a mad cougar! This puts me in mind of fastening to an
|
||
elephant in a tilbury on a plain—makes the wheel-spokes fly, boys, when you
|
||
fasten to him that way; and there’s danger of being pitched out too, when you
|
||
strike a hill. Hurrah! this is the way a fellow feels when he’s going to Davy
|
||
Jones—all a rush down an endless inclined plane! Hurrah! this whale carries the
|
||
everlasting mail!”
|
||
|
||
But the monster’s run was a brief one. Giving a sudden gasp, he tumultuously
|
||
sounded. With a grating rush, the three lines flew round the loggerheads with
|
||
such a force as to gouge deep grooves in them; while so fearful were the
|
||
harpooneers that this rapid sounding would soon exhaust the lines, that using
|
||
all their dexterous might, they caught repeated smoking turns with the rope to
|
||
hold on; till at last—owing to the perpendicular strain from the lead-lined
|
||
chocks of the boats, whence the three ropes went straight down into the blue—the
|
||
gunwales of the bows were almost even with the water, while the three sterns
|
||
tilted high in the air. And the whale soon ceasing to sound, for some time they
|
||
remained in that attitude, fearful of expending more line, though the position
|
||
was a little ticklish. But though boats have been taken down and lost in this
|
||
way, yet it is this “holding on,” as it is called; this hooking up by the sharp
|
||
barbs of his live flesh from the back; this it is that often torments the
|
||
Leviathan into soon rising again to meet the sharp lance of his foes. Yet not to
|
||
speak of the peril of the thing, it is to be doubted whether this course is
|
||
always the best; for it is but reasonable to presume, that the longer the
|
||
stricken whale stays under water, the more he is exhausted. Because, owing to
|
||
the enormous surface of him—in a full grown sperm whale something less than 2000
|
||
square feet—the pressure of the water is immense. We all know what an
|
||
astonishing atmospheric weight we ourselves stand up under; even here,
|
||
above-ground, in the air; how vast, then, the burden of a whale, bearing on his
|
||
back a column of two hundred fathoms of ocean! It must at least equal the weight
|
||
of fifty atmospheres. One whaleman has estimated it at the weight of twenty
|
||
line-of-battle ships, with all their guns, and stores, and men on board.
|
||
|
||
As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down into its
|
||
eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan or cry of any sort, nay, not so
|
||
much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its depths; what landsman would have
|
||
thought, that beneath all that silence and placidity, the utmost monster of the
|
||
seas was writhing and wrenching in agony! Not eight inches of perpendicular rope
|
||
were visible at the bows. Seems it credible that by three such thin threads the
|
||
great Leviathan was suspended like the big weight to an eight day clock.
|
||
Suspended? and to what? To three bits of board. Is this the creature of whom it
|
||
was once so triumphantly said—“Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or
|
||
his head with fish-spears? The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold, the
|
||
spear, the dart, nor the habergeon: he esteemeth iron as straw; the arrow cannot
|
||
make him flee; darts are counted as stubble; he laugheth at the shaking of a
|
||
spear!” This the creature? this he? Oh! that unfulfilments should follow the
|
||
prophets. For with the strength of a thousand thighs in his tail, Leviathan had
|
||
run his head under the mountains of the sea, to hide him from the Pequod’s
|
||
fish-spears!
|
||
|
||
In that sloping afternoon sunlight, the shadows that the three boats sent down
|
||
beneath the surface, must have been long enough and broad enough to shade half
|
||
Xerxes’ army. Who can tell how appalling to the wounded whale must have been
|
||
such huge phantoms flitting over his head!
|
||
|
||
“Stand by, men; he stirs,” cried Starbuck, as the three lines suddenly vibrated
|
||
in the water, distinctly conducting upwards to them, as by magnetic wires, the
|
||
life and death throbs of the whale, so that every oarsman felt them in his seat.
|
||
The next moment, relieved in great part from the downward strain at the bows,
|
||
the boats gave a sudden bounce upwards, as a small icefield will, when a dense
|
||
herd of white bears are scared from it into the sea.
|
||
|
||
“Haul in! Haul in!” cried Starbuck again; “he’s rising.”
|
||
|
||
The lines, of which, hardly an instant before, not one hand’s breadth could have
|
||
been gained, were now in long quick coils flung back all dripping into the
|
||
boats, and soon the whale broke water within two ship’s lengths of the hunters.
|
||
|
||
His motions plainly denoted his extreme exhaustion. In most land animals there
|
||
are certain valves or flood-gates in many of their veins, whereby when wounded,
|
||
the blood is in some degree at least instantly shut off in certain directions.
|
||
Not so with the whale; one of whose peculiarities it is to have an entire
|
||
non-valvular structure of the blood-vessels, so that when pierced even by so
|
||
small a point as a harpoon, a deadly drain is at once begun upon his whole
|
||
arterial system; and when this is heightened by the extraordinary pressure of
|
||
water at a great distance below the surface, his life may be said to pour from
|
||
him in incessant streams. Yet so vast is the quantity of blood in him, and so
|
||
distant and numerous its interior fountains, that he will keep thus bleeding and
|
||
bleeding for a considerable period; even as in a drought a river will flow,
|
||
whose source is in the well-springs of far-off and undiscernible hills. Even
|
||
now, when the boats pulled upon this whale, and perilously drew over his swaying
|
||
flukes, and the lances were darted into him, they were followed by steady jets
|
||
from the new made wound, which kept continually playing, while the natural
|
||
spout-hole in his head was only at intervals, however rapid, sending its
|
||
affrighted moisture into the air. From this last vent no blood yet came, because
|
||
no vital part of him had thus far been struck. His life, as they significantly
|
||
call it, was untouched.
|
||
|
||
As the boats now more closely surrounded him, the whole upper part of his form,
|
||
with much of it that is ordinarily submerged, was plainly revealed. His eyes, or
|
||
rather the places where his eyes had been, were beheld. As strange misgrown
|
||
masses gather in the knot-holes of the noblest oaks when prostrate, so from the
|
||
points which the whale’s eyes had once occupied, now protruded blind bulbs,
|
||
horribly pitiable to see. But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his
|
||
one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to
|
||
light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the
|
||
solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all. Still
|
||
rolling in his blood, at last he partially disclosed a strangely discoloured
|
||
bunch or protuberance, the size of a bushel, low down on the flank.
|
||
|
||
“A nice spot,” cried Flask; “just let me prick him there once.”
|
||
|
||
“Avast!” cried Starbuck, “there’s no need of that!”
|
||
|
||
But humane Starbuck was too late. At the instant of the dart an ulcerous jet
|
||
shot from this cruel wound, and goaded by it into more than sufferable anguish,
|
||
the whale now spouting thick blood, with swift fury blindly darted at the craft,
|
||
bespattering them and their glorying crews all over with showers of gore,
|
||
capsizing Flask’s boat and marring the bows. It was his death stroke. For, by
|
||
this time, so spent was he by loss of blood, that he helplessly rolled away from
|
||
the wreck he had made; lay panting on his side, impotently flapped with his
|
||
stumped fin, then over and over slowly revolved like a waning world; turned up
|
||
the white secrets of his belly; lay like a log, and died. It was most piteous,
|
||
that last expiring spout. As when by unseen hands the water is gradually drawn
|
||
off from some mighty fountain, and with half-stifled melancholy gurglings the
|
||
spray-column lowers and lowers to the ground—so the last long dying spout of the
|
||
whale.
|
||
|
||
Soon, while the crews were awaiting the arrival of the ship, the body showed
|
||
symptoms of sinking with all its treasures unrifled. Immediately, by Starbuck’s
|
||
orders, lines were secured to it at different points, so that ere long every
|
||
boat was a buoy; the sunken whale being suspended a few inches beneath them by
|
||
the cords. By very heedful management, when the ship drew nigh, the whale was
|
||
transferred to her side, and was strongly secured there by the stiffest
|
||
fluke-chains, for it was plain that unless artificially upheld, the body would
|
||
at once sink to the bottom.
|
||
|
||
It so chanced that almost upon first cutting into him with the spade, the entire
|
||
length of a corroded harpoon was found imbedded in his flesh, on the lower part
|
||
of the bunch before described. But as the stumps of harpoons are frequently
|
||
found in the dead bodies of captured whales, with the flesh perfectly healed
|
||
around them, and no prominence of any kind to denote their place; therefore,
|
||
there must needs have been some other unknown reason in the present case fully
|
||
to account for the ulceration alluded to. But still more curious was the fact of
|
||
a lance-head of stone being found in him, not far from the buried iron, the
|
||
flesh perfectly firm about it. Who had darted that stone lance? And when? It
|
||
might have been darted by some Nor’ West Indian long before America was
|
||
discovered.
|
||
|
||
What other marvels might have been rummaged out of this monstrous cabinet there
|
||
is no telling. But a sudden stop was put to further discoveries, by the ship’s
|
||
being unprecedentedly dragged over sideways to the sea, owing to the body’s
|
||
immensely increasing tendency to sink. However, Starbuck, who had the ordering
|
||
of affairs, hung on to it to the last; hung on to it so resolutely, indeed, that
|
||
when at length the ship would have been capsized, if still persisting in locking
|
||
arms with the body; then, when the command was given to break clear from it,
|
||
such was the immovable strain upon the timber-heads to which the fluke-chains
|
||
and cables were fastened, that it was impossible to cast them off. Meantime
|
||
everything in the Pequod was aslant. To cross to the other side of the deck was
|
||
like walking up the steep gabled roof of a house. The ship groaned and gasped.
|
||
Many of the ivory inlayings of her bulwarks and cabins were started from their
|
||
places, by the unnatural dislocation. In vain handspikes and crows were brought
|
||
to bear upon the immovable fluke-chains, to pry them adrift from the
|
||
timberheads; and so low had the whale now settled that the submerged ends could
|
||
not be at all approached, while every moment whole tons of ponderosity seemed
|
||
added to the sinking bulk, and the ship seemed on the point of going over.
|
||
|
||
“Hold on, hold on, won’t ye?” cried Stubb to the body, “don’t be in such a devil
|
||
of a hurry to sink! By thunder, men, we must do something or go for it. No use
|
||
prying there; avast, I say with your handspikes, and run one of ye for a prayer
|
||
book and a pen-knife, and cut the big chains.”
|
||
|
||
“Knife? Aye, aye,” cried Queequeg, and seizing the carpenter’s heavy hatchet, he
|
||
leaned out of a porthole, and steel to iron, began slashing at the largest
|
||
fluke-chains. But a few strokes, full of sparks, were given, when the exceeding
|
||
strain effected the rest. With a terrific snap, every fastening went adrift; the
|
||
ship righted, the carcase sank.
|
||
|
||
Now, this occasional inevitable sinking of the recently killed Sperm Whale is a
|
||
very curious thing; nor has any fisherman yet adequately accounted for it.
|
||
Usually the dead Sperm Whale floats with great buoyancy, with its side or belly
|
||
considerably elevated above the surface. If the only whales that thus sank were
|
||
old, meagre, and broken-hearted creatures, their pads of lard diminished and all
|
||
their bones heavy and rheumatic; then you might with some reason assert that
|
||
this sinking is caused by an uncommon specific gravity in the fish so sinking,
|
||
consequent upon this absence of buoyant matter in him. But it is not so. For
|
||
young whales, in the highest health, and swelling with noble aspirations,
|
||
prematurely cut off in the warm flush and May of life, with all their panting
|
||
lard about them; even these brawny, buoyant heroes do sometimes sink.
|
||
|
||
Be it said, however, that the Sperm Whale is far less liable to this accident
|
||
than any other species. Where one of that sort go down, twenty Right Whales do.
|
||
This difference in the species is no doubt imputable in no small degree to the
|
||
greater quantity of bone in the Right Whale; his Venetian blinds alone sometimes
|
||
weighing more than a ton; from this incumbrance the Sperm Whale is wholly free.
|
||
But there are instances where, after the lapse of many hours or several days,
|
||
the sunken whale again rises, more buoyant than in life. But the reason of this
|
||
is obvious. Gases are generated in him; he swells to a prodigious magnitude;
|
||
becomes a sort of animal balloon. A line-of-battle ship could hardly keep him
|
||
under then. In the Shore Whaling, on soundings, among the Bays of New Zealand,
|
||
when a Right Whale gives token of sinking, they fasten buoys to him, with plenty
|
||
of rope; so that when the body has gone down, they know where to look for it
|
||
when it shall have ascended again.
|
||
|
||
It was not long after the sinking of the body that a cry was heard from the
|
||
Pequod’s mast-heads, announcing that the Jungfrau was again lowering her boats;
|
||
though the only spout in sight was that of a Fin-Back, belonging to the species
|
||
of uncapturable whales, because of its incredible power of swimming.
|
||
Nevertheless, the Fin-Back’s spout is so similar to the Sperm Whale’s, that by
|
||
unskilful fishermen it is often mistaken for it. And consequently Derick and all
|
||
his host were now in valiant chase of this unnearable brute. The Virgin crowding
|
||
all sail, made after her four young keels, and thus they all disappeared far to
|
||
leeward, still in bold, hopeful chase.
|
||
|
||
Oh! many are the Fin-Backs, and many are the Dericks, my friend.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 82. The Honor and Glory of Whaling.
|
||
|
||
There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.
|
||
|
||
The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up to the
|
||
very spring-head of it so much the more am I impressed with its great
|
||
honorableness and antiquity; and especially when I find so many great demi-gods
|
||
and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or other have shed distinction
|
||
upon it, I am transported with the reflection that I myself belong, though but
|
||
subordinately, to so emblazoned a fraternity.
|
||
|
||
The gallant Perseus, a son of Jupiter, was the first whaleman; and to the
|
||
eternal honor of our calling be it said, that the first whale attacked by our
|
||
brotherhood was not killed with any sordid intent. Those were the knightly days
|
||
of our profession, when we only bore arms to succor the distressed, and not to
|
||
fill men’s lamp-feeders. Every one knows the fine story of Perseus and
|
||
Andromeda; how the lovely Andromeda, the daughter of a king, was tied to a rock
|
||
on the sea-coast, and as Leviathan was in the very act of carrying her off,
|
||
Perseus, the prince of whalemen, intrepidly advancing, harpooned the monster,
|
||
and delivered and married the maid. It was an admirable artistic exploit, rarely
|
||
achieved by the best harpooneers of the present day; inasmuch as this Leviathan
|
||
was slain at the very first dart. And let no man doubt this Arkite story; for in
|
||
the ancient Joppa, now Jaffa, on the Syrian coast, in one of the Pagan temples,
|
||
there stood for many ages the vast skeleton of a whale, which the city’s legends
|
||
and all the inhabitants asserted to be the identical bones of the monster that
|
||
Perseus slew. When the Romans took Joppa, the same skeleton was carried to Italy
|
||
in triumph. What seems most singular and suggestively important in this story,
|
||
is this: it was from Joppa that Jonah set sail.
|
||
|
||
Akin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda—indeed, by some supposed to be
|
||
indirectly derived from it—is that famous story of St. George and the Dragon;
|
||
which dragon I maintain to have been a whale; for in many old chronicles whales
|
||
and dragons are strangely jumbled together, and often stand for each other.
|
||
“Thou art as a lion of the waters, and as a dragon of the sea,” saith Ezekiel;
|
||
hereby, plainly meaning a whale; in truth, some versions of the Bible use that
|
||
word itself. Besides, it would much subtract from the glory of the exploit had
|
||
St. George but encountered a crawling reptile of the land, instead of doing
|
||
battle with the great monster of the deep. Any man may kill a snake, but only a
|
||
Perseus, a St. George, a Coffin, have the heart in them to march boldly up to a
|
||
whale.
|
||
|
||
Let not the modern paintings of this scene mislead us; for though the creature
|
||
encountered by that valiant whaleman of old is vaguely represented of a
|
||
griffin-like shape, and though the battle is depicted on land and the saint on
|
||
horseback, yet considering the great ignorance of those times, when the true
|
||
form of the whale was unknown to artists; and considering that as in Perseus’
|
||
case, St. George’s whale might have crawled up out of the sea on the beach; and
|
||
considering that the animal ridden by St. George might have been only a large
|
||
seal, or sea-horse; bearing all this in mind, it will not appear altogether
|
||
incompatible with the sacred legend and the ancientest draughts of the scene, to
|
||
hold this so-called dragon no other than the great Leviathan himself. In fact,
|
||
placed before the strict and piercing truth, this whole story will fare like
|
||
that fish, flesh, and fowl idol of the Philistines, Dagon by name; who being
|
||
planted before the ark of Israel, his horse’s head and both the palms of his
|
||
hands fell off from him, and only the stump or fishy part of him remained. Thus,
|
||
then, one of our own noble stamp, even a whaleman, is the tutelary guardian of
|
||
England; and by good rights, we harpooneers of Nantucket should be enrolled in
|
||
the most noble order of St. George. And therefore, let not the knights of that
|
||
honorable company (none of whom, I venture to say, have ever had to do with a
|
||
whale like their great patron), let them never eye a Nantucketer with disdain,
|
||
since even in our woollen frocks and tarred trowsers we are much better entitled
|
||
to St. George’s decoration than they.
|
||
|
||
Whether to admit Hercules among us or not, concerning this I long remained
|
||
dubious: for though according to the Greek mythologies, that antique Crockett
|
||
and Kit Carson—that brawny doer of rejoicing good deeds, was swallowed down and
|
||
thrown up by a whale; still, whether that strictly makes a whaleman of him, that
|
||
might be mooted. It nowhere appears that he ever actually harpooned his fish,
|
||
unless, indeed, from the inside. Nevertheless, he may be deemed a sort of
|
||
involuntary whaleman; at any rate the whale caught him, if he did not the whale.
|
||
I claim him for one of our clan.
|
||
|
||
But, by the best contradictory authorities, this Grecian story of Hercules and
|
||
the whale is considered to be derived from the still more ancient Hebrew story
|
||
of Jonah and the whale; and vice versâ; certainly they are very similar. If I
|
||
claim the demi-god then, why not the prophet?
|
||
|
||
Nor do heroes, saints, demigods, and prophets alone comprise the whole roll of
|
||
our order. Our grand master is still to be named; for like royal kings of old
|
||
times, we find the head waters of our fraternity in nothing short of the great
|
||
gods themselves. That wondrous oriental story is now to be rehearsed from the
|
||
Shaster, which gives us the dread Vishnoo, one of the three persons in the
|
||
godhead of the Hindoos; gives us this divine Vishnoo himself for our
|
||
Lord;—Vishnoo, who, by the first of his ten earthly incarnations, has for ever
|
||
set apart and sanctified the whale. When Brahma, or the God of Gods, saith the
|
||
Shaster, resolved to recreate the world after one of its periodical
|
||
dissolutions, he gave birth to Vishnoo, to preside over the work; but the Vedas,
|
||
or mystical books, whose perusal would seem to have been indispensable to
|
||
Vishnoo before beginning the creation, and which therefore must have contained
|
||
something in the shape of practical hints to young architects, these Vedas were
|
||
lying at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo became incarnate in a whale, and
|
||
sounding down in him to the uttermost depths, rescued the sacred volumes. Was
|
||
not this Vishnoo a whaleman, then? even as a man who rides a horse is called a
|
||
horseman?
|
||
|
||
Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there’s a member-roll for
|
||
you! What club but the whaleman’s can head off like that?
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 83. Jonah Historically Regarded.
|
||
|
||
Reference was made to the historical story of Jonah and the whale in the
|
||
preceding chapter. Now some Nantucketers rather distrust this historical story
|
||
of Jonah and the whale. But then there were some sceptical Greeks and Romans,
|
||
who, standing out from the orthodox pagans of their times, equally doubted the
|
||
story of Hercules and the whale, and Arion and the dolphin; and yet their
|
||
doubting those traditions did not make those traditions one whit the less facts,
|
||
for all that.
|
||
|
||
One old Sag-Harbor whaleman’s chief reason for questioning the Hebrew story was
|
||
this:—He had one of those quaint old-fashioned Bibles, embellished with curious,
|
||
unscientific plates; one of which represented Jonah’s whale with two spouts in
|
||
his head—a peculiarity only true with respect to a species of the Leviathan (the
|
||
Right Whale, and the varieties of that order), concerning which the fishermen
|
||
have this saying, “A penny roll would choke him”; his swallow is so very small.
|
||
But, to this, Bishop Jebb’s anticipative answer is ready. It is not necessary,
|
||
hints the Bishop, that we consider Jonah as tombed in the whale’s belly, but as
|
||
temporarily lodged in some part of his mouth. And this seems reasonable enough
|
||
in the good Bishop. For truly, the Right Whale’s mouth would accommodate a
|
||
couple of whist-tables, and comfortably seat all the players. Possibly, too,
|
||
Jonah might have ensconced himself in a hollow tooth; but, on second thoughts,
|
||
the Right Whale is toothless.
|
||
|
||
Another reason which Sag-Harbor (he went by that name) urged for his want of
|
||
faith in this matter of the prophet, was something obscurely in reference to his
|
||
incarcerated body and the whale’s gastric juices. But this objection likewise
|
||
falls to the ground, because a German exegetist supposes that Jonah must have
|
||
taken refuge in the floating body of a dead whale—even as the French soldiers in
|
||
the Russian campaign turned their dead horses into tents, and crawled into them.
|
||
Besides, it has been divined by other continental commentators, that when Jonah
|
||
was thrown overboard from the Joppa ship, he straightway effected his escape to
|
||
another vessel near by, some vessel with a whale for a figure-head; and, I would
|
||
add, possibly called “The Whale,” as some craft are nowadays christened the
|
||
“Shark,” the “Gull,” the “Eagle.” Nor have there been wanting learned exegetists
|
||
who have opined that the whale mentioned in the book of Jonah merely meant a
|
||
life-preserver—an inflated bag of wind—which the endangered prophet swam to, and
|
||
so was saved from a watery doom. Poor Sag-Harbor, therefore, seems worsted all
|
||
round. But he had still another reason for his want of faith. It was this, if I
|
||
remember right: Jonah was swallowed by the whale in the Mediterranean Sea, and
|
||
after three days he was vomited up somewhere within three days’ journey of
|
||
Nineveh, a city on the Tigris, very much more than three days’ journey across
|
||
from the nearest point of the Mediterranean coast. How is that?
|
||
|
||
But was there no other way for the whale to land the prophet within that short
|
||
distance of Nineveh? Yes. He might have carried him round by the way of the Cape
|
||
of Good Hope. But not to speak of the passage through the whole length of the
|
||
Mediterranean, and another passage up the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, such a
|
||
supposition would involve the complete circumnavigation of all Africa in three
|
||
days, not to speak of the Tigris waters, near the site of Nineveh, being too
|
||
shallow for any whale to swim in. Besides, this idea of Jonah’s weathering the
|
||
Cape of Good Hope at so early a day would wrest the honor of the discovery of
|
||
that great headland from Bartholomew Diaz, its reputed discoverer, and so make
|
||
modern history a liar.
|
||
|
||
But all these foolish arguments of old Sag-Harbor only evinced his foolish pride
|
||
of reason—a thing still more reprehensible in him, seeing that he had but little
|
||
learning except what he had picked up from the sun and the sea. I say it only
|
||
shows his foolish, impious pride, and abominable, devilish rebellion against the
|
||
reverend clergy. For by a Portuguese Catholic priest, this very idea of Jonah’s
|
||
going to Nineveh via the Cape of Good Hope was advanced as a signal
|
||
magnification of the general miracle. And so it was. Besides, to this day, the
|
||
highly enlightened Turks devoutly believe in the historical story of Jonah. And
|
||
some three centuries ago, an English traveller in old Harris’s Voyages, speaks
|
||
of a Turkish Mosque built in honor of Jonah, in which Mosque was a miraculous
|
||
lamp that burnt without any oil.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 84. Pitchpoling.
|
||
|
||
To make them run easily and swiftly, the axles of carriages are anointed; and
|
||
for much the same purpose, some whalers perform an analogous operation upon
|
||
their boat; they grease the bottom. Nor is it to be doubted that as such a
|
||
procedure can do no harm, it may possibly be of no contemptible advantage;
|
||
considering that oil and water are hostile; that oil is a sliding thing, and
|
||
that the object in view is to make the boat slide bravely. Queequeg believed
|
||
strongly in anointing his boat, and one morning not long after the German ship
|
||
Jungfrau disappeared, took more than customary pains in that occupation;
|
||
crawling under its bottom, where it hung over the side, and rubbing in the
|
||
unctuousness as though diligently seeking to insure a crop of hair from the
|
||
craft’s bald keel. He seemed to be working in obedience to some particular
|
||
presentiment. Nor did it remain unwarranted by the event.
|
||
|
||
Towards noon whales were raised; but so soon as the ship sailed down to them,
|
||
they turned and fled with swift precipitancy; a disordered flight, as of
|
||
Cleopatra’s barges from Actium.
|
||
|
||
Nevertheless, the boats pursued, and Stubb’s was foremost. By great exertion,
|
||
Tashtego at last succeeded in planting one iron; but the stricken whale, without
|
||
at all sounding, still continued his horizontal flight, with added fleetness.
|
||
Such unintermitted strainings upon the planted iron must sooner or later
|
||
inevitably extract it. It became imperative to lance the flying whale, or be
|
||
content to lose him. But to haul the boat up to his flank was impossible, he
|
||
swam so fast and furious. What then remained?
|
||
|
||
Of all the wondrous devices and dexterities, the sleights of hand and countless
|
||
subtleties, to which the veteran whaleman is so often forced, none exceed that
|
||
fine manœuvre with the lance called pitchpoling. Small sword, or broad sword, in
|
||
all its exercises boasts nothing like it. It is only indispensable with an
|
||
inveterate running whale; its grand fact and feature is the wonderful distance
|
||
to which the long lance is accurately darted from a violently rocking, jerking
|
||
boat, under extreme headway. Steel and wood included, the entire spear is some
|
||
ten or twelve feet in length; the staff is much slighter than that of the
|
||
harpoon, and also of a lighter material—pine. It is furnished with a small rope
|
||
called a warp, of considerable length, by which it can be hauled back to the
|
||
hand after darting.
|
||
|
||
But before going further, it is important to mention here, that though the
|
||
harpoon may be pitchpoled in the same way with the lance, yet it is seldom done;
|
||
and when done, is still less frequently successful, on account of the greater
|
||
weight and inferior length of the harpoon as compared with the lance, which in
|
||
effect become serious drawbacks. As a general thing, therefore, you must first
|
||
get fast to a whale, before any pitchpoling comes into play.
|
||
|
||
Look now at Stubb; a man who from his humorous, deliberate coolness and
|
||
equanimity in the direst emergencies, was specially qualified to excel in
|
||
pitchpoling. Look at him; he stands upright in the tossed bow of the flying
|
||
boat; wrapt in fleecy foam, the towing whale is forty feet ahead. Handling the
|
||
long lance lightly, glancing twice or thrice along its length to see if it be
|
||
exactly straight, Stubb whistlingly gathers up the coil of the warp in one hand,
|
||
so as to secure its free end in his grasp, leaving the rest unobstructed. Then
|
||
holding the lance full before his waistband’s middle, he levels it at the whale;
|
||
when, covering him with it, he steadily depresses the butt-end in his hand,
|
||
thereby elevating the point till the weapon stands fairly balanced upon his
|
||
palm, fifteen feet in the air. He minds you somewhat of a juggler, balancing a
|
||
long staff on his chin. Next moment with a rapid, nameless impulse, in a superb
|
||
lofty arch the bright steel spans the foaming distance, and quivers in the life
|
||
spot of the whale. Instead of sparkling water, he now spouts red blood.
|
||
|
||
“That drove the spigot out of him!” cried Stubb. “’Tis July’s immortal Fourth;
|
||
all fountains must run wine today! Would now, it were old Orleans whiskey, or
|
||
old Ohio, or unspeakable old Monongahela! Then, Tashtego, lad, I’d have ye hold
|
||
a canakin to the jet, and we’d drink round it! Yea, verily, hearts alive, we’d
|
||
brew choice punch in the spread of his spout-hole there, and from that live
|
||
punch-bowl quaff the living stuff.”
|
||
|
||
Again and again to such gamesome talk, the dexterous dart is repeated, the spear
|
||
returning to its master like a greyhound held in skilful leash. The agonized
|
||
whale goes into his flurry; the tow-line is slackened, and the pitchpoler
|
||
dropping astern, folds his hands, and mutely watches the monster die.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 85. The Fountain.
|
||
|
||
That for six thousand years—and no one knows how many millions of ages
|
||
before—the great whales should have been spouting all over the sea, and
|
||
sprinkling and mistifying the gardens of the deep, as with so many sprinkling or
|
||
mistifying pots; and that for some centuries back, thousands of hunters should
|
||
have been close by the fountain of the whale, watching these sprinklings and
|
||
spoutings—that all this should be, and yet, that down to this blessed minute
|
||
(fifteen and a quarter minutes past one o’clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of
|
||
December, A.D. 1851), it should still remain a problem, whether these spoutings
|
||
are, after all, really water, or nothing but vapor—this is surely a noteworthy
|
||
thing.
|
||
|
||
Let us, then, look at this matter, along with some interesting items contingent.
|
||
Every one knows that by the peculiar cunning of their gills, the finny tribes in
|
||
general breathe the air which at all times is combined with the element in which
|
||
they swim; hence, a herring or a cod might live a century, and never once raise
|
||
its head above the surface. But owing to his marked internal structure which
|
||
gives him regular lungs, like a human being’s, the whale can only live by
|
||
inhaling the disengaged air in the open atmosphere. Wherefore the necessity for
|
||
his periodical visits to the upper world. But he cannot in any degree breathe
|
||
through his mouth, for, in his ordinary attitude, the Sperm Whale’s mouth is
|
||
buried at least eight feet beneath the surface; and what is still more, his
|
||
windpipe has no connexion with his mouth. No, he breathes through his spiracle
|
||
alone; and this is on the top of his head.
|
||
|
||
If I say, that in any creature breathing is only a function indispensable to
|
||
vitality, inasmuch as it withdraws from the air a certain element, which being
|
||
subsequently brought into contact with the blood imparts to the blood its
|
||
vivifying principle, I do not think I shall err; though I may possibly use some
|
||
superfluous scientific words. Assume it, and it follows that if all the blood in
|
||
a man could be aerated with one breath, he might then seal up his nostrils and
|
||
not fetch another for a considerable time. That is to say, he would then live
|
||
without breathing. Anomalous as it may seem, this is precisely the case with the
|
||
whale, who systematically lives, by intervals, his full hour and more (when at
|
||
the bottom) without drawing a single breath, or so much as in any way inhaling a
|
||
particle of air; for, remember, he has no gills. How is this? Between his ribs
|
||
and on each side of his spine he is supplied with a remarkable involved Cretan
|
||
labyrinth of vermicelli-like vessels, which vessels, when he quits the surface,
|
||
are completely distended with oxygenated blood. So that for an hour or more, a
|
||
thousand fathoms in the sea, he carries a surplus stock of vitality in him, just
|
||
as the camel crossing the waterless desert carries a surplus supply of drink for
|
||
future use in its four supplementary stomachs. The anatomical fact of this
|
||
labyrinth is indisputable; and that the supposition founded upon it is
|
||
reasonable and true, seems the more cogent to me, when I consider the otherwise
|
||
inexplicable obstinacy of that leviathan in having his spoutings out, as the
|
||
fishermen phrase it. This is what I mean. If unmolested, upon rising to the
|
||
surface, the Sperm Whale will continue there for a period of time exactly
|
||
uniform with all his other unmolested risings. Say he stays eleven minutes, and
|
||
jets seventy times, that is, respires seventy breaths; then whenever he rises
|
||
again, he will be sure to have his seventy breaths over again, to a minute. Now,
|
||
if after he fetches a few breaths you alarm him, so that he sounds, he will be
|
||
always dodging up again to make good his regular allowance of air. And not till
|
||
those seventy breaths are told, will he finally go down to stay out his full
|
||
term below. Remark, however, that in different individuals these rates are
|
||
different; but in any one they are alike. Now, why should the whale thus insist
|
||
upon having his spoutings out, unless it be to replenish his reservoir of air,
|
||
ere descending for good? How obvious is it, too, that this necessity for the
|
||
whale’s rising exposes him to all the fatal hazards of the chase. For not by
|
||
hook or by net could this vast leviathan be caught, when sailing a thousand
|
||
fathoms beneath the sunlight. Not so much thy skill, then, O hunter, as the
|
||
great necessities that strike the victory to thee!
|
||
|
||
In man, breathing is incessantly going on—one breath only serving for two or
|
||
three pulsations; so that whatever other business he has to attend to, waking or
|
||
sleeping, breathe he must, or die he will. But the Sperm Whale only breathes
|
||
about one seventh or Sunday of his time.
|
||
|
||
It has been said that the whale only breathes through his spout-hole; if it
|
||
could truthfully be added that his spouts are mixed with water, then I opine we
|
||
should be furnished with the reason why his sense of smell seems obliterated in
|
||
him; for the only thing about him that at all answers to his nose is that
|
||
identical spout-hole; and being so clogged with two elements, it could not be
|
||
expected to have the power of smelling. But owing to the mystery of the
|
||
spout—whether it be water or whether it be vapor—no absolute certainty can as
|
||
yet be arrived at on this head. Sure it is, nevertheless, that the Sperm Whale
|
||
has no proper olfactories. But what does he want of them? No roses, no violets,
|
||
no Cologne-water in the sea.
|
||
|
||
Furthermore, as his windpipe solely opens into the tube of his spouting canal,
|
||
and as that long canal—like the grand Erie Canal—is furnished with a sort of
|
||
locks (that open and shut) for the downward retention of air or the upward
|
||
exclusion of water, therefore the whale has no voice; unless you insult him by
|
||
saying, that when he so strangely rumbles, he talks through his nose. But then
|
||
again, what has the whale to say? Seldom have I known any profound being that
|
||
had anything to say to this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way
|
||
of getting a living. Oh! happy that the world is such an excellent listener!
|
||
|
||
Now, the spouting canal of the Sperm Whale, chiefly intended as it is for the
|
||
conveyance of air, and for several feet laid along, horizontally, just beneath
|
||
the upper surface of his head, and a little to one side; this curious canal is
|
||
very much like a gas-pipe laid down in a city on one side of a street. But the
|
||
question returns whether this gas-pipe is also a water-pipe; in other words,
|
||
whether the spout of the Sperm Whale is the mere vapor of the exhaled breath, or
|
||
whether that exhaled breath is mixed with water taken in at the mouth, and
|
||
discharged through the spiracle. It is certain that the mouth indirectly
|
||
communicates with the spouting canal; but it cannot be proved that this is for
|
||
the purpose of discharging water through the spiracle. Because the greatest
|
||
necessity for so doing would seem to be, when in feeding he accidentally takes
|
||
in water. But the Sperm Whale’s food is far beneath the surface, and there he
|
||
cannot spout even if he would. Besides, if you regard him very closely, and time
|
||
him with your watch, you will find that when unmolested, there is an undeviating
|
||
rhyme between the periods of his jets and the ordinary periods of respiration.
|
||
|
||
But why pester one with all this reasoning on the subject? Speak out! You have
|
||
seen him spout; then declare what the spout is; can you not tell water from air?
|
||
My dear sir, in this world it is not so easy to settle these plain things. I
|
||
have ever found your plain things the knottiest of all. And as for this whale
|
||
spout, you might almost stand in it, and yet be undecided as to what it is
|
||
precisely.
|
||
|
||
The central body of it is hidden in the snowy sparkling mist enveloping it; and
|
||
how can you certainly tell whether any water falls from it, when, always, when
|
||
you are close enough to a whale to get a close view of his spout, he is in a
|
||
prodigious commotion, the water cascading all around him. And if at such times
|
||
you should think that you really perceived drops of moisture in the spout, how
|
||
do you know that they are not merely condensed from its vapor; or how do you
|
||
know that they are not those identical drops superficially lodged in the
|
||
spout-hole fissure, which is countersunk into the summit of the whale’s head?
|
||
For even when tranquilly swimming through the mid-day sea in a calm, with his
|
||
elevated hump sun-dried as a dromedary’s in the desert; even then, the whale
|
||
always carries a small basin of water on his head, as under a blazing sun you
|
||
will sometimes see a cavity in a rock filled up with rain.
|
||
|
||
Nor is it at all prudent for the hunter to be over curious touching the precise
|
||
nature of the whale spout. It will not do for him to be peering into it, and
|
||
putting his face in it. You cannot go with your pitcher to this fountain and
|
||
fill it, and bring it away. For even when coming into slight contact with the
|
||
outer, vapory shreds of the jet, which will often happen, your skin will
|
||
feverishly smart, from the acridness of the thing so touching it. And I know
|
||
one, who coming into still closer contact with the spout, whether with some
|
||
scientific object in view, or otherwise, I cannot say, the skin peeled off from
|
||
his cheek and arm. Wherefore, among whalemen, the spout is deemed poisonous;
|
||
they try to evade it. Another thing; I have heard it said, and I do not much
|
||
doubt it, that if the jet is fairly spouted into your eyes, it will blind you.
|
||
The wisest thing the investigator can do then, it seems to me, is to let this
|
||
deadly spout alone.
|
||
|
||
Still, we can hypothesize, even if we cannot prove and establish. My hypothesis
|
||
is this: that the spout is nothing but mist. And besides other reasons, to this
|
||
conclusion I am impelled, by considerations touching the great inherent dignity
|
||
and sublimity of the Sperm Whale; I account him no common, shallow being,
|
||
inasmuch as it is an undisputed fact that he is never found on soundings, or
|
||
near shores; all other whales sometimes are. He is both ponderous and profound.
|
||
And I am convinced that from the heads of all ponderous profound beings, such as
|
||
Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always goes up a
|
||
certain semi-visible steam, while in the act of thinking deep thoughts. While
|
||
composing a little treatise on Eternity, I had the curiosity to place a mirror
|
||
before me; and ere long saw reflected there, a curious involved worming and
|
||
undulation in the atmosphere over my head. The invariable moisture of my hair,
|
||
while plunged in deep thought, after six cups of hot tea in my thin shingled
|
||
attic, of an August noon; this seems an additional argument for the above
|
||
supposition.
|
||
|
||
And how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster, to behold him
|
||
solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea; his vast, mild head overhung by a
|
||
canopy of vapor, engendered by his incommunicable contemplations, and that
|
||
vapor—as you will sometimes see it—glorified by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself
|
||
had put its seal upon his thoughts. For, d’ye see, rainbows do not visit the
|
||
clear air; they only irradiate vapor. And so, through all the thick mists of the
|
||
dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog
|
||
with a heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny;
|
||
but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all
|
||
things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes
|
||
neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal
|
||
eye.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 86. The Tail.
|
||
|
||
Other poets have warbled the praises of the soft eye of the antelope, and the
|
||
lovely plumage of the bird that never alights; less celestial, I celebrate a
|
||
tail.
|
||
|
||
Reckoning the largest sized Sperm Whale’s tail to begin at that point of the
|
||
trunk where it tapers to about the girth of a man, it comprises upon its upper
|
||
surface alone, an area of at least fifty square feet. The compact round body of
|
||
its root expands into two broad, firm, flat palms or flukes, gradually shoaling
|
||
away to less than an inch in thickness. At the crotch or junction, these flukes
|
||
slightly overlap, then sideways recede from each other like wings, leaving a
|
||
wide vacancy between. In no living thing are the lines of beauty more
|
||
exquisitely defined than in the crescentic borders of these flukes. At its
|
||
utmost expansion in the full grown whale, the tail will considerably exceed
|
||
twenty feet across.
|
||
|
||
The entire member seems a dense webbed bed of welded sinews; but cut into it,
|
||
and you find that three distinct strata compose it:—upper, middle, and lower.
|
||
The fibres in the upper and lower layers, are long and horizontal; those of the
|
||
middle one, very short, and running crosswise between the outside layers. This
|
||
triune structure, as much as anything else, imparts power to the tail. To the
|
||
student of old Roman walls, the middle layer will furnish a curious parallel to
|
||
the thin course of tiles always alternating with the stone in those wonderful
|
||
relics of the antique, and which undoubtedly contribute so much to the great
|
||
strength of the masonry.
|
||
|
||
But as if this vast local power in the tendinous tail were not enough, the whole
|
||
bulk of the leviathan is knit over with a warp and woof of muscular fibres and
|
||
filaments, which passing on either side the loins and running down into the
|
||
flukes, insensibly blend with them, and largely contribute to their might; so
|
||
that in the tail the confluent measureless force of the whole whale seems
|
||
concentrated to a point. Could annihilation occur to matter, this were the thing
|
||
to do it.
|
||
|
||
Nor does this—its amazing strength, at all tend to cripple the graceful flexion
|
||
of its motions; where infantileness of ease undulates through a Titanism of
|
||
power. On the contrary, those motions derive their most appalling beauty from
|
||
it. Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it; and
|
||
in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic. Take
|
||
away the tied tendons that all over seem bursting from the marble in the carved
|
||
Hercules, and its charm would be gone. As devout Eckerman lifted the linen sheet
|
||
from the naked corpse of Goethe, he was overwhelmed with the massive chest of
|
||
the man, that seemed as a Roman triumphal arch. When Angelo paints even God the
|
||
Father in human form, mark what robustness is there. And whatever they may
|
||
reveal of the divine love in the Son, the soft, curled, hermaphroditical Italian
|
||
pictures, in which his idea has been most successfully embodied; these pictures,
|
||
so destitute as they are of all brawniness, hint nothing of any power, but the
|
||
mere negative, feminine one of submission and endurance, which on all hands it
|
||
is conceded, form the peculiar practical virtues of his teachings.
|
||
|
||
Such is the subtle elasticity of the organ I treat of, that whether wielded in
|
||
sport, or in earnest, or in anger, whatever be the mood it be in, its flexions
|
||
are invariably marked by exceeding grace. Therein no fairy’s arm can transcend
|
||
it.
|
||
|
||
Five great motions are peculiar to it. First, when used as a fin for
|
||
progression; Second, when used as a mace in battle; Third, in sweeping; Fourth,
|
||
in lobtailing; Fifth, in peaking flukes.
|
||
|
||
First: Being horizontal in its position, the Leviathan’s tail acts in a
|
||
different manner from the tails of all other sea creatures. It never wriggles.
|
||
In man or fish, wriggling is a sign of inferiority. To the whale, his tail is
|
||
the sole means of propulsion. Scroll-wise coiled forwards beneath the body, and
|
||
then rapidly sprung backwards, it is this which gives that singular darting,
|
||
leaping motion to the monster when furiously swimming. His side-fins only serve
|
||
to steer by.
|
||
|
||
Second: It is a little significant, that while one sperm whale only fights
|
||
another sperm whale with his head and jaw, nevertheless, in his conflicts with
|
||
man, he chiefly and contemptuously uses his tail. In striking at a boat, he
|
||
swiftly curves away his flukes from it, and the blow is only inflicted by the
|
||
recoil. If it be made in the unobstructed air, especially if it descend to its
|
||
mark, the stroke is then simply irresistible. No ribs of man or boat can
|
||
withstand it. Your only salvation lies in eluding it; but if it comes sideways
|
||
through the opposing water, then partly owing to the light buoyancy of the
|
||
whale-boat, and the elasticity of its materials, a cracked rib or a dashed plank
|
||
or two, a sort of stitch in the side, is generally the most serious result.
|
||
These submerged side blows are so often received in the fishery, that they are
|
||
accounted mere child’s play. Some one strips off a frock, and the hole is
|
||
stopped.
|
||
|
||
Third: I cannot demonstrate it, but it seems to me, that in the whale the sense
|
||
of touch is concentrated in the tail; for in this respect there is a delicacy in
|
||
it only equalled by the daintiness of the elephant’s trunk. This delicacy is
|
||
chiefly evinced in the action of sweeping, when in maidenly gentleness the whale
|
||
with a certain soft slowness moves his immense flukes from side to side upon the
|
||
surface of the sea; and if he feel but a sailor’s whisker, woe to that sailor,
|
||
whiskers and all. What tenderness there is in that preliminary touch! Had this
|
||
tail any prehensile power, I should straightway bethink me of Darmonodes’
|
||
elephant that so frequented the flower-market, and with low salutations
|
||
presented nosegays to damsels, and then caressed their zones. On more accounts
|
||
than one, a pity it is that the whale does not possess this prehensile virtue in
|
||
his tail; for I have heard of yet another elephant, that when wounded in the
|
||
fight, curved round his trunk and extracted the dart.
|
||
|
||
Fourth: Stealing unawares upon the whale in the fancied security of the middle
|
||
of solitary seas, you find him unbent from the vast corpulence of his dignity,
|
||
and kitten-like, he plays on the ocean as if it were a hearth. But still you see
|
||
his power in his play. The broad palms of his tail are flirted high into the
|
||
air; then smiting the surface, the thunderous concussion resounds for miles. You
|
||
would almost think a great gun had been discharged; and if you noticed the light
|
||
wreath of vapor from the spiracle at his other extremity, you would think that
|
||
that was the smoke from the touch-hole.
|
||
|
||
Fifth: As in the ordinary floating posture of the leviathan the flukes lie
|
||
considerably below the level of his back, they are then completely out of sight
|
||
beneath the surface; but when he is about to plunge into the deeps, his entire
|
||
flukes with at least thirty feet of his body are tossed erect in the air, and so
|
||
remain vibrating a moment, till they downwards shoot out of view. Excepting the
|
||
sublime breach—somewhere else to be described—this peaking of the whale’s flukes
|
||
is perhaps the grandest sight to be seen in all animated nature. Out of the
|
||
bottomless profundities the gigantic tail seems spasmodically snatching at the
|
||
highest heaven. So in dreams, have I seen majestic Satan thrusting forth his
|
||
tormented colossal claw from the flame Baltic of Hell. But in gazing at such
|
||
scenes, it is all in all what mood you are in; if in the Dantean, the devils
|
||
will occur to you; if in that of Isaiah, the archangels. Standing at the
|
||
mast-head of my ship during a sunrise that crimsoned sky and sea, I once saw a
|
||
large herd of whales in the east, all heading towards the sun, and for a moment
|
||
vibrating in concert with peaked flukes. As it seemed to me at the time, such a
|
||
grand embodiment of adoration of the gods was never beheld, even in Persia, the
|
||
home of the fire worshippers. As Ptolemy Philopater testified of the African
|
||
elephant, I then testified of the whale, pronouncing him the most devout of all
|
||
beings. For according to King Juba, the military elephants of antiquity often
|
||
hailed the morning with their trunks uplifted in the profoundest silence.
|
||
|
||
The chance comparison in this chapter, between the whale and the elephant, so
|
||
far as some aspects of the tail of the one and the trunk of the other are
|
||
concerned, should not tend to place those two opposite organs on an equality,
|
||
much less the creatures to which they respectively belong. For as the mightiest
|
||
elephant is but a terrier to Leviathan, so, compared with Leviathan’s tail, his
|
||
trunk is but the stalk of a lily. The most direful blow from the elephant’s
|
||
trunk were as the playful tap of a fan, compared with the measureless crush and
|
||
crash of the sperm whale’s ponderous flukes, which in repeated instances have
|
||
one after the other hurled entire boats with all their oars and crews into the
|
||
air, very much as an Indian juggler tosses his balls.*
|
||
|
||
*Though all comparison in the way of general bulk between the whale and the
|
||
elephant is preposterous, inasmuch as in that particular the elephant stands in
|
||
much the same respect to the whale that a dog does to the elephant;
|
||
nevertheless, there are not wanting some points of curious similitude; among
|
||
these is the spout. It is well known that the elephant will often draw up water
|
||
or dust in his trunk, and then elevating it, jet it forth in a stream.
|
||
|
||
The more I consider this mighty tail, the more do I deplore my inability to
|
||
express it. At times there are gestures in it, which, though they would well
|
||
grace the hand of man, remain wholly inexplicable. In an extensive herd, so
|
||
remarkable, occasionally, are these mystic gestures, that I have heard hunters
|
||
who have declared them akin to Free-Mason signs and symbols; that the whale,
|
||
indeed, by these methods intelligently conversed with the world. Nor are there
|
||
wanting other motions of the whale in his general body, full of strangeness, and
|
||
unaccountable to his most experienced assailant. Dissect him how I may, then, I
|
||
but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will. But if I know not even the
|
||
tail of this whale, how understand his head? much more, how comprehend his face,
|
||
when face he has none? Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say,
|
||
but my face shall not be seen. But I cannot completely make out his back parts;
|
||
and hint what he will about his face, I say again he has no face.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 87. The Grand Armada.
|
||
|
||
The long and narrow peninsula of Malacca, extending south-eastward from the
|
||
territories of Birmah, forms the most southerly point of all Asia. In a
|
||
continuous line from that peninsula stretch the long islands of Sumatra, Java,
|
||
Bally, and Timor; which, with many others, form a vast mole, or rampart,
|
||
lengthwise connecting Asia with Australia, and dividing the long unbroken Indian
|
||
ocean from the thickly studded oriental archipelagoes. This rampart is pierced
|
||
by several sally-ports for the convenience of ships and whales; conspicuous
|
||
among which are the straits of Sunda and Malacca. By the straits of Sunda,
|
||
chiefly, vessels bound to China from the west, emerge into the China seas.
|
||
|
||
Those narrow straits of Sunda divide Sumatra from Java; and standing midway in
|
||
that vast rampart of islands, buttressed by that bold green promontory, known to
|
||
seamen as Java Head; they not a little correspond to the central gateway opening
|
||
into some vast walled empire: and considering the inexhaustible wealth of
|
||
spices, and silks, and jewels, and gold, and ivory, with which the thousand
|
||
islands of that oriental sea are enriched, it seems a significant provision of
|
||
nature, that such treasures, by the very formation of the land, should at least
|
||
bear the appearance, however ineffectual, of being guarded from the all-grasping
|
||
western world. The shores of the Straits of Sunda are unsupplied with those
|
||
domineering fortresses which guard the entrances to the Mediterranean, the
|
||
Baltic, and the Propontis. Unlike the Danes, these Orientals do not demand the
|
||
obsequious homage of lowered top-sails from the endless procession of ships
|
||
before the wind, which for centuries past, by night and by day, have passed
|
||
between the islands of Sumatra and Java, freighted with the costliest cargoes of
|
||
the east. But while they freely waive a ceremonial like this, they do by no
|
||
means renounce their claim to more solid tribute.
|
||
|
||
Time out of mind the piratical proas of the Malays, lurking among the low shaded
|
||
coves and islets of Sumatra, have sallied out upon the vessels sailing through
|
||
the straits, fiercely demanding tribute at the point of their spears. Though by
|
||
the repeated bloody chastisements they have received at the hands of European
|
||
cruisers, the audacity of these corsairs has of late been somewhat repressed;
|
||
yet, even at the present day, we occasionally hear of English and American
|
||
vessels, which, in those waters, have been remorselessly boarded and pillaged.
|
||
|
||
With a fair, fresh wind, the Pequod was now drawing nigh to these straits; Ahab
|
||
purposing to pass through them into the Javan sea, and thence, cruising
|
||
northwards, over waters known to be frequented here and there by the Sperm
|
||
Whale, sweep inshore by the Philippine Islands, and gain the far coast of Japan,
|
||
in time for the great whaling season there. By these means, the circumnavigating
|
||
Pequod would sweep almost all the known Sperm Whale cruising grounds of the
|
||
world, previous to descending upon the Line in the Pacific; where Ahab, though
|
||
everywhere else foiled in his pursuit, firmly counted upon giving battle to Moby
|
||
Dick, in the sea he was most known to frequent; and at a season when he might
|
||
most reasonably be presumed to be haunting it.
|
||
|
||
But how now? in this zoned quest, does Ahab touch no land? does his crew drink
|
||
air? Surely, he will stop for water. Nay. For a long time, now, the
|
||
circus-running sun has raced within his fiery ring, and needs no sustenance but
|
||
what’s in himself. So Ahab. Mark this, too, in the whaler. While other hulls are
|
||
loaded down with alien stuff, to be transferred to foreign wharves; the
|
||
world-wandering whale-ship carries no cargo but herself and crew, their weapons
|
||
and their wants. She has a whole lake’s contents bottled in her ample hold. She
|
||
is ballasted with utilities; not altogether with unusable pig-lead and
|
||
kentledge. She carries years’ water in her. Clear old prime Nantucket water;
|
||
which, when three years afloat, the Nantucketer, in the Pacific, prefers to
|
||
drink before the brackish fluid, but yesterday rafted off in casks, from the
|
||
Peruvian or Indian streams. Hence it is, that, while other ships may have gone
|
||
to China from New York, and back again, touching at a score of ports, the
|
||
whale-ship, in all that interval, may not have sighted one grain of soil; her
|
||
crew having seen no man but floating seamen like themselves. So that did you
|
||
carry them the news that another flood had come; they would only answer—“Well,
|
||
boys, here’s the ark!”
|
||
|
||
Now, as many Sperm Whales had been captured off the western coast of Java, in
|
||
the near vicinity of the Straits of Sunda; indeed, as most of the ground,
|
||
roundabout, was generally recognised by the fishermen as an excellent spot for
|
||
cruising; therefore, as the Pequod gained more and more upon Java Head, the
|
||
look-outs were repeatedly hailed, and admonished to keep wide awake. But though
|
||
the green palmy cliffs of the land soon loomed on the starboard bow, and with
|
||
delighted nostrils the fresh cinnamon was snuffed in the air, yet not a single
|
||
jet was descried. Almost renouncing all thought of falling in with any game
|
||
hereabouts, the ship had well nigh entered the straits, when the customary
|
||
cheering cry was heard from aloft, and ere long a spectacle of singular
|
||
magnificence saluted us.
|
||
|
||
But here be it premised, that owing to the unwearied activity with which of late
|
||
they have been hunted over all four oceans, the Sperm Whales, instead of almost
|
||
invariably sailing in small detached companies, as in former times, are now
|
||
frequently met with in extensive herds, sometimes embracing so great a
|
||
multitude, that it would almost seem as if numerous nations of them had sworn
|
||
solemn league and covenant for mutual assistance and protection. To this
|
||
aggregation of the Sperm Whale into such immense caravans, may be imputed the
|
||
circumstance that even in the best cruising grounds, you may now sometimes sail
|
||
for weeks and months together, without being greeted by a single spout; and then
|
||
be suddenly saluted by what sometimes seems thousands on thousands.
|
||
|
||
Broad on both bows, at the distance of some two or three miles, and forming a
|
||
great semicircle, embracing one half of the level horizon, a continuous chain of
|
||
whale-jets were up-playing and sparkling in the noon-day air. Unlike the
|
||
straight perpendicular twin-jets of the Right Whale, which, dividing at top,
|
||
fall over in two branches, like the cleft drooping boughs of a willow, the
|
||
single forward-slanting spout of the Sperm Whale presents a thick curled bush of
|
||
white mist, continually rising and falling away to leeward.
|
||
|
||
Seen from the Pequod’s deck, then, as she would rise on a high hill of the sea,
|
||
this host of vapory spouts, individually curling up into the air, and beheld
|
||
through a blending atmosphere of bluish haze, showed like the thousand cheerful
|
||
chimneys of some dense metropolis, descried of a balmy autumnal morning, by some
|
||
horseman on a height.
|
||
|
||
As marching armies approaching an unfriendly defile in the mountains, accelerate
|
||
their march, all eagerness to place that perilous passage in their rear, and
|
||
once more expand in comparative security upon the plain; even so did this vast
|
||
fleet of whales now seem hurrying forward through the straits; gradually
|
||
contracting the wings of their semicircle, and swimming on, in one solid, but
|
||
still crescentic centre.
|
||
|
||
Crowding all sail the Pequod pressed after them; the harpooneers handling their
|
||
weapons, and loudly cheering from the heads of their yet suspended boats. If the
|
||
wind only held, little doubt had they, that chased through these Straits of
|
||
Sunda, the vast host would only deploy into the Oriental seas to witness the
|
||
capture of not a few of their number. And who could tell whether, in that
|
||
congregated caravan, Moby Dick himself might not temporarily be swimming, like
|
||
the worshipped white-elephant in the coronation procession of the Siamese! So
|
||
with stun-sail piled on stun-sail, we sailed along, driving these leviathans
|
||
before us; when, of a sudden, the voice of Tashtego was heard, loudly directing
|
||
attention to something in our wake.
|
||
|
||
Corresponding to the crescent in our van, we beheld another in our rear. It
|
||
seemed formed of detached white vapors, rising and falling something like the
|
||
spouts of the whales; only they did not so completely come and go; for they
|
||
constantly hovered, without finally disappearing. Levelling his glass at this
|
||
sight, Ahab quickly revolved in his pivot-hole, crying, “Aloft there, and rig
|
||
whips and buckets to wet the sails;—Malays, sir, and after us!”
|
||
|
||
As if too long lurking behind the headlands, till the Pequod should fairly have
|
||
entered the straits, these rascally Asiatics were now in hot pursuit, to make up
|
||
for their over-cautious delay. But when the swift Pequod, with a fresh leading
|
||
wind, was herself in hot chase; how very kind of these tawny philanthropists to
|
||
assist in speeding her on to her own chosen pursuit,—mere riding-whips and
|
||
rowels to her, that they were. As with glass under arm, Ahab to-and-fro paced
|
||
the deck; in his forward turn beholding the monsters he chased, and in the after
|
||
one the bloodthirsty pirates chasing him; some such fancy as the above seemed
|
||
his. And when he glanced upon the green walls of the watery defile in which the
|
||
ship was then sailing, and bethought him that through that gate lay the route to
|
||
his vengeance, and beheld, how that through that same gate he was now both
|
||
chasing and being chased to his deadly end; and not only that, but a herd of
|
||
remorseless wild pirates and inhuman atheistical devils were infernally cheering
|
||
him on with their curses;—when all these conceits had passed through his brain,
|
||
Ahab’s brow was left gaunt and ribbed, like the black sand beach after some
|
||
stormy tide has been gnawing it, without being able to drag the firm thing from
|
||
its place.
|
||
|
||
But thoughts like these troubled very few of the reckless crew; and when, after
|
||
steadily dropping and dropping the pirates astern, the Pequod at last shot by
|
||
the vivid green Cockatoo Point on the Sumatra side, emerging at last upon the
|
||
broad waters beyond; then, the harpooneers seemed more to grieve that the swift
|
||
whales had been gaining upon the ship, than to rejoice that the ship had so
|
||
victoriously gained upon the Malays. But still driving on in the wake of the
|
||
whales, at length they seemed abating their speed; gradually the ship neared
|
||
them; and the wind now dying away, word was passed to spring to the boats. But
|
||
no sooner did the herd, by some presumed wonderful instinct of the Sperm Whale,
|
||
become notified of the three keels that were after them,—though as yet a mile in
|
||
their rear,—than they rallied again, and forming in close ranks and battalions,
|
||
so that their spouts all looked like flashing lines of stacked bayonets, moved
|
||
on with redoubled velocity.
|
||
|
||
Stripped to our shirts and drawers, we sprang to the white-ash, and after
|
||
several hours’ pulling were almost disposed to renounce the chase, when a
|
||
general pausing commotion among the whales gave animating token that they were
|
||
now at last under the influence of that strange perplexity of inert
|
||
irresolution, which, when the fishermen perceive it in the whale, they say he is
|
||
gallied. The compact martial columns in which they had been hitherto rapidly and
|
||
steadily swimming, were now broken up in one measureless rout; and like King
|
||
Porus’ elephants in the Indian battle with Alexander, they seemed going mad with
|
||
consternation. In all directions expanding in vast irregular circles, and
|
||
aimlessly swimming hither and thither, by their short thick spoutings, they
|
||
plainly betrayed their distraction of panic. This was still more strangely
|
||
evinced by those of their number, who, completely paralysed as it were,
|
||
helplessly floated like water-logged dismantled ships on the sea. Had these
|
||
Leviathans been but a flock of simple sheep, pursued over the pasture by three
|
||
fierce wolves, they could not possibly have evinced such excessive dismay. But
|
||
this occasional timidity is characteristic of almost all herding creatures.
|
||
Though banding together in tens of thousands, the lion-maned buffaloes of the
|
||
West have fled before a solitary horseman. Witness, too, all human beings, how
|
||
when herded together in the sheepfold of a theatre’s pit, they will, at the
|
||
slightest alarm of fire, rush helter-skelter for the outlets, crowding,
|
||
trampling, jamming, and remorselessly dashing each other to death. Best,
|
||
therefore, withhold any amazement at the strangely gallied whales before us, for
|
||
there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by
|
||
the madness of men.
|
||
|
||
Though many of the whales, as has been said, were in violent motion, yet it is
|
||
to be observed that as a whole the herd neither advanced nor retreated, but
|
||
collectively remained in one place. As is customary in those cases, the boats at
|
||
once separated, each making for some one lone whale on the outskirts of the
|
||
shoal. In about three minutes’ time, Queequeg’s harpoon was flung; the stricken
|
||
fish darted blinding spray in our faces, and then running away with us like
|
||
light, steered straight for the heart of the herd. Though such a movement on the
|
||
part of the whale struck under such circumstances, is in no wise unprecedented;
|
||
and indeed is almost always more or less anticipated; yet does it present one of
|
||
the more perilous vicissitudes of the fishery. For as the swift monster drags
|
||
you deeper and deeper into the frantic shoal, you bid adieu to circumspect life
|
||
and only exist in a delirious throb.
|
||
|
||
As, blind and deaf, the whale plunged forward, as if by sheer power of speed to
|
||
rid himself of the iron leech that had fastened to him; as we thus tore a white
|
||
gash in the sea, on all sides menaced as we flew, by the crazed creatures to and
|
||
fro rushing about us; our beset boat was like a ship mobbed by ice-isles in a
|
||
tempest, and striving to steer through their complicated channels and straits,
|
||
knowing not at what moment it may be locked in and crushed.
|
||
|
||
But not a bit daunted, Queequeg steered us manfully; now sheering off from this
|
||
monster directly across our route in advance; now edging away from that, whose
|
||
colossal flukes were suspended overhead, while all the time, Starbuck stood up
|
||
in the bows, lance in hand, pricking out of our way whatever whales he could
|
||
reach by short darts, for there was no time to make long ones. Nor were the
|
||
oarsmen quite idle, though their wonted duty was now altogether dispensed with.
|
||
They chiefly attended to the shouting part of the business. “Out of the way,
|
||
Commodore!” cried one, to a great dromedary that of a sudden rose bodily to the
|
||
surface, and for an instant threatened to swamp us. “Hard down with your tail,
|
||
there!” cried a second to another, which, close to our gunwale, seemed calmly
|
||
cooling himself with his own fan-like extremity.
|
||
|
||
All whaleboats carry certain curious contrivances, originally invented by the
|
||
Nantucket Indians, called druggs. Two thick squares of wood of equal size are
|
||
stoutly clenched together, so that they cross each other’s grain at right
|
||
angles; a line of considerable length is then attached to the middle of this
|
||
block, and the other end of the line being looped, it can in a moment be
|
||
fastened to a harpoon. It is chiefly among gallied whales that this drugg is
|
||
used. For then, more whales are close round you than you can possibly chase at
|
||
one time. But sperm whales are not every day encountered; while you may, then,
|
||
you must kill all you can. And if you cannot kill them all at once, you must
|
||
wing them, so that they can be afterwards killed at your leisure. Hence it is,
|
||
that at times like these the drugg, comes into requisition. Our boat was
|
||
furnished with three of them. The first and second were successfully darted, and
|
||
we saw the whales staggeringly running off, fettered by the enormous sidelong
|
||
resistance of the towing drugg. They were cramped like malefactors with the
|
||
chain and ball. But upon flinging the third, in the act of tossing overboard the
|
||
clumsy wooden block, it caught under one of the seats of the boat, and in an
|
||
instant tore it out and carried it away, dropping the oarsman in the boat’s
|
||
bottom as the seat slid from under him. On both sides the sea came in at the
|
||
wounded planks, but we stuffed two or three drawers and shirts in, and so
|
||
stopped the leaks for the time.
|
||
|
||
It had been next to impossible to dart these drugged-harpoons, were it not that
|
||
as we advanced into the herd, our whale’s way greatly diminished; moreover, that
|
||
as we went still further and further from the circumference of commotion, the
|
||
direful disorders seemed waning. So that when at last the jerking harpoon drew
|
||
out, and the towing whale sideways vanished; then, with the tapering force of
|
||
his parting momentum, we glided between two whales into the innermost heart of
|
||
the shoal, as if from some mountain torrent we had slid into a serene valley
|
||
lake. Here the storms in the roaring glens between the outermost whales, were
|
||
heard but not felt. In this central expanse the sea presented that smooth
|
||
satin-like surface, called a sleek, produced by the subtle moisture thrown off
|
||
by the whale in his more quiet moods. Yes, we were now in that enchanted calm
|
||
which they say lurks at the heart of every commotion. And still in the
|
||
distracted distance we beheld the tumults of the outer concentric circles, and
|
||
saw successive pods of whales, eight or ten in each, swiftly going round and
|
||
round, like multiplied spans of horses in a ring; and so closely shoulder to
|
||
shoulder, that a Titanic circus-rider might easily have over-arched the middle
|
||
ones, and so have gone round on their backs. Owing to the density of the crowd
|
||
of reposing whales, more immediately surrounding the embayed axis of the herd,
|
||
no possible chance of escape was at present afforded us. We must watch for a
|
||
breach in the living wall that hemmed us in; the wall that had only admitted us
|
||
in order to shut us up. Keeping at the centre of the lake, we were occasionally
|
||
visited by small tame cows and calves; the women and children of this routed
|
||
host.
|
||
|
||
Now, inclusive of the occasional wide intervals between the revolving outer
|
||
circles, and inclusive of the spaces between the various pods in any one of
|
||
those circles, the entire area at this juncture, embraced by the whole
|
||
multitude, must have contained at least two or three square miles. At any
|
||
rate—though indeed such a test at such a time might be deceptive—spoutings might
|
||
be discovered from our low boat that seemed playing up almost from the rim of
|
||
the horizon. I mention this circumstance, because, as if the cows and calves had
|
||
been purposely locked up in this innermost fold; and as if the wide extent of
|
||
the herd had hitherto prevented them from learning the precise cause of its
|
||
stopping; or, possibly, being so young, unsophisticated, and every way innocent
|
||
and inexperienced; however it may have been, these smaller whales—now and then
|
||
visiting our becalmed boat from the margin of the lake—evinced a wondrous
|
||
fearlessness and confidence, or else a still becharmed panic which it was
|
||
impossible not to marvel at. Like household dogs they came snuffling round us,
|
||
right up to our gunwales, and touching them; till it almost seemed that some
|
||
spell had suddenly domesticated them. Queequeg patted their foreheads; Starbuck
|
||
scratched their backs with his lance; but fearful of the consequences, for the
|
||
time refrained from darting it.
|
||
|
||
But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger
|
||
world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery
|
||
vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales, and those that
|
||
by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers. The lake, as I have
|
||
hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent; and as human
|
||
infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if
|
||
leading two different lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal
|
||
nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly
|
||
reminiscence;—even so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards us,
|
||
but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their new-born sight.
|
||
Floating on their sides, the mothers also seemed quietly eyeing us. One of these
|
||
little infants, that from certain queer tokens seemed hardly a day old, might
|
||
have measured some fourteen feet in length, and some six feet in girth. He was a
|
||
little frisky; though as yet his body seemed scarce yet recovered from that
|
||
irksome position it had so lately occupied in the maternal reticule; where, tail
|
||
to head, and all ready for the final spring, the unborn whale lies bent like a
|
||
Tartar’s bow. The delicate side-fins, and the palms of his flukes, still freshly
|
||
retained the plaited crumpled appearance of a baby’s ears newly arrived from
|
||
foreign parts.
|
||
|
||
“Line! line!” cried Queequeg, looking over the gunwale; “him fast! him fast!—Who
|
||
line him! Who struck?—Two whale; one big, one little!”
|
||
|
||
“What ails ye, man?” cried Starbuck.
|
||
|
||
“Look-e here,” said Queequeg, pointing down.
|
||
|
||
As when the stricken whale, that from the tub has reeled out hundreds of fathoms
|
||
of rope; as, after deep sounding, he floats up again, and shows the slackened
|
||
curling line buoyantly rising and spiralling towards the air; so now, Starbuck
|
||
saw long coils of the umbilical cord of Madame Leviathan, by which the young cub
|
||
seemed still tethered to its dam. Not seldom in the rapid vicissitudes of the
|
||
chase, this natural line, with the maternal end loose, becomes entangled with
|
||
the hempen one, so that the cub is thereby trapped. Some of the subtlest secrets
|
||
of the seas seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond. We saw young Leviathan
|
||
amours in the deep.*
|
||
|
||
*The sperm whale, as with all other species of the Leviathan, but unlike most
|
||
other fish, breeds indifferently at all seasons; after a gestation which may
|
||
probably be set down at nine months, producing but one at a time; though in
|
||
some few known instances giving birth to an Esau and Jacob:—a contingency
|
||
provided for in suckling by two teats, curiously situated, one on each side of
|
||
the anus; but the breasts themselves extend upwards from that. When by chance
|
||
these precious parts in a nursing whale are cut by the hunter’s lance, the
|
||
mother’s pouring milk and blood rivallingly discolour the sea for rods. The
|
||
milk is very sweet and rich; it has been tasted by man; it might do well with
|
||
strawberries. When overflowing with mutual esteem, the whales salute more
|
||
hominum.
|
||
|
||
And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and
|
||
affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly
|
||
indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely revelled in dalliance and
|
||
delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still
|
||
for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning
|
||
woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in
|
||
eternal mildness of joy.
|
||
|
||
Meanwhile, as we thus lay entranced, the occasional sudden frantic spectacles in
|
||
the distance evinced the activity of the other boats, still engaged in drugging
|
||
the whales on the frontier of the host; or possibly carrying on the war within
|
||
the first circle, where abundance of room and some convenient retreats were
|
||
afforded them. But the sight of the enraged drugged whales now and then blindly
|
||
darting to and fro across the circles, was nothing to what at last met our eyes.
|
||
It is sometimes the custom when fast to a whale more than commonly powerful and
|
||
alert, to seek to hamstring him, as it were, by sundering or maiming his
|
||
gigantic tail-tendon. It is done by darting a short-handled cutting-spade, to
|
||
which is attached a rope for hauling it back again. A whale wounded (as we
|
||
afterwards learned) in this part, but not effectually, as it seemed, had broken
|
||
away from the boat, carrying along with him half of the harpoon line; and in the
|
||
extraordinary agony of the wound, he was now dashing among the revolving circles
|
||
like the lone mounted desperado Arnold, at the battle of Saratoga, carrying
|
||
dismay wherever he went.
|
||
|
||
But agonizing as was the wound of this whale, and an appalling spectacle enough,
|
||
any way; yet the peculiar horror with which he seemed to inspire the rest of the
|
||
herd, was owing to a cause which at first the intervening distance obscured from
|
||
us. But at length we perceived that by one of the unimaginable accidents of the
|
||
fishery, this whale had become entangled in the harpoon-line that he towed; he
|
||
had also run away with the cutting-spade in him; and while the free end of the
|
||
rope attached to that weapon, had permanently caught in the coils of the
|
||
harpoon-line round his tail, the cutting-spade itself had worked loose from his
|
||
flesh. So that tormented to madness, he was now churning through the water,
|
||
violently flailing with his flexible tail, and tossing the keen spade about him,
|
||
wounding and murdering his own comrades.
|
||
|
||
This terrific object seemed to recall the whole herd from their stationary
|
||
fright. First, the whales forming the margin of our lake began to crowd a
|
||
little, and tumble against each other, as if lifted by half spent billows from
|
||
afar; then the lake itself began faintly to heave and swell; the submarine
|
||
bridal-chambers and nurseries vanished; in more and more contracting orbits the
|
||
whales in the more central circles began to swim in thickening clusters. Yes,
|
||
the long calm was departing. A low advancing hum was soon heard; and then like
|
||
to the tumultuous masses of block-ice when the great river Hudson breaks up in
|
||
Spring, the entire host of whales came tumbling upon their inner centre, as if
|
||
to pile themselves up in one common mountain. Instantly Starbuck and Queequeg
|
||
changed places; Starbuck taking the stern.
|
||
|
||
“Oars! Oars!” he intensely whispered, seizing the helm—“gripe your oars, and
|
||
clutch your souls, now! My God, men, stand by! Shove him off, you Queequeg—the
|
||
whale there!—prick him!—hit him! Stand up—stand up, and stay so! Spring,
|
||
men—pull, men; never mind their backs—scrape them!—scrape away!”
|
||
|
||
The boat was now all but jammed between two vast black bulks, leaving a narrow
|
||
Dardanelles between their long lengths. But by desperate endeavor we at last
|
||
shot into a temporary opening; then giving way rapidly, and at the same time
|
||
earnestly watching for another outlet. After many similar hair-breadth escapes,
|
||
we at last swiftly glided into what had just been one of the outer circles, but
|
||
now crossed by random whales, all violently making for one centre. This lucky
|
||
salvation was cheaply purchased by the loss of Queequeg’s hat, who, while
|
||
standing in the bows to prick the fugitive whales, had his hat taken clean from
|
||
his head by the air-eddy made by the sudden tossing of a pair of broad flukes
|
||
close by.
|
||
|
||
Riotous and disordered as the universal commotion now was, it soon resolved
|
||
itself into what seemed a systematic movement; for having clumped together at
|
||
last in one dense body, they then renewed their onward flight with augmented
|
||
fleetness. Further pursuit was useless; but the boats still lingered in their
|
||
wake to pick up what drugged whales might be dropped astern, and likewise to
|
||
secure one which Flask had killed and waifed. The waif is a pennoned pole, two
|
||
or three of which are carried by every boat; and which, when additional game is
|
||
at hand, are inserted upright into the floating body of a dead whale, both to
|
||
mark its place on the sea, and also as token of prior possession, should the
|
||
boats of any other ship draw near.
|
||
|
||
The result of this lowering was somewhat illustrative of that sagacious saying
|
||
in the Fishery,—the more whales the less fish. Of all the drugged whales only
|
||
one was captured. The rest contrived to escape for the time, but only to be
|
||
taken, as will hereafter be seen, by some other craft than the Pequod.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 88. Schools and Schoolmasters.
|
||
|
||
The previous chapter gave account of an immense body or herd of Sperm Whales,
|
||
and there was also then given the probable cause inducing those vast
|
||
aggregations.
|
||
|
||
Now, though such great bodies are at times encountered, yet, as must have been
|
||
seen, even at the present day, small detached bands are occasionally observed,
|
||
embracing from twenty to fifty individuals each. Such bands are known as
|
||
schools. They generally are of two sorts; those composed almost entirely of
|
||
females, and those mustering none but young vigorous males, or bulls, as they
|
||
are familiarly designated.
|
||
|
||
In cavalier attendance upon the school of females, you invariably see a male of
|
||
full grown magnitude, but not old; who, upon any alarm, evinces his gallantry by
|
||
falling in the rear and covering the flight of his ladies. In truth, this
|
||
gentleman is a luxurious Ottoman, swimming about over the watery world,
|
||
surroundingly accompanied by all the solaces and endearments of the harem. The
|
||
contrast between this Ottoman and his concubines is striking; because, while he
|
||
is always of the largest leviathanic proportions, the ladies, even at full
|
||
growth, are not more than one-third of the bulk of an average-sized male. They
|
||
are comparatively delicate, indeed; I dare say, not to exceed half a dozen yards
|
||
round the waist. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied, that upon the whole they are
|
||
hereditarily entitled to en bon point.
|
||
|
||
It is very curious to watch this harem and its lord in their indolent ramblings.
|
||
Like fashionables, they are for ever on the move in leisurely search of variety.
|
||
You meet them on the Line in time for the full flower of the Equatorial feeding
|
||
season, having just returned, perhaps, from spending the summer in the Northern
|
||
seas, and so cheating summer of all unpleasant weariness and warmth. By the time
|
||
they have lounged up and down the promenade of the Equator awhile, they start
|
||
for the Oriental waters in anticipation of the cool season there, and so evade
|
||
the other excessive temperature of the year.
|
||
|
||
When serenely advancing on one of these journeys, if any strange suspicious
|
||
sights are seen, my lord whale keeps a wary eye on his interesting family.
|
||
Should any unwarrantably pert young Leviathan coming that way, presume to draw
|
||
confidentially close to one of the ladies, with what prodigious fury the Bashaw
|
||
assails him, and chases him away! High times, indeed, if unprincipled young
|
||
rakes like him are to be permitted to invade the sanctity of domestic bliss;
|
||
though do what the Bashaw will, he cannot keep the most notorious Lothario out
|
||
of his bed; for, alas! all fish bed in common. As ashore, the ladies often cause
|
||
the most terrible duels among their rival admirers; just so with the whales, who
|
||
sometimes come to deadly battle, and all for love. They fence with their long
|
||
lower jaws, sometimes locking them together, and so striving for the supremacy
|
||
like elks that warringly interweave their antlers. Not a few are captured having
|
||
the deep scars of these encounters,—furrowed heads, broken teeth, scolloped
|
||
fins; and in some instances, wrenched and dislocated mouths.
|
||
|
||
But supposing the invader of domestic bliss to betake himself away at the first
|
||
rush of the harem’s lord, then is it very diverting to watch that lord. Gently
|
||
he insinuates his vast bulk among them again and revels there awhile, still in
|
||
tantalizing vicinity to young Lothario, like pious Solomon devoutly worshipping
|
||
among his thousand concubines. Granting other whales to be in sight, the
|
||
fishermen will seldom give chase to one of these Grand Turks; for these Grand
|
||
Turks are too lavish of their strength, and hence their unctuousness is small.
|
||
As for the sons and the daughters they beget, why, those sons and daughters must
|
||
take care of themselves; at least, with only the maternal help. For like certain
|
||
other omnivorous roving lovers that might be named, my Lord Whale has no taste
|
||
for the nursery, however much for the bower; and so, being a great traveller, he
|
||
leaves his anonymous babies all over the world; every baby an exotic. In good
|
||
time, nevertheless, as the ardour of youth declines; as years and dumps
|
||
increase; as reflection lends her solemn pauses; in short, as a general
|
||
lassitude overtakes the sated Turk; then a love of ease and virtue supplants the
|
||
love for maidens; our Ottoman enters upon the impotent, repentant, admonitory
|
||
stage of life, forswears, disbands the harem, and grown to an exemplary, sulky
|
||
old soul, goes about all alone among the meridians and parallels saying his
|
||
prayers, and warning each young Leviathan from his amorous errors.
|
||
|
||
Now, as the harem of whales is called by the fishermen a school, so is the lord
|
||
and master of that school technically known as the schoolmaster. It is therefore
|
||
not in strict character, however admirably satirical, that after going to school
|
||
himself, he should then go abroad inculcating not what he learned there, but the
|
||
folly of it. His title, schoolmaster, would very naturally seem derived from the
|
||
name bestowed upon the harem itself, but some have surmised that the man who
|
||
first thus entitled this sort of Ottoman whale, must have read the memoirs of
|
||
Vidocq, and informed himself what sort of a country-schoolmaster that famous
|
||
Frenchman was in his younger days, and what was the nature of those occult
|
||
lessons he inculcated into some of his pupils.
|
||
|
||
The same secludedness and isolation to which the schoolmaster whale betakes
|
||
himself in his advancing years, is true of all aged Sperm Whales. Almost
|
||
universally, a lone whale—as a solitary Leviathan is called—proves an ancient
|
||
one. Like venerable moss-bearded Daniel Boone, he will have no one near him but
|
||
Nature herself; and her he takes to wife in the wilderness of waters, and the
|
||
best of wives she is, though she keeps so many moody secrets.
|
||
|
||
The schools composing none but young and vigorous males, previously mentioned,
|
||
offer a strong contrast to the harem schools. For while those female whales are
|
||
characteristically timid, the young males, or forty-barrel-bulls, as they call
|
||
them, are by far the most pugnacious of all Leviathans, and proverbially the
|
||
most dangerous to encounter; excepting those wondrous grey-headed, grizzled
|
||
whales, sometimes met, and these will fight you like grim fiends exasperated by
|
||
a penal gout.
|
||
|
||
The Forty-barrel-bull schools are larger than the harem schools. Like a mob of
|
||
young collegians, they are full of fight, fun, and wickedness, tumbling round
|
||
the world at such a reckless, rollicking rate, that no prudent underwriter would
|
||
insure them any more than he would a riotous lad at Yale or Harvard. They soon
|
||
relinquish this turbulence though, and when about three-fourths grown, break up,
|
||
and separately go about in quest of settlements, that is, harems.
|
||
|
||
Another point of difference between the male and female schools is still more
|
||
characteristic of the sexes. Say you strike a Forty-barrel-bull—poor devil! all
|
||
his comrades quit him. But strike a member of the harem school, and her
|
||
companions swim around her with every token of concern, sometimes lingering so
|
||
near her and so long, as themselves to fall a prey.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 89. Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish.
|
||
|
||
The allusion to the waif and waif-poles in the last chapter but one,
|
||
necessitates some account of the laws and regulations of the whale fishery, of
|
||
which the waif may be deemed the grand symbol and badge.
|
||
|
||
It frequently happens that when several ships are cruising in company, a whale
|
||
may be struck by one vessel, then escape, and be finally killed and captured by
|
||
another vessel; and herein are indirectly comprised many minor contingencies,
|
||
all partaking of this one grand feature. For example,—after a weary and perilous
|
||
chase and capture of a whale, the body may get loose from the ship by reason of
|
||
a violent storm; and drifting far away to leeward, be retaken by a second
|
||
whaler, who, in a calm, snugly tows it alongside, without risk of life or line.
|
||
Thus the most vexatious and violent disputes would often arise between the
|
||
fishermen, were there not some written or unwritten, universal, undisputed law
|
||
applicable to all cases.
|
||
|
||
Perhaps the only formal whaling code authorized by legislative enactment, was
|
||
that of Holland. It was decreed by the States-General in A.D. 1695. But though
|
||
no other nation has ever had any written whaling law, yet the American fishermen
|
||
have been their own legislators and lawyers in this matter. They have provided a
|
||
system which for terse comprehensiveness surpasses Justinian’s Pandects and the
|
||
By-laws of the Chinese Society for the Suppression of Meddling with other
|
||
People’s Business. Yes; these laws might be engraven on a Queen Anne’s farthing,
|
||
or the barb of a harpoon, and worn round the neck, so small are they.
|
||
|
||
I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it.
|
||
|
||
II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it.
|
||
|
||
But what plays the mischief with this masterly code is the admirable brevity of
|
||
it, which necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to expound it.
|
||
|
||
First: What is a Fast-Fish? Alive or dead a fish is technically fast, when it is
|
||
connected with an occupied ship or boat, by any medium at all controllable by
|
||
the occupant or occupants,—a mast, an oar, a nine-inch cable, a telegraph wire,
|
||
or a strand of cobweb, it is all the same. Likewise a fish is technically fast
|
||
when it bears a waif, or any other recognised symbol of possession; so long as
|
||
the party waifing it plainly evince their ability at any time to take it
|
||
alongside, as well as their intention so to do.
|
||
|
||
These are scientific commentaries; but the commentaries of the whalemen
|
||
themselves sometimes consist in hard words and harder knocks—the
|
||
Coke-upon-Littleton of the fist. True, among the more upright and honorable
|
||
whalemen allowances are always made for peculiar cases, where it would be an
|
||
outrageous moral injustice for one party to claim possession of a whale
|
||
previously chased or killed by another party. But others are by no means so
|
||
scrupulous.
|
||
|
||
Some fifty years ago there was a curious case of whale-trover litigated in
|
||
England, wherein the plaintiffs set forth that after a hard chase of a whale in
|
||
the Northern seas; and when indeed they (the plaintiffs) had succeeded in
|
||
harpooning the fish; they were at last, through peril of their lives, obliged to
|
||
forsake not only their lines, but their boat itself. Ultimately the defendants
|
||
(the crew of another ship) came up with the whale, struck, killed, seized, and
|
||
finally appropriated it before the very eyes of the plaintiffs. And when those
|
||
defendants were remonstrated with, their captain snapped his fingers in the
|
||
plaintiffs’ teeth, and assured them that by way of doxology to the deed he had
|
||
done, he would now retain their line, harpoons, and boat, which had remained
|
||
attached to the whale at the time of the seizure. Wherefore the plaintiffs now
|
||
sued for the recovery of the value of their whale, line, harpoons, and boat.
|
||
|
||
Mr. Erskine was counsel for the defendants; Lord Ellenborough was the judge. In
|
||
the course of the defence, the witty Erskine went on to illustrate his position,
|
||
by alluding to a recent crim. con. case, wherein a gentleman, after in vain
|
||
trying to bridle his wife’s viciousness, had at last abandoned her upon the seas
|
||
of life; but in the course of years, repenting of that step, he instituted an
|
||
action to recover possession of her. Erskine was on the other side; and he then
|
||
supported it by saying, that though the gentleman had originally harpooned the
|
||
lady, and had once had her fast, and only by reason of the great stress of her
|
||
plunging viciousness, had at last abandoned her; yet abandon her he did, so that
|
||
she became a loose-fish; and therefore when a subsequent gentleman re-harpooned
|
||
her, the lady then became that subsequent gentleman’s property, along with
|
||
whatever harpoon might have been found sticking in her.
|
||
|
||
Now in the present case Erskine contended that the examples of the whale and the
|
||
lady were reciprocally illustrative of each other.
|
||
|
||
These pleadings, and the counter pleadings, being duly heard, the very learned
|
||
judge in set terms decided, to wit,—That as for the boat, he awarded it to the
|
||
plaintiffs, because they had merely abandoned it to save their lives; but that
|
||
with regard to the controverted whale, harpoons, and line, they belonged to the
|
||
defendants; the whale, because it was a Loose-Fish at the time of the final
|
||
capture; and the harpoons and line because when the fish made off with them, it
|
||
(the fish) acquired a property in those articles; and hence anybody who
|
||
afterwards took the fish had a right to them. Now the defendants afterwards took
|
||
the fish; ergo, the aforesaid articles were theirs.
|
||
|
||
A common man looking at this decision of the very learned Judge, might possibly
|
||
object to it. But ploughed up to the primary rock of the matter, the two great
|
||
principles laid down in the twin whaling laws previously quoted, and applied and
|
||
elucidated by Lord Ellenborough in the above cited case; these two laws touching
|
||
Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, I say, will, on reflection, be found the fundamentals
|
||
of all human jurisprudence; for notwithstanding its complicated tracery of
|
||
sculpture, the Temple of the Law, like the Temple of the Philistines, has but
|
||
two props to stand on.
|
||
|
||
Is it not a saying in every one’s mouth, Possession is half of the law: that is,
|
||
regardless of how the thing came into possession? But often possession is the
|
||
whole of the law. What are the sinews and souls of Russian serfs and Republican
|
||
slaves but Fast-Fish, whereof possession is the whole of the law? What to the
|
||
rapacious landlord is the widow’s last mite but a Fast-Fish? What is yonder
|
||
undetected villain’s marble mansion with a door-plate for a waif; what is that
|
||
but a Fast-Fish? What is the ruinous discount which Mordecai, the broker, gets
|
||
from poor Woebegone, the bankrupt, on a loan to keep Woebegone’s family from
|
||
starvation; what is that ruinous discount but a Fast-Fish? What is the
|
||
Archbishop of Savesoul’s income of £100,000 seized from the scant bread and
|
||
cheese of hundreds of thousands of broken-backed laborers (all sure of heaven
|
||
without any of Savesoul’s help) what is that globular £100,000 but a Fast-Fish?
|
||
What are the Duke of Dunder’s hereditary towns and hamlets but Fast-Fish? What
|
||
to that redoubted harpooneer, John Bull, is poor Ireland, but a Fast-Fish? What
|
||
to that apostolic lancer, Brother Jonathan, is Texas but a Fast-Fish? And
|
||
concerning all these, is not Possession the whole of the law?
|
||
|
||
But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable, the kindred
|
||
doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so. That is internationally and
|
||
universally applicable.
|
||
|
||
What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish
|
||
standard by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland
|
||
to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will
|
||
Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish.
|
||
|
||
What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What
|
||
all men’s minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of religious
|
||
belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists
|
||
are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but
|
||
a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 90. Heads or Tails.
|
||
|
||
“De balena vero sufficit, si rex habeat caput, et regina caudam.” Bracton, l. 3,
|
||
c. 3.
|
||
|
||
Latin from the books of the Laws of England, which taken along with the context,
|
||
means, that of all whales captured by anybody on the coast of that land, the
|
||
King, as Honorary Grand Harpooneer, must have the head, and the Queen be
|
||
respectfully presented with the tail. A division which, in the whale, is much
|
||
like halving an apple; there is no intermediate remainder. Now as this law,
|
||
under a modified form, is to this day in force in England; and as it offers in
|
||
various respects a strange anomaly touching the general law of Fast and
|
||
Loose-Fish, it is here treated of in a separate chapter, on the same courteous
|
||
principle that prompts the English railways to be at the expense of a separate
|
||
car, specially reserved for the accommodation of royalty. In the first place, in
|
||
curious proof of the fact that the above-mentioned law is still in force, I
|
||
proceed to lay before you a circumstance that happened within the last two
|
||
years.
|
||
|
||
It seems that some honest mariners of Dover, or Sandwich, or some one of the
|
||
Cinque Ports, had after a hard chase succeeded in killing and beaching a fine
|
||
whale which they had originally descried afar off from the shore. Now the Cinque
|
||
Ports are partially or somehow under the jurisdiction of a sort of policeman or
|
||
beadle, called a Lord Warden. Holding the office directly from the crown, I
|
||
believe, all the royal emoluments incident to the Cinque Port territories become
|
||
by assignment his. By some writers this office is called a sinecure. But not so.
|
||
Because the Lord Warden is busily employed at times in fobbing his perquisites;
|
||
which are his chiefly by virtue of that same fobbing of them.
|
||
|
||
Now when these poor sun-burnt mariners, bare-footed, and with their trowsers
|
||
rolled high up on their eely legs, had wearily hauled their fat fish high and
|
||
dry, promising themselves a good £150 from the precious oil and bone; and in
|
||
fantasy sipping rare tea with their wives, and good ale with their cronies, upon
|
||
the strength of their respective shares; up steps a very learned and most
|
||
Christian and charitable gentleman, with a copy of Blackstone under his arm; and
|
||
laying it upon the whale’s head, he says—“Hands off! this fish, my masters, is a
|
||
Fast-Fish. I seize it as the Lord Warden’s.” Upon this the poor mariners in
|
||
their respectful consternation—so truly English—knowing not what to say, fall to
|
||
vigorously scratching their heads all round; meanwhile ruefully glancing from
|
||
the whale to the stranger. But that did in nowise mend the matter, or at all
|
||
soften the hard heart of the learned gentleman with the copy of Blackstone. At
|
||
length one of them, after long scratching about for his ideas, made bold to
|
||
speak,
|
||
|
||
“Please, sir, who is the Lord Warden?”
|
||
|
||
“The Duke.”
|
||
|
||
“But the duke had nothing to do with taking this fish?”
|
||
|
||
“It is his.”
|
||
|
||
“We have been at great trouble, and peril, and some expense, and is all that to
|
||
go to the Duke’s benefit; we getting nothing at all for our pains but our
|
||
blisters?”
|
||
|
||
“It is his.”
|
||
|
||
“Is the Duke so very poor as to be forced to this desperate mode of getting a
|
||
livelihood?”
|
||
|
||
“It is his.”
|
||
|
||
“I thought to relieve my old bed-ridden mother by part of my share of this
|
||
whale.”
|
||
|
||
“It is his.”
|
||
|
||
“Won’t the Duke be content with a quarter or a half?”
|
||
|
||
“It is his.”
|
||
|
||
In a word, the whale was seized and sold, and his Grace the Duke of Wellington
|
||
received the money. Thinking that viewed in some particular lights, the case
|
||
might by a bare possibility in some small degree be deemed, under the
|
||
circumstances, a rather hard one, an honest clergyman of the town respectfully
|
||
addressed a note to his Grace, begging him to take the case of those unfortunate
|
||
mariners into full consideration. To which my Lord Duke in substance replied
|
||
(both letters were published) that he had already done so, and received the
|
||
money, and would be obliged to the reverend gentleman if for the future he (the
|
||
reverend gentleman) would decline meddling with other people’s business. Is this
|
||
the still militant old man, standing at the corners of the three kingdoms, on
|
||
all hands coercing alms of beggars?
|
||
|
||
It will readily be seen that in this case the alleged right of the Duke to the
|
||
whale was a delegated one from the Sovereign. We must needs inquire then on what
|
||
principle the Sovereign is originally invested with that right. The law itself
|
||
has already been set forth. But Plowdon gives us the reason for it. Says
|
||
Plowdon, the whale so caught belongs to the King and Queen, “because of its
|
||
superior excellence.” And by the soundest commentators this has ever been held a
|
||
cogent argument in such matters.
|
||
|
||
But why should the King have the head, and the Queen the tail? A reason for
|
||
that, ye lawyers!
|
||
|
||
In his treatise on “Queen-Gold,” or Queen-pinmoney, an old King’s Bench author,
|
||
one William Prynne, thus discourseth: “Ye tail is ye Queen’s, that ye Queen’s
|
||
wardrobe may be supplied with ye whalebone.” Now this was written at a time when
|
||
the black limber bone of the Greenland or Right whale was largely used in
|
||
ladies’ bodices. But this same bone is not in the tail; it is in the head, which
|
||
is a sad mistake for a sagacious lawyer like Prynne. But is the Queen a mermaid,
|
||
to be presented with a tail? An allegorical meaning may lurk here.
|
||
|
||
There are two royal fish so styled by the English law writers—the whale and the
|
||
sturgeon; both royal property under certain limitations, and nominally supplying
|
||
the tenth branch of the crown’s ordinary revenue. I know not that any other
|
||
author has hinted of the matter; but by inference it seems to me that the
|
||
sturgeon must be divided in the same way as the whale, the King receiving the
|
||
highly dense and elastic head peculiar to that fish, which, symbolically
|
||
regarded, may possibly be humorously grounded upon some presumed congeniality.
|
||
And thus there seems a reason in all things, even in law.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 91. The Pequod Meets The Rose-Bud.
|
||
|
||
“In vain it was to rake for Ambergriese in the paunch of this Leviathan,
|
||
insufferable fetor denying not inquiry.” Sir T. Browne, V.E.
|
||
|
||
It was a week or two after the last whaling scene recounted, and when we were
|
||
slowly sailing over a sleepy, vapory, mid-day sea, that the many noses on the
|
||
Pequod’s deck proved more vigilant discoverers than the three pairs of eyes
|
||
aloft. A peculiar and not very pleasant smell was smelt in the sea.
|
||
|
||
“I will bet something now,” said Stubb, “that somewhere hereabouts are some of
|
||
those drugged whales we tickled the other day. I thought they would keel up
|
||
before long.”
|
||
|
||
Presently, the vapors in advance slid aside; and there in the distance lay a
|
||
ship, whose furled sails betokened that some sort of whale must be alongside. As
|
||
we glided nearer, the stranger showed French colours from his peak; and by the
|
||
eddying cloud of vulture sea-fowl that circled, and hovered, and swooped around
|
||
him, it was plain that the whale alongside must be what the fishermen call a
|
||
blasted whale, that is, a whale that has died unmolested on the sea, and so
|
||
floated an unappropriated corpse. It may well be conceived, what an unsavory
|
||
odor such a mass must exhale; worse than an Assyrian city in the plague, when
|
||
the living are incompetent to bury the departed. So intolerable indeed is it
|
||
regarded by some, that no cupidity could persuade them to moor alongside of it.
|
||
Yet are there those who will still do it; notwithstanding the fact that the oil
|
||
obtained from such subjects is of a very inferior quality, and by no means of
|
||
the nature of attar-of-rose.
|
||
|
||
Coming still nearer with the expiring breeze, we saw that the Frenchman had a
|
||
second whale alongside; and this second whale seemed even more of a nosegay than
|
||
the first. In truth, it turned out to be one of those problematical whales that
|
||
seem to dry up and die with a sort of prodigious dyspepsia, or indigestion;
|
||
leaving their defunct bodies almost entirely bankrupt of anything like oil.
|
||
Nevertheless, in the proper place we shall see that no knowing fisherman will
|
||
ever turn up his nose at such a whale as this, however much he may shun blasted
|
||
whales in general.
|
||
|
||
The Pequod had now swept so nigh to the stranger, that Stubb vowed he recognised
|
||
his cutting spade-pole entangled in the lines that were knotted round the tail
|
||
of one of these whales.
|
||
|
||
“There’s a pretty fellow, now,” he banteringly laughed, standing in the ship’s
|
||
bows, “there’s a jackal for ye! I well know that these Crappoes of Frenchmen are
|
||
but poor devils in the fishery; sometimes lowering their boats for breakers,
|
||
mistaking them for Sperm Whale spouts; yes, and sometimes sailing from their
|
||
port with their hold full of boxes of tallow candles, and cases of snuffers,
|
||
foreseeing that all the oil they will get won’t be enough to dip the Captain’s
|
||
wick into; aye, we all know these things; but look ye, here’s a Crappo that is
|
||
content with our leavings, the drugged whale there, I mean; aye, and is content
|
||
too with scraping the dry bones of that other precious fish he has there. Poor
|
||
devil! I say, pass round a hat, some one, and let’s make him a present of a
|
||
little oil for dear charity’s sake. For what oil he’ll get from that drugged
|
||
whale there, wouldn’t be fit to burn in a jail; no, not in a condemned cell. And
|
||
as for the other whale, why, I’ll agree to get more oil by chopping up and
|
||
trying out these three masts of ours, than he’ll get from that bundle of bones;
|
||
though, now that I think of it, it may contain something worth a good deal more
|
||
than oil; yes, ambergris. I wonder now if our old man has thought of that. It’s
|
||
worth trying. Yes, I’m for it;” and so saying he started for the quarter-deck.
|
||
|
||
By this time the faint air had become a complete calm; so that whether or no,
|
||
the Pequod was now fairly entrapped in the smell, with no hope of escaping
|
||
except by its breezing up again. Issuing from the cabin, Stubb now called his
|
||
boat’s crew, and pulled off for the stranger. Drawing across her bow, he
|
||
perceived that in accordance with the fanciful French taste, the upper part of
|
||
her stem-piece was carved in the likeness of a huge drooping stalk, was painted
|
||
green, and for thorns had copper spikes projecting from it here and there; the
|
||
whole terminating in a symmetrical folded bulb of a bright red colour. Upon her
|
||
head boards, in large gilt letters, he read “Bouton de Rose,”—Rose-button, or
|
||
Rose-bud; and this was the romantic name of this aromatic ship.
|
||
|
||
Though Stubb did not understand the Bouton part of the inscription, yet the word
|
||
rose, and the bulbous figure-head put together, sufficiently explained the whole
|
||
to him.
|
||
|
||
“A wooden rose-bud, eh?” he cried with his hand to his nose, “that will do very
|
||
well; but how like all creation it smells!”
|
||
|
||
Now in order to hold direct communication with the people on deck, he had to
|
||
pull round the bows to the starboard side, and thus come close to the blasted
|
||
whale; and so talk over it.
|
||
|
||
Arrived then at this spot, with one hand still to his nose, he
|
||
bawled—“Bouton-de-Rose, ahoy! are there any of you Bouton-de-Roses that speak
|
||
English?”
|
||
|
||
“Yes,” rejoined a Guernsey-man from the bulwarks, who turned out to be the
|
||
chief-mate.
|
||
|
||
“Well, then, my Bouton-de-Rose-bud, have you seen the White Whale?”
|
||
|
||
“What whale?”
|
||
|
||
“The White Whale—a Sperm Whale—Moby Dick, have ye seen him?
|
||
|
||
“Never heard of such a whale. Cachalot Blanche! White Whale—no.”
|
||
|
||
“Very good, then; good bye now, and I’ll call again in a minute.”
|
||
|
||
Then rapidly pulling back towards the Pequod, and seeing Ahab leaning over the
|
||
quarter-deck rail awaiting his report, he moulded his two hands into a trumpet
|
||
and shouted—“No, Sir! No!” Upon which Ahab retired, and Stubb returned to the
|
||
Frenchman.
|
||
|
||
He now perceived that the Guernsey-man, who had just got into the chains, and
|
||
was using a cutting-spade, had slung his nose in a sort of bag.
|
||
|
||
“What’s the matter with your nose, there?” said Stubb. “Broke it?”
|
||
|
||
“I wish it was broken, or that I didn’t have any nose at all!” answered the
|
||
Guernsey-man, who did not seem to relish the job he was at very much. “But what
|
||
are you holding yours for?”
|
||
|
||
“Oh, nothing! It’s a wax nose; I have to hold it on. Fine day, ain’t it? Air
|
||
rather gardenny, I should say; throw us a bunch of posies, will ye,
|
||
Bouton-de-Rose?”
|
||
|
||
“What in the devil’s name do you want here?” roared the Guernseyman, flying into
|
||
a sudden passion.
|
||
|
||
“Oh! keep cool—cool? yes, that’s the word! why don’t you pack those whales in
|
||
ice while you’re working at ’em? But joking aside, though; do you know,
|
||
Rose-bud, that it’s all nonsense trying to get any oil out of such whales? As
|
||
for that dried up one, there, he hasn’t a gill in his whole carcase.”
|
||
|
||
“I know that well enough; but, d’ye see, the Captain here won’t believe it; this
|
||
is his first voyage; he was a Cologne manufacturer before. But come aboard, and
|
||
mayhap he’ll believe you, if he won’t me; and so I’ll get out of this dirty
|
||
scrape.”
|
||
|
||
“Anything to oblige ye, my sweet and pleasant fellow,” rejoined Stubb, and with
|
||
that he soon mounted to the deck. There a queer scene presented itself. The
|
||
sailors, in tasselled caps of red worsted, were getting the heavy tackles in
|
||
readiness for the whales. But they worked rather slow and talked very fast, and
|
||
seemed in anything but a good humor. All their noses upwardly projected from
|
||
their faces like so many jib-booms. Now and then pairs of them would drop their
|
||
work, and run up to the mast-head to get some fresh air. Some thinking they
|
||
would catch the plague, dipped oakum in coal-tar, and at intervals held it to
|
||
their nostrils. Others having broken the stems of their pipes almost short off
|
||
at the bowl, were vigorously puffing tobacco-smoke, so that it constantly filled
|
||
their olfactories.
|
||
|
||
Stubb was struck by a shower of outcries and anathemas proceeding from the
|
||
Captain’s round-house abaft; and looking in that direction saw a fiery face
|
||
thrust from behind the door, which was held ajar from within. This was the
|
||
tormented surgeon, who, after in vain remonstrating against the proceedings of
|
||
the day, had betaken himself to the Captain’s round-house (cabinet he called it)
|
||
to avoid the pest; but still, could not help yelling out his entreaties and
|
||
indignations at times.
|
||
|
||
Marking all this, Stubb argued well for his scheme, and turning to the
|
||
Guernsey-man had a little chat with him, during which the stranger mate
|
||
expressed his detestation of his Captain as a conceited ignoramus, who had
|
||
brought them all into so unsavory and unprofitable a pickle. Sounding him
|
||
carefully, Stubb further perceived that the Guernsey-man had not the slightest
|
||
suspicion concerning the ambergris. He therefore held his peace on that head,
|
||
but otherwise was quite frank and confidential with him, so that the two quickly
|
||
concocted a little plan for both circumventing and satirizing the Captain,
|
||
without his at all dreaming of distrusting their sincerity. According to this
|
||
little plan of theirs, the Guernsey-man, under cover of an interpreter’s office,
|
||
was to tell the Captain what he pleased, but as coming from Stubb; and as for
|
||
Stubb, he was to utter any nonsense that should come uppermost in him during the
|
||
interview.
|
||
|
||
By this time their destined victim appeared from his cabin. He was a small and
|
||
dark, but rather delicate looking man for a sea-captain, with large whiskers and
|
||
moustache, however; and wore a red cotton velvet vest with watch-seals at his
|
||
side. To this gentleman, Stubb was now politely introduced by the Guernsey-man,
|
||
who at once ostentatiously put on the aspect of interpreting between them.
|
||
|
||
“What shall I say to him first?” said he.
|
||
|
||
“Why,” said Stubb, eyeing the velvet vest and the watch and seals, “you may as
|
||
well begin by telling him that he looks a sort of babyish to me, though I don’t
|
||
pretend to be a judge.”
|
||
|
||
“He says, Monsieur,” said the Guernsey-man, in French, turning to his captain,
|
||
“that only yesterday his ship spoke a vessel, whose captain and chief-mate, with
|
||
six sailors, had all died of a fever caught from a blasted whale they had
|
||
brought alongside.”
|
||
|
||
Upon this the captain started, and eagerly desired to know more.
|
||
|
||
“What now?” said the Guernsey-man to Stubb.
|
||
|
||
“Why, since he takes it so easy, tell him that now I have eyed him carefully,
|
||
I’m quite certain that he’s no more fit to command a whale-ship than a St. Jago
|
||
monkey. In fact, tell him from me he’s a baboon.”
|
||
|
||
“He vows and declares, Monsieur, that the other whale, the dried one, is far
|
||
more deadly than the blasted one; in fine, Monsieur, he conjures us, as we value
|
||
our lives, to cut loose from these fish.”
|
||
|
||
Instantly the captain ran forward, and in a loud voice commanded his crew to
|
||
desist from hoisting the cutting-tackles, and at once cast loose the cables and
|
||
chains confining the whales to the ship.
|
||
|
||
“What now?” said the Guernsey-man, when the Captain had returned to them.
|
||
|
||
“Why, let me see; yes, you may as well tell him now that—that—in fact, tell him
|
||
I’ve diddled him, and (aside to himself) perhaps somebody else.”
|
||
|
||
“He says, Monsieur, that he’s very happy to have been of any service to us.”
|
||
|
||
Hearing this, the captain vowed that they were the grateful parties (meaning
|
||
himself and mate) and concluded by inviting Stubb down into his cabin to drink a
|
||
bottle of Bordeaux.
|
||
|
||
“He wants you to take a glass of wine with him,” said the interpreter.
|
||
|
||
“Thank him heartily; but tell him it’s against my principles to drink with the
|
||
man I’ve diddled. In fact, tell him I must go.”
|
||
|
||
“He says, Monsieur, that his principles won’t admit of his drinking; but that if
|
||
Monsieur wants to live another day to drink, then Monsieur had best drop all
|
||
four boats, and pull the ship away from these whales, for it’s so calm they
|
||
won’t drift.”
|
||
|
||
By this time Stubb was over the side, and getting into his boat, hailed the
|
||
Guernsey-man to this effect,—that having a long tow-line in his boat, he would
|
||
do what he could to help them, by pulling out the lighter whale of the two from
|
||
the ship’s side. While the Frenchman’s boats, then, were engaged in towing the
|
||
ship one way, Stubb benevolently towed away at his whale the other way,
|
||
ostentatiously slacking out a most unusually long tow-line.
|
||
|
||
Presently a breeze sprang up; Stubb feigned to cast off from the whale; hoisting
|
||
his boats, the Frenchman soon increased his distance, while the Pequod slid in
|
||
between him and Stubb’s whale. Whereupon Stubb quickly pulled to the floating
|
||
body, and hailing the Pequod to give notice of his intentions, at once proceeded
|
||
to reap the fruit of his unrighteous cunning. Seizing his sharp boat-spade, he
|
||
commenced an excavation in the body, a little behind the side fin. You would
|
||
almost have thought he was digging a cellar there in the sea; and when at length
|
||
his spade struck against the gaunt ribs, it was like turning up old Roman tiles
|
||
and pottery buried in fat English loam. His boat’s crew were all in high
|
||
excitement, eagerly helping their chief, and looking as anxious as gold-hunters.
|
||
|
||
And all the time numberless fowls were diving, and ducking, and screaming, and
|
||
yelling, and fighting around them. Stubb was beginning to look disappointed,
|
||
especially as the horrible nosegay increased, when suddenly from out the very
|
||
heart of this plague, there stole a faint stream of perfume, which flowed
|
||
through the tide of bad smells without being absorbed by it, as one river will
|
||
flow into and then along with another, without at all blending with it for a
|
||
time.
|
||
|
||
“I have it, I have it,” cried Stubb, with delight, striking something in the
|
||
subterranean regions, “a purse! a purse!”
|
||
|
||
Dropping his spade, he thrust both hands in, and drew out handfuls of something
|
||
that looked like ripe Windsor soap, or rich mottled old cheese; very unctuous
|
||
and savory withal. You might easily dent it with your thumb; it is of a hue
|
||
between yellow and ash colour. And this, good friends, is ambergris, worth a
|
||
gold guinea an ounce to any druggist. Some six handfuls were obtained; but more
|
||
was unavoidably lost in the sea, and still more, perhaps, might have been
|
||
secured were it not for impatient Ahab’s loud command to Stubb to desist, and
|
||
come on board, else the ship would bid them good bye.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 92. Ambergris.
|
||
|
||
Now this ambergris is a very curious substance, and so important as an article
|
||
of commerce, that in 1791 a certain Nantucket-born Captain Coffin was examined
|
||
at the bar of the English House of Commons on that subject. For at that time,
|
||
and indeed until a comparatively late day, the precise origin of ambergris
|
||
remained, like amber itself, a problem to the learned. Though the word ambergris
|
||
is but the French compound for grey amber, yet the two substances are quite
|
||
distinct. For amber, though at times found on the sea-coast, is also dug up in
|
||
some far inland soils, whereas ambergris is never found except upon the sea.
|
||
Besides, amber is a hard, transparent, brittle, odorless substance, used for
|
||
mouth-pieces to pipes, for beads and ornaments; but ambergris is soft, waxy, and
|
||
so highly fragrant and spicy, that it is largely used in perfumery, in pastiles,
|
||
precious candles, hair-powders, and pomatum. The Turks use it in cooking, and
|
||
also carry it to Mecca, for the same purpose that frankincense is carried to St.
|
||
Peter’s in Rome. Some wine merchants drop a few grains into claret, to flavor
|
||
it.
|
||
|
||
Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale
|
||
themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale! Yet
|
||
so it is. By some, ambergris is supposed to be the cause, and by others the
|
||
effect, of the dyspepsia in the whale. How to cure such a dyspepsia it were hard
|
||
to say, unless by administering three or four boat loads of Brandreth’s pills,
|
||
and then running out of harm’s way, as laborers do in blasting rocks.
|
||
|
||
I have forgotten to say that there were found in this ambergris, certain hard,
|
||
round, bony plates, which at first Stubb thought might be sailors’ trowsers
|
||
buttons; but it afterwards turned out that they were nothing more than pieces of
|
||
small squid bones embalmed in that manner.
|
||
|
||
Now that the incorruption of this most fragrant ambergris should be found in the
|
||
heart of such decay; is this nothing? Bethink thee of that saying of St. Paul in
|
||
Corinthians, about corruption and incorruption; how that we are sown in
|
||
dishonor, but raised in glory. And likewise call to mind that saying of
|
||
Paracelsus about what it is that maketh the best musk. Also forget not the
|
||
strange fact that of all things of ill-savor, Cologne-water, in its rudimental
|
||
manufacturing stages, is the worst.
|
||
|
||
I should like to conclude the chapter with the above appeal, but cannot, owing
|
||
to my anxiety to repel a charge often made against whalemen, and which, in the
|
||
estimation of some already biased minds, might be considered as indirectly
|
||
substantiated by what has been said of the Frenchman’s two whales. Elsewhere in
|
||
this volume the slanderous aspersion has been disproved, that the vocation of
|
||
whaling is throughout a slatternly, untidy business. But there is another thing
|
||
to rebut. They hint that all whales always smell bad. Now how did this odious
|
||
stigma originate?
|
||
|
||
I opine, that it is plainly traceable to the first arrival of the Greenland
|
||
whaling ships in London, more than two centuries ago. Because those whalemen did
|
||
not then, and do not now, try out their oil at sea as the Southern ships have
|
||
always done; but cutting up the fresh blubber in small bits, thrust it through
|
||
the bung holes of large casks, and carry it home in that manner; the shortness
|
||
of the season in those Icy Seas, and the sudden and violent storms to which they
|
||
are exposed, forbidding any other course. The consequence is, that upon breaking
|
||
into the hold, and unloading one of these whale cemeteries, in the Greenland
|
||
dock, a savor is given forth somewhat similar to that arising from excavating an
|
||
old city grave-yard, for the foundations of a Lying-in Hospital.
|
||
|
||
I partly surmise also, that this wicked charge against whalers may be likewise
|
||
imputed to the existence on the coast of Greenland, in former times, of a Dutch
|
||
village called Schmerenburgh or Smeerenberg, which latter name is the one used
|
||
by the learned Fogo Von Slack, in his great work on Smells, a text-book on that
|
||
subject. As its name imports (smeer, fat; berg, to put up), this village was
|
||
founded in order to afford a place for the blubber of the Dutch whale fleet to
|
||
be tried out, without being taken home to Holland for that purpose. It was a
|
||
collection of furnaces, fat-kettles, and oil sheds; and when the works were in
|
||
full operation certainly gave forth no very pleasant savor. But all this is
|
||
quite different with a South Sea Sperm Whaler; which in a voyage of four years
|
||
perhaps, after completely filling her hold with oil, does not, perhaps, consume
|
||
fifty days in the business of boiling out; and in the state that it is casked,
|
||
the oil is nearly scentless. The truth is, that living or dead, if but decently
|
||
treated, whales as a species are by no means creatures of ill odor; nor can
|
||
whalemen be recognised, as the people of the middle ages affected to detect a
|
||
Jew in the company, by the nose. Nor indeed can the whale possibly be otherwise
|
||
than fragrant, when, as a general thing, he enjoys such high health; taking
|
||
abundance of exercise; always out of doors; though, it is true, seldom in the
|
||
open air. I say, that the motion of a Sperm Whale’s flukes above water dispenses
|
||
a perfume, as when a musk-scented lady rustles her dress in a warm parlor. What
|
||
then shall I liken the Sperm Whale to for fragrance, considering his magnitude?
|
||
Must it not be to that famous elephant, with jewelled tusks, and redolent with
|
||
myrrh, which was led out of an Indian town to do honor to Alexander the Great?
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 93. The Castaway.
|
||
|
||
It was but some few days after encountering the Frenchman, that a most
|
||
significant event befell the most insignificant of the Pequod’s crew; an event
|
||
most lamentable; and which ended in providing the sometimes madly merry and
|
||
predestinated craft with a living and ever accompanying prophecy of whatever
|
||
shattered sequel might prove her own.
|
||
|
||
Now, in the whale ship, it is not every one that goes in the boats. Some few
|
||
hands are reserved called ship-keepers, whose province it is to work the vessel
|
||
while the boats are pursuing the whale. As a general thing, these ship-keepers
|
||
are as hardy fellows as the men comprising the boats’ crews. But if there happen
|
||
to be an unduly slender, clumsy, or timorous wight in the ship, that wight is
|
||
certain to be made a ship-keeper. It was so in the Pequod with the little negro
|
||
Pippin by nick-name, Pip by abbreviation. Poor Pip! ye have heard of him before;
|
||
ye must remember his tambourine on that dramatic midnight, so gloomy-jolly.
|
||
|
||
In outer aspect, Pip and Dough-Boy made a match, like a black pony and a white
|
||
one, of equal developments, though of dissimilar colour, driven in one eccentric
|
||
span. But while hapless Dough-Boy was by nature dull and torpid in his
|
||
intellects, Pip, though over tender-hearted, was at bottom very bright, with
|
||
that pleasant, genial, jolly brightness peculiar to his tribe; a tribe, which
|
||
ever enjoy all holidays and festivities with finer, freer relish than any other
|
||
race. For blacks, the year’s calendar should show naught but three hundred and
|
||
sixty-five Fourth of Julys and New Year’s Days. Nor smile so, while I write that
|
||
this little black was brilliant, for even blackness has its brilliancy; behold
|
||
yon lustrous ebony, panelled in king’s cabinets. But Pip loved life, and all
|
||
life’s peaceable securities; so that the panic-striking business in which he had
|
||
somehow unaccountably become entrapped, had most sadly blurred his brightness;
|
||
though, as ere long will be seen, what was thus temporarily subdued in him, in
|
||
the end was destined to be luridly illumined by strange wild fires, that
|
||
fictitiously showed him off to ten times the natural lustre with which in his
|
||
native Tolland County in Connecticut, he had once enlivened many a fiddler’s
|
||
frolic on the green; and at melodious even-tide, with his gay ha-ha! had turned
|
||
the round horizon into one star-belled tambourine. So, though in the clear air
|
||
of day, suspended against a blue-veined neck, the pure-watered diamond drop will
|
||
healthful glow; yet, when the cunning jeweller would show you the diamond in its
|
||
most impressive lustre, he lays it against a gloomy ground, and then lights it
|
||
up, not by the sun, but by some unnatural gases. Then come out those fiery
|
||
effulgences, infernally superb; then the evil-blazing diamond, once the divinest
|
||
symbol of the crystal skies, looks like some crown-jewel stolen from the King of
|
||
Hell. But let us to the story.
|
||
|
||
It came to pass, that in the ambergris affair Stubb’s after-oarsman chanced so
|
||
to sprain his hand, as for a time to become quite maimed; and, temporarily, Pip
|
||
was put into his place.
|
||
|
||
The first time Stubb lowered with him, Pip evinced much nervousness; but
|
||
happily, for that time, escaped close contact with the whale; and therefore came
|
||
off not altogether discreditably; though Stubb observing him, took care,
|
||
afterwards, to exhort him to cherish his courageousness to the utmost, for he
|
||
might often find it needful.
|
||
|
||
Now upon the second lowering, the boat paddled upon the whale; and as the fish
|
||
received the darted iron, it gave its customary rap, which happened, in this
|
||
instance, to be right under poor Pip’s seat. The involuntary consternation of
|
||
the moment caused him to leap, paddle in hand, out of the boat; and in such a
|
||
way, that part of the slack whale line coming against his chest, he breasted it
|
||
overboard with him, so as to become entangled in it, when at last plumping into
|
||
the water. That instant the stricken whale started on a fierce run, the line
|
||
swiftly straightened; and presto! poor Pip came all foaming up to the chocks of
|
||
the boat, remorselessly dragged there by the line, which had taken several turns
|
||
around his chest and neck.
|
||
|
||
Tashtego stood in the bows. He was full of the fire of the hunt. He hated Pip
|
||
for a poltroon. Snatching the boat-knife from its sheath, he suspended its sharp
|
||
edge over the line, and turning towards Stubb, exclaimed interrogatively, “Cut?”
|
||
Meantime Pip’s blue, choked face plainly looked, Do, for God’s sake! All passed
|
||
in a flash. In less than half a minute, this entire thing happened.
|
||
|
||
“Damn him, cut!” roared Stubb; and so the whale was lost and Pip was saved.
|
||
|
||
So soon as he recovered himself, the poor little negro was assailed by yells and
|
||
execrations from the crew. Tranquilly permitting these irregular cursings to
|
||
evaporate, Stubb then in a plain, business-like, but still half humorous manner,
|
||
cursed Pip officially; and that done, unofficially gave him much wholesome
|
||
advice. The substance was, Never jump from a boat, Pip, except—but all the rest
|
||
was indefinite, as the soundest advice ever is. Now, in general, Stick to the
|
||
boat, is your true motto in whaling; but cases will sometimes happen when Leap
|
||
from the boat, is still better. Moreover, as if perceiving at last that if he
|
||
should give undiluted conscientious advice to Pip, he would be leaving him too
|
||
wide a margin to jump in for the future; Stubb suddenly dropped all advice, and
|
||
concluded with a peremptory command, “Stick to the boat, Pip, or by the Lord, I
|
||
won’t pick you up if you jump; mind that. We can’t afford to lose whales by the
|
||
likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in
|
||
Alabama. Bear that in mind, and don’t jump any more.” Hereby perhaps Stubb
|
||
indirectly hinted, that though man loved his fellow, yet man is a money-making
|
||
animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.
|
||
|
||
But we are all in the hands of the Gods; and Pip jumped again. It was under very
|
||
similar circumstances to the first performance; but this time he did not breast
|
||
out the line; and hence, when the whale started to run, Pip was left behind on
|
||
the sea, like a hurried traveller’s trunk. Alas! Stubb was but too true to his
|
||
word. It was a beautiful, bounteous, blue day; the spangled sea calm and cool,
|
||
and flatly stretching away, all round, to the horizon, like gold-beater’s skin
|
||
hammered out to the extremest. Bobbing up and down in that sea, Pip’s ebon head
|
||
showed like a head of cloves. No boat-knife was lifted when he fell so rapidly
|
||
astern. Stubb’s inexorable back was turned upon him; and the whale was winged.
|
||
In three minutes, a whole mile of shoreless ocean was between Pip and Stubb. Out
|
||
from the centre of the sea, poor Pip turned his crisp, curling, black head to
|
||
the sun, another lonely castaway, though the loftiest and the brightest.
|
||
|
||
Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised
|
||
swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is
|
||
intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless
|
||
immensity, my God! who can tell it? Mark, how when sailors in a dead calm bathe
|
||
in the open sea—mark how closely they hug their ship and only coast along her
|
||
sides.
|
||
|
||
But had Stubb really abandoned the poor little negro to his fate? No; he did not
|
||
mean to, at least. Because there were two boats in his wake, and he supposed, no
|
||
doubt, that they would of course come up to Pip very quickly, and pick him up;
|
||
though, indeed, such considerations towards oarsmen jeopardized through their
|
||
own timidity, is not always manifested by the hunters in all similar instances;
|
||
and such instances not unfrequently occur; almost invariably in the fishery, a
|
||
coward, so called, is marked with the same ruthless detestation peculiar to
|
||
military navies and armies.
|
||
|
||
But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying whales
|
||
close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and Stubb’s boat was now so
|
||
far away, and he and all his crew so intent upon his fish, that Pip’s ringed
|
||
horizon began to expand around him miserably. By the merest chance the ship
|
||
itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the
|
||
deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his
|
||
finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely,
|
||
though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of
|
||
the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the
|
||
miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous,
|
||
heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent,
|
||
coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He
|
||
saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his
|
||
shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering
|
||
from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to
|
||
reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised,
|
||
indifferent as his God.
|
||
|
||
For the rest, blame not Stubb too hardly. The thing is common in that fishery;
|
||
and in the sequel of the narrative, it will then be seen what like abandonment
|
||
befell myself.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 94. A Squeeze of the Hand.
|
||
|
||
That whale of Stubb’s, so dearly purchased, was duly brought to the Pequod’s
|
||
side, where all those cutting and hoisting operations previously detailed, were
|
||
regularly gone through, even to the baling of the Heidelburgh Tun, or Case.
|
||
|
||
While some were occupied with this latter duty, others were employed in dragging
|
||
away the larger tubs, so soon as filled with the sperm; and when the proper time
|
||
arrived, this same sperm was carefully manipulated ere going to the try-works,
|
||
of which anon.
|
||
|
||
It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several others,
|
||
I sat down before a large Constantine’s bath of it, I found it strangely
|
||
concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in the liquid part. It was
|
||
our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A sweet and unctuous duty!
|
||
No wonder that in old times this sperm was such a favourite cosmetic. Such a
|
||
clearer! such a sweetener! such a softener! such a delicious molifier! After
|
||
having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and
|
||
began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralise.
|
||
|
||
As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion
|
||
at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and
|
||
gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle
|
||
globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour; as they richly
|
||
broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes
|
||
their wine; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,—literally and truly, like
|
||
the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a
|
||
musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm,
|
||
I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old
|
||
Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of
|
||
anger; while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or
|
||
petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.
|
||
|
||
Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I
|
||
myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of
|
||
insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’
|
||
hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding,
|
||
affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I
|
||
was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes
|
||
sentimentally; as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we
|
||
longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy!
|
||
Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into
|
||
each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of
|
||
kindness.
|
||
|
||
Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many
|
||
prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must
|
||
eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not
|
||
placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart,
|
||
the bed, the table, the saddle, the fireside, the country; now that I have
|
||
perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the
|
||
visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands
|
||
in a jar of spermaceti.
|
||
|
||
Now, while discoursing of sperm, it behooves to speak of other things akin to
|
||
it, in the business of preparing the sperm whale for the try-works.
|
||
|
||
First comes white-horse, so called, which is obtained from the tapering part of
|
||
the fish, and also from the thicker portions of his flukes. It is tough with
|
||
congealed tendons—a wad of muscle—but still contains some oil. After being
|
||
severed from the whale, the white-horse is first cut into portable oblongs ere
|
||
going to the mincer. They look much like blocks of Berkshire marble.
|
||
|
||
Plum-pudding is the term bestowed upon certain fragmentary parts of the whale’s
|
||
flesh, here and there adhering to the blanket of blubber, and often
|
||
participating to a considerable degree in its unctuousness. It is a most
|
||
refreshing, convivial, beautiful object to behold. As its name imports, it is of
|
||
an exceedingly rich, mottled tint, with a bestreaked snowy and golden ground,
|
||
dotted with spots of the deepest crimson and purple. It is plums of rubies, in
|
||
pictures of citron. Spite of reason, it is hard to keep yourself from eating it.
|
||
I confess, that once I stole behind the foremast to try it. It tasted something
|
||
as I should conceive a royal cutlet from the thigh of Louis le Gros might have
|
||
tasted, supposing him to have been killed the first day after the venison
|
||
season, and that particular venison season contemporary with an unusually fine
|
||
vintage of the vineyards of Champagne.
|
||
|
||
There is another substance, and a very singular one, which turns up in the
|
||
course of this business, but which I feel it to be very puzzling adequately to
|
||
describe. It is called slobgollion; an appellation original with the whalemen,
|
||
and even so is the nature of the substance. It is an ineffably oozy, stringy
|
||
affair, most frequently found in the tubs of sperm, after a prolonged squeezing,
|
||
and subsequent decanting. I hold it to be the wondrously thin, ruptured
|
||
membranes of the case, coalescing.
|
||
|
||
Gurry, so called, is a term properly belonging to right whalemen, but sometimes
|
||
incidentally used by the sperm fishermen. It designates the dark, glutinous
|
||
substance which is scraped off the back of the Greenland or right whale, and
|
||
much of which covers the decks of those inferior souls who hunt that ignoble
|
||
Leviathan.
|
||
|
||
Nippers. Strictly this word is not indigenous to the whale’s vocabulary. But as
|
||
applied by whalemen, it becomes so. A whaleman’s nipper is a short firm strip of
|
||
tendinous stuff cut from the tapering part of Leviathan’s tail: it averages an
|
||
inch in thickness, and for the rest, is about the size of the iron part of a
|
||
hoe. Edgewise moved along the oily deck, it operates like a leathern squilgee;
|
||
and by nameless blandishments, as of magic, allures along with it all
|
||
impurities.
|
||
|
||
But to learn all about these recondite matters, your best way is at once to
|
||
descend into the blubber-room, and have a long talk with its inmates. This place
|
||
has previously been mentioned as the receptacle for the blanket-pieces, when
|
||
stript and hoisted from the whale. When the proper time arrives for cutting up
|
||
its contents, this apartment is a scene of terror to all tyros, especially by
|
||
night. On one side, lit by a dull lantern, a space has been left clear for the
|
||
workmen. They generally go in pairs,—a pike-and-gaffman and a spade-man. The
|
||
whaling-pike is similar to a frigate’s boarding-weapon of the same name. The
|
||
gaff is something like a boat-hook. With his gaff, the gaffman hooks on to a
|
||
sheet of blubber, and strives to hold it from slipping, as the ship pitches and
|
||
lurches about. Meanwhile, the spade-man stands on the sheet itself,
|
||
perpendicularly chopping it into the portable horse-pieces. This spade is sharp
|
||
as hone can make it; the spademan’s feet are shoeless; the thing he stands on
|
||
will sometimes irresistibly slide away from him, like a sledge. If he cuts off
|
||
one of his own toes, or one of his assistants’, would you be very much
|
||
astonished? Toes are scarce among veteran blubber-room men.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 95. The Cassock.
|
||
|
||
Had you stepped on board the Pequod at a certain juncture of this
|
||
post-mortemizing of the whale; and had you strolled forward nigh the windlass,
|
||
pretty sure am I that you would have scanned with no small curiosity a very
|
||
strange, enigmatical object, which you would have seen there, lying along
|
||
lengthwise in the lee scuppers. Not the wondrous cistern in the whale’s huge
|
||
head; not the prodigy of his unhinged lower jaw; not the miracle of his
|
||
symmetrical tail; none of these would so surprise you, as half a glimpse of that
|
||
unaccountable cone,—longer than a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at
|
||
the base, and jet-black as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg. And an idol,
|
||
indeed, it is; or, rather, in old times, its likeness was. Such an idol as that
|
||
found in the secret groves of Queen Maachah in Judea; and for worshipping which,
|
||
King Asa, her son, did depose her, and destroyed the idol, and burnt it for an
|
||
abomination at the brook Kedron, as darkly set forth in the 15th chapter of the
|
||
First Book of Kings.
|
||
|
||
Look at the sailor, called the mincer, who now comes along, and assisted by two
|
||
allies, heavily backs the grandissimus, as the mariners call it, and with bowed
|
||
shoulders, staggers off with it as if he were a grenadier carrying a dead
|
||
comrade from the field. Extending it upon the forecastle deck, he now proceeds
|
||
cylindrically to remove its dark pelt, as an African hunter the pelt of a boa.
|
||
This done he turns the pelt inside out, like a pantaloon leg; gives it a good
|
||
stretching, so as almost to double its diameter; and at last hangs it, well
|
||
spread, in the rigging, to dry. Ere long, it is taken down; when removing some
|
||
three feet of it, towards the pointed extremity, and then cutting two slits for
|
||
arm-holes at the other end, he lengthwise slips himself bodily into it. The
|
||
mincer now stands before you invested in the full canonicals of his calling.
|
||
Immemorial to all his order, this investiture alone will adequately protect him,
|
||
while employed in the peculiar functions of his office.
|
||
|
||
That office consists in mincing the horse-pieces of blubber for the pots; an
|
||
operation which is conducted at a curious wooden horse, planted endwise against
|
||
the bulwarks, and with a capacious tub beneath it, into which the minced pieces
|
||
drop, fast as the sheets from a rapt orator’s desk. Arrayed in decent black;
|
||
occupying a conspicuous pulpit; intent on bible leaves; what a candidate for an
|
||
archbishopric, what a lad for a Pope were this mincer!*
|
||
|
||
*Bible leaves! Bible leaves! This is the invariable cry from the mates to the
|
||
mincer. It enjoins him to be careful, and cut his work into as thin slices as
|
||
possible, inasmuch as by so doing the business of boiling out the oil is much
|
||
accelerated, and its quantity considerably increased, besides perhaps improving
|
||
it in quality.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 96. The Try-Works.
|
||
|
||
Besides her hoisted boats, an American whaler is outwardly distinguished by her
|
||
try-works. She presents the curious anomaly of the most solid masonry joining
|
||
with oak and hemp in constituting the completed ship. It is as if from the open
|
||
field a brick-kiln were transported to her planks.
|
||
|
||
The try-works are planted between the foremast and mainmast, the most roomy part
|
||
of the deck. The timbers beneath are of a peculiar strength, fitted to sustain
|
||
the weight of an almost solid mass of brick and mortar, some ten feet by eight
|
||
square, and five in height. The foundation does not penetrate the deck, but the
|
||
masonry is firmly secured to the surface by ponderous knees of iron bracing it
|
||
on all sides, and screwing it down to the timbers. On the flanks it is cased
|
||
with wood, and at top completely covered by a large, sloping, battened hatchway.
|
||
Removing this hatch we expose the great try-pots, two in number, and each of
|
||
several barrels’ capacity. When not in use, they are kept remarkably clean.
|
||
Sometimes they are polished with soapstone and sand, till they shine within like
|
||
silver punch-bowls. During the night-watches some cynical old sailors will crawl
|
||
into them and coil themselves away there for a nap. While employed in polishing
|
||
them—one man in each pot, side by side—many confidential communications are
|
||
carried on, over the iron lips. It is a place also for profound mathematical
|
||
meditation. It was in the left hand try-pot of the Pequod, with the soapstone
|
||
diligently circling round me, that I was first indirectly struck by the
|
||
remarkable fact, that in geometry all bodies gliding along the cycloid, my
|
||
soapstone for example, will descend from any point in precisely the same time.
|
||
|
||
Removing the fire-board from the front of the try-works, the bare masonry of
|
||
that side is exposed, penetrated by the two iron mouths of the furnaces,
|
||
directly underneath the pots. These mouths are fitted with heavy doors of iron.
|
||
The intense heat of the fire is prevented from communicating itself to the deck,
|
||
by means of a shallow reservoir extending under the entire inclosed surface of
|
||
the works. By a tunnel inserted at the rear, this reservoir is kept replenished
|
||
with water as fast as it evaporates. There are no external chimneys; they open
|
||
direct from the rear wall. And here let us go back for a moment.
|
||
|
||
It was about nine o’clock at night that the Pequod’s try-works were first
|
||
started on this present voyage. It belonged to Stubb to oversee the business.
|
||
|
||
“All ready there? Off hatch, then, and start her. You cook, fire the works.”
|
||
This was an easy thing, for the carpenter had been thrusting his shavings into
|
||
the furnace throughout the passage. Here be it said that in a whaling voyage the
|
||
first fire in the try-works has to be fed for a time with wood. After that no
|
||
wood is used, except as a means of quick ignition to the staple fuel. In a word,
|
||
after being tried out, the crisp, shrivelled blubber, now called scraps or
|
||
fritters, still contains considerable of its unctuous properties. These fritters
|
||
feed the flames. Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming
|
||
misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own
|
||
body. Would that he consumed his own smoke! for his smoke is horrible to inhale,
|
||
and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you must live in it for the time.
|
||
It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the
|
||
vicinity of funereal pyres. It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment;
|
||
it is an argument for the pit.
|
||
|
||
By midnight the works were in full operation. We were clear from the carcase;
|
||
sail had been made; the wind was freshening; the wild ocean darkness was
|
||
intense. But that darkness was licked up by the fierce flames, which at
|
||
intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and illuminated every lofty rope in
|
||
the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire. The burning ship drove on, as if
|
||
remorselessly commissioned to some vengeful deed. So the pitch and
|
||
sulphur-freighted brigs of the bold Hydriote, Canaris, issuing from their
|
||
midnight harbors, with broad sheets of flame for sails, bore down upon the
|
||
Turkish frigates, and folded them in conflagrations.
|
||
|
||
The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide hearth in
|
||
front of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of the pagan
|
||
harpooneers, always the whale-ship’s stokers. With huge pronged poles they
|
||
pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up the
|
||
fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch
|
||
them by the feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the
|
||
ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap
|
||
into their faces. Opposite the mouth of the works, on the further side of the
|
||
wide wooden hearth, was the windlass. This served for a sea-sofa. Here lounged
|
||
the watch, when not otherwise employed, looking into the red heat of the fire,
|
||
till their eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their tawny features, now all
|
||
begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric
|
||
brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in the capricious
|
||
emblazonings of the works. As they narrated to each other their unholy
|
||
adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized
|
||
laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and
|
||
fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged
|
||
forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship
|
||
groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further
|
||
into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white
|
||
bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing
|
||
Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and
|
||
plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her
|
||
monomaniac commander’s soul.
|
||
|
||
So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently guided
|
||
the way of this fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped, for that interval, in darkness
|
||
myself, I but the better saw the redness, the madness, the ghastliness of
|
||
others. The continual sight of the fiend shapes before me, capering half in
|
||
smoke and half in fire, these at last begat kindred visions in my soul, so soon
|
||
as I began to yield to that unaccountable drowsiness which ever would come over
|
||
me at a midnight helm.
|
||
|
||
But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since inexplicable) thing
|
||
occurred to me. Starting from a brief standing sleep, I was horribly conscious
|
||
of something fatally wrong. The jaw-bone tiller smote my side, which leaned
|
||
against it; in my ears was the low hum of sails, just beginning to shake in the
|
||
wind; I thought my eyes were open; I was half conscious of putting my fingers to
|
||
the lids and mechanically stretching them still further apart. But, spite of all
|
||
this, I could see no compass before me to steer by; though it seemed but a
|
||
minute since I had been watching the card, by the steady binnacle lamp
|
||
illuminating it. Nothing seemed before me but a jet gloom, now and then made
|
||
ghastly by flashes of redness. Uppermost was the impression, that whatever
|
||
swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as
|
||
rushing from all havens astern. A stark, bewildered feeling, as of death, came
|
||
over me. Convulsively my hands grasped the tiller, but with the crazy conceit
|
||
that the tiller was, somehow, in some enchanted way, inverted. My God! what is
|
||
the matter with me? thought I. Lo! in my brief sleep I had turned myself about,
|
||
and was fronting the ship’s stern, with my back to her prow and the compass. In
|
||
an instant I faced back, just in time to prevent the vessel from flying up into
|
||
the wind, and very probably capsizing her. How glad and how grateful the relief
|
||
from this unnatural hallucination of the night, and the fatal contingency of
|
||
being brought by the lee!
|
||
|
||
Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on
|
||
the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first hint of the
|
||
hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all
|
||
things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright;
|
||
those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in far
|
||
other, at least gentler, relief; the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true
|
||
lamp—all others but liars!
|
||
|
||
Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia’s Dismal Swamp, nor Rome’s accursed
|
||
Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of deserts and of
|
||
griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of
|
||
this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal
|
||
man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true—not
|
||
true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of
|
||
Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine
|
||
hammered steel of woe. “All is vanity.” ALL. This wilful world hath not got hold
|
||
of unchristian Solomon’s wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals and jails, and
|
||
walks fast crossing graveyards, and would rather talk of operas than hell; calls
|
||
Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and throughout a
|
||
care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly;—not
|
||
that man is fitted to sit down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould
|
||
with unfathomably wondrous Solomon.
|
||
|
||
But even Solomon, he says, “the man that wandereth out of the way of
|
||
understanding shall remain” (i.e., even while living) “in the congregation of
|
||
the dead.” Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee;
|
||
as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe
|
||
that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive
|
||
down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible
|
||
in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge
|
||
is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is
|
||
still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 97. The Lamp.
|
||
|
||
Had you descended from the Pequod’s try-works to the Pequod’s forecastle, where
|
||
the off duty watch were sleeping, for one single moment you would have almost
|
||
thought you were standing in some illuminated shrine of canonized kings and
|
||
counsellors. There they lay in their triangular oaken vaults, each mariner a
|
||
chiselled muteness; a score of lamps flashing upon his hooded eyes.
|
||
|
||
In merchantmen, oil for the sailor is more scarce than the milk of queens. To
|
||
dress in the dark, and eat in the dark, and stumble in darkness to his pallet,
|
||
this is his usual lot. But the whaleman, as he seeks the food of light, so he
|
||
lives in light. He makes his berth an Aladdin’s lamp, and lays him down in it;
|
||
so that in the pitchiest night the ship’s black hull still houses an
|
||
illumination.
|
||
|
||
See with what entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful of lamps—often but
|
||
old bottles and vials, though—to the copper cooler at the try-works, and
|
||
replenishes them there, as mugs of ale at a vat. He burns, too, the purest of
|
||
oil, in its unmanufactured, and, therefore, unvitiated state; a fluid unknown to
|
||
solar, lunar, or astral contrivances ashore. It is sweet as early grass butter
|
||
in April. He goes and hunts for his oil, so as to be sure of its freshness and
|
||
genuineness, even as the traveller on the prairie hunts up his own supper of
|
||
game.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 98. Stowing Down and Clearing Up.
|
||
|
||
Already has it been related how the great leviathan is afar off descried from
|
||
the mast-head; how he is chased over the watery moors, and slaughtered in the
|
||
valleys of the deep; how he is then towed alongside and beheaded; and how (on
|
||
the principle which entitled the headsman of old to the garments in which the
|
||
beheaded was killed) his great padded surtout becomes the property of his
|
||
executioner; how, in due time, he is condemned to the pots, and, like Shadrach,
|
||
Meshach, and Abednego, his spermaceti, oil, and bone pass unscathed through the
|
||
fire;—but now it remains to conclude the last chapter of this part of the
|
||
description by rehearsing—singing, if I may—the romantic proceeding of decanting
|
||
off his oil into the casks and striking them down into the hold, where once
|
||
again leviathan returns to his native profundities, sliding along beneath the
|
||
surface as before; but, alas! never more to rise and blow.
|
||
|
||
While still warm, the oil, like hot punch, is received into the six-barrel
|
||
casks; and while, perhaps, the ship is pitching and rolling this way and that in
|
||
the midnight sea, the enormous casks are slewed round and headed over, end for
|
||
end, and sometimes perilously scoot across the slippery deck, like so many land
|
||
slides, till at last man-handled and stayed in their course; and all round the
|
||
hoops, rap, rap, go as many hammers as can play upon them, for now, ex officio,
|
||
every sailor is a cooper.
|
||
|
||
At length, when the last pint is casked, and all is cool, then the great
|
||
hatchways are unsealed, the bowels of the ship are thrown open, and down go the
|
||
casks to their final rest in the sea. This done, the hatches are replaced, and
|
||
hermetically closed, like a closet walled up.
|
||
|
||
In the sperm fishery, this is perhaps one of the most remarkable incidents in
|
||
all the business of whaling. One day the planks stream with freshets of blood
|
||
and oil; on the sacred quarter-deck enormous masses of the whale’s head are
|
||
profanely piled; great rusty casks lie about, as in a brewery yard; the smoke
|
||
from the try-works has besooted all the bulwarks; the mariners go about suffused
|
||
with unctuousness; the entire ship seems great leviathan himself; while on all
|
||
hands the din is deafening.
|
||
|
||
But a day or two after, you look about you, and prick your ears in this
|
||
self-same ship; and were it not for the tell-tale boats and try-works, you would
|
||
all but swear you trod some silent merchant vessel, with a most scrupulously
|
||
neat commander. The unmanufactured sperm oil possesses a singularly cleansing
|
||
virtue. This is the reason why the decks never look so white as just after what
|
||
they call an affair of oil. Besides, from the ashes of the burned scraps of the
|
||
whale, a potent lye is readily made; and whenever any adhesiveness from the back
|
||
of the whale remains clinging to the side, that lye quickly exterminates it.
|
||
Hands go diligently along the bulwarks, and with buckets of water and rags
|
||
restore them to their full tidiness. The soot is brushed from the lower rigging.
|
||
All the numerous implements which have been in use are likewise faithfully
|
||
cleansed and put away. The great hatch is scrubbed and placed upon the
|
||
try-works, completely hiding the pots; every cask is out of sight; all tackles
|
||
are coiled in unseen nooks; and when by the combined and simultaneous industry
|
||
of almost the entire ship’s company, the whole of this conscientious duty is at
|
||
last concluded, then the crew themselves proceed to their own ablutions; shift
|
||
themselves from top to toe; and finally issue to the immaculate deck, fresh and
|
||
all aglow, as bridegrooms new-leaped from out the daintiest Holland.
|
||
|
||
Now, with elated step, they pace the planks in twos and threes, and humorously
|
||
discourse of parlors, sofas, carpets, and fine cambrics; propose to mat the
|
||
deck; think of having hanging to the top; object not to taking tea by moonlight
|
||
on the piazza of the forecastle. To hint to such musked mariners of oil, and
|
||
bone, and blubber, were little short of audacity. They know not the thing you
|
||
distantly allude to. Away, and bring us napkins!
|
||
|
||
But mark: aloft there, at the three mast heads, stand three men intent on spying
|
||
out more whales, which, if caught, infallibly will again soil the old oaken
|
||
furniture, and drop at least one small grease-spot somewhere. Yes; and many is
|
||
the time, when, after the severest uninterrupted labors, which know no night;
|
||
continuing straight through for ninety-six hours; when from the boat, where they
|
||
have swelled their wrists with all day rowing on the Line,—they only step to the
|
||
deck to carry vast chains, and heave the heavy windlass, and cut and slash, yea,
|
||
and in their very sweatings to be smoked and burned anew by the combined fires
|
||
of the equatorial sun and the equatorial try-works; when, on the heel of all
|
||
this, they have finally bestirred themselves to cleanse the ship, and make a
|
||
spotless dairy room of it; many is the time the poor fellows, just buttoning the
|
||
necks of their clean frocks, are startled by the cry of “There she blows!” and
|
||
away they fly to fight another whale, and go through the whole weary thing
|
||
again. Oh! my friends, but this is man-killing! Yet this is life. For hardly
|
||
have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world’s vast bulk its small
|
||
but valuable sperm; and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its
|
||
defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly
|
||
is this done, when—There she blows!—the ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to
|
||
fight some other world, and go through young life’s old routine again.
|
||
|
||
Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two thousand
|
||
years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with thee along the
|
||
Peruvian coast last voyage—and, foolish as I am, taught thee, a green simple
|
||
boy, how to splice a rope!
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 99. The Doubloon.
|
||
|
||
Ere now it has been related how Ahab was wont to pace his quarter-deck, taking
|
||
regular turns at either limit, the binnacle and mainmast; but in the
|
||
multiplicity of other things requiring narration it has not been added how that
|
||
sometimes in these walks, when most plunged in his mood, he was wont to pause in
|
||
turn at each spot, and stand there strangely eyeing the particular object before
|
||
him. When he halted before the binnacle, with his glance fastened on the pointed
|
||
needle in the compass, that glance shot like a javelin with the pointed
|
||
intensity of his purpose; and when resuming his walk he again paused before the
|
||
mainmast, then, as the same riveted glance fastened upon the riveted gold coin
|
||
there, he still wore the same aspect of nailed firmness, only dashed with a
|
||
certain wild longing, if not hopefulness.
|
||
|
||
But one morning, turning to pass the doubloon, he seemed to be newly attracted
|
||
by the strange figures and inscriptions stamped on it, as though now for the
|
||
first time beginning to interpret for himself in some monomaniac way whatever
|
||
significance might lurk in them. And some certain significance lurks in all
|
||
things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an
|
||
empty cipher, except to sell by the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to
|
||
fill up some morass in the Milky Way.
|
||
|
||
Now this doubloon was of purest, virgin gold, raked somewhere out of the heart
|
||
of gorgeous hills, whence, east and west, over golden sands, the head-waters of
|
||
many a Pactolus flows. And though now nailed amidst all the rustiness of iron
|
||
bolts and the verdigris of copper spikes, yet, untouchable and immaculate to any
|
||
foulness, it still preserved its Quito glow. Nor, though placed amongst a
|
||
ruthless crew and every hour passed by ruthless hands, and through the livelong
|
||
nights shrouded with thick darkness which might cover any pilfering approach,
|
||
nevertheless every sunrise found the doubloon where the sunset left it last. For
|
||
it was set apart and sanctified to one awe-striking end; and however wanton in
|
||
their sailor ways, one and all, the mariners revered it as the white whale’s
|
||
talisman. Sometimes they talked it over in the weary watch by night, wondering
|
||
whose it was to be at last, and whether he would ever live to spend it.
|
||
|
||
Now those noble golden coins of South America are as medals of the sun and
|
||
tropic token-pieces. Here palms, alpacas, and volcanoes; sun’s disks and stars;
|
||
ecliptics, horns-of-plenty, and rich banners waving, are in luxuriant profusion
|
||
stamped; so that the precious gold seems almost to derive an added preciousness
|
||
and enhancing glories, by passing through those fancy mints, so Spanishly
|
||
poetic.
|
||
|
||
It so chanced that the doubloon of the Pequod was a most wealthy example of
|
||
these things. On its round border it bore the letters, REPUBLICA DEL ECUADOR:
|
||
QUITO. So this bright coin came from a country planted in the middle of the
|
||
world, and beneath the great equator, and named after it; and it had been cast
|
||
midway up the Andes, in the unwaning clime that knows no autumn. Zoned by those
|
||
letters you saw the likeness of three Andes’ summits; from one a flame; a tower
|
||
on another; on the third a crowing cock; while arching over all was a segment of
|
||
the partitioned zodiac, the signs all marked with their usual cabalistics, and
|
||
the keystone sun entering the equinoctial point at Libra.
|
||
|
||
Before this equatorial coin, Ahab, not unobserved by others, was now pausing.
|
||
|
||
“There’s something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all other
|
||
grand and lofty things; look here,—three peaks as proud as Lucifer. The firm
|
||
tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous, the undaunted,
|
||
and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all are Ahab; and this round gold is
|
||
but the image of the rounder globe, which, like a magician’s glass, to each and
|
||
every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self. Great pains, small
|
||
gains for those who ask the world to solve them; it cannot solve itself.
|
||
Methinks now this coined sun wears a ruddy face; but see! aye, he enters the
|
||
sign of storms, the equinox! and but six months before he wheeled out of a
|
||
former equinox at Aries! From storm to storm! So be it, then. Born in throes,
|
||
’tis fit that man should live in pains and die in pangs! So be it, then! Here’s
|
||
stout stuff for woe to work on. So be it, then.”
|
||
|
||
“No fairy fingers can have pressed the gold, but devil’s claws must have left
|
||
their mouldings there since yesterday,” murmured Starbuck to himself, leaning
|
||
against the bulwarks. “The old man seems to read Belshazzar’s awful writing. I
|
||
have never marked the coin inspectingly. He goes below; let me read. A dark
|
||
valley between three mighty, heaven-abiding peaks, that almost seem the Trinity,
|
||
in some faint earthly symbol. So in this vale of Death, God girds us round; and
|
||
over all our gloom, the sun of Righteousness still shines a beacon and a hope.
|
||
If we bend down our eyes, the dark vale shows her mouldy soil; but if we lift
|
||
them, the bright sun meets our glance half way, to cheer. Yet, oh, the great sun
|
||
is no fixture; and if, at midnight, we would fain snatch some sweet solace from
|
||
him, we gaze for him in vain! This coin speaks wisely, mildly, truly, but still
|
||
sadly to me. I will quit it, lest Truth shake me falsely.”
|
||
|
||
“There now’s the old Mogul,” soliloquized Stubb by the try-works, “he’s been
|
||
twigging it; and there goes Starbuck from the same, and both with faces which I
|
||
should say might be somewhere within nine fathoms long. And all from looking at
|
||
a piece of gold, which did I have it now on Negro Hill or in Corlaer’s Hook, I’d
|
||
not look at it very long ere spending it. Humph! in my poor, insignificant
|
||
opinion, I regard this as queer. I have seen doubloons before now in my
|
||
voyagings; your doubloons of old Spain, your doubloons of Peru, your doubloons
|
||
of Chili, your doubloons of Bolivia, your doubloons of Popayan; with plenty of
|
||
gold moidores and pistoles, and joes, and half joes, and quarter joes. What then
|
||
should there be in this doubloon of the Equator that is so killing wonderful? By
|
||
Golconda! let me read it once. Halloa! here’s signs and wonders truly! That,
|
||
now, is what old Bowditch in his Epitome calls the zodiac, and what my almanac
|
||
below calls ditto. I’ll get the almanac and as I have heard devils can be raised
|
||
with Daboll’s arithmetic, I’ll try my hand at raising a meaning out of these
|
||
queer curvicues here with the Massachusetts calendar. Here’s the book. Let’s see
|
||
now. Signs and wonders; and the sun, he’s always among ’em. Hem, hem, hem; here
|
||
they are—here they go—all alive:—Aries, or the Ram; Taurus, or the Bull and
|
||
Jimimi! here’s Gemini himself, or the Twins. Well; the sun he wheels among ’em.
|
||
Aye, here on the coin he’s just crossing the threshold between two of twelve
|
||
sitting-rooms all in a ring. Book! you lie there; the fact is, you books must
|
||
know your places. You’ll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in
|
||
to supply the thoughts. That’s my small experience, so far as the Massachusetts
|
||
calendar, and Bowditch’s navigator, and Daboll’s arithmetic go. Signs and
|
||
wonders, eh? Pity if there is nothing wonderful in signs, and significant in
|
||
wonders! There’s a clue somewhere; wait a bit; hist—hark! By Jove, I have it!
|
||
Look you, Doubloon, your zodiac here is the life of man in one round chapter;
|
||
and now I’ll read it off, straight out of the book. Come, Almanack! To begin:
|
||
there’s Aries, or the Ram—lecherous dog, he begets us; then, Taurus, or the
|
||
Bull—he bumps us the first thing; then Gemini, or the Twins—that is, Virtue and
|
||
Vice; we try to reach Virtue, when lo! comes Cancer the Crab, and drags us back;
|
||
and here, going from Virtue, Leo, a roaring Lion, lies in the path—he gives a
|
||
few fierce bites and surly dabs with his paw; we escape, and hail Virgo, the
|
||
Virgin! that’s our first love; we marry and think to be happy for aye, when pop
|
||
comes Libra, or the Scales—happiness weighed and found wanting; and while we are
|
||
very sad about that, Lord! how we suddenly jump, as Scorpio, or the Scorpion,
|
||
stings us in the rear; we are curing the wound, when whang come the arrows all
|
||
round; Sagittarius, or the Archer, is amusing himself. As we pluck out the
|
||
shafts, stand aside! here’s the battering-ram, Capricornus, or the Goat; full
|
||
tilt, he comes rushing, and headlong we are tossed; when Aquarius, or the
|
||
Water-bearer, pours out his whole deluge and drowns us; and to wind up with
|
||
Pisces, or the Fishes, we sleep. There’s a sermon now, writ in high heaven, and
|
||
the sun goes through it every year, and yet comes out of it all alive and
|
||
hearty. Jollily he, aloft there, wheels through toil and trouble; and so, alow
|
||
here, does jolly Stubb. Oh, jolly’s the word for aye! Adieu, Doubloon! But stop;
|
||
here comes little King-Post; dodge round the try-works, now, and let’s hear what
|
||
he’ll have to say. There; he’s before it; he’ll out with something presently.
|
||
So, so; he’s beginning.”
|
||
|
||
“I see nothing here, but a round thing made of gold, and whoever raises a
|
||
certain whale, this round thing belongs to him. So, what’s all this staring been
|
||
about? It is worth sixteen dollars, that’s true; and at two cents the cigar,
|
||
that’s nine hundred and sixty cigars. I won’t smoke dirty pipes like Stubb, but
|
||
I like cigars, and here’s nine hundred and sixty of them; so here goes Flask
|
||
aloft to spy ’em out.”
|
||
|
||
“Shall I call that wise or foolish, now; if it be really wise it has a foolish
|
||
look to it; yet, if it be really foolish, then has it a sort of wiseish look to
|
||
it. But, avast; here comes our old Manxman—the old hearse-driver, he must have
|
||
been, that is, before he took to the sea. He luffs up before the doubloon;
|
||
halloa, and goes round on the other side of the mast; why, there’s a horse-shoe
|
||
nailed on that side; and now he’s back again; what does that mean? Hark! he’s
|
||
muttering—voice like an old worn-out coffee-mill. Prick ears, and listen!”
|
||
|
||
“If the White Whale be raised, it must be in a month and a day, when the sun
|
||
stands in some one of these signs. I’ve studied signs, and know their marks;
|
||
they were taught me two score years ago, by the old witch in Copenhagen. Now, in
|
||
what sign will the sun then be? The horse-shoe sign; for there it is, right
|
||
opposite the gold. And what’s the horse-shoe sign? The lion is the horse-shoe
|
||
sign—the roaring and devouring lion. Ship, old ship! my old head shakes to think
|
||
of thee.”
|
||
|
||
“There’s another rendering now; but still one text. All sorts of men in one kind
|
||
of world, you see. Dodge again! here comes Queequeg—all tattooing—looks like the
|
||
signs of the Zodiac himself. What says the Cannibal? As I live he’s comparing
|
||
notes; looking at his thigh bone; thinks the sun is in the thigh, or in the
|
||
calf, or in the bowels, I suppose, as the old women talk Surgeon’s Astronomy in
|
||
the back country. And by Jove, he’s found something there in the vicinity of his
|
||
thigh—I guess it’s Sagittarius, or the Archer. No: he don’t know what to make of
|
||
the doubloon; he takes it for an old button off some king’s trowsers. But, aside
|
||
again! here comes that ghost-devil, Fedallah; tail coiled out of sight as usual,
|
||
oakum in the toes of his pumps as usual. What does he say, with that look of
|
||
his? Ah, only makes a sign to the sign and bows himself; there is a sun on the
|
||
coin—fire worshipper, depend upon it. Ho! more and more. This way comes Pip—poor
|
||
boy! would he had died, or I; he’s half horrible to me. He too has been watching
|
||
all of these interpreters—myself included—and look now, he comes to read, with
|
||
that unearthly idiot face. Stand away again and hear him. Hark!”
|
||
|
||
“I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.”
|
||
|
||
“Upon my soul, he’s been studying Murray’s Grammar! Improving his mind, poor
|
||
fellow! But what’s that he says now—hist!”
|
||
|
||
“I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.”
|
||
|
||
“Why, he’s getting it by heart—hist! again.”
|
||
|
||
“I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.”
|
||
|
||
“Well, that’s funny.”
|
||
|
||
“And I, you, and he; and we, ye, and they, are all bats; and I’m a crow,
|
||
especially when I stand a’top of this pine tree here. Caw! caw! caw! caw! caw!
|
||
caw! Ain’t I a crow? And where’s the scare-crow? There he stands; two bones
|
||
stuck into a pair of old trowsers, and two more poked into the sleeves of an old
|
||
jacket.”
|
||
|
||
“Wonder if he means me?—complimentary!—poor lad!—I could go hang myself. Any
|
||
way, for the present, I’ll quit Pip’s vicinity. I can stand the rest, for they
|
||
have plain wits; but he’s too crazy-witty for my sanity. So, so, I leave him
|
||
muttering.”
|
||
|
||
“Here’s the ship’s navel, this doubloon here, and they are all on fire to
|
||
unscrew it. But, unscrew your navel, and what’s the consequence? Then again, if
|
||
it stays here, that is ugly, too, for when aught’s nailed to the mast it’s a
|
||
sign that things grow desperate. Ha, ha! old Ahab! the White Whale; he’ll nail
|
||
ye! This is a pine tree. My father, in old Tolland county, cut down a pine tree
|
||
once, and found a silver ring grown over in it; some old darkey’s wedding ring.
|
||
How did it get there? And so they’ll say in the resurrection, when they come to
|
||
fish up this old mast, and find a doubloon lodged in it, with bedded oysters for
|
||
the shaggy bark. Oh, the gold! the precious, precious, gold! the green miser’ll
|
||
hoard ye soon! Hish! hish! God goes ’mong the worlds blackberrying. Cook! ho,
|
||
cook! and cook us! Jenny! hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, Jenny, Jenny! and get your
|
||
hoe-cake done!”
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 100. Leg and Arm. The Pequod, of Nantucket, Meets the Samuel Enderby,
|
||
of London.
|
||
|
||
“Ship, ahoy! Hast seen the White Whale?”
|
||
|
||
So cried Ahab, once more hailing a ship showing English colours, bearing down
|
||
under the stern. Trumpet to mouth, the old man was standing in his hoisted
|
||
quarter-boat, his ivory leg plainly revealed to the stranger captain, who was
|
||
carelessly reclining in his own boat’s bow. He was a darkly-tanned, burly,
|
||
good-natured, fine-looking man, of sixty or thereabouts, dressed in a spacious
|
||
roundabout, that hung round him in festoons of blue pilot-cloth; and one empty
|
||
arm of this jacket streamed behind him like the broidered arm of a hussar’s
|
||
surcoat.
|
||
|
||
“Hast seen the White Whale?”
|
||
|
||
“See you this?” and withdrawing it from the folds that had hidden it, he held up
|
||
a white arm of sperm whale bone, terminating in a wooden head like a mallet.
|
||
|
||
“Man my boat!” cried Ahab, impetuously, and tossing about the oars near
|
||
him—“Stand by to lower!”
|
||
|
||
In less than a minute, without quitting his little craft, he and his crew were
|
||
dropped to the water, and were soon alongside of the stranger. But here a
|
||
curious difficulty presented itself. In the excitement of the moment, Ahab had
|
||
forgotten that since the loss of his leg he had never once stepped on board of
|
||
any vessel at sea but his own, and then it was always by an ingenious and very
|
||
handy mechanical contrivance peculiar to the Pequod, and a thing not to be
|
||
rigged and shipped in any other vessel at a moment’s warning. Now, it is no very
|
||
easy matter for anybody—except those who are almost hourly used to it, like
|
||
whalemen—to clamber up a ship’s side from a boat on the open sea; for the great
|
||
swells now lift the boat high up towards the bulwarks, and then instantaneously
|
||
drop it half way down to the kelson. So, deprived of one leg, and the strange
|
||
ship of course being altogether unsupplied with the kindly invention, Ahab now
|
||
found himself abjectly reduced to a clumsy landsman again; hopelessly eyeing the
|
||
uncertain changeful height he could hardly hope to attain.
|
||
|
||
It has before been hinted, perhaps, that every little untoward circumstance that
|
||
befell him, and which indirectly sprang from his luckless mishap, almost
|
||
invariably irritated or exasperated Ahab. And in the present instance, all this
|
||
was heightened by the sight of the two officers of the strange ship, leaning
|
||
over the side, by the perpendicular ladder of nailed cleets there, and swinging
|
||
towards him a pair of tastefully-ornamented man-ropes; for at first they did not
|
||
seem to bethink them that a one-legged man must be too much of a cripple to use
|
||
their sea bannisters. But this awkwardness only lasted a minute, because the
|
||
strange captain, observing at a glance how affairs stood, cried out, “I see, I
|
||
see!—avast heaving there! Jump, boys, and swing over the cutting-tackle.”
|
||
|
||
As good luck would have it, they had had a whale alongside a day or two
|
||
previous, and the great tackles were still aloft, and the massive curved
|
||
blubber-hook, now clean and dry, was still attached to the end. This was quickly
|
||
lowered to Ahab, who at once comprehending it all, slid his solitary thigh into
|
||
the curve of the hook (it was like sitting in the fluke of an anchor, or the
|
||
crotch of an apple tree), and then giving the word, held himself fast, and at
|
||
the same time also helped to hoist his own weight, by pulling hand-over-hand
|
||
upon one of the running parts of the tackle. Soon he was carefully swung inside
|
||
the high bulwarks, and gently landed upon the capstan head. With his ivory arm
|
||
frankly thrust forth in welcome, the other captain advanced, and Ahab, putting
|
||
out his ivory leg, and crossing the ivory arm (like two sword-fish blades) cried
|
||
out in his walrus way, “Aye, aye, hearty! let us shake bones together!—an arm
|
||
and a leg!—an arm that never can shrink, d’ye see; and a leg that never can run.
|
||
Where did’st thou see the White Whale?—how long ago?”
|
||
|
||
“The White Whale,” said the Englishman, pointing his ivory arm towards the East,
|
||
and taking a rueful sight along it, as if it had been a telescope; “there I saw
|
||
him, on the Line, last season.”
|
||
|
||
“And he took that arm off, did he?” asked Ahab, now sliding down from the
|
||
capstan, and resting on the Englishman’s shoulder, as he did so.
|
||
|
||
“Aye, he was the cause of it, at least; and that leg, too?”
|
||
|
||
“Spin me the yarn,” said Ahab; “how was it?”
|
||
|
||
“It was the first time in my life that I ever cruised on the Line,” began the
|
||
Englishman. “I was ignorant of the White Whale at that time. Well, one day we
|
||
lowered for a pod of four or five whales, and my boat fastened to one of them; a
|
||
regular circus horse he was, too, that went milling and milling round so, that
|
||
my boat’s crew could only trim dish, by sitting all their sterns on the outer
|
||
gunwale. Presently up breaches from the bottom of the sea a bouncing great
|
||
whale, with a milky-white head and hump, all crows’ feet and wrinkles.”
|
||
|
||
“It was he, it was he!” cried Ahab, suddenly letting out his suspended breath.
|
||
|
||
“And harpoons sticking in near his starboard fin.”
|
||
|
||
“Aye, aye—they were mine—my irons,” cried Ahab, exultingly—“but on!”
|
||
|
||
“Give me a chance, then,” said the Englishman, good-humoredly. “Well, this old
|
||
great-grandfather, with the white head and hump, runs all afoam into the pod,
|
||
and goes to snapping furiously at my fast-line!
|
||
|
||
“Aye, I see!—wanted to part it; free the fast-fish—an old trick—I know him.”
|
||
|
||
“How it was exactly,” continued the one-armed commander, “I do not know; but in
|
||
biting the line, it got foul of his teeth, caught there somehow; but we didn’t
|
||
know it then; so that when we afterwards pulled on the line, bounce we came
|
||
plump on to his hump! instead of the other whale’s; that went off to windward,
|
||
all fluking. Seeing how matters stood, and what a noble great whale it was—the
|
||
noblest and biggest I ever saw, sir, in my life—I resolved to capture him, spite
|
||
of the boiling rage he seemed to be in. And thinking the hap-hazard line would
|
||
get loose, or the tooth it was tangled to might draw (for I have a devil of a
|
||
boat’s crew for a pull on a whale-line); seeing all this, I say, I jumped into
|
||
my first mate’s boat—Mr. Mounttop’s here (by the way, Captain—Mounttop;
|
||
Mounttop—the captain);—as I was saying, I jumped into Mounttop’s boat, which,
|
||
d’ye see, was gunwale and gunwale with mine, then; and snatching the first
|
||
harpoon, let this old great-grandfather have it. But, Lord, look you, sir—hearts
|
||
and souls alive, man—the next instant, in a jiff, I was blind as a bat—both eyes
|
||
out—all befogged and bedeadened with black foam—the whale’s tail looming
|
||
straight up out of it, perpendicular in the air, like a marble steeple. No use
|
||
sterning all, then; but as I was groping at midday, with a blinding sun, all
|
||
crown-jewels; as I was groping, I say, after the second iron, to toss it
|
||
overboard—down comes the tail like a Lima tower, cutting my boat in two, leaving
|
||
each half in splinters; and, flukes first, the white hump backed through the
|
||
wreck, as though it was all chips. We all struck out. To escape his terrible
|
||
flailings, I seized hold of my harpoon-pole sticking in him, and for a moment
|
||
clung to that like a sucking fish. But a combing sea dashed me off, and at the
|
||
same instant, the fish, taking one good dart forwards, went down like a flash;
|
||
and the barb of that cursed second iron towing along near me caught me here”
|
||
(clapping his hand just below his shoulder); “yes, caught me just here, I say,
|
||
and bore me down to Hell’s flames, I was thinking; when, when, all of a sudden,
|
||
thank the good God, the barb ript its way along the flesh—clear along the whole
|
||
length of my arm—came out nigh my wrist, and up I floated;—and that gentleman
|
||
there will tell you the rest (by the way, captain—Dr. Bunger, ship’s surgeon:
|
||
Bunger, my lad,—the captain). Now, Bunger boy, spin your part of the yarn.”
|
||
|
||
The professional gentleman thus familiarly pointed out, had been all the time
|
||
standing near them, with nothing specific visible, to denote his gentlemanly
|
||
rank on board. His face was an exceedingly round but sober one; he was dressed
|
||
in a faded blue woollen frock or shirt, and patched trowsers; and had thus far
|
||
been dividing his attention between a marlingspike he held in one hand, and a
|
||
pill-box held in the other, occasionally casting a critical glance at the ivory
|
||
limbs of the two crippled captains. But, at his superior’s introduction of him
|
||
to Ahab, he politely bowed, and straightway went on to do his captain’s bidding.
|
||
|
||
“It was a shocking bad wound,” began the whale-surgeon; “and, taking my advice,
|
||
Captain Boomer here, stood our old Sammy—”
|
||
|
||
“Samuel Enderby is the name of my ship,” interrupted the one-armed captain,
|
||
addressing Ahab; “go on, boy.”
|
||
|
||
“Stood our old Sammy off to the northward, to get out of the blazing hot weather
|
||
there on the Line. But it was no use—I did all I could; sat up with him nights;
|
||
was very severe with him in the matter of diet—”
|
||
|
||
“Oh, very severe!” chimed in the patient himself; then suddenly altering his
|
||
voice, “Drinking hot rum toddies with me every night, till he couldn’t see to
|
||
put on the bandages; and sending me to bed, half seas over, about three o’clock
|
||
in the morning. Oh, ye stars! he sat up with me indeed, and was very severe in
|
||
my diet. Oh! a great watcher, and very dietetically severe, is Dr. Bunger.
|
||
(Bunger, you dog, laugh out! why don’t ye? You know you’re a precious jolly
|
||
rascal.) But, heave ahead, boy, I’d rather be killed by you than kept alive by
|
||
any other man.”
|
||
|
||
“My captain, you must have ere this perceived, respected sir”—said the
|
||
imperturbable godly-looking Bunger, slightly bowing to Ahab—“is apt to be
|
||
facetious at times; he spins us many clever things of that sort. But I may as
|
||
well say—en passant, as the French remark—that I myself—that is to say, Jack
|
||
Bunger, late of the reverend clergy—am a strict total abstinence man; I never
|
||
drink—”
|
||
|
||
“Water!” cried the captain; “he never drinks it; it’s a sort of fits to him;
|
||
fresh water throws him into the hydrophobia; but go on—go on with the arm
|
||
story.”
|
||
|
||
“Yes, I may as well,” said the surgeon, coolly. “I was about observing, sir,
|
||
before Captain Boomer’s facetious interruption, that spite of my best and
|
||
severest endeavors, the wound kept getting worse and worse; the truth was, sir,
|
||
it was as ugly gaping wound as surgeon ever saw; more than two feet and several
|
||
inches long. I measured it with the lead line. In short, it grew black; I knew
|
||
what was threatened, and off it came. But I had no hand in shipping that ivory
|
||
arm there; that thing is against all rule”—pointing at it with the
|
||
marlingspike—“that is the captain’s work, not mine; he ordered the carpenter to
|
||
make it; he had that club-hammer there put to the end, to knock some one’s
|
||
brains out with, I suppose, as he tried mine once. He flies into diabolical
|
||
passions sometimes. Do ye see this dent, sir”—removing his hat, and brushing
|
||
aside his hair, and exposing a bowl-like cavity in his skull, but which bore not
|
||
the slightest scarry trace, or any token of ever having been a wound—“Well, the
|
||
captain there will tell you how that came here; he knows.”
|
||
|
||
“No, I don’t,” said the captain, “but his mother did; he was born with it. Oh,
|
||
you solemn rogue, you—you Bunger! was there ever such another Bunger in the
|
||
watery world? Bunger, when you die, you ought to die in pickle, you dog; you
|
||
should be preserved to future ages, you rascal.”
|
||
|
||
“What became of the White Whale?” now cried Ahab, who thus far had been
|
||
impatiently listening to this by-play between the two Englishmen.
|
||
|
||
“Oh!” cried the one-armed captain, “oh, yes! Well; after he sounded, we didn’t
|
||
see him again for some time; in fact, as I before hinted, I didn’t then know
|
||
what whale it was that had served me such a trick, till some time afterwards,
|
||
when coming back to the Line, we heard about Moby Dick—as some call him—and then
|
||
I knew it was he.”
|
||
|
||
“Did’st thou cross his wake again?”
|
||
|
||
“Twice.”
|
||
|
||
“But could not fasten?”
|
||
|
||
“Didn’t want to try to: ain’t one limb enough? What should I do without this
|
||
other arm? And I’m thinking Moby Dick doesn’t bite so much as he swallows.”
|
||
|
||
“Well, then,” interrupted Bunger, “give him your left arm for bait to get the
|
||
right. Do you know, gentlemen”—very gravely and mathematically bowing to each
|
||
Captain in succession—“Do you know, gentlemen, that the digestive organs of the
|
||
whale are so inscrutably constructed by Divine Providence, that it is quite
|
||
impossible for him to completely digest even a man’s arm? And he knows it too.
|
||
So that what you take for the White Whale’s malice is only his awkwardness. For
|
||
he never means to swallow a single limb; he only thinks to terrify by feints.
|
||
But sometimes he is like the old juggling fellow, formerly a patient of mine in
|
||
Ceylon, that making believe swallow jack-knives, once upon a time let one drop
|
||
into him in good earnest, and there it stayed for a twelvemonth or more; when I
|
||
gave him an emetic, and he heaved it up in small tacks, d’ye see. No possible
|
||
way for him to digest that jack-knife, and fully incorporate it into his general
|
||
bodily system. Yes, Captain Boomer, if you are quick enough about it, and have a
|
||
mind to pawn one arm for the sake of the privilege of giving decent burial to
|
||
the other, why in that case the arm is yours; only let the whale have another
|
||
chance at you shortly, that’s all.”
|
||
|
||
“No, thank ye, Bunger,” said the English Captain, “he’s welcome to the arm he
|
||
has, since I can’t help it, and didn’t know him then; but not to another one. No
|
||
more White Whales for me; I’ve lowered for him once, and that has satisfied me.
|
||
There would be great glory in killing him, I know that; and there is a ship-load
|
||
of precious sperm in him, but, hark ye, he’s best let alone; don’t you think so,
|
||
Captain?”—glancing at the ivory leg.
|
||
|
||
“He is. But he will still be hunted, for all that. What is best let alone, that
|
||
accursed thing is not always what least allures. He’s all a magnet! How long
|
||
since thou saw’st him last? Which way heading?”
|
||
|
||
“Bless my soul, and curse the foul fiend’s,” cried Bunger, stoopingly walking
|
||
round Ahab, and like a dog, strangely snuffing; “this man’s blood—bring the
|
||
thermometer!—it’s at the boiling point!—his pulse makes these planks
|
||
beat!—sir!”—taking a lancet from his pocket, and drawing near to Ahab’s arm.
|
||
|
||
“Avast!” roared Ahab, dashing him against the bulwarks—“Man the boat! Which way
|
||
heading?”
|
||
|
||
“Good God!” cried the English Captain, to whom the question was put. “What’s the
|
||
matter? He was heading east, I think.—Is your Captain crazy?” whispering
|
||
Fedallah.
|
||
|
||
But Fedallah, putting a finger on his lip, slid over the bulwarks to take the
|
||
boat’s steering oar, and Ahab, swinging the cutting-tackle towards him,
|
||
commanded the ship’s sailors to stand by to lower.
|
||
|
||
In a moment he was standing in the boat’s stern, and the Manilla men were
|
||
springing to their oars. In vain the English Captain hailed him. With back to
|
||
the stranger ship, and face set like a flint to his own, Ahab stood upright till
|
||
alongside of the Pequod.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 101. The Decanter.
|
||
|
||
Ere the English ship fades from sight, be it set down here, that she hailed from
|
||
London, and was named after the late Samuel Enderby, merchant of that city, the
|
||
original of the famous whaling house of Enderby & Sons; a house which in my poor
|
||
whaleman’s opinion, comes not far behind the united royal houses of the Tudors
|
||
and Bourbons, in point of real historical interest. How long, prior to the year
|
||
of our Lord 1775, this great whaling house was in existence, my numerous
|
||
fish-documents do not make plain; but in that year (1775) it fitted out the
|
||
first English ships that ever regularly hunted the Sperm Whale; though for some
|
||
score of years previous (ever since 1726) our valiant Coffins and Maceys of
|
||
Nantucket and the Vineyard had in large fleets pursued that Leviathan, but only
|
||
in the North and South Atlantic: not elsewhere. Be it distinctly recorded here,
|
||
that the Nantucketers were the first among mankind to harpoon with civilized
|
||
steel the great Sperm Whale; and that for half a century they were the only
|
||
people of the whole globe who so harpooned him.
|
||
|
||
In 1778, a fine ship, the Amelia, fitted out for the express purpose, and at the
|
||
sole charge of the vigorous Enderbys, boldly rounded Cape Horn, and was the
|
||
first among the nations to lower a whale-boat of any sort in the great South
|
||
Sea. The voyage was a skilful and lucky one; and returning to her berth with her
|
||
hold full of the precious sperm, the Amelia’s example was soon followed by other
|
||
ships, English and American, and thus the vast Sperm Whale grounds of the
|
||
Pacific were thrown open. But not content with this good deed, the indefatigable
|
||
house again bestirred itself: Samuel and all his Sons—how many, their mother
|
||
only knows—and under their immediate auspices, and partly, I think, at their
|
||
expense, the British government was induced to send the sloop-of-war Rattler on
|
||
a whaling voyage of discovery into the South Sea. Commanded by a naval
|
||
Post-Captain, the Rattler made a rattling voyage of it, and did some service;
|
||
how much does not appear. But this is not all. In 1819, the same house fitted
|
||
out a discovery whale ship of their own, to go on a tasting cruise to the remote
|
||
waters of Japan. That ship—well called the “Syren”—made a noble experimental
|
||
cruise; and it was thus that the great Japanese Whaling Ground first became
|
||
generally known. The Syren in this famous voyage was commanded by a Captain
|
||
Coffin, a Nantucketer.
|
||
|
||
All honor to the Enderbies, therefore, whose house, I think, exists to the
|
||
present day; though doubtless the original Samuel must long ago have slipped his
|
||
cable for the great South Sea of the other world.
|
||
|
||
The ship named after him was worthy of the honor, being a very fast sailer and a
|
||
noble craft every way. I boarded her once at midnight somewhere off the
|
||
Patagonian coast, and drank good flip down in the forecastle. It was a fine gam
|
||
we had, and they were all trumps—every soul on board. A short life to them, and
|
||
a jolly death. And that fine gam I had—long, very long after old Ahab touched
|
||
her planks with his ivory heel—it minds me of the noble, solid, Saxon
|
||
hospitality of that ship; and may my parson forget me, and the devil remember
|
||
me, if I ever lose sight of it. Flip? Did I say we had flip? Yes, and we flipped
|
||
it at the rate of ten gallons the hour; and when the squall came (for it’s
|
||
squally off there by Patagonia), and all hands—visitors and all—were called to
|
||
reef topsails, we were so top-heavy that we had to swing each other aloft in
|
||
bowlines; and we ignorantly furled the skirts of our jackets into the sails, so
|
||
that we hung there, reefed fast in the howling gale, a warning example to all
|
||
drunken tars. However, the masts did not go overboard; and by and by we
|
||
scrambled down, so sober, that we had to pass the flip again, though the savage
|
||
salt spray bursting down the forecastle scuttle, rather too much diluted and
|
||
pickled it to my taste.
|
||
|
||
The beef was fine—tough, but with body in it. They said it was bull-beef;
|
||
others, that it was dromedary beef; but I do not know, for certain, how that
|
||
was. They had dumplings too; small, but substantial, symmetrically globular, and
|
||
indestructible dumplings. I fancied that you could feel them, and roll them
|
||
about in you after they were swallowed. If you stooped over too far forward, you
|
||
risked their pitching out of you like billiard-balls. The bread—but that
|
||
couldn’t be helped; besides, it was an anti-scorbutic; in short, the bread
|
||
contained the only fresh fare they had. But the forecastle was not very light,
|
||
and it was very easy to step over into a dark corner when you ate it. But all in
|
||
all, taking her from truck to helm, considering the dimensions of the cook’s
|
||
boilers, including his own live parchment boilers; fore and aft, I say, the
|
||
Samuel Enderby was a jolly ship; of good fare and plenty; fine flip and strong;
|
||
crack fellows all, and capital from boot heels to hat-band.
|
||
|
||
But why was it, think ye, that the Samuel Enderby, and some other English
|
||
whalers I know of—not all though—were such famous, hospitable ships; that passed
|
||
round the beef, and the bread, and the can, and the joke; and were not soon
|
||
weary of eating, and drinking, and laughing? I will tell you. The abounding good
|
||
cheer of these English whalers is matter for historical research. Nor have I
|
||
been at all sparing of historical whale research, when it has seemed needed.
|
||
|
||
The English were preceded in the whale fishery by the Hollanders, Zealanders,
|
||
and Danes; from whom they derived many terms still extant in the fishery; and
|
||
what is yet more, their fat old fashions, touching plenty to eat and drink. For,
|
||
as a general thing, the English merchant-ship scrimps her crew; but not so the
|
||
English whaler. Hence, in the English, this thing of whaling good cheer is not
|
||
normal and natural, but incidental and particular; and, therefore, must have
|
||
some special origin, which is here pointed out, and will be still further
|
||
elucidated.
|
||
|
||
During my researches in the Leviathanic histories, I stumbled upon an ancient
|
||
Dutch volume, which, by the musty whaling smell of it, I knew must be about
|
||
whalers. The title was, “Dan Coopman,” wherefore I concluded that this must be
|
||
the invaluable memoirs of some Amsterdam cooper in the fishery, as every whale
|
||
ship must carry its cooper. I was reinforced in this opinion by seeing that it
|
||
was the production of one “Fitz Swackhammer.” But my friend Dr. Snodhead, a very
|
||
learned man, professor of Low Dutch and High German in the college of Santa
|
||
Claus and St. Pott’s, to whom I handed the work for translation, giving him a
|
||
box of sperm candles for his trouble—this same Dr. Snodhead, so soon as he spied
|
||
the book, assured me that “Dan Coopman” did not mean “The Cooper,” but “The
|
||
Merchant.” In short, this ancient and learned Low Dutch book treated of the
|
||
commerce of Holland; and, among other subjects, contained a very interesting
|
||
account of its whale fishery. And in this chapter it was, headed, “Smeer,” or
|
||
“Fat,” that I found a long detailed list of the outfits for the larders and
|
||
cellars of 180 sail of Dutch whalemen; from which list, as translated by Dr.
|
||
Snodhead, I transcribe the following:
|
||
|
||
400,000 lbs. of beef. 60,000 lbs. Friesland pork. 150,000 lbs. of stock fish.
|
||
550,000 lbs. of biscuit. 72,000 lbs. of soft bread. 2,800 firkins of butter.
|
||
20,000 lbs. Texel & Leyden cheese. 144,000 lbs. cheese (probably an inferior
|
||
article). 550 ankers of Geneva. 10,800 barrels of beer.
|
||
|
||
Most statistical tables are parchingly dry in the reading; not so in the present
|
||
case, however, where the reader is flooded with whole pipes, barrels, quarts,
|
||
and gills of good gin and good cheer.
|
||
|
||
At the time, I devoted three days to the studious digesting of all this beer,
|
||
beef, and bread, during which many profound thoughts were incidentally suggested
|
||
to me, capable of a transcendental and Platonic application; and, furthermore, I
|
||
compiled supplementary tables of my own, touching the probable quantity of
|
||
stock-fish, etc., consumed by every Low Dutch harpooneer in that ancient
|
||
Greenland and Spitzbergen whale fishery. In the first place, the amount of
|
||
butter, and Texel and Leyden cheese consumed, seems amazing. I impute it,
|
||
though, to their naturally unctuous natures, being rendered still more unctuous
|
||
by the nature of their vocation, and especially by their pursuing their game in
|
||
those frigid Polar Seas, on the very coasts of that Esquimaux country where the
|
||
convivial natives pledge each other in bumpers of train oil.
|
||
|
||
The quantity of beer, too, is very large, 10,800 barrels. Now, as those polar
|
||
fisheries could only be prosecuted in the short summer of that climate, so that
|
||
the whole cruise of one of these Dutch whalemen, including the short voyage to
|
||
and from the Spitzbergen sea, did not much exceed three months, say, and
|
||
reckoning 30 men to each of their fleet of 180 sail, we have 5,400 Low Dutch
|
||
seamen in all; therefore, I say, we have precisely two barrels of beer per man,
|
||
for a twelve weeks’ allowance, exclusive of his fair proportion of that 550
|
||
ankers of gin. Now, whether these gin and beer harpooneers, so fuddled as one
|
||
might fancy them to have been, were the right sort of men to stand up in a
|
||
boat’s head, and take good aim at flying whales; this would seem somewhat
|
||
improbable. Yet they did aim at them, and hit them too. But this was very far
|
||
North, be it remembered, where beer agrees well with the constitution; upon the
|
||
Equator, in our southern fishery, beer would be apt to make the harpooneer
|
||
sleepy at the mast-head and boozy in his boat; and grievous loss might ensue to
|
||
Nantucket and New Bedford.
|
||
|
||
But no more; enough has been said to show that the old Dutch whalers of two or
|
||
three centuries ago were high livers; and that the English whalers have not
|
||
neglected so excellent an example. For, say they, when cruising in an empty
|
||
ship, if you can get nothing better out of the world, get a good dinner out of
|
||
it, at least. And this empties the decanter.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 102. A Bower in the Arsacides.
|
||
|
||
Hitherto, in descriptively treating of the Sperm Whale, I have chiefly dwelt
|
||
upon the marvels of his outer aspect; or separately and in detail upon some few
|
||
interior structural features. But to a large and thorough sweeping comprehension
|
||
of him, it behooves me now to unbutton him still further, and untagging the
|
||
points of his hose, unbuckling his garters, and casting loose the hooks and the
|
||
eyes of the joints of his innermost bones, set him before you in his ultimatum;
|
||
that is to say, in his unconditional skeleton.
|
||
|
||
But how now, Ishmael? How is it, that you, a mere oarsman in the fishery,
|
||
pretend to know aught about the subterranean parts of the whale? Did erudite
|
||
Stubb, mounted upon your capstan, deliver lectures on the anatomy of the
|
||
Cetacea; and by help of the windlass, hold up a specimen rib for exhibition?
|
||
Explain thyself, Ishmael. Can you land a full-grown whale on your deck for
|
||
examination, as a cook dishes a roast-pig? Surely not. A veritable witness have
|
||
you hitherto been, Ishmael; but have a care how you seize the privilege of Jonah
|
||
alone; the privilege of discoursing upon the joists and beams; the rafters,
|
||
ridge-pole, sleepers, and under-pinnings, making up the frame-work of leviathan;
|
||
and belike of the tallow-vats, dairy-rooms, butteries, and cheeseries in his
|
||
bowels.
|
||
|
||
I confess, that since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated very far beneath the
|
||
skin of the adult whale; nevertheless, I have been blessed with an opportunity
|
||
to dissect him in miniature. In a ship I belonged to, a small cub Sperm Whale
|
||
was once bodily hoisted to the deck for his poke or bag, to make sheaths for the
|
||
barbs of the harpoons, and for the heads of the lances. Think you I let that
|
||
chance go, without using my boat-hatchet and jack-knife, and breaking the seal
|
||
and reading all the contents of that young cub?
|
||
|
||
And as for my exact knowledge of the bones of the leviathan in their gigantic,
|
||
full grown development, for that rare knowledge I am indebted to my late royal
|
||
friend Tranquo, king of Tranque, one of the Arsacides. For being at Tranque,
|
||
years ago, when attached to the trading-ship Dey of Algiers, I was invited to
|
||
spend part of the Arsacidean holidays with the lord of Tranque, at his retired
|
||
palm villa at Pupella; a sea-side glen not very far distant from what our
|
||
sailors called Bamboo-Town, his capital.
|
||
|
||
Among many other fine qualities, my royal friend Tranquo, being gifted with a
|
||
devout love for all matters of barbaric vertu, had brought together in Pupella
|
||
whatever rare things the more ingenious of his people could invent; chiefly
|
||
carved woods of wonderful devices, chiselled shells, inlaid spears, costly
|
||
paddles, aromatic canoes; and all these distributed among whatever natural
|
||
wonders, the wonder-freighted, tribute-rendering waves had cast upon his shores.
|
||
|
||
Chief among these latter was a great Sperm Whale, which, after an unusually long
|
||
raging gale, had been found dead and stranded, with his head against a cocoa-nut
|
||
tree, whose plumage-like, tufted droopings seemed his verdant jet. When the vast
|
||
body had at last been stripped of its fathom-deep enfoldings, and the bones
|
||
become dust dry in the sun, then the skeleton was carefully transported up the
|
||
Pupella glen, where a grand temple of lordly palms now sheltered it.
|
||
|
||
The ribs were hung with trophies; the vertebræ were carved with Arsacidean
|
||
annals, in strange hieroglyphics; in the skull, the priests kept up an
|
||
unextinguished aromatic flame, so that the mystic head again sent forth its
|
||
vapory spout; while, suspended from a bough, the terrific lower jaw vibrated
|
||
over all the devotees, like the hair-hung sword that so affrighted Damocles.
|
||
|
||
It was a wondrous sight. The wood was green as mosses of the Icy Glen; the trees
|
||
stood high and haughty, feeling their living sap; the industrious earth beneath
|
||
was as a weaver’s loom, with a gorgeous carpet on it, whereof the ground-vine
|
||
tendrils formed the warp and woof, and the living flowers the figures. All the
|
||
trees, with all their laden branches; all the shrubs, and ferns, and grasses;
|
||
the message-carrying air; all these unceasingly were active. Through the lacings
|
||
of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied
|
||
verdure. Oh, busy weaver! unseen weaver!—pause!—one word!—whither flows the
|
||
fabric? what palace may it deck? wherefore all these ceaseless toilings? Speak,
|
||
weaver!—stay thy hand!—but one single word with thee! Nay—the shuttle flies—the
|
||
figures float from forth the loom; the freshet-rushing carpet for ever slides
|
||
away. The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he
|
||
hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are
|
||
deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that
|
||
speak through it. For even so it is in all material factories. The spoken words
|
||
that are inaudible among the flying spindles; those same words are plainly heard
|
||
without the walls, bursting from the opened casements. Thereby have villainies
|
||
been detected. Ah, mortal! then, be heedful; for so, in all this din of the
|
||
great world’s loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be overheard afar.
|
||
|
||
Now, amid the green, life-restless loom of that Arsacidean wood, the great,
|
||
white, worshipped skeleton lay lounging—a gigantic idler! Yet, as the ever-woven
|
||
verdant warp and woof intermixed and hummed around him, the mighty idler seemed
|
||
the cunning weaver; himself all woven over with the vines; every month assuming
|
||
greener, fresher verdure; but himself a skeleton. Life folded Death; Death
|
||
trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him
|
||
curly-headed glories.
|
||
|
||
Now, when with royal Tranquo I visited this wondrous whale, and saw the skull an
|
||
altar, and the artificial smoke ascending from where the real jet had issued, I
|
||
marvelled that the king should regard a chapel as an object of vertu. He
|
||
laughed. But more I marvelled that the priests should swear that smoky jet of
|
||
his was genuine. To and fro I paced before this skeleton—brushed the vines
|
||
aside—broke through the ribs—and with a ball of Arsacidean twine, wandered,
|
||
eddied long amid its many winding, shaded colonnades and arbours. But soon my
|
||
line was out; and following it back, I emerged from the opening where I entered.
|
||
I saw no living thing within; naught was there but bones.
|
||
|
||
Cutting me a green measuring-rod, I once more dived within the skeleton. From
|
||
their arrow-slit in the skull, the priests perceived me taking the altitude of
|
||
the final rib, “How now!” they shouted; “Dar’st thou measure this our god!
|
||
That’s for us.” “Aye, priests—well, how long do ye make him, then?” But hereupon
|
||
a fierce contest rose among them, concerning feet and inches; they cracked each
|
||
other’s sconces with their yard-sticks—the great skull echoed—and seizing that
|
||
lucky chance, I quickly concluded my own admeasurements.
|
||
|
||
These admeasurements I now propose to set before you. But first, be it recorded,
|
||
that, in this matter, I am not free to utter any fancied measurement I please.
|
||
Because there are skeleton authorities you can refer to, to test my accuracy.
|
||
There is a Leviathanic Museum, they tell me, in Hull, England, one of the
|
||
whaling ports of that country, where they have some fine specimens of fin-backs
|
||
and other whales. Likewise, I have heard that in the museum of Manchester, in
|
||
New Hampshire, they have what the proprietors call “the only perfect specimen of
|
||
a Greenland or River Whale in the United States.” Moreover, at a place in
|
||
Yorkshire, England, Burton Constable by name, a certain Sir Clifford Constable
|
||
has in his possession the skeleton of a Sperm Whale, but of moderate size, by no
|
||
means of the full-grown magnitude of my friend King Tranquo’s.
|
||
|
||
In both cases, the stranded whales to which these two skeletons belonged, were
|
||
originally claimed by their proprietors upon similar grounds. King Tranquo
|
||
seizing his because he wanted it; and Sir Clifford, because he was lord of the
|
||
seignories of those parts. Sir Clifford’s whale has been articulated throughout;
|
||
so that, like a great chest of drawers, you can open and shut him, in all his
|
||
bony cavities—spread out his ribs like a gigantic fan—and swing all day upon his
|
||
lower jaw. Locks are to be put upon some of his trap-doors and shutters; and a
|
||
footman will show round future visitors with a bunch of keys at his side. Sir
|
||
Clifford thinks of charging twopence for a peep at the whispering gallery in the
|
||
spinal column; threepence to hear the echo in the hollow of his cerebellum; and
|
||
sixpence for the unrivalled view from his forehead.
|
||
|
||
The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied verbatim from
|
||
my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild wanderings at that
|
||
period, there was no other secure way of preserving such valuable statistics.
|
||
But as I was crowded for space, and wished the other parts of my body to remain
|
||
a blank page for a poem I was then composing—at least, what untattooed parts
|
||
might remain—I did not trouble myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, should
|
||
inches at all enter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 103. Measurement of The Whale’s Skeleton.
|
||
|
||
In the first place, I wish to lay before you a particular, plain statement,
|
||
touching the living bulk of this leviathan, whose skeleton we are briefly to
|
||
exhibit. Such a statement may prove useful here.
|
||
|
||
According to a careful calculation I have made, and which I partly base upon
|
||
Captain Scoresby’s estimate, of seventy tons for the largest sized Greenland
|
||
whale of sixty feet in length; according to my careful calculation, I say, a
|
||
Sperm Whale of the largest magnitude, between eighty-five and ninety feet in
|
||
length, and something less than forty feet in its fullest circumference, such a
|
||
whale will weigh at least ninety tons; so that, reckoning thirteen men to a ton,
|
||
he would considerably outweigh the combined population of a whole village of one
|
||
thousand one hundred inhabitants.
|
||
|
||
Think you not then that brains, like yoked cattle, should be put to this
|
||
leviathan, to make him at all budge to any landsman’s imagination?
|
||
|
||
Having already in various ways put before you his skull, spout-hole, jaw, teeth,
|
||
tail, forehead, fins, and divers other parts, I shall now simply point out what
|
||
is most interesting in the general bulk of his unobstructed bones. But as the
|
||
colossal skull embraces so very large a proportion of the entire extent of the
|
||
skeleton; as it is by far the most complicated part; and as nothing is to be
|
||
repeated concerning it in this chapter, you must not fail to carry it in your
|
||
mind, or under your arm, as we proceed, otherwise you will not gain a complete
|
||
notion of the general structure we are about to view.
|
||
|
||
In length, the Sperm Whale’s skeleton at Tranque measured seventy-two feet; so
|
||
that when fully invested and extended in life, he must have been ninety feet
|
||
long; for in the whale, the skeleton loses about one fifth in length compared
|
||
with the living body. Of this seventy-two feet, his skull and jaw comprised some
|
||
twenty feet, leaving some fifty feet of plain back-bone. Attached to this
|
||
back-bone, for something less than a third of its length, was the mighty
|
||
circular basket of ribs which once enclosed his vitals.
|
||
|
||
To me this vast ivory-ribbed chest, with the long, unrelieved spine, extending
|
||
far away from it in a straight line, not a little resembled the hull of a great
|
||
ship new-laid upon the stocks, when only some twenty of her naked bow-ribs are
|
||
inserted, and the keel is otherwise, for the time, but a long, disconnected
|
||
timber.
|
||
|
||
The ribs were ten on a side. The first, to begin from the neck, was nearly six
|
||
feet long; the second, third, and fourth were each successively longer, till you
|
||
came to the climax of the fifth, or one of the middle ribs, which measured eight
|
||
feet and some inches. From that part, the remaining ribs diminished, till the
|
||
tenth and last only spanned five feet and some inches. In general thickness,
|
||
they all bore a seemly correspondence to their length. The middle ribs were the
|
||
most arched. In some of the Arsacides they are used for beams whereon to lay
|
||
footpath bridges over small streams.
|
||
|
||
In considering these ribs, I could not but be struck anew with the circumstance,
|
||
so variously repeated in this book, that the skeleton of the whale is by no
|
||
means the mould of his invested form. The largest of the Tranque ribs, one of
|
||
the middle ones, occupied that part of the fish which, in life, is greatest in
|
||
depth. Now, the greatest depth of the invested body of this particular whale
|
||
must have been at least sixteen feet; whereas, the corresponding rib measured
|
||
but little more than eight feet. So that this rib only conveyed half of the true
|
||
notion of the living magnitude of that part. Besides, for some way, where I now
|
||
saw but a naked spine, all that had been once wrapped round with tons of added
|
||
bulk in flesh, muscle, blood, and bowels. Still more, for the ample fins, I here
|
||
saw but a few disordered joints; and in place of the weighty and majestic, but
|
||
boneless flukes, an utter blank!
|
||
|
||
How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man to try to
|
||
comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring over his dead attenuated
|
||
skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood. No. Only in the heart of quickest
|
||
perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry flukes; only on the profound
|
||
unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out.
|
||
|
||
But the spine. For that, the best way we can consider it is, with a crane, to
|
||
pile its bones high up on end. No speedy enterprise. But now it’s done, it looks
|
||
much like Pompey’s Pillar.
|
||
|
||
There are forty and odd vertebræ in all, which in the skeleton are not locked
|
||
together. They mostly lie like the great knobbed blocks on a Gothic spire,
|
||
forming solid courses of heavy masonry. The largest, a middle one, is in width
|
||
something less than three feet, and in depth more than four. The smallest, where
|
||
the spine tapers away into the tail, is only two inches in width, and looks
|
||
something like a white billiard-ball. I was told that there were still smaller
|
||
ones, but they had been lost by some little cannibal urchins, the priest’s
|
||
children, who had stolen them to play marbles with. Thus we see how that the
|
||
spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple child’s
|
||
play.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 104. The Fossil Whale.
|
||
|
||
From his mighty bulk the whale affords a most congenial theme whereon to
|
||
enlarge, amplify, and generally expatiate. Would you, you could not compress
|
||
him. By good rights he should only be treated of in imperial folio. Not to tell
|
||
over again his furlongs from spiracle to tail, and the yards he measures about
|
||
the waist; only think of the gigantic involutions of his intestines, where they
|
||
lie in him like great cables and hawsers coiled away in the subterranean
|
||
orlop-deck of a line-of-battle-ship.
|
||
|
||
Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behooves me to approve
|
||
myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise; not overlooking the minutest
|
||
seminal germs of his blood, and spinning him out to the uttermost coil of his
|
||
bowels. Having already described him in most of his present habitatory and
|
||
anatomical peculiarities, it now remains to magnify him in an archæological,
|
||
fossiliferous, and antediluvian point of view. Applied to any other creature
|
||
than the Leviathan—to an ant or a flea—such portly terms might justly be deemed
|
||
unwarrantably grandiloquent. But when Leviathan is the text, the case is
|
||
altered. Fain am I to stagger to this emprise under the weightiest words of the
|
||
dictionary. And here be it said, that whenever it has been convenient to consult
|
||
one in the course of these dissertations, I have invariably used a huge quarto
|
||
edition of Johnson, expressly purchased for that purpose; because that famous
|
||
lexicographer’s uncommon personal bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon to
|
||
be used by a whale author like me.
|
||
|
||
One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may
|
||
seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan?
|
||
Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor’s
|
||
quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in
|
||
the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make
|
||
me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the
|
||
whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and
|
||
mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of
|
||
empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs.
|
||
Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand
|
||
to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great
|
||
and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who
|
||
have tried it.
|
||
|
||
Ere entering upon the subject of Fossil Whales, I present my credentials as a
|
||
geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous time I have been a stone-mason,
|
||
and also a great digger of ditches, canals and wells, wine-vaults, cellars, and
|
||
cisterns of all sorts. Likewise, by way of preliminary, I desire to remind the
|
||
reader, that while in the earlier geological strata there are found the fossils
|
||
of monsters now almost completely extinct; the subsequent relics discovered in
|
||
what are called the Tertiary formations seem the connecting, or at any rate
|
||
intercepted links, between the antichronical creatures, and those whose remote
|
||
posterity are said to have entered the Ark; all the Fossil Whales hitherto
|
||
discovered belong to the Tertiary period, which is the last preceding the
|
||
superficial formations. And though none of them precisely answer to any known
|
||
species of the present time, they are yet sufficiently akin to them in general
|
||
respects, to justify their taking rank as Cetacean fossils.
|
||
|
||
Detached broken fossils of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their bones and
|
||
skeletons, have within thirty years past, at various intervals, been found at
|
||
the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, in France, in England, in Scotland, and in
|
||
the States of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Among the more curious of
|
||
such remains is part of a skull, which in the year 1779 was disinterred in the
|
||
Rue Dauphine in Paris, a short street opening almost directly upon the palace of
|
||
the Tuileries; and bones disinterred in excavating the great docks of Antwerp,
|
||
in Napoleon’s time. Cuvier pronounced these fragments to have belonged to some
|
||
utterly unknown Leviathanic species.
|
||
|
||
But by far the most wonderful of all Cetacean relics was the almost complete
|
||
vast skeleton of an extinct monster, found in the year 1842, on the plantation
|
||
of Judge Creagh, in Alabama. The awe-stricken credulous slaves in the vicinity
|
||
took it for the bones of one of the fallen angels. The Alabama doctors declared
|
||
it a huge reptile, and bestowed upon it the name of Basilosaurus. But some
|
||
specimen bones of it being taken across the sea to Owen, the English Anatomist,
|
||
it turned out that this alleged reptile was a whale, though of a departed
|
||
species. A significant illustration of the fact, again and again repeated in
|
||
this book, that the skeleton of the whale furnishes but little clue to the shape
|
||
of his fully invested body. So Owen rechristened the monster Zeuglodon; and in
|
||
his paper read before the London Geological Society, pronounced it, in
|
||
substance, one of the most extraordinary creatures which the mutations of the
|
||
globe have blotted out of existence.
|
||
|
||
When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks, jaws, ribs,
|
||
and vertebræ, all characterized by partial resemblances to the existing breeds
|
||
of sea-monsters; but at the same time bearing on the other hand similar
|
||
affinities to the annihilated antichronical Leviathans, their incalculable
|
||
seniors; I am, by a flood, borne back to that wondrous period, ere time itself
|
||
can be said to have begun; for time began with man. Here Saturn’s grey chaos
|
||
rolls over me, and I obtain dim, shuddering glimpses into those Polar
|
||
eternities; when wedged bastions of ice pressed hard upon what are now the
|
||
Tropics; and in all the 25,000 miles of this world’s circumference, not an
|
||
inhabitable hand’s breadth of land was visible. Then the whole world was the
|
||
whale’s; and, king of creation, he left his wake along the present lines of the
|
||
Andes and the Himmalehs. Who can show a pedigree like Leviathan? Ahab’s harpoon
|
||
had shed older blood than the Pharaoh’s. Methuselah seems a school-boy. I look
|
||
round to shake hands with Shem. I am horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced
|
||
existence of the unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been before all
|
||
time, must needs exist after all humane ages are over.
|
||
|
||
But not alone has this Leviathan left his pre-adamite traces in the stereotype
|
||
plates of nature, and in limestone and marl bequeathed his ancient bust; but
|
||
upon Egyptian tablets, whose antiquity seems to claim for them an almost
|
||
fossiliferous character, we find the unmistakable print of his fin. In an
|
||
apartment of the great temple of Denderah, some fifty years ago, there was
|
||
discovered upon the granite ceiling a sculptured and painted planisphere,
|
||
abounding in centaurs, griffins, and dolphins, similar to the grotesque figures
|
||
on the celestial globe of the moderns. Gliding among them, old Leviathan swam as
|
||
of yore; was there swimming in that planisphere, centuries before Solomon was
|
||
cradled.
|
||
|
||
Nor must there be omitted another strange attestation of the antiquity of the
|
||
whale, in his own osseous post-diluvian reality, as set down by the venerable
|
||
John Leo, the old Barbary traveller.
|
||
|
||
“Not far from the Sea-side, they have a Temple, the Rafters and Beams of which
|
||
are made of Whale-Bones; for Whales of a monstrous size are oftentimes cast up
|
||
dead upon that shore. The Common People imagine, that by a secret Power bestowed
|
||
by God upon the Temple, no Whale can pass it without immediate death. But the
|
||
truth of the Matter is, that on either side of the Temple, there are Rocks that
|
||
shoot two Miles into the Sea, and wound the Whales when they light upon ’em.
|
||
They keep a Whale’s Rib of an incredible length for a Miracle, which lying upon
|
||
the Ground with its convex part uppermost, makes an Arch, the Head of which
|
||
cannot be reached by a Man upon a Camel’s Back. This Rib (says John Leo) is said
|
||
to have layn there a hundred Years before I saw it. Their Historians affirm,
|
||
that a Prophet who prophesy’d of Mahomet, came from this Temple, and some do not
|
||
stand to assert, that the Prophet Jonas was cast forth by the Whale at the Base
|
||
of the Temple.”
|
||
|
||
In this Afric Temple of the Whale I leave you, reader, and if you be a
|
||
Nantucketer, and a whaleman, you will silently worship there.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 105. Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish?—Will He Perish?
|
||
|
||
Inasmuch, then, as this Leviathan comes floundering down upon us from the
|
||
head-waters of the Eternities, it may be fitly inquired, whether, in the long
|
||
course of his generations, he has not degenerated from the original bulk of his
|
||
sires.
|
||
|
||
But upon investigation we find, that not only are the whales of the present day
|
||
superior in magnitude to those whose fossil remains are found in the Tertiary
|
||
system (embracing a distinct geological period prior to man), but of the whales
|
||
found in that Tertiary system, those belonging to its latter formations exceed
|
||
in size those of its earlier ones.
|
||
|
||
Of all the pre-adamite whales yet exhumed, by far the largest is the Alabama one
|
||
mentioned in the last chapter, and that was less than seventy feet in length in
|
||
the skeleton. Whereas, we have already seen, that the tape-measure gives
|
||
seventy-two feet for the skeleton of a large sized modern whale. And I have
|
||
heard, on whalemen’s authority, that Sperm Whales have been captured near a
|
||
hundred feet long at the time of capture.
|
||
|
||
But may it not be, that while the whales of the present hour are an advance in
|
||
magnitude upon those of all previous geological periods; may it not be, that
|
||
since Adam’s time they have degenerated?
|
||
|
||
Assuredly, we must conclude so, if we are to credit the accounts of such
|
||
gentlemen as Pliny, and the ancient naturalists generally. For Pliny tells us of
|
||
whales that embraced acres of living bulk, and Aldrovandus of others which
|
||
measured eight hundred feet in length—Rope Walks and Thames Tunnels of Whales!
|
||
And even in the days of Banks and Solander, Cooke’s naturalists, we find a
|
||
Danish member of the Academy of Sciences setting down certain Iceland Whales
|
||
(reydan-siskur, or Wrinkled Bellies) at one hundred and twenty yards; that is,
|
||
three hundred and sixty feet. And Lacépède, the French naturalist, in his
|
||
elaborate history of whales, in the very beginning of his work (page 3), sets
|
||
down the Right Whale at one hundred metres, three hundred and twenty-eight feet.
|
||
And this work was published so late as A.D. 1825.
|
||
|
||
But will any whaleman believe these stories? No. The whale of to-day is as big
|
||
as his ancestors in Pliny’s time. And if ever I go where Pliny is, I, a whaleman
|
||
(more than he was), will make bold to tell him so. Because I cannot understand
|
||
how it is, that while the Egyptian mummies that were buried thousands of years
|
||
before even Pliny was born, do not measure so much in their coffins as a modern
|
||
Kentuckian in his socks; and while the cattle and other animals sculptured on
|
||
the oldest Egyptian and Nineveh tablets, by the relative proportions in which
|
||
they are drawn, just as plainly prove that the high-bred, stall-fed, prize
|
||
cattle of Smithfield, not only equal, but far exceed in magnitude the fattest of
|
||
Pharaoh’s fat kine; in the face of all this, I will not admit that of all
|
||
animals the whale alone should have degenerated.
|
||
|
||
But still another inquiry remains; one often agitated by the more recondite
|
||
Nantucketers. Whether owing to the almost omniscient look-outs at the mast-heads
|
||
of the whale-ships, now penetrating even through Behring’s straits, and into the
|
||
remotest secret drawers and lockers of the world; and the thousand harpoons and
|
||
lances darted along all continental coasts; the moot point is, whether Leviathan
|
||
can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not
|
||
at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the last man,
|
||
smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff.
|
||
|
||
Comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo, which,
|
||
not forty years ago, overspread by tens of thousands the prairies of Illinois
|
||
and Missouri, and shook their iron manes and scowled with their thunder-clotted
|
||
brows upon the sites of populous river-capitals, where now the polite broker
|
||
sells you land at a dollar an inch; in such a comparison an irresistible
|
||
argument would seem furnished, to show that the hunted whale cannot now escape
|
||
speedy extinction.
|
||
|
||
But you must look at this matter in every light. Though so short a period
|
||
ago—not a good lifetime—the census of the buffalo in Illinois exceeded the
|
||
census of men now in London, and though at the present day not one horn or hoof
|
||
of them remains in all that region; and though the cause of this wondrous
|
||
extermination was the spear of man; yet the far different nature of the
|
||
whale-hunt peremptorily forbids so inglorious an end to the Leviathan. Forty men
|
||
in one ship hunting the Sperm Whales for forty-eight months think they have done
|
||
extremely well, and thank God, if at last they carry home the oil of forty fish.
|
||
Whereas, in the days of the old Canadian and Indian hunters and trappers of the
|
||
West, when the far west (in whose sunset suns still rise) was a wilderness and a
|
||
virgin, the same number of moccasined men, for the same number of months,
|
||
mounted on horse instead of sailing in ships, would have slain not forty, but
|
||
forty thousand and more buffaloes; a fact that, if need were, could be
|
||
statistically stated.
|
||
|
||
Nor, considered aright, does it seem any argument in favour of the gradual
|
||
extinction of the Sperm Whale, for example, that in former years (the latter
|
||
part of the last century, say) these Leviathans, in small pods, were encountered
|
||
much oftener than at present, and, in consequence, the voyages were not so
|
||
prolonged, and were also much more remunerative. Because, as has been elsewhere
|
||
noticed, those whales, influenced by some views to safety, now swim the seas in
|
||
immense caravans, so that to a large degree the scattered solitaries, yokes, and
|
||
pods, and schools of other days are now aggregated into vast but widely
|
||
separated, unfrequent armies. That is all. And equally fallacious seems the
|
||
conceit, that because the so-called whale-bone whales no longer haunt many
|
||
grounds in former years abounding with them, hence that species also is
|
||
declining. For they are only being driven from promontory to cape; and if one
|
||
coast is no longer enlivened with their jets, then, be sure, some other and
|
||
remoter strand has been very recently startled by the unfamiliar spectacle.
|
||
|
||
Furthermore: concerning these last mentioned Leviathans, they have two firm
|
||
fortresses, which, in all human probability, will for ever remain impregnable.
|
||
And as upon the invasion of their valleys, the frosty Swiss have retreated to
|
||
their mountains; so, hunted from the savannas and glades of the middle seas, the
|
||
whale-bone whales can at last resort to their Polar citadels, and diving under
|
||
the ultimate glassy barriers and walls there, come up among icy fields and
|
||
floes; and in a charmed circle of everlasting December, bid defiance to all
|
||
pursuit from man.
|
||
|
||
But as perhaps fifty of these whale-bone whales are harpooned for one cachalot,
|
||
some philosophers of the forecastle have concluded that this positive havoc has
|
||
already very seriously diminished their battalions. But though for some time
|
||
past a number of these whales, not less than 13,000, have been annually slain on
|
||
the nor’ west coast by the Americans alone; yet there are considerations which
|
||
render even this circumstance of little or no account as an opposing argument in
|
||
this matter.
|
||
|
||
Natural as it is to be somewhat incredulous concerning the populousness of the
|
||
more enormous creatures of the globe, yet what shall we say to Harto, the
|
||
historian of Goa, when he tells us that at one hunting the King of Siam took
|
||
4,000 elephants; that in those regions elephants are numerous as droves of
|
||
cattle in the temperate climes. And there seems no reason to doubt that if these
|
||
elephants, which have now been hunted for thousands of years, by Semiramis, by
|
||
Porus, by Hannibal, and by all the successive monarchs of the East—if they still
|
||
survive there in great numbers, much more may the great whale outlast all
|
||
hunting, since he has a pasture to expatiate in, which is precisely twice as
|
||
large as all Asia, both Americas, Europe and Africa, New Holland, and all the
|
||
Isles of the sea combined.
|
||
|
||
Moreover: we are to consider, that from the presumed great longevity of whales,
|
||
their probably attaining the age of a century and more, therefore at any one
|
||
period of time, several distinct adult generations must be contemporary. And
|
||
what that is, we may soon gain some idea of, by imagining all the grave-yards,
|
||
cemeteries, and family vaults of creation yielding up the live bodies of all the
|
||
men, women, and children who were alive seventy-five years ago; and adding this
|
||
countless host to the present human population of the globe.
|
||
|
||
Wherefore, for all these things, we account the whale immortal in his species,
|
||
however perishable in his individuality. He swam the seas before the continents
|
||
broke water; he once swam over the site of the Tuileries, and Windsor Castle,
|
||
and the Kremlin. In Noah’s flood he despised Noah’s Ark; and if ever the world
|
||
is to be again flooded, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the
|
||
eternal whale will still survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the
|
||
equatorial flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 106. Ahab’s Leg.
|
||
|
||
The precipitating manner in which Captain Ahab had quitted the Samuel Enderby of
|
||
London, had not been unattended with some small violence to his own person. He
|
||
had lighted with such energy upon a thwart of his boat that his ivory leg had
|
||
received a half-splintering shock. And when after gaining his own deck, and his
|
||
own pivot-hole there, he so vehemently wheeled round with an urgent command to
|
||
the steersman (it was, as ever, something about his not steering inflexibly
|
||
enough); then, the already shaken ivory received such an additional twist and
|
||
wrench, that though it still remained entire, and to all appearances lusty, yet
|
||
Ahab did not deem it entirely trustworthy.
|
||
|
||
And, indeed, it seemed small matter for wonder, that for all his pervading, mad
|
||
recklessness, Ahab did at times give careful heed to the condition of that dead
|
||
bone upon which he partly stood. For it had not been very long prior to the
|
||
Pequod’s sailing from Nantucket, that he had been found one night lying prone
|
||
upon the ground, and insensible; by some unknown, and seemingly inexplicable,
|
||
unimaginable casualty, his ivory limb having been so violently displaced, that
|
||
it had stake-wise smitten, and all but pierced his groin; nor was it without
|
||
extreme difficulty that the agonizing wound was entirely cured.
|
||
|
||
Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that all the
|
||
anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct issue of a former woe;
|
||
and he too plainly seemed to see, that as the most poisonous reptile of the
|
||
marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as the sweetest songster of the grove;
|
||
so, equally with every felicity, all miserable events do naturally beget their
|
||
like. Yea, more than equally, thought Ahab; since both the ancestry and
|
||
posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy. For, not
|
||
to hint of this: that it is an inference from certain canonic teachings, that
|
||
while some natural enjoyments here shall have no children born to them for the
|
||
other world, but, on the contrary, shall be followed by the joy-childlessness of
|
||
all hell’s despair; whereas, some guilty mortal miseries shall still fertilely
|
||
beget to themselves an eternally progressive progeny of griefs beyond the grave;
|
||
not at all to hint of this, there still seems an inequality in the deeper
|
||
analysis of the thing. For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly
|
||
felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at
|
||
bottom, all heartwoes, a mystic significance, and, in some men, an archangelic
|
||
grandeur; so do their diligent tracings-out not belie the obvious deduction. To
|
||
trail the genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among
|
||
the sourceless primogenitures of the gods; so that, in the face of all the glad,
|
||
hay-making suns, and soft cymballing, round harvest-moons, we must needs give in
|
||
to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad
|
||
birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers.
|
||
|
||
Unwittingly here a secret has been divulged, which perhaps might more properly,
|
||
in set way, have been disclosed before. With many other particulars concerning
|
||
Ahab, always had it remained a mystery to some, why it was, that for a certain
|
||
period, both before and after the sailing of the Pequod, he had hidden himself
|
||
away with such Grand-Lama-like exclusiveness; and, for that one interval, sought
|
||
speechless refuge, as it were, among the marble senate of the dead. Captain
|
||
Peleg’s bruited reason for this thing appeared by no means adequate; though,
|
||
indeed, as touching all Ahab’s deeper part, every revelation partook more of
|
||
significant darkness than of explanatory light. But, in the end, it all came
|
||
out; this one matter did, at least. That direful mishap was at the bottom of his
|
||
temporary recluseness. And not only this, but to that ever-contracting, dropping
|
||
circle ashore, who, for any reason, possessed the privilege of a less banned
|
||
approach to him; to that timid circle the above hinted casualty—remaining, as it
|
||
did, moodily unaccounted for by Ahab—invested itself with terrors, not entirely
|
||
underived from the land of spirits and of wails. So that, through their zeal for
|
||
him, they had all conspired, so far as in them lay, to muffle up the knowledge
|
||
of this thing from others; and hence it was, that not till a considerable
|
||
interval had elapsed, did it transpire upon the Pequod’s decks.
|
||
|
||
But be all this as it may; let the unseen, ambiguous synod in the air, or the
|
||
vindictive princes and potentates of fire, have to do or not with earthly Ahab,
|
||
yet, in this present matter of his leg, he took plain practical procedures;—he
|
||
called the carpenter.
|
||
|
||
And when that functionary appeared before him, he bade him without delay set
|
||
about making a new leg, and directed the mates to see him supplied with all the
|
||
studs and joists of jaw-ivory (Sperm Whale) which had thus far been accumulated
|
||
on the voyage, in order that a careful selection of the stoutest,
|
||
clearest-grained stuff might be secured. This done, the carpenter received
|
||
orders to have the leg completed that night; and to provide all the fittings for
|
||
it, independent of those pertaining to the distrusted one in use. Moreover, the
|
||
ship’s forge was ordered to be hoisted out of its temporary idleness in the
|
||
hold; and, to accelerate the affair, the blacksmith was commanded to proceed at
|
||
once to the forging of whatever iron contrivances might be needed.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 107. The Carpenter.
|
||
|
||
Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted
|
||
man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same
|
||
point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of
|
||
unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary. But most humble though
|
||
he was, and far from furnishing an example of the high, humane abstraction; the
|
||
Pequod’s carpenter was no duplicate; hence, he now comes in person on this
|
||
stage.
|
||
|
||
Like all sea-going ship carpenters, and more especially those belonging to
|
||
whaling vessels, he was, to a certain off-handed, practical extent, alike
|
||
experienced in numerous trades and callings collateral to his own; the
|
||
carpenter’s pursuit being the ancient and outbranching trunk of all those
|
||
numerous handicrafts which more or less have to do with wood as an auxiliary
|
||
material. But, besides the application to him of the generic remark above, this
|
||
carpenter of the Pequod was singularly efficient in those thousand nameless
|
||
mechanical emergencies continually recurring in a large ship, upon a three or
|
||
four years’ voyage, in uncivilized and far-distant seas. For not to speak of his
|
||
readiness in ordinary duties:—repairing stove boats, sprung spars, reforming the
|
||
shape of clumsy-bladed oars, inserting bull’s eyes in the deck, or new
|
||
tree-nails in the side planks, and other miscellaneous matters more directly
|
||
pertaining to his special business; he was moreover unhesitatingly expert in all
|
||
manner of conflicting aptitudes, both useful and capricious.
|
||
|
||
The one grand stage where he enacted all his various parts so manifold, was his
|
||
vice-bench; a long rude ponderous table furnished with several vices, of
|
||
different sizes, and both of iron and of wood. At all times except when whales
|
||
were alongside, this bench was securely lashed athwartships against the rear of
|
||
the Try-works.
|
||
|
||
A belaying pin is found too large to be easily inserted into its hole: the
|
||
carpenter claps it into one of his ever-ready vices, and straightway files it
|
||
smaller. A lost land-bird of strange plumage strays on board, and is made a
|
||
captive: out of clean shaved rods of right-whale bone, and cross-beams of sperm
|
||
whale ivory, the carpenter makes a pagoda-looking cage for it. An oarsman
|
||
sprains his wrist: the carpenter concocts a soothing lotion. Stubb longed for
|
||
vermillion stars to be painted upon the blade of his every oar; screwing each
|
||
oar in his big vice of wood, the carpenter symmetrically supplies the
|
||
constellation. A sailor takes a fancy to wear shark-bone ear-rings: the
|
||
carpenter drills his ears. Another has the toothache: the carpenter out pincers,
|
||
and clapping one hand upon his bench bids him be seated there; but the poor
|
||
fellow unmanageably winces under the unconcluded operation; whirling round the
|
||
handle of his wooden vice, the carpenter signs him to clap his jaw in that, if
|
||
he would have him draw the tooth.
|
||
|
||
Thus, this carpenter was prepared at all points, and alike indifferent and
|
||
without respect in all. Teeth he accounted bits of ivory; heads he deemed but
|
||
top-blocks; men themselves he lightly held for capstans. But while now upon so
|
||
wide a field thus variously accomplished and with such liveliness of expertness
|
||
in him, too; all this would seem to argue some uncommon vivacity of
|
||
intelligence. But not precisely so. For nothing was this man more remarkable,
|
||
than for a certain impersonal stolidity as it were; impersonal, I say; for it so
|
||
shaded off into the surrounding infinite of things, that it seemed one with the
|
||
general stolidity discernible in the whole visible world; which while
|
||
pauselessly active in uncounted modes, still eternally holds its peace, and
|
||
ignores you, though you dig foundations for cathedrals. Yet was this
|
||
half-horrible stolidity in him, involving, too, as it appeared, an all-ramifying
|
||
heartlessness;—yet was it oddly dashed at times, with an old, crutch-like,
|
||
antediluvian, wheezing humorousness, not unstreaked now and then with a certain
|
||
grizzled wittiness; such as might have served to pass the time during the
|
||
midnight watch on the bearded forecastle of Noah’s ark. Was it that this old
|
||
carpenter had been a life-long wanderer, whose much rolling, to and fro, not
|
||
only had gathered no moss; but what is more, had rubbed off whatever small
|
||
outward clingings might have originally pertained to him? He was a stript
|
||
abstract; an unfractioned integral; uncompromised as a new-born babe; living
|
||
without premeditated reference to this world or the next. You might almost say,
|
||
that this strange uncompromisedness in him involved a sort of unintelligence;
|
||
for in his numerous trades, he did not seem to work so much by reason or by
|
||
instinct, or simply because he had been tutored to it, or by any intermixture of
|
||
all these, even or uneven; but merely by a kind of deaf and dumb, spontaneous
|
||
literal process. He was a pure manipulator; his brain, if he had ever had one,
|
||
must have early oozed along into the muscles of his fingers. He was like one of
|
||
those unreasoning but still highly useful, multum in parvo, Sheffield
|
||
contrivances, assuming the exterior—though a little swelled—of a common pocket
|
||
knife; but containing, not only blades of various sizes, but also screw-drivers,
|
||
cork-screws, tweezers, awls, pens, rulers, nail-filers, countersinkers. So, if
|
||
his superiors wanted to use the carpenter for a screw-driver, all they had to do
|
||
was to open that part of him, and the screw was fast: or if for tweezers, take
|
||
him up by the legs, and there they were.
|
||
|
||
Yet, as previously hinted, this omnitooled, open-and-shut carpenter, was, after
|
||
all, no mere machine of an automaton. If he did not have a common soul in him,
|
||
he had a subtle something that somehow anomalously did its duty. What that was,
|
||
whether essence of quicksilver, or a few drops of hartshorn, there is no
|
||
telling. But there it was; and there it had abided for now some sixty years or
|
||
more. And this it was, this same unaccountable, cunning life-principle in him;
|
||
this it was, that kept him a great part of the time soliloquizing; but only like
|
||
an unreasoning wheel, which also hummingly soliloquizes; or rather, his body was
|
||
a sentry-box and this soliloquizer on guard there, and talking all the time to
|
||
keep himself awake.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 108. Ahab and the Carpenter. The Deck—First Night Watch.
|
||
|
||
(Carpenter standing before his vice-bench, and by the light of two lanterns
|
||
busily filing the ivory joist for the leg, which joist is firmly fixed in the
|
||
vice. Slabs of ivory, leather straps, pads, screws, and various tools of all
|
||
sorts lying about the bench. Forward, the red flame of the forge is seen, where
|
||
the blacksmith is at work.)
|
||
|
||
Drat the file, and drat the bone! That is hard which should be soft, and that is
|
||
soft which should be hard. So we go, who file old jaws and shinbones. Let’s try
|
||
another. Aye, now, this works better (sneezes). Halloa, this bone dust is
|
||
(sneezes)—why it’s (sneezes)—yes it’s (sneezes)—bless my soul, it won’t let me
|
||
speak! This is what an old fellow gets now for working in dead lumber. Saw a
|
||
live tree, and you don’t get this dust; amputate a live bone, and you don’t get
|
||
it (sneezes). Come, come, you old Smut, there, bear a hand, and let’s have that
|
||
ferule and buckle-screw; I’ll be ready for them presently. Lucky now (sneezes)
|
||
there’s no knee-joint to make; that might puzzle a little; but a mere
|
||
shinbone—why it’s easy as making hop-poles; only I should like to put a good
|
||
finish on. Time, time; if I but only had the time, I could turn him out as neat
|
||
a leg now as ever (sneezes) scraped to a lady in a parlor. Those buckskin legs
|
||
and calves of legs I’ve seen in shop windows wouldn’t compare at all. They soak
|
||
water, they do; and of course get rheumatic, and have to be doctored (sneezes)
|
||
with washes and lotions, just like live legs. There; before I saw it off, now, I
|
||
must call his old Mogulship, and see whether the length will be all right; too
|
||
short, if anything, I guess. Ha! that’s the heel; we are in luck; here he comes,
|
||
or it’s somebody else, that’s certain.
|
||
|
||
AHAB (advancing). (During the ensuing scene, the carpenter continues sneezing at
|
||
times.)
|
||
|
||
Well, manmaker!
|
||
|
||
Just in time, sir. If the captain pleases, I will now mark the length. Let me
|
||
measure, sir.
|
||
|
||
Measured for a leg! good. Well, it’s not the first time. About it! There; keep
|
||
thy finger on it. This is a cogent vice thou hast here, carpenter; let me feel
|
||
its grip once. So, so; it does pinch some.
|
||
|
||
Oh, sir, it will break bones—beware, beware!
|
||
|
||
No fear; I like a good grip; I like to feel something in this slippery world
|
||
that can hold, man. What’s Prometheus about there?—the blacksmith, I mean—what’s
|
||
he about?
|
||
|
||
He must be forging the buckle-screw, sir, now.
|
||
|
||
Right. It’s a partnership; he supplies the muscle part. He makes a fierce red
|
||
flame there!
|
||
|
||
Aye, sir; he must have the white heat for this kind of fine work.
|
||
|
||
Um-m. So he must. I do deem it now a most meaning thing, that that old Greek,
|
||
Prometheus, who made men, they say, should have been a blacksmith, and animated
|
||
them with fire; for what’s made in fire must properly belong to fire; and so
|
||
hell’s probable. How the soot flies! This must be the remainder the Greek made
|
||
the Africans of. Carpenter, when he’s through with that buckle, tell him to
|
||
forge a pair of steel shoulder-blades; there’s a pedlar aboard with a crushing
|
||
pack.
|
||
|
||
Sir?
|
||
|
||
Hold; while Prometheus is about it, I’ll order a complete man after a desirable
|
||
pattern. Imprimis, fifty feet high in his socks; then, chest modelled after the
|
||
Thames Tunnel; then, legs with roots to ’em, to stay in one place; then, arms
|
||
three feet through the wrist; no heart at all, brass forehead, and about a
|
||
quarter of an acre of fine brains; and let me see—shall I order eyes to see
|
||
outwards? No, but put a sky-light on top of his head to illuminate inwards.
|
||
There, take the order, and away.
|
||
|
||
Now, what’s he speaking about, and who’s he speaking to, I should like to know?
|
||
Shall I keep standing here? (aside).
|
||
|
||
’Tis but indifferent architecture to make a blind dome; here’s one. No, no, no;
|
||
I must have a lantern.
|
||
|
||
Ho, ho! That’s it, hey? Here are two, sir; one will serve my turn.
|
||
|
||
What art thou thrusting that thief-catcher into my face for, man? Thrusted light
|
||
is worse than presented pistols.
|
||
|
||
I thought, sir, that you spoke to carpenter.
|
||
|
||
Carpenter? why that’s—but no;—a very tidy, and, I may say, an extremely
|
||
gentlemanlike sort of business thou art in here, carpenter;—or would’st thou
|
||
rather work in clay?
|
||
|
||
Sir?—Clay? clay, sir? That’s mud; we leave clay to ditchers, sir.
|
||
|
||
The fellow’s impious! What art thou sneezing about?
|
||
|
||
Bone is rather dusty, sir.
|
||
|
||
Take the hint, then; and when thou art dead, never bury thyself under living
|
||
people’s noses.
|
||
|
||
Sir?—oh! ah!—I guess so;—yes—oh, dear!
|
||
|
||
Look ye, carpenter, I dare say thou callest thyself a right good workmanlike
|
||
workman, eh? Well, then, will it speak thoroughly well for thy work, if, when I
|
||
come to mount this leg thou makest, I shall nevertheless feel another leg in the
|
||
same identical place with it; that is, carpenter, my old lost leg; the flesh and
|
||
blood one, I mean. Canst thou not drive that old Adam away?
|
||
|
||
Truly, sir, I begin to understand somewhat now. Yes, I have heard something
|
||
curious on that score, sir; how that a dismasted man never entirely loses the
|
||
feeling of his old spar, but it will be still pricking him at times. May I
|
||
humbly ask if it be really so, sir?
|
||
|
||
It is, man. Look, put thy live leg here in the place where mine once was; so,
|
||
now, here is only one distinct leg to the eye, yet two to the soul. Where thou
|
||
feelest tingling life; there, exactly there, there to a hair, do I. Is’t a
|
||
riddle?
|
||
|
||
I should humbly call it a poser, sir.
|
||
|
||
Hist, then. How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing may not
|
||
be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where thou now
|
||
standest; aye, and standing there in thy spite? In thy most solitary hours,
|
||
then, dost thou not fear eavesdroppers? Hold, don’t speak! And if I still feel
|
||
the smart of my crushed leg, though it be now so long dissolved; then, why mayst
|
||
not thou, carpenter, feel the fiery pains of hell for ever, and without a body?
|
||
Hah!
|
||
|
||
Good Lord! Truly, sir, if it comes to that, I must calculate over again; I think
|
||
I didn’t carry a small figure, sir.
|
||
|
||
Look ye, pudding-heads should never grant premises.—How long before the leg is
|
||
done?
|
||
|
||
Perhaps an hour, sir.
|
||
|
||
Bungle away at it then, and bring it to me (turns to go). Oh, Life! Here I am,
|
||
proud as Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for a bone to
|
||
stand on! Cursed be that mortal inter-indebtedness which will not do away with
|
||
ledgers. I would be free as air; and I’m down in the whole world’s books. I am
|
||
so rich, I could have given bid for bid with the wealthiest Prætorians at the
|
||
auction of the Roman empire (which was the world’s); and yet I owe for the flesh
|
||
in the tongue I brag with. By heavens! I’ll get a crucible, and into it, and
|
||
dissolve myself down to one small, compendious vertebra. So.
|
||
|
||
CARPENTER (resuming his work).
|
||
|
||
Well, well, well! Stubb knows him best of all, and Stubb always says he’s queer;
|
||
says nothing but that one sufficient little word queer; he’s queer, says Stubb;
|
||
he’s queer—queer, queer; and keeps dinning it into Mr. Starbuck all the
|
||
time—queer—sir—queer, queer, very queer. And here’s his leg! Yes, now that I
|
||
think of it, here’s his bedfellow! has a stick of whale’s jaw-bone for a wife!
|
||
And this is his leg; he’ll stand on this. What was that now about one leg
|
||
standing in three places, and all three places standing in one hell—how was
|
||
that? Oh! I don’t wonder he looked so scornful at me! I’m a sort of
|
||
strange-thoughted sometimes, they say; but that’s only haphazard-like. Then, a
|
||
short, little old body like me, should never undertake to wade out into deep
|
||
waters with tall, heron-built captains; the water chucks you under the chin
|
||
pretty quick, and there’s a great cry for life-boats. And here’s the heron’s
|
||
leg! long and slim, sure enough! Now, for most folks one pair of legs lasts a
|
||
lifetime, and that must be because they use them mercifully, as a tender-hearted
|
||
old lady uses her roly-poly old coach-horses. But Ahab; oh he’s a hard driver.
|
||
Look, driven one leg to death, and spavined the other for life, and now wears
|
||
out bone legs by the cord. Halloa, there, you Smut! bear a hand there with those
|
||
screws, and let’s finish it before the resurrection fellow comes a-calling with
|
||
his horn for all legs, true or false, as brewery-men go round collecting old
|
||
beer barrels, to fill ’em up again. What a leg this is! It looks like a real
|
||
live leg, filed down to nothing but the core; he’ll be standing on this
|
||
to-morrow; he’ll be taking altitudes on it. Halloa! I almost forgot the little
|
||
oval slate, smoothed ivory, where he figures up the latitude. So, so; chisel,
|
||
file, and sand-paper, now!
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 109. Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin.
|
||
|
||
According to usage they were pumping the ship next morning; and lo! no
|
||
inconsiderable oil came up with the water; the casks below must have sprung a
|
||
bad leak. Much concern was shown; and Starbuck went down into the cabin to
|
||
report this unfavourable affair.*
|
||
|
||
*In Sperm-whalemen with any considerable quantity of oil on board, it is a
|
||
regular semi-weekly duty to conduct a hose into the hold, and drench the casks
|
||
with sea-water; which afterwards, at varying intervals, is removed by the
|
||
ship’s pumps. Hereby the casks are sought to be kept damply tight; while by the
|
||
changed character of the withdrawn water, the mariners readily detect any
|
||
serious leakage in the precious cargo.
|
||
|
||
Now, from the South and West the Pequod was drawing nigh to Formosa and the
|
||
Bashee Isles, between which lies one of the tropical outlets from the China
|
||
waters into the Pacific. And so Starbuck found Ahab with a general chart of the
|
||
oriental archipelagoes spread before him; and another separate one representing
|
||
the long eastern coasts of the Japanese islands—Niphon, Matsmai, and Sikoke.
|
||
With his snow-white new ivory leg braced against the screwed leg of his table,
|
||
and with a long pruning-hook of a jack-knife in his hand, the wondrous old man,
|
||
with his back to the gangway door, was wrinkling his brow, and tracing his old
|
||
courses again.
|
||
|
||
“Who’s there?” hearing the footstep at the door, but not turning round to it.
|
||
“On deck! Begone!”
|
||
|
||
“Captain Ahab mistakes; it is I. The oil in the hold is leaking, sir. We must up
|
||
Burtons and break out.”
|
||
|
||
“Up Burtons and break out? Now that we are nearing Japan; heave-to here for a
|
||
week to tinker a parcel of old hoops?”
|
||
|
||
“Either do that, sir, or waste in one day more oil than we may make good in a
|
||
year. What we come twenty thousand miles to get is worth saving, sir.”
|
||
|
||
“So it is, so it is; if we get it.”
|
||
|
||
“I was speaking of the oil in the hold, sir.”
|
||
|
||
“And I was not speaking or thinking of that at all. Begone! Let it leak! I’m all
|
||
aleak myself. Aye! leaks in leaks! not only full of leaky casks, but those leaky
|
||
casks are in a leaky ship; and that’s a far worse plight than the Pequod’s, man.
|
||
Yet I don’t stop to plug my leak; for who can find it in the deep-loaded hull;
|
||
or how hope to plug it, even if found, in this life’s howling gale? Starbuck!
|
||
I’ll not have the Burtons hoisted.”
|
||
|
||
“What will the owners say, sir?”
|
||
|
||
“Let the owners stand on Nantucket beach and outyell the Typhoons. What cares
|
||
Ahab? Owners, owners? Thou art always prating to me, Starbuck, about those
|
||
miserly owners, as if the owners were my conscience. But look ye, the only real
|
||
owner of anything is its commander; and hark ye, my conscience is in this ship’s
|
||
keel.—On deck!”
|
||
|
||
“Captain Ahab,” said the reddening mate, moving further into the cabin, with a
|
||
daring so strangely respectful and cautious that it almost seemed not only every
|
||
way seeking to avoid the slightest outward manifestation of itself, but within
|
||
also seemed more than half distrustful of itself; “A better man than I might
|
||
well pass over in thee what he would quickly enough resent in a younger man;
|
||
aye, and in a happier, Captain Ahab.”
|
||
|
||
“Devils! Dost thou then so much as dare to critically think of me?—On deck!”
|
||
|
||
“Nay, sir, not yet; I do entreat. And I do dare, sir—to be forbearing! Shall we
|
||
not understand each other better than hitherto, Captain Ahab?”
|
||
|
||
Ahab seized a loaded musket from the rack (forming part of most South-Sea-men’s
|
||
cabin furniture), and pointing it towards Starbuck, exclaimed: “There is one God
|
||
that is Lord over the earth, and one Captain that is lord over the Pequod.—On
|
||
deck!”
|
||
|
||
For an instant in the flashing eyes of the mate, and his fiery cheeks, you would
|
||
have almost thought that he had really received the blaze of the levelled tube.
|
||
But, mastering his emotion, he half calmly rose, and as he quitted the cabin,
|
||
paused for an instant and said: “Thou hast outraged, not insulted me, sir; but
|
||
for that I ask thee not to beware of Starbuck; thou wouldst but laugh; but let
|
||
Ahab beware of Ahab; beware of thyself, old man.”
|
||
|
||
“He waxes brave, but nevertheless obeys; most careful bravery that!” murmured
|
||
Ahab, as Starbuck disappeared. “What’s that he said—Ahab beware of Ahab—there’s
|
||
something there!” Then unconsciously using the musket for a staff, with an iron
|
||
brow he paced to and fro in the little cabin; but presently the thick plaits of
|
||
his forehead relaxed, and returning the gun to the rack, he went to the deck.
|
||
|
||
“Thou art but too good a fellow, Starbuck,” he said lowly to the mate; then
|
||
raising his voice to the crew: “Furl the t’gallant-sails, and close-reef the
|
||
top-sails, fore and aft; back the main-yard; up Burton, and break out in the
|
||
main-hold.”
|
||
|
||
It were perhaps vain to surmise exactly why it was, that as respecting Starbuck,
|
||
Ahab thus acted. It may have been a flash of honesty in him; or mere prudential
|
||
policy which, under the circumstance, imperiously forbade the slightest symptom
|
||
of open disaffection, however transient, in the important chief officer of his
|
||
ship. However it was, his orders were executed; and the Burtons were hoisted.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 110. Queequeg in His Coffin.
|
||
|
||
Upon searching, it was found that the casks last struck into the hold were
|
||
perfectly sound, and that the leak must be further off. So, it being calm
|
||
weather, they broke out deeper and deeper, disturbing the slumbers of the huge
|
||
ground-tier butts; and from that black midnight sending those gigantic moles
|
||
into the daylight above. So deep did they go; and so ancient, and corroded, and
|
||
weedy the aspect of the lowermost puncheons, that you almost looked next for
|
||
some mouldy corner-stone cask containing coins of Captain Noah, with copies of
|
||
the posted placards, vainly warning the infatuated old world from the flood.
|
||
Tierce after tierce, too, of water, and bread, and beef, and shooks of staves,
|
||
and iron bundles of hoops, were hoisted out, till at last the piled decks were
|
||
hard to get about; and the hollow hull echoed under foot, as if you were
|
||
treading over empty catacombs, and reeled and rolled in the sea like an
|
||
air-freighted demijohn. Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all
|
||
Aristotle in his head. Well was it that the Typhoons did not visit them then.
|
||
|
||
Now, at this time it was that my poor pagan companion, and fast bosom-friend,
|
||
Queequeg, was seized with a fever, which brought him nigh to his endless end.
|
||
|
||
Be it said, that in this vocation of whaling, sinecures are unknown; dignity and
|
||
danger go hand in hand; till you get to be Captain, the higher you rise the
|
||
harder you toil. So with poor Queequeg, who, as harpooneer, must not only face
|
||
all the rage of the living whale, but—as we have elsewhere seen—mount his dead
|
||
back in a rolling sea; and finally descend into the gloom of the hold, and
|
||
bitterly sweating all day in that subterraneous confinement, resolutely
|
||
manhandle the clumsiest casks and see to their stowage. To be short, among
|
||
whalemen, the harpooneers are the holders, so called.
|
||
|
||
Poor Queequeg! when the ship was about half disembowelled, you should have
|
||
stooped over the hatchway, and peered down upon him there; where, stripped to
|
||
his woollen drawers, the tattooed savage was crawling about amid that dampness
|
||
and slime, like a green spotted lizard at the bottom of a well. And a well, or
|
||
an ice-house, it somehow proved to him, poor pagan; where, strange to say, for
|
||
all the heat of his sweatings, he caught a terrible chill which lapsed into a
|
||
fever; and at last, after some days’ suffering, laid him in his hammock, close
|
||
to the very sill of the door of death. How he wasted and wasted away in those
|
||
few long-lingering days, till there seemed but little left of him but his frame
|
||
and tattooing. But as all else in him thinned, and his cheek-bones grew sharper,
|
||
his eyes, nevertheless, seemed growing fuller and fuller; they became of a
|
||
strange softness of lustre; and mildly but deeply looked out at you there from
|
||
his sickness, a wondrous testimony to that immortal health in him which could
|
||
not die, or be weakened. And like circles on the water, which, as they grow
|
||
fainter, expand; so his eyes seemed rounding and rounding, like the rings of
|
||
Eternity. An awe that cannot be named would steal over you as you sat by the
|
||
side of this waning savage, and saw as strange things in his face, as any beheld
|
||
who were bystanders when Zoroaster died. For whatever is truly wondrous and
|
||
fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books. And the drawing near of
|
||
Death, which alike levels all, alike impresses all with a last revelation, which
|
||
only an author from the dead could adequately tell. So that—let us say it
|
||
again—no dying Chaldee or Greek had higher and holier thoughts than those, whose
|
||
mysterious shades you saw creeping over the face of poor Queequeg, as he quietly
|
||
lay in his swaying hammock, and the rolling sea seemed gently rocking him to his
|
||
final rest, and the ocean’s invisible flood-tide lifted him higher and higher
|
||
towards his destined heaven.
|
||
|
||
Not a man of the crew but gave him up; and, as for Queequeg himself, what he
|
||
thought of his case was forcibly shown by a curious favour he asked. He called
|
||
one to him in the grey morning watch, when the day was just breaking, and taking
|
||
his hand, said that while in Nantucket he had chanced to see certain little
|
||
canoes of dark wood, like the rich war-wood of his native isle; and upon
|
||
inquiry, he had learned that all whalemen who died in Nantucket, were laid in
|
||
those same dark canoes, and that the fancy of being so laid had much pleased
|
||
him; for it was not unlike the custom of his own race, who, after embalming a
|
||
dead warrior, stretched him out in his canoe, and so left him to be floated away
|
||
to the starry archipelagoes; for not only do they believe that the stars are
|
||
isles, but that far beyond all visible horizons, their own mild, uncontinented
|
||
seas, interflow with the blue heavens; and so form the white breakers of the
|
||
milky way. He added, that he shuddered at the thought of being buried in his
|
||
hammock, according to the usual sea-custom, tossed like something vile to the
|
||
death-devouring sharks. No: he desired a canoe like those of Nantucket, all the
|
||
more congenial to him, being a whaleman, that like a whale-boat these
|
||
coffin-canoes were without a keel; though that involved but uncertain steering,
|
||
and much lee-way adown the dim ages.
|
||
|
||
Now, when this strange circumstance was made known aft, the carpenter was at
|
||
once commanded to do Queequeg’s bidding, whatever it might include. There was
|
||
some heathenish, coffin-coloured old lumber aboard, which, upon a long previous
|
||
voyage, had been cut from the aboriginal groves of the Lackaday islands, and
|
||
from these dark planks the coffin was recommended to be made. No sooner was the
|
||
carpenter apprised of the order, than taking his rule, he forthwith with all the
|
||
indifferent promptitude of his character, proceeded into the forecastle and took
|
||
Queequeg’s measure with great accuracy, regularly chalking Queequeg’s person as
|
||
he shifted the rule.
|
||
|
||
“Ah! poor fellow! he’ll have to die now,” ejaculated the Long Island sailor.
|
||
|
||
Going to his vice-bench, the carpenter for convenience sake and general
|
||
reference, now transferringly measured on it the exact length the coffin was to
|
||
be, and then made the transfer permanent by cutting two notches at its
|
||
extremities. This done, he marshalled the planks and his tools, and to work.
|
||
|
||
When the last nail was driven, and the lid duly planed and fitted, he lightly
|
||
shouldered the coffin and went forward with it, inquiring whether they were
|
||
ready for it yet in that direction.
|
||
|
||
Overhearing the indignant but half-humorous cries with which the people on deck
|
||
began to drive the coffin away, Queequeg, to every one’s consternation,
|
||
commanded that the thing should be instantly brought to him, nor was there any
|
||
denying him; seeing that, of all mortals, some dying men are the most
|
||
tyrannical; and certainly, since they will shortly trouble us so little for
|
||
evermore, the poor fellows ought to be indulged.
|
||
|
||
Leaning over in his hammock, Queequeg long regarded the coffin with an attentive
|
||
eye. He then called for his harpoon, had the wooden stock drawn from it, and
|
||
then had the iron part placed in the coffin along with one of the paddles of his
|
||
boat. All by his own request, also, biscuits were then ranged round the sides
|
||
within: a flask of fresh water was placed at the head, and a small bag of woody
|
||
earth scraped up in the hold at the foot; and a piece of sail-cloth being rolled
|
||
up for a pillow, Queequeg now entreated to be lifted into his final bed, that he
|
||
might make trial of its comforts, if any it had. He lay without moving a few
|
||
minutes, then told one to go to his bag and bring out his little god, Yojo. Then
|
||
crossing his arms on his breast with Yojo between, he called for the coffin lid
|
||
(hatch he called it) to be placed over him. The head part turned over with a
|
||
leather hinge, and there lay Queequeg in his coffin with little but his composed
|
||
countenance in view. “Rarmai” (it will do; it is easy), he murmured at last, and
|
||
signed to be replaced in his hammock.
|
||
|
||
But ere this was done, Pip, who had been slily hovering near by all this while,
|
||
drew nigh to him where he lay, and with soft sobbings, took him by the hand; in
|
||
the other, holding his tambourine.
|
||
|
||
“Poor rover! will ye never have done with all this weary roving? where go ye
|
||
now? But if the currents carry ye to those sweet Antilles where the beaches are
|
||
only beat with water-lilies, will ye do one little errand for me? Seek out one
|
||
Pip, who’s now been missing long: I think he’s in those far Antilles. If ye find
|
||
him, then comfort him; for he must be very sad; for look! he’s left his
|
||
tambourine behind;—I found it. Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! Now, Queequeg, die; and I’ll
|
||
beat ye your dying march.”
|
||
|
||
“I have heard,” murmured Starbuck, gazing down the scuttle, “that in violent
|
||
fevers, men, all ignorance, have talked in ancient tongues; and that when the
|
||
mystery is probed, it turns out always that in their wholly forgotten childhood
|
||
those ancient tongues had been really spoken in their hearing by some lofty
|
||
scholars. So, to my fond faith, poor Pip, in this strange sweetness of his
|
||
lunacy, brings heavenly vouchers of all our heavenly homes. Where learned he
|
||
that, but there?—Hark! he speaks again: but more wildly now.”
|
||
|
||
“Form two and two! Let’s make a General of him! Ho, where’s his harpoon? Lay it
|
||
across here.—Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! huzza! Oh for a game cock now to sit upon his
|
||
head and crow! Queequeg dies game!—mind ye that; Queequeg dies game!—take ye
|
||
good heed of that; Queequeg dies game! I say; game, game, game! but base little
|
||
Pip, he died a coward; died all a’shiver;—out upon Pip! Hark ye; if ye find Pip,
|
||
tell all the Antilles he’s a runaway; a coward, a coward, a coward! Tell them he
|
||
jumped from a whale-boat! I’d never beat my tambourine over base Pip, and hail
|
||
him General, if he were once more dying here. No, no! shame upon all
|
||
cowards—shame upon them! Let ’em go drown like Pip, that jumped from a
|
||
whale-boat. Shame! shame!”
|
||
|
||
During all this, Queequeg lay with closed eyes, as if in a dream. Pip was led
|
||
away, and the sick man was replaced in his hammock.
|
||
|
||
But now that he had apparently made every preparation for death; now that his
|
||
coffin was proved a good fit, Queequeg suddenly rallied; soon there seemed no
|
||
need of the carpenter’s box: and thereupon, when some expressed their delighted
|
||
surprise, he, in substance, said, that the cause of his sudden convalescence was
|
||
this;—at a critical moment, he had just recalled a little duty ashore, which he
|
||
was leaving undone; and therefore had changed his mind about dying: he could not
|
||
die yet, he averred. They asked him, then, whether to live or die was a matter
|
||
of his own sovereign will and pleasure. He answered, certainly. In a word, it
|
||
was Queequeg’s conceit, that if a man made up his mind to live, mere sickness
|
||
could not kill him: nothing but a whale, or a gale, or some violent,
|
||
ungovernable, unintelligent destroyer of that sort.
|
||
|
||
Now, there is this noteworthy difference between savage and civilized; that
|
||
while a sick, civilized man may be six months convalescing, generally speaking,
|
||
a sick savage is almost half-well again in a day. So, in good time my Queequeg
|
||
gained strength; and at length after sitting on the windlass for a few indolent
|
||
days (but eating with a vigorous appetite) he suddenly leaped to his feet, threw
|
||
out his arms and legs, gave himself a good stretching, yawned a little bit, and
|
||
then springing into the head of his hoisted boat, and poising a harpoon,
|
||
pronounced himself fit for a fight.
|
||
|
||
With a wild whimsiness, he now used his coffin for a sea-chest; and emptying
|
||
into it his canvas bag of clothes, set them in order there. Many spare hours he
|
||
spent, in carving the lid with all manner of grotesque figures and drawings; and
|
||
it seemed that hereby he was striving, in his rude way, to copy parts of the
|
||
twisted tattooing on his body. And this tattooing had been the work of a
|
||
departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had
|
||
written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a
|
||
mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own
|
||
proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose
|
||
mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against
|
||
them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away
|
||
with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the
|
||
last. And this thought it must have been which suggested to Ahab that wild
|
||
exclamation of his, when one morning turning away from surveying poor
|
||
Queequeg—“Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods!”
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 111. The Pacific.
|
||
|
||
When gliding by the Bashee isles we emerged at last upon the great South Sea;
|
||
were it not for other things, I could have greeted my dear Pacific with
|
||
uncounted thanks, for now the long supplication of my youth was answered; that
|
||
serene ocean rolled eastwards from me a thousand leagues of blue.
|
||
|
||
There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful
|
||
stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those fabled
|
||
undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St. John. And meet it
|
||
is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters’
|
||
Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow
|
||
unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams,
|
||
somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming,
|
||
dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves
|
||
but made so by their restlessness.
|
||
|
||
To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once beheld, must ever
|
||
after be the sea of his adoption. It rolls the midmost waters of the world, the
|
||
Indian ocean and Atlantic being but its arms. The same waves wash the moles of
|
||
the new-built Californian towns, but yesterday planted by the recentest race of
|
||
men, and lave the faded but still gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than
|
||
Abraham; while all between float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying,
|
||
endless, unknown Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans. Thus this mysterious,
|
||
divine Pacific zones the world’s whole bulk about; makes all coasts one bay to
|
||
it; seems the tide-beating heart of earth. Lifted by those eternal swells, you
|
||
needs must own the seductive god, bowing your head to Pan.
|
||
|
||
But few thoughts of Pan stirred Ahab’s brain, as standing like an iron statue at
|
||
his accustomed place beside the mizen rigging, with one nostril he unthinkingly
|
||
snuffed the sugary musk from the Bashee isles (in whose sweet woods mild lovers
|
||
must be walking), and with the other consciously inhaled the salt breath of the
|
||
new found sea; that sea in which the hated White Whale must even then be
|
||
swimming. Launched at length upon these almost final waters, and gliding towards
|
||
the Japanese cruising-ground, the old man’s purpose intensified itself. His firm
|
||
lips met like the lips of a vice; the Delta of his forehead’s veins swelled like
|
||
overladen brooks; in his very sleep, his ringing cry ran through the vaulted
|
||
hull, “Stern all! the White Whale spouts thick blood!”
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 112. The Blacksmith.
|
||
|
||
Availing himself of the mild, summer-cool weather that now reigned in these
|
||
latitudes, and in preparation for the peculiarly active pursuits shortly to be
|
||
anticipated, Perth, the begrimed, blistered old blacksmith, had not removed his
|
||
portable forge to the hold again, after concluding his contributory work for
|
||
Ahab’s leg, but still retained it on deck, fast lashed to ringbolts by the
|
||
foremast; being now almost incessantly invoked by the headsmen, and harpooneers,
|
||
and bowsmen to do some little job for them; altering, or repairing, or new
|
||
shaping their various weapons and boat furniture. Often he would be surrounded
|
||
by an eager circle, all waiting to be served; holding boat-spades, pike-heads,
|
||
harpoons, and lances, and jealously watching his every sooty movement, as he
|
||
toiled. Nevertheless, this old man’s was a patient hammer wielded by a patient
|
||
arm. No murmur, no impatience, no petulance did come from him. Silent, slow, and
|
||
solemn; bowing over still further his chronically broken back, he toiled away,
|
||
as if toil were life itself, and the heavy beating of his hammer the heavy
|
||
beating of his heart. And so it was.—Most miserable!
|
||
|
||
A peculiar walk in this old man, a certain slight but painful appearing yawing
|
||
in his gait, had at an early period of the voyage excited the curiosity of the
|
||
mariners. And to the importunity of their persisted questionings he had finally
|
||
given in; and so it came to pass that every one now knew the shameful story of
|
||
his wretched fate.
|
||
|
||
Belated, and not innocently, one bitter winter’s midnight, on the road running
|
||
between two country towns, the blacksmith half-stupidly felt the deadly numbness
|
||
stealing over him, and sought refuge in a leaning, dilapidated barn. The issue
|
||
was, the loss of the extremities of both feet. Out of this revelation, part by
|
||
part, at last came out the four acts of the gladness, and the one long, and as
|
||
yet uncatastrophied fifth act of the grief of his life’s drama.
|
||
|
||
He was an old man, who, at the age of nearly sixty, had postponedly encountered
|
||
that thing in sorrow’s technicals called ruin. He had been an artisan of famed
|
||
excellence, and with plenty to do; owned a house and garden; embraced a
|
||
youthful, daughter-like, loving wife, and three blithe, ruddy children; every
|
||
Sunday went to a cheerful-looking church, planted in a grove. But one night,
|
||
under cover of darkness, and further concealed in a most cunning disguisement, a
|
||
desperate burglar slid into his happy home, and robbed them all of everything.
|
||
And darker yet to tell, the blacksmith himself did ignorantly conduct this
|
||
burglar into his family’s heart. It was the Bottle Conjuror! Upon the opening of
|
||
that fatal cork, forth flew the fiend, and shrivelled up his home. Now, for
|
||
prudent, most wise, and economic reasons, the blacksmith’s shop was in the
|
||
basement of his dwelling, but with a separate entrance to it; so that always had
|
||
the young and loving healthy wife listened with no unhappy nervousness, but with
|
||
vigorous pleasure, to the stout ringing of her young-armed old husband’s hammer;
|
||
whose reverberations, muffled by passing through the floors and walls, came up
|
||
to her, not unsweetly, in her nursery; and so, to stout Labor’s iron lullaby,
|
||
the blacksmith’s infants were rocked to slumber.
|
||
|
||
Oh, woe on woe! Oh, Death, why canst thou not sometimes be timely? Hadst thou
|
||
taken this old blacksmith to thyself ere his full ruin came upon him, then had
|
||
the young widow had a delicious grief, and her orphans a truly venerable,
|
||
legendary sire to dream of in their after years; and all of them a care-killing
|
||
competency. But Death plucked down some virtuous elder brother, on whose
|
||
whistling daily toil solely hung the responsibilities of some other family, and
|
||
left the worse than useless old man standing, till the hideous rot of life
|
||
should make him easier to harvest.
|
||
|
||
Why tell the whole? The blows of the basement hammer every day grew more and
|
||
more between; and each blow every day grew fainter than the last; the wife sat
|
||
frozen at the window, with tearless eyes, glitteringly gazing into the weeping
|
||
faces of her children; the bellows fell; the forge choked up with cinders; the
|
||
house was sold; the mother dived down into the long church-yard grass; her
|
||
children twice followed her thither; and the houseless, familyless old man
|
||
staggered off a vagabond in crape; his every woe unreverenced; his grey head a
|
||
scorn to flaxen curls!
|
||
|
||
Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but Death is only
|
||
a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first
|
||
salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the
|
||
Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men, who still have left
|
||
in them some interior compunctions against suicide, does the all-contributed and
|
||
all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable,
|
||
taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life adventures; and from the hearts of
|
||
infinite Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them—“Come hither,
|
||
broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate death;
|
||
here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them. Come hither! bury thyself
|
||
in a life which, to your now equally abhorred and abhorring, landed world, is
|
||
more oblivious than death. Come hither! put up thy gravestone, too, within the
|
||
churchyard, and come hither, till we marry thee!”
|
||
|
||
Hearkening to these voices, East and West, by early sunrise, and by fall of eve,
|
||
the blacksmith’s soul responded, Aye, I come! And so Perth went a-whaling.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 113. The Forge.
|
||
|
||
With matted beard, and swathed in a bristling shark-skin apron, about mid-day,
|
||
Perth was standing between his forge and anvil, the latter placed upon an
|
||
iron-wood log, with one hand holding a pike-head in the coals, and with the
|
||
other at his forge’s lungs, when Captain Ahab came along, carrying in his hand a
|
||
small rusty-looking leathern bag. While yet a little distance from the forge,
|
||
moody Ahab paused; till at last, Perth, withdrawing his iron from the fire,
|
||
began hammering it upon the anvil—the red mass sending off the sparks in thick
|
||
hovering flights, some of which flew close to Ahab.
|
||
|
||
“Are these thy Mother Carey’s chickens, Perth? they are always flying in thy
|
||
wake; birds of good omen, too, but not to all;—look here, they burn; but
|
||
thou—thou liv’st among them without a scorch.”
|
||
|
||
“Because I am scorched all over, Captain Ahab,” answered Perth, resting for a
|
||
moment on his hammer; “I am past scorching; not easily can’st thou scorch a
|
||
scar.”
|
||
|
||
“Well, well; no more. Thy shrunk voice sounds too calmly, sanely woeful to me.
|
||
In no Paradise myself, I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad.
|
||
Thou should’st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can’st
|
||
thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can’st
|
||
not go mad?—What wert thou making there?”
|
||
|
||
“Welding an old pike-head, sir; there were seams and dents in it.”
|
||
|
||
“And can’st thou make it all smooth again, blacksmith, after such hard usage as
|
||
it had?”
|
||
|
||
“I think so, sir.”
|
||
|
||
“And I suppose thou can’st smoothe almost any seams and dents; never mind how
|
||
hard the metal, blacksmith?”
|
||
|
||
“Aye, sir, I think I can; all seams and dents but one.”
|
||
|
||
“Look ye here, then,” cried Ahab, passionately advancing, and leaning with both
|
||
hands on Perth’s shoulders; “look ye here—here—can ye smoothe out a seam like
|
||
this, blacksmith,” sweeping one hand across his ribbed brow; “if thou could’st,
|
||
blacksmith, glad enough would I lay my head upon thy anvil, and feel thy
|
||
heaviest hammer between my eyes. Answer! Can’st thou smoothe this seam?”
|
||
|
||
“Oh! that is the one, sir! Said I not all seams and dents but one?”
|
||
|
||
“Aye, blacksmith, it is the one; aye, man, it is unsmoothable; for though thou
|
||
only see’st it here in my flesh, it has worked down into the bone of my
|
||
skull—that is all wrinkles! But, away with child’s play; no more gaffs and pikes
|
||
to-day. Look ye here!” jingling the leathern bag, as if it were full of gold
|
||
coins. “I, too, want a harpoon made; one that a thousand yoke of fiends could
|
||
not part, Perth; something that will stick in a whale like his own fin-bone.
|
||
There’s the stuff,” flinging the pouch upon the anvil. “Look ye, blacksmith,
|
||
these are the gathered nail-stubbs of the steel shoes of racing horses.”
|
||
|
||
“Horse-shoe stubbs, sir? Why, Captain Ahab, thou hast here, then, the best and
|
||
stubbornest stuff we blacksmiths ever work.”
|
||
|
||
“I know it, old man; these stubbs will weld together like glue from the melted
|
||
bones of murderers. Quick! forge me the harpoon. And forge me first, twelve rods
|
||
for its shank; then wind, and twist, and hammer these twelve together like the
|
||
yarns and strands of a tow-line. Quick! I’ll blow the fire.”
|
||
|
||
When at last the twelve rods were made, Ahab tried them, one by one, by
|
||
spiralling them, with his own hand, round a long, heavy iron bolt. “A flaw!”
|
||
rejecting the last one. “Work that over again, Perth.”
|
||
|
||
This done, Perth was about to begin welding the twelve into one, when Ahab
|
||
stayed his hand, and said he would weld his own iron. As, then, with regular,
|
||
gasping hems, he hammered on the anvil, Perth passing to him the glowing rods,
|
||
one after the other, and the hard pressed forge shooting up its intense straight
|
||
flame, the Parsee passed silently, and bowing over his head towards the fire,
|
||
seemed invoking some curse or some blessing on the toil. But, as Ahab looked up,
|
||
he slid aside.
|
||
|
||
“What’s that bunch of lucifers dodging about there for?” muttered Stubb, looking
|
||
on from the forecastle. “That Parsee smells fire like a fusee; and smells of it
|
||
himself, like a hot musket’s powder-pan.”
|
||
|
||
At last the shank, in one complete rod, received its final heat; and as Perth,
|
||
to temper it, plunged it all hissing into the cask of water near by, the
|
||
scalding steam shot up into Ahab’s bent face.
|
||
|
||
“Would’st thou brand me, Perth?” wincing for a moment with the pain; “have I
|
||
been but forging my own branding-iron, then?”
|
||
|
||
“Pray God, not that; yet I fear something, Captain Ahab. Is not this harpoon for
|
||
the White Whale?”
|
||
|
||
“For the white fiend! But now for the barbs; thou must make them thyself, man.
|
||
Here are my razors—the best of steel; here, and make the barbs sharp as the
|
||
needle-sleet of the Icy Sea.”
|
||
|
||
For a moment, the old blacksmith eyed the razors as though he would fain not use
|
||
them.
|
||
|
||
“Take them, man, I have no need for them; for I now neither shave, sup, nor pray
|
||
till—but here—to work!”
|
||
|
||
Fashioned at last into an arrowy shape, and welded by Perth to the shank, the
|
||
steel soon pointed the end of the iron; and as the blacksmith was about giving
|
||
the barbs their final heat, prior to tempering them, he cried to Ahab to place
|
||
the water-cask near.
|
||
|
||
“No, no—no water for that; I want it of the true death-temper. Ahoy, there!
|
||
Tashtego, Queequeg, Daggoo! What say ye, pagans! Will ye give me as much blood
|
||
as will cover this barb?” holding it high up. A cluster of dark nods replied,
|
||
Yes. Three punctures were made in the heathen flesh, and the White Whale’s barbs
|
||
were then tempered.
|
||
|
||
“Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!” deliriously howled
|
||
Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the baptismal blood.
|
||
|
||
Now, mustering the spare poles from below, and selecting one of hickory, with
|
||
the bark still investing it, Ahab fitted the end to the socket of the iron. A
|
||
coil of new tow-line was then unwound, and some fathoms of it taken to the
|
||
windlass, and stretched to a great tension. Pressing his foot upon it, till the
|
||
rope hummed like a harp-string, then eagerly bending over it, and seeing no
|
||
strandings, Ahab exclaimed, “Good! and now for the seizings.”
|
||
|
||
At one extremity the rope was unstranded, and the separate spread yarns were all
|
||
braided and woven round the socket of the harpoon; the pole was then driven hard
|
||
up into the socket; from the lower end the rope was traced half-way along the
|
||
pole’s length, and firmly secured so, with intertwistings of twine. This done,
|
||
pole, iron, and rope—like the Three Fates—remained inseparable, and Ahab moodily
|
||
stalked away with the weapon; the sound of his ivory leg, and the sound of the
|
||
hickory pole, both hollowly ringing along every plank. But ere he entered his
|
||
cabin, light, unnatural, half-bantering, yet most piteous sound was heard. Oh,
|
||
Pip! thy wretched laugh, thy idle but unresting eye; all thy strange mummeries
|
||
not unmeaningly blended with the black tragedy of the melancholy ship, and
|
||
mocked it!
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 114. The Gilder.
|
||
|
||
Penetrating further and further into the heart of the Japanese cruising ground,
|
||
the Pequod was soon all astir in the fishery. Often, in mild, pleasant weather,
|
||
for twelve, fifteen, eighteen, and twenty hours on the stretch, they were
|
||
engaged in the boats, steadily pulling, or sailing, or paddling after the
|
||
whales, or for an interlude of sixty or seventy minutes calmly awaiting their
|
||
uprising; though with but small success for their pains.
|
||
|
||
At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow heaving
|
||
swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so sociably mixing with
|
||
the soft waves themselves, that like hearth-stone cats they purr against the
|
||
gunwale; these are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil
|
||
beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that
|
||
pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but
|
||
conceals a remorseless fang.
|
||
|
||
These are the times, when in his whale-boat the rover softly feels a certain
|
||
filial, confident, land-like feeling towards the sea; that he regards it as so
|
||
much flowery earth; and the distant ship revealing only the tops of her masts,
|
||
seems struggling forward, not through high rolling waves, but through the tall
|
||
grass of a rolling prairie: as when the western emigrants’ horses only show
|
||
their erected ears, while their hidden bodies widely wade through the amazing
|
||
verdure.
|
||
|
||
The long-drawn virgin vales; the mild blue hill-sides; as over these there
|
||
steals the hush, the hum; you almost swear that play-wearied children lie
|
||
sleeping in these solitudes, in some glad May-time, when the flowers of the
|
||
woods are plucked. And all this mixes with your most mystic mood; so that fact
|
||
and fancy, half-way meeting, interpenetrate, and form one seamless whole.
|
||
|
||
Nor did such soothing scenes, however temporary, fail of at least as temporary
|
||
an effect on Ahab. But if these secret golden keys did seem to open in him his
|
||
own secret golden treasuries, yet did his breath upon them prove but tarnishing.
|
||
|
||
Oh, grassy glades! oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye,—though
|
||
long parched by the dead drought of the earthy life,—in ye, men yet may roll,
|
||
like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few fleeting moments, feel
|
||
the cool dew of the life immortal on them. Would to God these blessed calms
|
||
would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and
|
||
woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady
|
||
unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations,
|
||
and at the last one pause:—through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s
|
||
thoughtless faith, adolescence’ doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then
|
||
disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But once gone
|
||
through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs
|
||
eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt
|
||
ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the
|
||
foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded
|
||
mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave,
|
||
and we must there to learn it.
|
||
|
||
And that same day, too, gazing far down from his boat’s side into that same
|
||
golden sea, Starbuck lowly murmured:—
|
||
|
||
“Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride’s eye!—Tell me
|
||
not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibal ways. Let faith oust
|
||
fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.”
|
||
|
||
And Stubb, fish-like, with sparkling scales, leaped up in that same golden
|
||
light:—
|
||
|
||
“I am Stubb, and Stubb has his history; but here Stubb takes oaths that he has
|
||
always been jolly!”
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 115. The Pequod Meets The Bachelor.
|
||
|
||
And jolly enough were the sights and the sounds that came bearing down before
|
||
the wind, some few weeks after Ahab’s harpoon had been welded.
|
||
|
||
It was a Nantucket ship, the Bachelor, which had just wedged in her last cask of
|
||
oil, and bolted down her bursting hatches; and now, in glad holiday apparel, was
|
||
joyously, though somewhat vain-gloriously, sailing round among the
|
||
widely-separated ships on the ground, previous to pointing her prow for home.
|
||
|
||
The three men at her mast-head wore long streamers of narrow red bunting at
|
||
their hats; from the stern, a whale-boat was suspended, bottom down; and hanging
|
||
captive from the bowsprit was seen the long lower jaw of the last whale they had
|
||
slain. Signals, ensigns, and jacks of all colours were flying from her rigging,
|
||
on every side. Sideways lashed in each of her three basketed tops were two
|
||
barrels of sperm; above which, in her top-mast cross-trees, you saw slender
|
||
breakers of the same precious fluid; and nailed to her main truck was a brazen
|
||
lamp.
|
||
|
||
As was afterwards learned, the Bachelor had met with the most surprising
|
||
success; all the more wonderful, for that while cruising in the same seas
|
||
numerous other vessels had gone entire months without securing a single fish.
|
||
Not only had barrels of beef and bread been given away to make room for the far
|
||
more valuable sperm, but additional supplemental casks had been bartered for,
|
||
from the ships she had met; and these were stowed along the deck, and in the
|
||
captain’s and officers’ state-rooms. Even the cabin table itself had been
|
||
knocked into kindling-wood; and the cabin mess dined off the broad head of an
|
||
oil-butt, lashed down to the floor for a centrepiece. In the forecastle, the
|
||
sailors had actually caulked and pitched their chests, and filled them; it was
|
||
humorously added, that the cook had clapped a head on his largest boiler, and
|
||
filled it; that the steward had plugged his spare coffee-pot and filled it; that
|
||
the harpooneers had headed the sockets of their irons and filled them; that
|
||
indeed everything was filled with sperm, except the captain’s pantaloons
|
||
pockets, and those he reserved to thrust his hands into, in self-complacent
|
||
testimony of his entire satisfaction.
|
||
|
||
As this glad ship of good luck bore down upon the moody Pequod, the barbarian
|
||
sound of enormous drums came from her forecastle; and drawing still nearer, a
|
||
crowd of her men were seen standing round her huge try-pots, which, covered with
|
||
the parchment-like poke or stomach skin of the black fish, gave forth a loud
|
||
roar to every stroke of the clenched hands of the crew. On the quarter-deck, the
|
||
mates and harpooneers were dancing with the olive-hued girls who had eloped with
|
||
them from the Polynesian Isles; while suspended in an ornamented boat, firmly
|
||
secured aloft between the foremast and mainmast, three Long Island negroes, with
|
||
glittering fiddle-bows of whale ivory, were presiding over the hilarious jig.
|
||
Meanwhile, others of the ship’s company were tumultuously busy at the masonry of
|
||
the try-works, from which the huge pots had been removed. You would have almost
|
||
thought they were pulling down the cursed Bastille, such wild cries they raised,
|
||
as the now useless brick and mortar were being hurled into the sea.
|
||
|
||
Lord and master over all this scene, the captain stood erect on the ship’s
|
||
elevated quarter-deck, so that the whole rejoicing drama was full before him,
|
||
and seemed merely contrived for his own individual diversion.
|
||
|
||
And Ahab, he too was standing on his quarter-deck, shaggy and black, with a
|
||
stubborn gloom; and as the two ships crossed each other’s wakes—one all
|
||
jubilations for things passed, the other all forebodings as to things to
|
||
come—their two captains in themselves impersonated the whole striking contrast
|
||
of the scene.
|
||
|
||
“Come aboard, come aboard!” cried the gay Bachelor’s commander, lifting a glass
|
||
and a bottle in the air.
|
||
|
||
“Hast seen the White Whale?” gritted Ahab in reply.
|
||
|
||
“No; only heard of him; but don’t believe in him at all,” said the other
|
||
good-humoredly. “Come aboard!”
|
||
|
||
“Thou art too damned jolly. Sail on. Hast lost any men?”
|
||
|
||
“Not enough to speak of—two islanders, that’s all;—but come aboard, old hearty,
|
||
come along. I’ll soon take that black from your brow. Come along, will ye
|
||
(merry’s the play); a full ship and homeward-bound.”
|
||
|
||
“How wondrous familiar is a fool!” muttered Ahab; then aloud, “Thou art a full
|
||
ship and homeward bound, thou sayst; well, then, call me an empty ship, and
|
||
outward-bound. So go thy ways, and I will mine. Forward there! Set all sail, and
|
||
keep her to the wind!”
|
||
|
||
And thus, while the one ship went cheerily before the breeze, the other
|
||
stubbornly fought against it; and so the two vessels parted; the crew of the
|
||
Pequod looking with grave, lingering glances towards the receding Bachelor; but
|
||
the Bachelor’s men never heeding their gaze for the lively revelry they were in.
|
||
And as Ahab, leaning over the taffrail, eyed the homeward-bound craft, he took
|
||
from his pocket a small vial of sand, and then looking from the ship to the
|
||
vial, seemed thereby bringing two remote associations together, for that vial
|
||
was filled with Nantucket soundings.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 116. The Dying Whale.
|
||
|
||
Not seldom in this life, when, on the right side, fortune’s favourites sail
|
||
close by us, we, though all adroop before, catch somewhat of the rushing breeze,
|
||
and joyfully feel our bagging sails fill out. So seemed it with the Pequod. For
|
||
next day after encountering the gay Bachelor, whales were seen and four were
|
||
slain; and one of them by Ahab.
|
||
|
||
It was far down the afternoon; and when all the spearings of the crimson fight
|
||
were done: and floating in the lovely sunset sea and sky, sun and whale both
|
||
stilly died together; then, such a sweetness and such plaintiveness, such
|
||
inwreathing orisons curled up in that rosy air, that it almost seemed as if far
|
||
over from the deep green convent valleys of the Manilla isles, the Spanish
|
||
land-breeze, wantonly turned sailor, had gone to sea, freighted with these
|
||
vesper hymns.
|
||
|
||
Soothed again, but only soothed to deeper gloom, Ahab, who had sterned off from
|
||
the whale, sat intently watching his final wanings from the now tranquil boat.
|
||
For that strange spectacle observable in all sperm whales dying—the turning
|
||
sunwards of the head, and so expiring—that strange spectacle, beheld of such a
|
||
placid evening, somehow to Ahab conveyed a wondrousness unknown before.
|
||
|
||
“He turns and turns him to it,—how slowly, but how steadfastly, his
|
||
homage-rendering and invoking brow, with his last dying motions. He too worships
|
||
fire; most faithful, broad, baronial vassal of the sun!—Oh that these
|
||
too-favouring eyes should see these too-favouring sights. Look! here, far
|
||
water-locked; beyond all hum of human weal or woe; in these most candid and
|
||
impartial seas; where to traditions no rocks furnish tablets; where for long
|
||
Chinese ages, the billows have still rolled on speechless and unspoken to, as
|
||
stars that shine upon the Niger’s unknown source; here, too, life dies sunwards
|
||
full of faith; but see! no sooner dead, than death whirls round the corpse, and
|
||
it heads some other way.
|
||
|
||
“Oh, thou dark Hindoo half of nature, who of drowned bones hast builded thy
|
||
separate throne somewhere in the heart of these unverdured seas; thou art an
|
||
infidel, thou queen, and too truly speakest to me in the wide-slaughtering
|
||
Typhoon, and the hushed burial of its after calm. Nor has this thy whale
|
||
sunwards turned his dying head, and then gone round again, without a lesson to
|
||
me.
|
||
|
||
“Oh, trebly hooped and welded hip of power! Oh, high aspiring, rainbowed
|
||
jet!—that one strivest, this one jettest all in vain! In vain, oh whale, dost
|
||
thou seek intercedings with yon all-quickening sun, that only calls forth life,
|
||
but gives it not again. Yet dost thou, darker half, rock me with a prouder, if a
|
||
darker faith. All thy unnamable imminglings float beneath me here; I am buoyed
|
||
by breaths of once living things, exhaled as air, but water now.
|
||
|
||
“Then hail, for ever hail, O sea, in whose eternal tossings the wild fowl finds
|
||
his only rest. Born of earth, yet suckled by the sea; though hill and valley
|
||
mothered me, ye billows are my foster-brothers!”
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 117. The Whale Watch.
|
||
|
||
The four whales slain that evening had died wide apart; one, far to windward;
|
||
one, less distant, to leeward; one ahead; one astern. These last three were
|
||
brought alongside ere nightfall; but the windward one could not be reached till
|
||
morning; and the boat that had killed it lay by its side all night; and that
|
||
boat was Ahab’s.
|
||
|
||
The waif-pole was thrust upright into the dead whale’s spout-hole; and the
|
||
lantern hanging from its top, cast a troubled flickering glare upon the black,
|
||
glossy back, and far out upon the midnight waves, which gently chafed the
|
||
whale’s broad flank, like soft surf upon a beach.
|
||
|
||
Ahab and all his boat’s crew seemed asleep but the Parsee; who crouching in the
|
||
bow, sat watching the sharks, that spectrally played round the whale, and tapped
|
||
the light cedar planks with their tails. A sound like the moaning in squadrons
|
||
over Asphaltites of unforgiven ghosts of Gomorrah, ran shuddering through the
|
||
air.
|
||
|
||
Started from his slumbers, Ahab, face to face, saw the Parsee; and hooped round
|
||
by the gloom of the night they seemed the last men in a flooded world. “I have
|
||
dreamed it again,” said he.
|
||
|
||
“Of the hearses? Have I not said, old man, that neither hearse nor coffin can be
|
||
thine?”
|
||
|
||
“And who are hearsed that die on the sea?”
|
||
|
||
“But I said, old man, that ere thou couldst die on this voyage, two hearses must
|
||
verily be seen by thee on the sea; the first not made by mortal hands; and the
|
||
visible wood of the last one must be grown in America.”
|
||
|
||
“Aye, aye! a strange sight that, Parsee:—a hearse and its plumes floating over
|
||
the ocean with the waves for the pall-bearers. Ha! Such a sight we shall not
|
||
soon see.”
|
||
|
||
“Believe it or not, thou canst not die till it be seen, old man.”
|
||
|
||
“And what was that saying about thyself?”
|
||
|
||
“Though it come to the last, I shall still go before thee thy pilot.”
|
||
|
||
“And when thou art so gone before—if that ever befall—then ere I can follow,
|
||
thou must still appear to me, to pilot me still?—Was it not so? Well, then, did
|
||
I believe all ye say, oh my pilot! I have here two pledges that I shall yet slay
|
||
Moby Dick and survive it.”
|
||
|
||
“Take another pledge, old man,” said the Parsee, as his eyes lighted up like
|
||
fire-flies in the gloom—“Hemp only can kill thee.”
|
||
|
||
“The gallows, ye mean.—I am immortal then, on land and on sea,” cried Ahab, with
|
||
a laugh of derision;—“Immortal on land and on sea!”
|
||
|
||
Both were silent again, as one man. The grey dawn came on, and the slumbering
|
||
crew arose from the boat’s bottom, and ere noon the dead whale was brought to
|
||
the ship.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 118. The Quadrant.
|
||
|
||
The season for the Line at length drew near; and every day when Ahab, coming
|
||
from his cabin, cast his eyes aloft, the vigilant helmsman would ostentatiously
|
||
handle his spokes, and the eager mariners quickly run to the braces, and would
|
||
stand there with all their eyes centrally fixed on the nailed doubloon;
|
||
impatient for the order to point the ship’s prow for the equator. In good time
|
||
the order came. It was hard upon high noon; and Ahab, seated in the bows of his
|
||
high-hoisted boat, was about taking his wonted daily observation of the sun to
|
||
determine his latitude.
|
||
|
||
Now, in that Japanese sea, the days in summer are as freshets of effulgences.
|
||
That unblinkingly vivid Japanese sun seems the blazing focus of the glassy
|
||
ocean’s immeasurable burning-glass. The sky looks lacquered; clouds there are
|
||
none; the horizon floats; and this nakedness of unrelieved radiance is as the
|
||
insufferable splendors of God’s throne. Well that Ahab’s quadrant was furnished
|
||
with coloured glasses, through which to take sight of that solar fire. So,
|
||
swinging his seated form to the roll of the ship, and with his
|
||
astrological-looking instrument placed to his eye, he remained in that posture
|
||
for some moments to catch the precise instant when the sun should gain its
|
||
precise meridian. Meantime while his whole attention was absorbed, the Parsee
|
||
was kneeling beneath him on the ship’s deck, and with face thrown up like
|
||
Ahab’s, was eyeing the same sun with him; only the lids of his eyes half hooded
|
||
their orbs, and his wild face was subdued to an earthly passionlessness. At
|
||
length the desired observation was taken; and with his pencil upon his ivory
|
||
leg, Ahab soon calculated what his latitude must be at that precise instant.
|
||
Then falling into a moment’s revery, he again looked up towards the sun and
|
||
murmured to himself: “Thou sea-mark! thou high and mighty Pilot! thou tellest me
|
||
truly where I am—but canst thou cast the least hint where I shall be? Or canst
|
||
thou tell where some other thing besides me is this moment living? Where is Moby
|
||
Dick? This instant thou must be eyeing him. These eyes of mine look into the
|
||
very eye that is even now beholding him; aye, and into the eye that is even now
|
||
equally beholding the objects on the unknown, thither side of thee, thou sun!”
|
||
|
||
Then gazing at his quadrant, and handling, one after the other, its numerous
|
||
cabalistical contrivances, he pondered again, and muttered: “Foolish toy!
|
||
babies’ plaything of haughty Admirals, and Commodores, and Captains; the world
|
||
brags of thee, of thy cunning and might; but what after all canst thou do, but
|
||
tell the poor, pitiful point, where thou thyself happenest to be on this wide
|
||
planet, and the hand that holds thee: no! not one jot more! Thou canst not tell
|
||
where one drop of water or one grain of sand will be to-morrow noon; and yet
|
||
with thy impotence thou insultest the sun! Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy;
|
||
and cursed be all the things that cast man’s eyes aloft to that heaven, whose
|
||
live vividness but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now scorched with
|
||
thy light, O sun! Level by nature to this earth’s horizon are the glances of
|
||
man’s eyes; not shot from the crown of his head, as if God had meant him to gaze
|
||
on his firmament. Curse thee, thou quadrant!” dashing it to the deck, “no longer
|
||
will I guide my earthly way by thee; the level ship’s compass, and the level
|
||
dead-reckoning, by log and by line; these shall conduct me, and show me my place
|
||
on the sea. Aye,” lighting from the boat to the deck, “thus I trample on thee,
|
||
thou paltry thing that feebly pointest on high; thus I split and destroy thee!”
|
||
|
||
As the frantic old man thus spoke and thus trampled with his live and dead feet,
|
||
a sneering triumph that seemed meant for Ahab, and a fatalistic despair that
|
||
seemed meant for himself—these passed over the mute, motionless Parsee’s face.
|
||
Unobserved he rose and glided away; while, awestruck by the aspect of their
|
||
commander, the seamen clustered together on the forecastle, till Ahab,
|
||
troubledly pacing the deck, shouted out—“To the braces! Up helm!—square in!”
|
||
|
||
In an instant the yards swung round; and as the ship half-wheeled upon her heel,
|
||
her three firm-seated graceful masts erectly poised upon her long, ribbed hull,
|
||
seemed as the three Horatii pirouetting on one sufficient steed.
|
||
|
||
Standing between the knight-heads, Starbuck watched the Pequod’s tumultuous way,
|
||
and Ahab’s also, as he went lurching along the deck.
|
||
|
||
“I have sat before the dense coal fire and watched it all aglow, full of its
|
||
tormented flaming life; and I have seen it wane at last, down, down, to dumbest
|
||
dust. Old man of oceans! of all this fiery life of thine, what will at length
|
||
remain but one little heap of ashes!”
|
||
|
||
“Aye,” cried Stubb, “but sea-coal ashes—mind ye that, Mr. Starbuck—sea-coal, not
|
||
your common charcoal. Well, well; I heard Ahab mutter, ‘Here some one thrusts
|
||
these cards into these old hands of mine; swears that I must play them, and no
|
||
others.’ And damn me, Ahab, but thou actest right; live in the game, and die in
|
||
it!”
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 119. The Candles.
|
||
|
||
Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs: the tiger of Bengal crouches in
|
||
spiced groves of ceaseless verdure. Skies the most effulgent but basket the
|
||
deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba knows tornadoes that never swept tame northern
|
||
lands. So, too, it is, that in these resplendent Japanese seas the mariner
|
||
encounters the direst of all storms, the Typhoon. It will sometimes burst from
|
||
out that cloudless sky, like an exploding bomb upon a dazed and sleepy town.
|
||
|
||
Towards evening of that day, the Pequod was torn of her canvas, and bare-poled
|
||
was left to fight a Typhoon which had struck her directly ahead. When darkness
|
||
came on, sky and sea roared and split with the thunder, and blazed with the
|
||
lightning, that showed the disabled masts fluttering here and there with the
|
||
rags which the first fury of the tempest had left for its after sport.
|
||
|
||
Holding by a shroud, Starbuck was standing on the quarter-deck; at every flash
|
||
of the lightning glancing aloft, to see what additional disaster might have
|
||
befallen the intricate hamper there; while Stubb and Flask were directing the
|
||
men in the higher hoisting and firmer lashing of the boats. But all their pains
|
||
seemed naught. Though lifted to the very top of the cranes, the windward quarter
|
||
boat (Ahab’s) did not escape. A great rolling sea, dashing high up against the
|
||
reeling ship’s high teetering side, stove in the boat’s bottom at the stern, and
|
||
left it again, all dripping through like a sieve.
|
||
|
||
“Bad work, bad work! Mr. Starbuck,” said Stubb, regarding the wreck, “but the
|
||
sea will have its way. Stubb, for one, can’t fight it. You see, Mr. Starbuck, a
|
||
wave has such a great long start before it leaps, all round the world it runs,
|
||
and then comes the spring! But as for me, all the start I have to meet it, is
|
||
just across the deck here. But never mind; it’s all in fun: so the old song
|
||
says;”—(sings.)
|
||
|
||
Oh! jolly is the gale, And a joker is the whale, A’ flourishin’ his tail,—
|
||
Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!
|
||
|
||
The scud all a flyin’, That’s his flip only foamin’; When he stirs in the
|
||
spicin’,— Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the
|
||
Ocean, oh!
|
||
|
||
Thunder splits the ships, But he only smacks his lips, A tastin’ of this
|
||
flip,— Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean,
|
||
oh!
|
||
|
||
“Avast Stubb,” cried Starbuck, “let the Typhoon sing, and strike his harp here
|
||
in our rigging; but if thou art a brave man thou wilt hold thy peace.”
|
||
|
||
“But I am not a brave man; never said I was a brave man; I am a coward; and I
|
||
sing to keep up my spirits. And I tell you what it is, Mr. Starbuck, there’s no
|
||
way to stop my singing in this world but to cut my throat. And when that’s done,
|
||
ten to one I sing ye the doxology for a wind-up.”
|
||
|
||
“Madman! look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own.”
|
||
|
||
“What! how can you see better of a dark night than anybody else, never mind how
|
||
foolish?”
|
||
|
||
“Here!” cried Starbuck, seizing Stubb by the shoulder, and pointing his hand
|
||
towards the weather bow, “markest thou not that the gale comes from the
|
||
eastward, the very course Ahab is to run for Moby Dick? the very course he swung
|
||
to this day noon? now mark his boat there; where is that stove? In the
|
||
stern-sheets, man; where he is wont to stand—his stand-point is stove, man! Now
|
||
jump overboard, and sing away, if thou must!
|
||
|
||
“I don’t half understand ye: what’s in the wind?”
|
||
|
||
“Yes, yes, round the Cape of Good Hope is the shortest way to Nantucket,”
|
||
soliloquized Starbuck suddenly, heedless of Stubb’s question. “The gale that now
|
||
hammers at us to stave us, we can turn it into a fair wind that will drive us
|
||
towards home. Yonder, to windward, all is blackness of doom; but to leeward,
|
||
homeward—I see it lightens up there; but not with the lightning.”
|
||
|
||
At that moment in one of the intervals of profound darkness, following the
|
||
flashes, a voice was heard at his side; and almost at the same instant a volley
|
||
of thunder peals rolled overhead.
|
||
|
||
“Who’s there?”
|
||
|
||
“Old Thunder!” said Ahab, groping his way along the bulwarks to his pivot-hole;
|
||
but suddenly finding his path made plain to him by elbowed lances of fire.
|
||
|
||
Now, as the lightning rod to a spire on shore is intended to carry off the
|
||
perilous fluid into the soil; so the kindred rod which at sea some ships carry
|
||
to each mast, is intended to conduct it into the water. But as this conductor
|
||
must descend to considerable depth, that its end may avoid all contact with the
|
||
hull; and as moreover, if kept constantly towing there, it would be liable to
|
||
many mishaps, besides interfering not a little with some of the rigging, and
|
||
more or less impeding the vessel’s way in the water; because of all this, the
|
||
lower parts of a ship’s lightning-rods are not always overboard; but are
|
||
generally made in long slender links, so as to be the more readily hauled up
|
||
into the chains outside, or thrown down into the sea, as occasion may require.
|
||
|
||
“The rods! the rods!” cried Starbuck to the crew, suddenly admonished to
|
||
vigilance by the vivid lightning that had just been darting flambeaux, to light
|
||
Ahab to his post. “Are they overboard? drop them over, fore and aft. Quick!”
|
||
|
||
“Avast!” cried Ahab; “let’s have fair play here, though we be the weaker side.
|
||
Yet I’ll contribute to raise rods on the Himmalehs and Andes, that all the world
|
||
may be secured; but out on privileges! Let them be, sir.”
|
||
|
||
“Look aloft!” cried Starbuck. “The corpusants! the corpusants!”
|
||
|
||
All the yard-arms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each
|
||
tri-pointed lightning-rod-end with three tapering white flames, each of the
|
||
three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air, like three
|
||
gigantic wax tapers before an altar.
|
||
|
||
“Blast the boat! let it go!” cried Stubb at this instant, as a swashing sea
|
||
heaved up under his own little craft, so that its gunwale violently jammed his
|
||
hand, as he was passing a lashing. “Blast it!”—but slipping backward on the
|
||
deck, his uplifted eyes caught the flames; and immediately shifting his tone he
|
||
cried—“The corpusants have mercy on us all!”
|
||
|
||
To sailors, oaths are household words; they will swear in the trance of the
|
||
calm, and in the teeth of the tempest; they will imprecate curses from the
|
||
topsail-yard-arms, when most they teeter over to a seething sea; but in all my
|
||
voyagings, seldom have I heard a common oath when God’s burning finger has been
|
||
laid on the ship; when His “Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin” has been woven into the
|
||
shrouds and the cordage.
|
||
|
||
While this pallidness was burning aloft, few words were heard from the enchanted
|
||
crew; who in one thick cluster stood on the forecastle, all their eyes gleaming
|
||
in that pale phosphorescence, like a far away constellation of stars. Relieved
|
||
against the ghostly light, the gigantic jet negro, Daggoo, loomed up to thrice
|
||
his real stature, and seemed the black cloud from which the thunder had come.
|
||
The parted mouth of Tashtego revealed his shark-white teeth, which strangely
|
||
gleamed as if they too had been tipped by corpusants; while lit up by the
|
||
preternatural light, Queequeg’s tattooing burned like Satanic blue flames on his
|
||
body.
|
||
|
||
The tableau all waned at last with the pallidness aloft; and once more the
|
||
Pequod and every soul on her decks were wrapped in a pall. A moment or two
|
||
passed, when Starbuck, going forward, pushed against some one. It was Stubb.
|
||
“What thinkest thou now, man; I heard thy cry; it was not the same in the song.”
|
||
|
||
“No, no, it wasn’t; I said the corpusants have mercy on us all; and I hope they
|
||
will, still. But do they only have mercy on long faces?—have they no bowels for
|
||
a laugh? And look ye, Mr. Starbuck—but it’s too dark to look. Hear me, then: I
|
||
take that mast-head flame we saw for a sign of good luck; for those masts are
|
||
rooted in a hold that is going to be chock a’ block with sperm-oil, d’ye see;
|
||
and so, all that sperm will work up into the masts, like sap in a tree. Yes, our
|
||
three masts will yet be as three spermaceti candles—that’s the good promise we
|
||
saw.”
|
||
|
||
At that moment Starbuck caught sight of Stubb’s face slowly beginning to glimmer
|
||
into sight. Glancing upwards, he cried: “See! see!” and once more the high
|
||
tapering flames were beheld with what seemed redoubled supernaturalness in their
|
||
pallor.
|
||
|
||
“The corpusants have mercy on us all,” cried Stubb, again.
|
||
|
||
At the base of the mainmast, full beneath the doubloon and the flame, the Parsee
|
||
was kneeling in Ahab’s front, but with his head bowed away from him; while near
|
||
by, from the arched and overhanging rigging, where they had just been engaged
|
||
securing a spar, a number of the seamen, arrested by the glare, now cohered
|
||
together, and hung pendulous, like a knot of numbed wasps from a drooping,
|
||
orchard twig. In various enchanted attitudes, like the standing, or stepping, or
|
||
running skeletons in Herculaneum, others remained rooted to the deck; but all
|
||
their eyes upcast.
|
||
|
||
“Aye, aye, men!” cried Ahab. “Look up at it; mark it well; the white flame but
|
||
lights the way to the White Whale! Hand me those mainmast links there; I would
|
||
fain feel this pulse, and let mine beat against it; blood against fire! So.”
|
||
|
||
Then turning—the last link held fast in his left hand, he put his foot upon the
|
||
Parsee; and with fixed upward eye, and high-flung right arm, he stood erect
|
||
before the lofty tri-pointed trinity of flames.
|
||
|
||
“Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did
|
||
worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear
|
||
the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right
|
||
worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt thou be kind; and e’en
|
||
for hate thou canst but kill; and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts
|
||
thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my
|
||
earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the
|
||
midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but a
|
||
point at best; whencesoe’er I came; wheresoe’er I go; yet while I earthly live,
|
||
the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights. But war is
|
||
pain, and hate is woe. Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and
|
||
kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere supernal power; and though thou
|
||
launchest navies of full-freighted worlds, there’s that in here that still
|
||
remains indifferent. Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like
|
||
a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee.”
|
||
|
||
[Sudden, repeated flashes of lightning; the nine flames leap lengthwise to
|
||
thrice their previous height; Ahab, with the rest, closes his eyes, his right
|
||
hand pressed hard upon them.]
|
||
|
||
“I own thy speechless, placeless power; said I not so? Nor was it wrung from me;
|
||
nor do I now drop these links. Thou canst blind; but I can then grope. Thou
|
||
canst consume; but I can then be ashes. Take the homage of these poor eyes, and
|
||
shutter-hands. I would not take it. The lightning flashes through my skull; mine
|
||
eye-balls ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on
|
||
some stunning ground. Oh, oh! Yet blindfold, yet will I talk to thee. Light
|
||
though thou be, thou leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of
|
||
light, leaping out of thee! The javelins cease; open eyes; see, or not? There
|
||
burn the flames! Oh, thou magnanimous! now I do glory in my genealogy. But thou
|
||
art but my fiery father; my sweet mother, I know not. Oh, cruel! what hast thou
|
||
done with her? There lies my puzzle; but thine is greater. Thou knowest not how
|
||
came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy beginning,
|
||
hence callest thyself unbegun. I know that of me, which thou knowest not of
|
||
thyself, oh, thou omnipotent. There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou
|
||
clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness
|
||
mechanical. Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see it.
|
||
Oh, thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy
|
||
incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again with haughty agony,
|
||
I read my sire. Leap! leap up, and lick the sky! I leap with thee; I burn with
|
||
thee; would fain be welded with thee; defyingly I worship thee!”
|
||
|
||
“The boat! the boat!” cried Starbuck, “look at thy boat, old man!”
|
||
|
||
Ahab’s harpoon, the one forged at Perth’s fire, remained firmly lashed in its
|
||
conspicuous crotch, so that it projected beyond his whale-boat’s bow; but the
|
||
sea that had stove its bottom had caused the loose leather sheath to drop off;
|
||
and from the keen steel barb there now came a levelled flame of pale, forked
|
||
fire. As the silent harpoon burned there like a serpent’s tongue, Starbuck
|
||
grasped Ahab by the arm—“God, God is against thee, old man; forbear! ’tis an ill
|
||
voyage! ill begun, ill continued; let me square the yards, while we may, old
|
||
man, and make a fair wind of it homewards, to go on a better voyage than this.”
|
||
|
||
Overhearing Starbuck, the panic-stricken crew instantly ran to the braces—though
|
||
not a sail was left aloft. For the moment all the aghast mate’s thoughts seemed
|
||
theirs; they raised a half mutinous cry. But dashing the rattling lightning
|
||
links to the deck, and snatching the burning harpoon, Ahab waved it like a torch
|
||
among them; swearing to transfix with it the first sailor that but cast loose a
|
||
rope’s end. Petrified by his aspect, and still more shrinking from the fiery
|
||
dart that he held, the men fell back in dismay, and Ahab again spoke:—
|
||
|
||
“All your oaths to hunt the White Whale are as binding as mine; and heart, soul,
|
||
and body, lungs and life, old Ahab is bound. And that ye may know to what tune
|
||
this heart beats; look ye here; thus I blow out the last fear!” And with one
|
||
blast of his breath he extinguished the flame.
|
||
|
||
As in the hurricane that sweeps the plain, men fly the neighborhood of some
|
||
lone, gigantic elm, whose very height and strength but render it so much the
|
||
more unsafe, because so much the more a mark for thunderbolts; so at those last
|
||
words of Ahab’s many of the mariners did run from him in a terror of dismay.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 120. The Deck Towards the End of the First Night Watch.
|
||
|
||
Ahab standing by the helm. Starbuck approaching him.
|
||
|
||
“We must send down the main-top-sail yard, sir. The band is working loose and
|
||
the lee lift is half-stranded. Shall I strike it, sir?”
|
||
|
||
“Strike nothing; lash it. If I had sky-sail poles, I’d sway them up now.”
|
||
|
||
“Sir!—in God’s name!—sir?”
|
||
|
||
“Well.”
|
||
|
||
“The anchors are working, sir. Shall I get them inboard?”
|
||
|
||
“Strike nothing, and stir nothing, but lash everything. The wind rises, but it
|
||
has not got up to my table-lands yet. Quick, and see to it.—By masts and keels!
|
||
he takes me for the hunch-backed skipper of some coasting smack. Send down my
|
||
main-top-sail yard! Ho, gluepots! Loftiest trucks were made for wildest winds,
|
||
and this brain-truck of mine now sails amid the cloud-scud. Shall I strike that?
|
||
Oh, none but cowards send down their brain-trucks in tempest time. What a
|
||
hooroosh aloft there! I would e’en take it for sublime, did I not know that the
|
||
colic is a noisy malady. Oh, take medicine, take medicine!”
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 121. Midnight.—The Forecastle Bulwarks.
|
||
|
||
Stubb and Flask mounted on them, and passing additional lashings over the
|
||
anchors there hanging.
|
||
|
||
“No, Stubb; you may pound that knot there as much as you please, but you will
|
||
never pound into me what you were just now saying. And how long ago is it since
|
||
you said the very contrary? Didn’t you once say that whatever ship Ahab sails
|
||
in, that ship should pay something extra on its insurance policy, just as though
|
||
it were loaded with powder barrels aft and boxes of lucifers forward? Stop, now;
|
||
didn’t you say so?”
|
||
|
||
“Well, suppose I did? What then? I’ve part changed my flesh since that time, why
|
||
not my mind? Besides, supposing we are loaded with powder barrels aft and
|
||
lucifers forward; how the devil could the lucifers get afire in this drenching
|
||
spray here? Why, my little man, you have pretty red hair, but you couldn’t get
|
||
afire now. Shake yourself; you’re Aquarius, or the water-bearer, Flask; might
|
||
fill pitchers at your coat collar. Don’t you see, then, that for these extra
|
||
risks the Marine Insurance companies have extra guarantees? Here are hydrants,
|
||
Flask. But hark, again, and I’ll answer ye the other thing. First take your leg
|
||
off from the crown of the anchor here, though, so I can pass the rope; now
|
||
listen. What’s the mighty difference between holding a mast’s lightning-rod in
|
||
the storm, and standing close by a mast that hasn’t got any lightning-rod at all
|
||
in a storm? Don’t you see, you timber-head, that no harm can come to the holder
|
||
of the rod, unless the mast is first struck? What are you talking about, then?
|
||
Not one ship in a hundred carries rods, and Ahab,—aye, man, and all of us,—were
|
||
in no more danger then, in my poor opinion, than all the crews in ten thousand
|
||
ships now sailing the seas. Why, you King-Post, you, I suppose you would have
|
||
every man in the world go about with a small lightning-rod running up the corner
|
||
of his hat, like a militia officer’s skewered feather, and trailing behind like
|
||
his sash. Why don’t ye be sensible, Flask? it’s easy to be sensible; why don’t
|
||
ye, then? any man with half an eye can be sensible.”
|
||
|
||
“I don’t know that, Stubb. You sometimes find it rather hard.”
|
||
|
||
“Yes, when a fellow’s soaked through, it’s hard to be sensible, that’s a fact.
|
||
And I am about drenched with this spray. Never mind; catch the turn there, and
|
||
pass it. Seems to me we are lashing down these anchors now as if they were never
|
||
going to be used again. Tying these two anchors here, Flask, seems like tying a
|
||
man’s hands behind him. And what big generous hands they are, to be sure. These
|
||
are your iron fists, hey? What a hold they have, too! I wonder, Flask, whether
|
||
the world is anchored anywhere; if she is, she swings with an uncommon long
|
||
cable, though. There, hammer that knot down, and we’ve done. So; next to
|
||
touching land, lighting on deck is the most satisfactory. I say, just wring out
|
||
my jacket skirts, will ye? Thank ye. They laugh at long-togs so, Flask; but
|
||
seems to me, a long tailed coat ought always to be worn in all storms afloat.
|
||
The tails tapering down that way, serve to carry off the water, d’ye see. Same
|
||
with cocked hats; the cocks form gable-end eave-troughs, Flask. No more
|
||
monkey-jackets and tarpaulins for me; I must mount a swallow-tail, and drive
|
||
down a beaver; so. Halloa! whew! there goes my tarpaulin overboard; Lord, Lord,
|
||
that the winds that come from heaven should be so unmannerly! This is a nasty
|
||
night, lad.”
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 122. Midnight Aloft.—Thunder and Lightning.
|
||
|
||
The main-top-sail yard.—Tashtego passing new lashings around it.
|
||
|
||
“Um, um, um. Stop that thunder! Plenty too much thunder up here. What’s the use
|
||
of thunder? Um, um, um. We don’t want thunder; we want rum; give us a glass of
|
||
rum. Um, um, um!”
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 123. The Musket.
|
||
|
||
During the most violent shocks of the Typhoon, the man at the Pequod’s jaw-bone
|
||
tiller had several times been reelingly hurled to the deck by its spasmodic
|
||
motions, even though preventer tackles had been attached to it—for they were
|
||
slack—because some play to the tiller was indispensable.
|
||
|
||
In a severe gale like this, while the ship is but a tossed shuttlecock to the
|
||
blast, it is by no means uncommon to see the needles in the compasses, at
|
||
intervals, go round and round. It was thus with the Pequod’s; at almost every
|
||
shock the helmsman had not failed to notice the whirling velocity with which
|
||
they revolved upon the cards; it is a sight that hardly anyone can behold
|
||
without some sort of unwonted emotion.
|
||
|
||
Some hours after midnight, the Typhoon abated so much, that through the
|
||
strenuous exertions of Starbuck and Stubb—one engaged forward and the other
|
||
aft—the shivered remnants of the jib and fore and main-top-sails were cut adrift
|
||
from the spars, and went eddying away to leeward, like the feathers of an
|
||
albatross, which sometimes are cast to the winds when that storm-tossed bird is
|
||
on the wing.
|
||
|
||
The three corresponding new sails were now bent and reefed, and a storm-trysail
|
||
was set further aft; so that the ship soon went through the water with some
|
||
precision again; and the course—for the present, East-south-east—which he was to
|
||
steer, if practicable, was once more given to the helmsman. For during the
|
||
violence of the gale, he had only steered according to its vicissitudes. But as
|
||
he was now bringing the ship as near her course as possible, watching the
|
||
compass meanwhile, lo! a good sign! the wind seemed coming round astern; aye,
|
||
the foul breeze became fair!
|
||
|
||
Instantly the yards were squared, to the lively song of “Ho! the fair wind!
|
||
oh-ye-ho, cheerly men!” the crew singing for joy, that so promising an event
|
||
should so soon have falsified the evil portents preceding it.
|
||
|
||
In compliance with the standing order of his commander—to report immediately,
|
||
and at any one of the twenty-four hours, any decided change in the affairs of
|
||
the deck,—Starbuck had no sooner trimmed the yards to the breeze—however
|
||
reluctantly and gloomily,—than he mechanically went below to apprise Captain
|
||
Ahab of the circumstance.
|
||
|
||
Ere knocking at his state-room, he involuntarily paused before it a moment. The
|
||
cabin lamp—taking long swings this way and that—was burning fitfully, and
|
||
casting fitful shadows upon the old man’s bolted door,—a thin one, with fixed
|
||
blinds inserted, in place of upper panels. The isolated subterraneousness of the
|
||
cabin made a certain humming silence to reign there, though it was hooped round
|
||
by all the roar of the elements. The loaded muskets in the rack were shiningly
|
||
revealed, as they stood upright against the forward bulkhead. Starbuck was an
|
||
honest, upright man; but out of Starbuck’s heart, at that instant when he saw
|
||
the muskets, there strangely evolved an evil thought; but so blent with its
|
||
neutral or good accompaniments that for the instant he hardly knew it for
|
||
itself.
|
||
|
||
“He would have shot me once,” he murmured, “yes, there’s the very musket that he
|
||
pointed at me;—that one with the studded stock; let me touch it—lift it.
|
||
Strange, that I, who have handled so many deadly lances, strange, that I should
|
||
shake so now. Loaded? I must see. Aye, aye; and powder in the pan;—that’s not
|
||
good. Best spill it?—wait. I’ll cure myself of this. I’ll hold the musket boldly
|
||
while I think.—I come to report a fair wind to him. But how fair? Fair for death
|
||
and doom,—that’s fair for Moby Dick. It’s a fair wind that’s only fair for that
|
||
accursed fish.—The very tube he pointed at me!—the very one; this one—I hold it
|
||
here; he would have killed me with the very thing I handle now.—Aye and he would
|
||
fain kill all his crew. Does he not say he will not strike his spars to any
|
||
gale? Has he not dashed his heavenly quadrant? and in these same perilous seas,
|
||
gropes he not his way by mere dead reckoning of the error-abounding log? and in
|
||
this very Typhoon, did he not swear that he would have no lightning-rods? But
|
||
shall this crazed old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship’s company down
|
||
to doom with him?—Yes, it would make him the wilful murderer of thirty men and
|
||
more, if this ship come to any deadly harm; and come to deadly harm, my soul
|
||
swears this ship will, if Ahab have his way. If, then, he were this instant—put
|
||
aside, that crime would not be his. Ha! is he muttering in his sleep? Yes, just
|
||
there,—in there, he’s sleeping. Sleeping? aye, but still alive, and soon awake
|
||
again. I can’t withstand thee, then, old man. Not reasoning; not remonstrance;
|
||
not entreaty wilt thou hearken to; all this thou scornest. Flat obedience to thy
|
||
own flat commands, this is all thou breathest. Aye, and say’st the men have
|
||
vow’d thy vow; say’st all of us are Ahabs. Great God forbid!—But is there no
|
||
other way? no lawful way?—Make him a prisoner to be taken home? What! hope to
|
||
wrest this old man’s living power from his own living hands? Only a fool would
|
||
try it. Say he were pinioned even; knotted all over with ropes and hawsers;
|
||
chained down to ring-bolts on this cabin floor; he would be more hideous than a
|
||
caged tiger, then. I could not endure the sight; could not possibly fly his
|
||
howlings; all comfort, sleep itself, inestimable reason would leave me on the
|
||
long intolerable voyage. What, then, remains? The land is hundreds of leagues
|
||
away, and locked Japan the nearest. I stand alone here upon an open sea, with
|
||
two oceans and a whole continent between me and law.—Aye, aye, ’tis so.—Is
|
||
heaven a murderer when its lightning strikes a would-be murderer in his bed,
|
||
tindering sheets and skin together?—And would I be a murderer, then, if”—and
|
||
slowly, stealthily, and half sideways looking, he placed the loaded musket’s end
|
||
against the door.
|
||
|
||
“On this level, Ahab’s hammock swings within; his head this way. A touch, and
|
||
Starbuck may survive to hug his wife and child again.—Oh Mary! Mary!—boy! boy!
|
||
boy!—But if I wake thee not to death, old man, who can tell to what unsounded
|
||
deeps Starbuck’s body this day week may sink, with all the crew! Great God,
|
||
where art Thou? Shall I? shall I?—The wind has gone down and shifted, sir; the
|
||
fore and main topsails are reefed and set; she heads her course.”
|
||
|
||
“Stern all! Oh Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart at last!”
|
||
|
||
Such were the sounds that now came hurtling from out the old man’s tormented
|
||
sleep, as if Starbuck’s voice had caused the long dumb dream to speak.
|
||
|
||
The yet levelled musket shook like a drunkard’s arm against the panel; Starbuck
|
||
seemed wrestling with an angel; but turning from the door, he placed the
|
||
death-tube in its rack, and left the place.
|
||
|
||
“He’s too sound asleep, Mr. Stubb; go thou down, and wake him, and tell him. I
|
||
must see to the deck here. Thou know’st what to say.”
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 124. The Needle.
|
||
|
||
Next morning the not-yet-subsided sea rolled in long slow billows of mighty
|
||
bulk, and striving in the Pequod’s gurgling track, pushed her on like giants’
|
||
palms outspread. The strong, unstaggering breeze abounded so, that sky and air
|
||
seemed vast outbellying sails; the whole world boomed before the wind. Muffled
|
||
in the full morning light, the invisible sun was only known by the spread
|
||
intensity of his place; where his bayonet rays moved on in stacks. Emblazonings,
|
||
as of crowned Babylonian kings and queens, reigned over everything. The sea was
|
||
as a crucible of molten gold, that bubblingly leaps with light and heat.
|
||
|
||
Long maintaining an enchanted silence, Ahab stood apart; and every time the
|
||
tetering ship loweringly pitched down her bowsprit, he turned to eye the bright
|
||
sun’s rays produced ahead; and when she profoundly settled by the stern, he
|
||
turned behind, and saw the sun’s rearward place, and how the same yellow rays
|
||
were blending with his undeviating wake.
|
||
|
||
“Ha, ha, my ship! thou mightest well be taken now for the sea-chariot of the
|
||
sun. Ho, ho! all ye nations before my prow, I bring the sun to ye! Yoke on the
|
||
further billows; hallo! a tandem, I drive the sea!”
|
||
|
||
But suddenly reined back by some counter thought, he hurried towards the helm,
|
||
huskily demanding how the ship was heading.
|
||
|
||
“East-sou-east, sir,” said the frightened steersman.
|
||
|
||
“Thou liest!” smiting him with his clenched fist. “Heading East at this hour in
|
||
the morning, and the sun astern?”
|
||
|
||
Upon this every soul was confounded; for the phenomenon just then observed by
|
||
Ahab had unaccountably escaped every one else; but its very blinding
|
||
palpableness must have been the cause.
|
||
|
||
Thrusting his head half way into the binnacle, Ahab caught one glimpse of the
|
||
compasses; his uplifted arm slowly fell; for a moment he almost seemed to
|
||
stagger. Standing behind him Starbuck looked, and lo! the two compasses pointed
|
||
East, and the Pequod was as infallibly going West.
|
||
|
||
But ere the first wild alarm could get out abroad among the crew, the old man
|
||
with a rigid laugh exclaimed, “I have it! It has happened before. Mr. Starbuck,
|
||
last night’s thunder turned our compasses—that’s all. Thou hast before now heard
|
||
of such a thing, I take it.”
|
||
|
||
“Aye; but never before has it happened to me, sir,” said the pale mate,
|
||
gloomily.
|
||
|
||
Here, it must needs be said, that accidents like this have in more than one case
|
||
occurred to ships in violent storms. The magnetic energy, as developed in the
|
||
mariner’s needle, is, as all know, essentially one with the electricity beheld
|
||
in heaven; hence it is not to be much marvelled at, that such things should be.
|
||
Instances where the lightning has actually struck the vessel, so as to smite
|
||
down some of the spars and rigging, the effect upon the needle has at times been
|
||
still more fatal; all its loadstone virtue being annihilated, so that the before
|
||
magnetic steel was of no more use than an old wife’s knitting needle. But in
|
||
either case, the needle never again, of itself, recovers the original virtue
|
||
thus marred or lost; and if the binnacle compasses be affected, the same fate
|
||
reaches all the others that may be in the ship; even were the lowermost one
|
||
inserted into the kelson.
|
||
|
||
Deliberately standing before the binnacle, and eyeing the transpointed
|
||
compasses, the old man, with the sharp of his extended hand, now took the
|
||
precise bearing of the sun, and satisfied that the needles were exactly
|
||
inverted, shouted out his orders for the ship’s course to be changed
|
||
accordingly. The yards were hard up; and once more the Pequod thrust her
|
||
undaunted bows into the opposing wind, for the supposed fair one had only been
|
||
juggling her.
|
||
|
||
Meanwhile, whatever were his own secret thoughts, Starbuck said nothing, but
|
||
quietly he issued all requisite orders; while Stubb and Flask—who in some small
|
||
degree seemed then to be sharing his feelings—likewise unmurmuringly acquiesced.
|
||
As for the men, though some of them lowly rumbled, their fear of Ahab was
|
||
greater than their fear of Fate. But as ever before, the pagan harpooneers
|
||
remained almost wholly unimpressed; or if impressed, it was only with a certain
|
||
magnetism shot into their congenial hearts from inflexible Ahab’s.
|
||
|
||
For a space the old man walked the deck in rolling reveries. But chancing to
|
||
slip with his ivory heel, he saw the crushed copper sight-tubes of the quadrant
|
||
he had the day before dashed to the deck.
|
||
|
||
“Thou poor, proud heaven-gazer and sun’s pilot! yesterday I wrecked thee, and
|
||
to-day the compasses would fain have wrecked me. So, so. But Ahab is lord over
|
||
the level loadstone yet. Mr. Starbuck—a lance without a pole; a top-maul, and
|
||
the smallest of the sail-maker’s needles. Quick!”
|
||
|
||
Accessory, perhaps, to the impulse dictating the thing he was now about to do,
|
||
were certain prudential motives, whose object might have been to revive the
|
||
spirits of his crew by a stroke of his subtile skill, in a matter so wondrous as
|
||
that of the inverted compasses. Besides, the old man well knew that to steer by
|
||
transpointed needles, though clumsily practicable, was not a thing to be passed
|
||
over by superstitious sailors, without some shudderings and evil portents.
|
||
|
||
“Men,” said he, steadily turning upon the crew, as the mate handed him the
|
||
things he had demanded, “my men, the thunder turned old Ahab’s needles; but out
|
||
of this bit of steel Ahab can make one of his own, that will point as true as
|
||
any.”
|
||
|
||
Abashed glances of servile wonder were exchanged by the sailors, as this was
|
||
said; and with fascinated eyes they awaited whatever magic might follow. But
|
||
Starbuck looked away.
|
||
|
||
With a blow from the top-maul Ahab knocked off the steel head of the lance, and
|
||
then handing to the mate the long iron rod remaining, bade him hold it upright,
|
||
without its touching the deck. Then, with the maul, after repeatedly smiting the
|
||
upper end of this iron rod, he placed the blunted needle endwise on the top of
|
||
it, and less strongly hammered that, several times, the mate still holding the
|
||
rod as before. Then going through some small strange motions with it—whether
|
||
indispensable to the magnetizing of the steel, or merely intended to augment the
|
||
awe of the crew, is uncertain—he called for linen thread; and moving to the
|
||
binnacle, slipped out the two reversed needles there, and horizontally suspended
|
||
the sail-needle by its middle, over one of the compass-cards. At first, the
|
||
steel went round and round, quivering and vibrating at either end; but at last
|
||
it settled to its place, when Ahab, who had been intently watching for this
|
||
result, stepped frankly back from the binnacle, and pointing his stretched arm
|
||
towards it, exclaimed,—“Look ye, for yourselves, if Ahab be not lord of the
|
||
level loadstone! The sun is East, and that compass swears it!”
|
||
|
||
One after another they peered in, for nothing but their own eyes could persuade
|
||
such ignorance as theirs, and one after another they slunk away.
|
||
|
||
In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all his fatal
|
||
pride.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 125. The Log and Line.
|
||
|
||
While now the fated Pequod had been so long afloat this voyage, the log and line
|
||
had but very seldom been in use. Owing to a confident reliance upon other means
|
||
of determining the vessel’s place, some merchantmen, and many whalemen,
|
||
especially when cruising, wholly neglect to heave the log; though at the same
|
||
time, and frequently more for form’s sake than anything else, regularly putting
|
||
down upon the customary slate the course steered by the ship, as well as the
|
||
presumed average rate of progression every hour. It had been thus with the
|
||
Pequod. The wooden reel and angular log attached hung, long untouched, just
|
||
beneath the railing of the after bulwarks. Rains and spray had damped it; sun
|
||
and wind had warped it; all the elements had combined to rot a thing that hung
|
||
so idly. But heedless of all this, his mood seized Ahab, as he happened to
|
||
glance upon the reel, not many hours after the magnet scene, and he remembered
|
||
how his quadrant was no more, and recalled his frantic oath about the level log
|
||
and line. The ship was sailing plungingly; astern the billows rolled in riots.
|
||
|
||
“Forward, there! Heave the log!”
|
||
|
||
Two seamen came. The golden-hued Tahitian and the grizzly Manxman. “Take the
|
||
reel, one of ye, I’ll heave.”
|
||
|
||
They went towards the extreme stern, on the ship’s lee side, where the deck,
|
||
with the oblique energy of the wind, was now almost dipping into the creamy,
|
||
sidelong-rushing sea.
|
||
|
||
The Manxman took the reel, and holding it high up, by the projecting handle-ends
|
||
of the spindle, round which the spool of line revolved, so stood with the
|
||
angular log hanging downwards, till Ahab advanced to him.
|
||
|
||
Ahab stood before him, and was lightly unwinding some thirty or forty turns to
|
||
form a preliminary hand-coil to toss overboard, when the old Manxman, who was
|
||
intently eyeing both him and the line, made bold to speak.
|
||
|
||
“Sir, I mistrust it; this line looks far gone, long heat and wet have spoiled
|
||
it.”
|
||
|
||
“’Twill hold, old gentleman. Long heat and wet, have they spoiled thee? Thou
|
||
seem’st to hold. Or, truer perhaps, life holds thee; not thou it.”
|
||
|
||
“I hold the spool, sir. But just as my captain says. With these grey hairs of
|
||
mine ’tis not worth while disputing, ’specially with a superior, who’ll ne’er
|
||
confess.”
|
||
|
||
“What’s that? There now’s a patched professor in Queen Nature’s granite-founded
|
||
College; but methinks he’s too subservient. Where wert thou born?”
|
||
|
||
“In the little rocky Isle of Man, sir.”
|
||
|
||
“Excellent! Thou’st hit the world by that.”
|
||
|
||
“I know not, sir, but I was born there.”
|
||
|
||
“In the Isle of Man, hey? Well, the other way, it’s good. Here’s a man from Man;
|
||
a man born in once independent Man, and now unmanned of Man; which is sucked
|
||
in—by what? Up with the reel! The dead, blind wall butts all inquiring heads at
|
||
last. Up with it! So.”
|
||
|
||
The log was heaved. The loose coils rapidly straightened out in a long dragging
|
||
line astern, and then, instantly, the reel began to whirl. In turn, jerkingly
|
||
raised and lowered by the rolling billows, the towing resistance of the log
|
||
caused the old reelman to stagger strangely.
|
||
|
||
“Hold hard!”
|
||
|
||
Snap! the overstrained line sagged down in one long festoon; the tugging log was
|
||
gone.
|
||
|
||
“I crush the quadrant, the thunder turns the needles, and now the mad sea parts
|
||
the log-line. But Ahab can mend all. Haul in here, Tahitian; reel up, Manxman.
|
||
And look ye, let the carpenter make another log, and mend thou the line. See to
|
||
it.”
|
||
|
||
“There he goes now; to him nothing’s happened; but to me, the skewer seems
|
||
loosening out of the middle of the world. Haul in, haul in, Tahitian! These
|
||
lines run whole, and whirling out: come in broken, and dragging slow. Ha, Pip?
|
||
come to help; eh, Pip?”
|
||
|
||
“Pip? whom call ye Pip? Pip jumped from the whale-boat. Pip’s missing. Let’s see
|
||
now if ye haven’t fished him up here, fisherman. It drags hard; I guess he’s
|
||
holding on. Jerk him, Tahiti! Jerk him off; we haul in no cowards here. Ho!
|
||
there’s his arm just breaking water. A hatchet! a hatchet! cut it off—we haul in
|
||
no cowards here. Captain Ahab! sir, sir! here’s Pip, trying to get on board
|
||
again.”
|
||
|
||
“Peace, thou crazy loon,” cried the Manxman, seizing him by the arm. “Away from
|
||
the quarter-deck!”
|
||
|
||
“The greater idiot ever scolds the lesser,” muttered Ahab, advancing. “Hands off
|
||
from that holiness! Where sayest thou Pip was, boy?
|
||
|
||
“Astern there, sir, astern! Lo! lo!”
|
||
|
||
“And who art thou, boy? I see not my reflection in the vacant pupils of thy
|
||
eyes. Oh God! that man should be a thing for immortal souls to sieve through!
|
||
Who art thou, boy?”
|
||
|
||
“Bell-boy, sir; ship’s-crier; ding, dong, ding! Pip! Pip! Pip! One hundred
|
||
pounds of clay reward for Pip; five feet high—looks cowardly—quickest known by
|
||
that! Ding, dong, ding! Who’s seen Pip the coward?”
|
||
|
||
“There can be no hearts above the snow-line. Oh, ye frozen heavens! look down
|
||
here. Ye did beget this luckless child, and have abandoned him, ye creative
|
||
libertines. Here, boy; Ahab’s cabin shall be Pip’s home henceforth, while Ahab
|
||
lives. Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy; thou art tied to me by cords woven
|
||
of my heart-strings. Come, let’s down.”
|
||
|
||
“What’s this? here’s velvet shark-skin,” intently gazing at Ahab’s hand, and
|
||
feeling it. “Ah, now, had poor Pip but felt so kind a thing as this, perhaps he
|
||
had ne’er been lost! This seems to me, sir, as a man-rope; something that weak
|
||
souls may hold by. Oh, sir, let old Perth now come and rivet these two hands
|
||
together; the black one with the white, for I will not let this go.”
|
||
|
||
“Oh, boy, nor will I thee, unless I should thereby drag thee to worse horrors
|
||
than are here. Come, then, to my cabin. Lo! ye believers in gods all goodness,
|
||
and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man;
|
||
and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full of the sweet
|
||
things of love and gratitude. Come! I feel prouder leading thee by thy black
|
||
hand, than though I grasped an Emperor’s!”
|
||
|
||
“There go two daft ones now,” muttered the old Manxman. “One daft with strength,
|
||
the other daft with weakness. But here’s the end of the rotten line—all
|
||
dripping, too. Mend it, eh? I think we had best have a new line altogether. I’ll
|
||
see Mr. Stubb about it.”
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 126. The Life-Buoy.
|
||
|
||
Steering now south-eastward by Ahab’s levelled steel, and her progress solely
|
||
determined by Ahab’s level log and line; the Pequod held on her path towards the
|
||
Equator. Making so long a passage through such unfrequented waters, descrying no
|
||
ships, and ere long, sideways impelled by unvarying trade winds, over waves
|
||
monotonously mild; all these seemed the strange calm things preluding some
|
||
riotous and desperate scene.
|
||
|
||
At last, when the ship drew near to the outskirts, as it were, of the Equatorial
|
||
fishing-ground, and in the deep darkness that goes before the dawn, was sailing
|
||
by a cluster of rocky islets; the watch—then headed by Flask—was startled by a
|
||
cry so plaintively wild and unearthly—like half-articulated wailings of the
|
||
ghosts of all Herod’s murdered Innocents—that one and all, they started from
|
||
their reveries, and for the space of some moments stood, or sat, or leaned all
|
||
transfixedly listening, like the carved Roman slave, while that wild cry
|
||
remained within hearing. The Christian or civilized part of the crew said it was
|
||
mermaids, and shuddered; but the pagan harpooneers remained unappalled. Yet the
|
||
grey Manxman—the oldest mariner of all—declared that the wild thrilling sounds
|
||
that were heard, were the voices of newly drowned men in the sea.
|
||
|
||
Below in his hammock, Ahab did not hear of this till grey dawn, when he came to
|
||
the deck; it was then recounted to him by Flask, not unaccompanied with hinted
|
||
dark meanings. He hollowly laughed, and thus explained the wonder.
|
||
|
||
Those rocky islands the ship had passed were the resort of great numbers of
|
||
seals, and some young seals that had lost their dams, or some dams that had lost
|
||
their cubs, must have risen nigh the ship and kept company with her, crying and
|
||
sobbing with their human sort of wail. But this only the more affected some of
|
||
them, because most mariners cherish a very superstitious feeling about seals,
|
||
arising not only from their peculiar tones when in distress, but also from the
|
||
human look of their round heads and semi-intelligent faces, seen peeringly
|
||
uprising from the water alongside. In the sea, under certain circumstances,
|
||
seals have more than once been mistaken for men.
|
||
|
||
But the bodings of the crew were destined to receive a most plausible
|
||
confirmation in the fate of one of their number that morning. At sun-rise this
|
||
man went from his hammock to his mast-head at the fore; and whether it was that
|
||
he was not yet half waked from his sleep (for sailors sometimes go aloft in a
|
||
transition state), whether it was thus with the man, there is now no telling;
|
||
but, be that as it may, he had not been long at his perch, when a cry was
|
||
heard—a cry and a rushing—and looking up, they saw a falling phantom in the air;
|
||
and looking down, a little tossed heap of white bubbles in the blue of the sea.
|
||
|
||
The life-buoy—a long slender cask—was dropped from the stern, where it always
|
||
hung obedient to a cunning spring; but no hand rose to seize it, and the sun
|
||
having long beat upon this cask it had shrunken, so that it slowly filled, and
|
||
that parched wood also filled at its every pore; and the studded iron-bound cask
|
||
followed the sailor to the bottom, as if to yield him his pillow, though in
|
||
sooth but a hard one.
|
||
|
||
And thus the first man of the Pequod that mounted the mast to look out for the
|
||
White Whale, on the White Whale’s own peculiar ground; that man was swallowed up
|
||
in the deep. But few, perhaps, thought of that at the time. Indeed, in some
|
||
sort, they were not grieved at this event, at least as a portent; for they
|
||
regarded it, not as a foreshadowing of evil in the future, but as the fulfilment
|
||
of an evil already presaged. They declared that now they knew the reason of
|
||
those wild shrieks they had heard the night before. But again the old Manxman
|
||
said nay.
|
||
|
||
The lost life-buoy was now to be replaced; Starbuck was directed to see to it;
|
||
but as no cask of sufficient lightness could be found, and as in the feverish
|
||
eagerness of what seemed the approaching crisis of the voyage, all hands were
|
||
impatient of any toil but what was directly connected with its final end,
|
||
whatever that might prove to be; therefore, they were going to leave the ship’s
|
||
stern unprovided with a buoy, when by certain strange signs and inuendoes
|
||
Queequeg hinted a hint concerning his coffin.
|
||
|
||
“A life-buoy of a coffin!” cried Starbuck, starting.
|
||
|
||
“Rather queer, that, I should say,” said Stubb.
|
||
|
||
“It will make a good enough one,” said Flask, “the carpenter here can arrange it
|
||
easily.”
|
||
|
||
“Bring it up; there’s nothing else for it,” said Starbuck, after a melancholy
|
||
pause. “Rig it, carpenter; do not look at me so—the coffin, I mean. Dost thou
|
||
hear me? Rig it.”
|
||
|
||
“And shall I nail down the lid, sir?” moving his hand as with a hammer.
|
||
|
||
“Aye.”
|
||
|
||
“And shall I caulk the seams, sir?” moving his hand as with a caulking-iron.
|
||
|
||
“Aye.”
|
||
|
||
“And shall I then pay over the same with pitch, sir?” moving his hand as with a
|
||
pitch-pot.
|
||
|
||
“Away! what possesses thee to this? Make a life-buoy of the coffin, and no
|
||
more.—Mr. Stubb, Mr. Flask, come forward with me.”
|
||
|
||
“He goes off in a huff. The whole he can endure; at the parts he baulks. Now I
|
||
don’t like this. I make a leg for Captain Ahab, and he wears it like a
|
||
gentleman; but I make a bandbox for Queequeg, and he won’t put his head into it.
|
||
Are all my pains to go for nothing with that coffin? And now I’m ordered to make
|
||
a life-buoy of it. It’s like turning an old coat; going to bring the flesh on
|
||
the other side now. I don’t like this cobbling sort of business—I don’t like it
|
||
at all; it’s undignified; it’s not my place. Let tinkers’ brats do tinkerings;
|
||
we are their betters. I like to take in hand none but clean, virgin,
|
||
fair-and-square mathematical jobs, something that regularly begins at the
|
||
beginning, and is at the middle when midway, and comes to an end at the
|
||
conclusion; not a cobbler’s job, that’s at an end in the middle, and at the
|
||
beginning at the end. It’s the old woman’s tricks to be giving cobbling jobs.
|
||
Lord! what an affection all old women have for tinkers. I know an old woman of
|
||
sixty-five who ran away with a bald-headed young tinker once. And that’s the
|
||
reason I never would work for lonely widow old women ashore, when I kept my
|
||
job-shop in the Vineyard; they might have taken it into their lonely old heads
|
||
to run off with me. But heigh-ho! there are no caps at sea but snow-caps. Let me
|
||
see. Nail down the lid; caulk the seams; pay over the same with pitch; batten
|
||
them down tight, and hang it with the snap-spring over the ship’s stern. Were
|
||
ever such things done before with a coffin? Some superstitious old carpenters,
|
||
now, would be tied up in the rigging, ere they would do the job. But I’m made of
|
||
knotty Aroostook hemlock; I don’t budge. Cruppered with a coffin! Sailing about
|
||
with a grave-yard tray! But never mind. We workers in woods make
|
||
bridal-bedsteads and card-tables, as well as coffins and hearses. We work by the
|
||
month, or by the job, or by the profit; not for us to ask the why and wherefore
|
||
of our work, unless it be too confounded cobbling, and then we stash it if we
|
||
can. Hem! I’ll do the job, now, tenderly. I’ll have me—let’s see—how many in the
|
||
ship’s company, all told? But I’ve forgotten. Any way, I’ll have me thirty
|
||
separate, Turk’s-headed life-lines, each three feet long hanging all round to
|
||
the coffin. Then, if the hull go down, there’ll be thirty lively fellows all
|
||
fighting for one coffin, a sight not seen very often beneath the sun! Come
|
||
hammer, caulking-iron, pitch-pot, and marling-spike! Let’s to it.”
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 127. The Deck.
|
||
|
||
The coffin laid upon two line-tubs, between the vice-bench and the open
|
||
hatchway; the Carpenter caulking its seams; the string of twisted oakum slowly
|
||
unwinding from a large roll of it placed in the bosom of his frock.—Ahab comes
|
||
slowly from the cabin-gangway, and hears Pip following him.
|
||
|
||
“Back, lad; I will be with ye again presently. He goes! Not this hand complies
|
||
with my humor more genially than that boy.—Middle aisle of a church! What’s
|
||
here?”
|
||
|
||
“Life-buoy, sir. Mr. Starbuck’s orders. Oh, look, sir! Beware the hatchway!”
|
||
|
||
“Thank ye, man. Thy coffin lies handy to the vault.”
|
||
|
||
“Sir? The hatchway? oh! So it does, sir, so it does.”
|
||
|
||
“Art not thou the leg-maker? Look, did not this stump come from thy shop?”
|
||
|
||
“I believe it did, sir; does the ferrule stand, sir?”
|
||
|
||
“Well enough. But art thou not also the undertaker?”
|
||
|
||
“Aye, sir; I patched up this thing here as a coffin for Queequeg; but they’ve
|
||
set me now to turning it into something else.”
|
||
|
||
“Then tell me; art thou not an arrant, all-grasping, intermeddling,
|
||
monopolising, heathenish old scamp, to be one day making legs, and the next day
|
||
coffins to clap them in, and yet again life-buoys out of those same coffins?
|
||
Thou art as unprincipled as the gods, and as much of a jack-of-all-trades.”
|
||
|
||
“But I do not mean anything, sir. I do as I do.”
|
||
|
||
“The gods again. Hark ye, dost thou not ever sing working about a coffin? The
|
||
Titans, they say, hummed snatches when chipping out the craters for volcanoes;
|
||
and the grave-digger in the play sings, spade in hand. Dost thou never?”
|
||
|
||
“Sing, sir? Do I sing? Oh, I’m indifferent enough, sir, for that; but the reason
|
||
why the grave-digger made music must have been because there was none in his
|
||
spade, sir. But the caulking mallet is full of it. Hark to it.”
|
||
|
||
“Aye, and that’s because the lid there’s a sounding-board; and what in all
|
||
things makes the sounding-board is this—there’s naught beneath. And yet, a
|
||
coffin with a body in it rings pretty much the same, Carpenter. Hast thou ever
|
||
helped carry a bier, and heard the coffin knock against the churchyard gate,
|
||
going in?
|
||
|
||
“Faith, sir, I’ve——”
|
||
|
||
“Faith? What’s that?”
|
||
|
||
“Why, faith, sir, it’s only a sort of exclamation-like—that’s all, sir.”
|
||
|
||
“Um, um; go on.”
|
||
|
||
“I was about to say, sir, that——”
|
||
|
||
“Art thou a silk-worm? Dost thou spin thy own shroud out of thyself? Look at thy
|
||
bosom! Despatch! and get these traps out of sight.”
|
||
|
||
“He goes aft. That was sudden, now; but squalls come sudden in hot latitudes.
|
||
I’ve heard that the Isle of Albemarle, one of the Gallipagos, is cut by the
|
||
Equator right in the middle. Seems to me some sort of Equator cuts yon old man,
|
||
too, right in his middle. He’s always under the Line—fiery hot, I tell ye! He’s
|
||
looking this way—come, oakum; quick. Here we go again. This wooden mallet is the
|
||
cork, and I’m the professor of musical glasses—tap, tap!”
|
||
|
||
(Ahab to himself.)
|
||
|
||
“There’s a sight! There’s a sound! The greyheaded woodpecker tapping the hollow
|
||
tree! Blind and dumb might well be envied now. See! that thing rests on two
|
||
line-tubs, full of tow-lines. A most malicious wag, that fellow. Rat-tat! So
|
||
man’s seconds tick! Oh! how immaterial are all materials! What things real are
|
||
there, but imponderable thoughts? Here now’s the very dreaded symbol of grim
|
||
death, by a mere hap, made the expressive sign of the help and hope of most
|
||
endangered life. A life-buoy of a coffin! Does it go further? Can it be that in
|
||
some spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but an immortality-preserver!
|
||
I’ll think of that. But no. So far gone am I in the dark side of earth, that its
|
||
other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me. Will
|
||
ye never have done, Carpenter, with that accursed sound? I go below; let me not
|
||
see that thing here when I return again. Now, then, Pip, we’ll talk this over; I
|
||
do suck most wondrous philosophies from thee! Some unknown conduits from the
|
||
unknown worlds must empty into thee!”
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 128. The Pequod Meets The Rachel.
|
||
|
||
Next day, a large ship, the Rachel, was descried, bearing directly down upon the
|
||
Pequod, all her spars thickly clustering with men. At the time the Pequod was
|
||
making good speed through the water; but as the broad-winged windward stranger
|
||
shot nigh to her, the boastful sails all fell together as blank bladders that
|
||
are burst, and all life fled from the smitten hull.
|
||
|
||
“Bad news; she brings bad news,” muttered the old Manxman. But ere her
|
||
commander, who, with trumpet to mouth, stood up in his boat; ere he could
|
||
hopefully hail, Ahab’s voice was heard.
|
||
|
||
“Hast seen the White Whale?”
|
||
|
||
“Aye, yesterday. Have ye seen a whale-boat adrift?”
|
||
|
||
Throttling his joy, Ahab negatively answered this unexpected question; and would
|
||
then have fain boarded the stranger, when the stranger captain himself, having
|
||
stopped his vessel’s way, was seen descending her side. A few keen pulls, and
|
||
his boat-hook soon clinched the Pequod’s main-chains, and he sprang to the deck.
|
||
Immediately he was recognised by Ahab for a Nantucketer he knew. But no formal
|
||
salutation was exchanged.
|
||
|
||
“Where was he?—not killed!—not killed!” cried Ahab, closely advancing. “How was
|
||
it?”
|
||
|
||
It seemed that somewhat late on the afternoon of the day previous, while three
|
||
of the stranger’s boats were engaged with a shoal of whales, which had led them
|
||
some four or five miles from the ship; and while they were yet in swift chase to
|
||
windward, the white hump and head of Moby Dick had suddenly loomed up out of the
|
||
water, not very far to leeward; whereupon, the fourth rigged boat—a reserved
|
||
one—had been instantly lowered in chase. After a keen sail before the wind, this
|
||
fourth boat—the swiftest keeled of all—seemed to have succeeded in fastening—at
|
||
least, as well as the man at the mast-head could tell anything about it. In the
|
||
distance he saw the diminished dotted boat; and then a swift gleam of bubbling
|
||
white water; and after that nothing more; whence it was concluded that the
|
||
stricken whale must have indefinitely run away with his pursuers, as often
|
||
happens. There was some apprehension, but no positive alarm, as yet. The recall
|
||
signals were placed in the rigging; darkness came on; and forced to pick up her
|
||
three far to windward boats—ere going in quest of the fourth one in the
|
||
precisely opposite direction—the ship had not only been necessitated to leave
|
||
that boat to its fate till near midnight, but, for the time, to increase her
|
||
distance from it. But the rest of her crew being at last safe aboard, she
|
||
crowded all sail—stunsail on stunsail—after the missing boat; kindling a fire in
|
||
her try-pots for a beacon; and every other man aloft on the look-out. But though
|
||
when she had thus sailed a sufficient distance to gain the presumed place of the
|
||
absent ones when last seen; though she then paused to lower her spare boats to
|
||
pull all around her; and not finding anything, had again dashed on; again
|
||
paused, and lowered her boats; and though she had thus continued doing till
|
||
daylight; yet not the least glimpse of the missing keel had been seen.
|
||
|
||
The story told, the stranger Captain immediately went on to reveal his object in
|
||
boarding the Pequod. He desired that ship to unite with his own in the search;
|
||
by sailing over the sea some four or five miles apart, on parallel lines, and so
|
||
sweeping a double horizon, as it were.
|
||
|
||
“I will wager something now,” whispered Stubb to Flask, “that some one in that
|
||
missing boat wore off that Captain’s best coat; mayhap, his watch—he’s so cursed
|
||
anxious to get it back. Who ever heard of two pious whale-ships cruising after
|
||
one missing whale-boat in the height of the whaling season? See, Flask, only see
|
||
how pale he looks—pale in the very buttons of his eyes—look—it wasn’t the
|
||
coat—it must have been the—”
|
||
|
||
“My boy, my own boy is among them. For God’s sake—I beg, I conjure”—here
|
||
exclaimed the stranger Captain to Ahab, who thus far had but icily received his
|
||
petition. “For eight-and-forty hours let me charter your ship—I will gladly pay
|
||
for it, and roundly pay for it—if there be no other way—for eight-and-forty
|
||
hours only—only that—you must, oh, you must, and you shall do this thing.”
|
||
|
||
“His son!” cried Stubb, “oh, it’s his son he’s lost! I take back the coat and
|
||
watch—what says Ahab? We must save that boy.”
|
||
|
||
“He’s drowned with the rest on ’em, last night,” said the old Manx sailor
|
||
standing behind them; “I heard; all of ye heard their spirits.”
|
||
|
||
Now, as it shortly turned out, what made this incident of the Rachel’s the more
|
||
melancholy, was the circumstance, that not only was one of the Captain’s sons
|
||
among the number of the missing boat’s crew; but among the number of the other
|
||
boat’s crews, at the same time, but on the other hand, separated from the ship
|
||
during the dark vicissitudes of the chase, there had been still another son; as
|
||
that for a time, the wretched father was plunged to the bottom of the cruellest
|
||
perplexity; which was only solved for him by his chief mate’s instinctively
|
||
adopting the ordinary procedure of a whale-ship in such emergencies, that is,
|
||
when placed between jeopardized but divided boats, always to pick up the
|
||
majority first. But the captain, for some unknown constitutional reason, had
|
||
refrained from mentioning all this, and not till forced to it by Ahab’s iciness
|
||
did he allude to his one yet missing boy; a little lad, but twelve years old,
|
||
whose father with the earnest but unmisgiving hardihood of a Nantucketer’s
|
||
paternal love, had thus early sought to initiate him in the perils and wonders
|
||
of a vocation almost immemorially the destiny of all his race. Nor does it
|
||
unfrequently occur, that Nantucket captains will send a son of such tender age
|
||
away from them, for a protracted three or four years’ voyage in some other ship
|
||
than their own; so that their first knowledge of a whaleman’s career shall be
|
||
unenervated by any chance display of a father’s natural but untimely partiality,
|
||
or undue apprehensiveness and concern.
|
||
|
||
Meantime, now the stranger was still beseeching his poor boon of Ahab; and Ahab
|
||
still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock, but without the least
|
||
quivering of his own.
|
||
|
||
“I will not go,” said the stranger, “till you say aye to me. Do to me as you
|
||
would have me do to you in the like case. For you too have a boy, Captain
|
||
Ahab—though but a child, and nestling safely at home now—a child of your old age
|
||
too—Yes, yes, you relent; I see it—run, run, men, now, and stand by to square in
|
||
the yards.”
|
||
|
||
“Avast,” cried Ahab—“touch not a rope-yarn”; then in a voice that prolongingly
|
||
moulded every word—“Captain Gardiner, I will not do it. Even now I lose time.
|
||
Good-bye, good-bye. God bless ye, man, and may I forgive myself, but I must go.
|
||
Mr. Starbuck, look at the binnacle watch, and in three minutes from this present
|
||
instant warn off all strangers: then brace forward again, and let the ship sail
|
||
as before.”
|
||
|
||
Hurriedly turning, with averted face, he descended into his cabin, leaving the
|
||
strange captain transfixed at this unconditional and utter rejection of his so
|
||
earnest suit. But starting from his enchantment, Gardiner silently hurried to
|
||
the side; more fell than stepped into his boat, and returned to his ship.
|
||
|
||
Soon the two ships diverged their wakes; and long as the strange vessel was in
|
||
view, she was seen to yaw hither and thither at every dark spot, however small,
|
||
on the sea. This way and that her yards were swung round; starboard and
|
||
larboard, she continued to tack; now she beat against a head sea; and again it
|
||
pushed her before it; while all the while, her masts and yards were thickly
|
||
clustered with men, as three tall cherry trees, when the boys are cherrying
|
||
among the boughs.
|
||
|
||
But by her still halting course and winding, woeful way, you plainly saw that
|
||
this ship that so wept with spray, still remained without comfort. She was
|
||
Rachel, weeping for her children, because they were not.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 129. The Cabin.
|
||
|
||
(Ahab moving to go on deck; Pip catches him by the hand to follow.)
|
||
|
||
“Lad, lad, I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now. The hour is coming when
|
||
Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would not have thee by him. There is
|
||
that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady. Like cures like;
|
||
and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired health. Do thou abide below
|
||
here, where they shall serve thee, as if thou wert the captain. Aye, lad, thou
|
||
shalt sit here in my own screwed chair; another screw to it, thou must be.”
|
||
|
||
“No, no, no! ye have not a whole body, sir; do ye but use poor me for your one
|
||
lost leg; only tread upon me, sir; I ask no more, so I remain a part of ye.”
|
||
|
||
“Oh! spite of million villains, this makes me a bigot in the fadeless fidelity
|
||
of man!—and a black! and crazy!—but methinks like-cures-like applies to him too;
|
||
he grows so sane again.”
|
||
|
||
“They tell me, sir, that Stubb did once desert poor little Pip, whose drowned
|
||
bones now show white, for all the blackness of his living skin. But I will never
|
||
desert ye, sir, as Stubb did him. Sir, I must go with ye.”
|
||
|
||
“If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab’s purpose keels up in him. I tell
|
||
thee no; it cannot be.”
|
||
|
||
“Oh good master, master, master!
|
||
|
||
“Weep so, and I will murder thee! have a care, for Ahab too is mad. Listen, and
|
||
thou wilt often hear my ivory foot upon the deck, and still know that I am
|
||
there. And now I quit thee. Thy hand!—Met! True art thou, lad, as the
|
||
circumference to its centre. So: God for ever bless thee; and if it come to
|
||
that,—God for ever save thee, let what will befall.”
|
||
|
||
(Ahab goes; Pip steps one step forward.)
|
||
|
||
“Here he this instant stood; I stand in his air,—but I’m alone. Now were even
|
||
poor Pip here I could endure it, but he’s missing. Pip! Pip! Ding, dong, ding!
|
||
Who’s seen Pip? He must be up here; let’s try the door. What? neither lock, nor
|
||
bolt, nor bar; and yet there’s no opening it. It must be the spell; he told me
|
||
to stay here: Aye, and told me this screwed chair was mine. Here, then, I’ll
|
||
seat me, against the transom, in the ship’s full middle, all her keel and her
|
||
three masts before me. Here, our old sailors say, in their black seventy-fours
|
||
great admirals sometimes sit at table, and lord it over rows of captains and
|
||
lieutenants. Ha! what’s this? epaulets! epaulets! the epaulets all come
|
||
crowding! Pass round the decanters; glad to see ye; fill up, monsieurs! What an
|
||
odd feeling, now, when a black boy’s host to white men with gold lace upon their
|
||
coats!—Monsieurs, have ye seen one Pip?—a little negro lad, five feet high,
|
||
hang-dog look, and cowardly! Jumped from a whale-boat once;—seen him? No! Well
|
||
then, fill up again, captains, and let’s drink shame upon all cowards! I name no
|
||
names. Shame upon them! Put one foot upon the table. Shame upon all
|
||
cowards.—Hist! above there, I hear ivory—Oh, master! master! I am indeed
|
||
down-hearted when you walk over me. But here I’ll stay, though this stern
|
||
strikes rocks; and they bulge through; and oysters come to join me.”
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 130. The Hat.
|
||
|
||
And now that at the proper time and place, after so long and wide a preliminary
|
||
cruise, Ahab,—all other whaling waters swept—seemed to have chased his foe into
|
||
an ocean-fold, to slay him the more securely there; now, that he found himself
|
||
hard by the very latitude and longitude where his tormenting wound had been
|
||
inflicted; now that a vessel had been spoken which on the very day preceding had
|
||
actually encountered Moby Dick;—and now that all his successive meetings with
|
||
various ships contrastingly concurred to show the demoniac indifference with
|
||
which the white whale tore his hunters, whether sinning or sinned against; now
|
||
it was that there lurked a something in the old man’s eyes, which it was hardly
|
||
sufferable for feeble souls to see. As the unsetting polar star, which through
|
||
the livelong, arctic, six months’ night sustains its piercing, steady, central
|
||
gaze; so Ahab’s purpose now fixedly gleamed down upon the constant midnight of
|
||
the gloomy crew. It domineered above them so, that all their bodings, doubts,
|
||
misgivings, fears, were fain to hide beneath their souls, and not sprout forth a
|
||
single spear or leaf.
|
||
|
||
In this foreshadowing interval too, all humor, forced or natural, vanished.
|
||
Stubb no more strove to raise a smile; Starbuck no more strove to check one.
|
||
Alike, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, seemed ground to finest dust, and
|
||
powdered, for the time, in the clamped mortar of Ahab’s iron soul. Like
|
||
machines, they dumbly moved about the deck, ever conscious that the old man’s
|
||
despot eye was on them.
|
||
|
||
But did you deeply scan him in his more secret confidential hours; when he
|
||
thought no glance but one was on him; then you would have seen that even as
|
||
Ahab’s eyes so awed the crew’s, the inscrutable Parsee’s glance awed his; or
|
||
somehow, at least, in some wild way, at times affected it. Such an added,
|
||
gliding strangeness began to invest the thin Fedallah now; such ceaseless
|
||
shudderings shook him; that the men looked dubious at him; half uncertain, as it
|
||
seemed, whether indeed he were a mortal substance, or else a tremulous shadow
|
||
cast upon the deck by some unseen being’s body. And that shadow was always
|
||
hovering there. For not by night, even, had Fedallah ever certainly been known
|
||
to slumber, or go below. He would stand still for hours: but never sat or
|
||
leaned; his wan but wondrous eyes did plainly say—We two watchmen never rest.
|
||
|
||
Nor, at any time, by night or day could the mariners now step upon the deck,
|
||
unless Ahab was before them; either standing in his pivot-hole, or exactly
|
||
pacing the planks between two undeviating limits,—the main-mast and the mizen;
|
||
or else they saw him standing in the cabin-scuttle,—his living foot advanced
|
||
upon the deck, as if to step; his hat slouched heavily over his eyes; so that
|
||
however motionless he stood, however the days and nights were added on, that he
|
||
had not swung in his hammock; yet hidden beneath that slouching hat, they could
|
||
never tell unerringly whether, for all this, his eyes were really closed at
|
||
times; or whether he was still intently scanning them; no matter, though he
|
||
stood so in the scuttle for a whole hour on the stretch, and the unheeded
|
||
night-damp gathered in beads of dew upon that stone-carved coat and hat. The
|
||
clothes that the night had wet, the next day’s sunshine dried upon him; and so,
|
||
day after day, and night after night; he went no more beneath the planks;
|
||
whatever he wanted from the cabin that thing he sent for.
|
||
|
||
He ate in the same open air; that is, his two only meals,—breakfast and dinner:
|
||
supper he never touched; nor reaped his beard; which darkly grew all gnarled, as
|
||
unearthed roots of trees blown over, which still grow idly on at naked base,
|
||
though perished in the upper verdure. But though his whole life was now become
|
||
one watch on deck; and though the Parsee’s mystic watch was without intermission
|
||
as his own; yet these two never seemed to speak—one man to the other—unless at
|
||
long intervals some passing unmomentous matter made it necessary. Though such a
|
||
potent spell seemed secretly to join the twain; openly, and to the awe-struck
|
||
crew, they seemed pole-like asunder. If by day they chanced to speak one word;
|
||
by night, dumb men were both, so far as concerned the slightest verbal
|
||
interchange. At times, for longest hours, without a single hail, they stood far
|
||
parted in the starlight; Ahab in his scuttle, the Parsee by the mainmast; but
|
||
still fixedly gazing upon each other; as if in the Parsee Ahab saw his
|
||
forethrown shadow, in Ahab the Parsee his abandoned substance.
|
||
|
||
And yet, somehow, did Ahab—in his own proper self, as daily, hourly, and every
|
||
instant, commandingly revealed to his subordinates,—Ahab seemed an independent
|
||
lord; the Parsee but his slave. Still again both seemed yoked together, and an
|
||
unseen tyrant driving them; the lean shade siding the solid rib. For be this
|
||
Parsee what he may, all rib and keel was solid Ahab.
|
||
|
||
At the first faintest glimmering of the dawn, his iron voice was heard from
|
||
aft,—“Man the mast-heads!”—and all through the day, till after sunset and after
|
||
twilight, the same voice every hour, at the striking of the helmsman’s bell, was
|
||
heard—“What d’ye see?—sharp! sharp!”
|
||
|
||
But when three or four days had slided by, after meeting the children-seeking
|
||
Rachel; and no spout had yet been seen; the monomaniac old man seemed
|
||
distrustful of his crew’s fidelity; at least, of nearly all except the Pagan
|
||
harpooneers; he seemed to doubt, even, whether Stubb and Flask might not
|
||
willingly overlook the sight he sought. But if these suspicions were really his,
|
||
he sagaciously refrained from verbally expressing them, however his actions
|
||
might seem to hint them.
|
||
|
||
“I will have the first sight of the whale myself,”—he said. “Aye! Ahab must have
|
||
the doubloon!” and with his own hands he rigged a nest of basketed bowlines; and
|
||
sending a hand aloft, with a single sheaved block, to secure to the main-mast
|
||
head, he received the two ends of the downward-reeved rope; and attaching one to
|
||
his basket prepared a pin for the other end, in order to fasten it at the rail.
|
||
This done, with that end yet in his hand and standing beside the pin, he looked
|
||
round upon his crew, sweeping from one to the other; pausing his glance long
|
||
upon Daggoo, Queequeg, Tashtego; but shunning Fedallah; and then settling his
|
||
firm relying eye upon the chief mate, said,—“Take the rope, sir—I give it into
|
||
thy hands, Starbuck.” Then arranging his person in the basket, he gave the word
|
||
for them to hoist him to his perch, Starbuck being the one who secured the rope
|
||
at last; and afterwards stood near it. And thus, with one hand clinging round
|
||
the royal mast, Ahab gazed abroad upon the sea for miles and miles,—ahead,
|
||
astern, this side, and that,—within the wide expanded circle commanded at so
|
||
great a height.
|
||
|
||
When in working with his hands at some lofty almost isolated place in the
|
||
rigging, which chances to afford no foothold, the sailor at sea is hoisted up to
|
||
that spot, and sustained there by the rope; under these circumstances, its
|
||
fastened end on deck is always given in strict charge to some one man who has
|
||
the special watch of it. Because in such a wilderness of running rigging, whose
|
||
various different relations aloft cannot always be infallibly discerned by what
|
||
is seen of them at the deck; and when the deck-ends of these ropes are being
|
||
every few minutes cast down from the fastenings, it would be but a natural
|
||
fatality, if, unprovided with a constant watchman, the hoisted sailor should by
|
||
some carelessness of the crew be cast adrift and fall all swooping to the sea.
|
||
So Ahab’s proceedings in this matter were not unusual; the only strange thing
|
||
about them seemed to be, that Starbuck, almost the one only man who had ever
|
||
ventured to oppose him with anything in the slightest degree approaching to
|
||
decision—one of those too, whose faithfulness on the look-out he had seemed to
|
||
doubt somewhat;—it was strange, that this was the very man he should select for
|
||
his watchman; freely giving his whole life into such an otherwise distrusted
|
||
person’s hands.
|
||
|
||
Now, the first time Ahab was perched aloft; ere he had been there ten minutes;
|
||
one of those red-billed savage sea-hawks which so often fly incommodiously close
|
||
round the manned mast-heads of whalemen in these latitudes; one of these birds
|
||
came wheeling and screaming round his head in a maze of untrackably swift
|
||
circlings. Then it darted a thousand feet straight up into the air; then
|
||
spiralized downwards, and went eddying again round his head.
|
||
|
||
But with his gaze fixed upon the dim and distant horizon, Ahab seemed not to
|
||
mark this wild bird; nor, indeed, would any one else have marked it much, it
|
||
being no uncommon circumstance; only now almost the least heedful eye seemed to
|
||
see some sort of cunning meaning in almost every sight.
|
||
|
||
“Your hat, your hat, sir!” suddenly cried the Sicilian seaman, who being posted
|
||
at the mizen-mast-head, stood directly behind Ahab, though somewhat lower than
|
||
his level, and with a deep gulf of air dividing them.
|
||
|
||
But already the sable wing was before the old man’s eyes; the long hooked bill
|
||
at his head: with a scream, the black hawk darted away with his prize.
|
||
|
||
An eagle flew thrice round Tarquin’s head, removing his cap to replace it, and
|
||
thereupon Tanaquil, his wife, declared that Tarquin would be king of Rome. But
|
||
only by the replacing of the cap was that omen accounted good. Ahab’s hat was
|
||
never restored; the wild hawk flew on and on with it; far in advance of the
|
||
prow: and at last disappeared; while from the point of that disappearance, a
|
||
minute black spot was dimly discerned, falling from that vast height into the
|
||
sea.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 131. The Pequod Meets The Delight.
|
||
|
||
The intense Pequod sailed on; the rolling waves and days went by; the
|
||
life-buoy-coffin still lightly swung; and another ship, most miserably misnamed
|
||
the Delight, was descried. As she drew nigh, all eyes were fixed upon her broad
|
||
beams, called shears, which, in some whaling-ships, cross the quarter-deck at
|
||
the height of eight or nine feet; serving to carry the spare, unrigged, or
|
||
disabled boats.
|
||
|
||
Upon the stranger’s shears were beheld the shattered, white ribs, and some few
|
||
splintered planks, of what had once been a whale-boat; but you now saw through
|
||
this wreck, as plainly as you see through the peeled, half-unhinged, and
|
||
bleaching skeleton of a horse.
|
||
|
||
“Hast seen the White Whale?”
|
||
|
||
“Look!” replied the hollow-cheeked captain from his taffrail; and with his
|
||
trumpet he pointed to the wreck.
|
||
|
||
“Hast killed him?”
|
||
|
||
“The harpoon is not yet forged that ever will do that,” answered the other,
|
||
sadly glancing upon a rounded hammock on the deck, whose gathered sides some
|
||
noiseless sailors were busy in sewing together.
|
||
|
||
“Not forged!” and snatching Perth’s levelled iron from the crotch, Ahab held it
|
||
out, exclaiming—“Look ye, Nantucketer; here in this hand I hold his death!
|
||
Tempered in blood, and tempered by lightning are these barbs; and I swear to
|
||
temper them triply in that hot place behind the fin, where the White Whale most
|
||
feels his accursed life!”
|
||
|
||
“Then God keep thee, old man—see’st thou that”—pointing to the hammock—“I bury
|
||
but one of five stout men, who were alive only yesterday; but were dead ere
|
||
night. Only that one I bury; the rest were buried before they died; you sail
|
||
upon their tomb.” Then turning to his crew—“Are ye ready there? place the plank
|
||
then on the rail, and lift the body; so, then—Oh! God”—advancing towards the
|
||
hammock with uplifted hands—“may the resurrection and the life——”
|
||
|
||
“Brace forward! Up helm!” cried Ahab like lightning to his men.
|
||
|
||
But the suddenly started Pequod was not quick enough to escape the sound of the
|
||
splash that the corpse soon made as it struck the sea; not so quick, indeed, but
|
||
that some of the flying bubbles might have sprinkled her hull with their ghostly
|
||
baptism.
|
||
|
||
As Ahab now glided from the dejected Delight, the strange life-buoy hanging at
|
||
the Pequod’s stern came into conspicuous relief.
|
||
|
||
“Ha! yonder! look yonder, men!” cried a foreboding voice in her wake. “In vain,
|
||
oh, ye strangers, ye fly our sad burial; ye but turn us your taffrail to show us
|
||
your coffin!”
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 132. The Symphony.
|
||
|
||
It was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea were hardly
|
||
separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air was transparently
|
||
pure and soft, with a woman’s look, and the robust and man-like sea heaved with
|
||
long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson’s chest in his sleep.
|
||
|
||
Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small, unspeckled
|
||
birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air; but to and fro in the
|
||
deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed mighty leviathans, sword-fish,
|
||
and sharks; and these were the strong, troubled, murderous thinkings of the
|
||
masculine sea.
|
||
|
||
But though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades and shadows
|
||
without; those two seemed one; it was only the sex, as it were, that
|
||
distinguished them.
|
||
|
||
Aloft, like a royal czar and king, the sun seemed giving this gentle air to this
|
||
bold and rolling sea; even as bride to groom. And at the girdling line of the
|
||
horizon, a soft and tremulous motion—most seen here at the equator—denoted the
|
||
fond, throbbing trust, the loving alarms, with which the poor bride gave her
|
||
bosom away.
|
||
|
||
Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm and
|
||
unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the ashes of ruin;
|
||
untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting his
|
||
splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl’s forehead of heaven.
|
||
|
||
Oh, immortal infancy, and innocency of the azure! Invisible winged creatures
|
||
that frolic all round us! Sweet childhood of air and sky! how oblivious were ye
|
||
of old Ahab’s close-coiled woe! But so have I seen little Miriam and Martha,
|
||
laughing-eyed elves, heedlessly gambol around their old sire; sporting with the
|
||
circle of singed locks which grew on the marge of that burnt-out crater of his
|
||
brain.
|
||
|
||
Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side and watched
|
||
how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, the more and the more
|
||
that he strove to pierce the profundity. But the lovely aromas in that enchanted
|
||
air did at last seem to dispel, for a moment, the cankerous thing in his soul.
|
||
That glad, happy air, that winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the
|
||
step-mother world, so long cruel—forbidding—now threw affectionate arms round
|
||
his stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that
|
||
however wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save and to
|
||
bless. From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did
|
||
all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.
|
||
|
||
Starbuck saw the old man; saw him, how he heavily leaned over the side; and he
|
||
seemed to hear in his own true heart the measureless sobbing that stole out of
|
||
the centre of the serenity around. Careful not to touch him, or be noticed by
|
||
him, he yet drew near to him, and stood there.
|
||
|
||
Ahab turned.
|
||
|
||
“Starbuck!”
|
||
|
||
“Sir.”
|
||
|
||
“Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such a
|
||
day—very much such a sweetness as this—I struck my first whale—a boy-harpooneer
|
||
of eighteen! Forty—forty—forty years ago!—ago! Forty years of continual whaling!
|
||
forty years of privation, and peril, and storm-time! forty years on the pitiless
|
||
sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to
|
||
make war on the horrors of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty
|
||
years I have not spent three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the
|
||
desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain’s
|
||
exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green
|
||
country without—oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary
|
||
command!—when I think of all this; only half-suspected, not so keenly known to
|
||
me before—and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare—fit emblem of
|
||
the dry nourishment of my soil!—when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to
|
||
his daily hand, and broken the world’s fresh bread to my mouldy crusts—away,
|
||
whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for
|
||
Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow—wife?
|
||
wife?—rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that poor girl when
|
||
I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood
|
||
and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has
|
||
furiously, foamingly chased his prey—more a demon than a man!—aye, aye! what a
|
||
forty years’ fool—fool—old fool, has old Ahab been! Why this strife of the
|
||
chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how
|
||
the richer or better is Ahab now? Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that
|
||
with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under
|
||
me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so
|
||
grey did never grow but from out some ashes! But do I look very old, so very,
|
||
very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were
|
||
Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God! God!
|
||
God!—crack my heart!—stave my brain!—mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of
|
||
grey hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus
|
||
intolerably old? Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human
|
||
eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By
|
||
the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is the magic glass, man; I see
|
||
my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no; stay on board, on board!—lower not
|
||
when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be
|
||
thine. No, no! not with the far away home I see in that eye!”
|
||
|
||
“Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all! why should
|
||
any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! let us fly these deadly
|
||
waters! let us home! Wife and child, too, are Starbuck’s—wife and child of his
|
||
brotherly, sisterly, play-fellow youth; even as thine, sir, are the wife and
|
||
child of thy loving, longing, paternal old age! Away! let us away!—this instant
|
||
let me alter the course! How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we
|
||
bowl on our way to see old Nantucket again! I think, sir, they have some such
|
||
mild blue days, even as this, in Nantucket.”
|
||
|
||
“They have, they have. I have seen them—some summer days in the morning. About
|
||
this time—yes, it is his noon nap now—the boy vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed;
|
||
and his mother tells him of me, of cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the
|
||
deep, but will yet come back to dance him again.”
|
||
|
||
“’Tis my Mary, my Mary herself! She promised that my boy, every morning, should
|
||
be carried to the hill to catch the first glimpse of his father’s sail! Yes,
|
||
yes! no more! it is done! we head for Nantucket! Come, my Captain, study out the
|
||
course, and let us away! See, see! the boy’s face from the window! the boy’s
|
||
hand on the hill!”
|
||
|
||
But Ahab’s glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his
|
||
last, cindered apple to the soil.
|
||
|
||
“What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening,
|
||
hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against
|
||
all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming
|
||
myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper,
|
||
natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who,
|
||
that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an
|
||
errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible
|
||
power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think
|
||
thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living,
|
||
and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like
|
||
yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling
|
||
sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon Albicore! who put it into him to
|
||
chase and fang that flying-fish? Where do murderers go, man! Who’s to doom, when
|
||
the judge himself is dragged to the bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild
|
||
looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they
|
||
have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the
|
||
mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we how we may,
|
||
we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last
|
||
year’s scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut swaths—Starbuck!”
|
||
|
||
But blanched to a corpse’s hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away.
|
||
|
||
Ahab crossed the deck to gaze over on the other side; but started at two
|
||
reflected, fixed eyes in the water there. Fedallah was motionlessly leaning over
|
||
the same rail.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 133. The Chase—First Day.
|
||
|
||
That night, in the mid-watch, when the old man—as his wont at intervals—stepped
|
||
forth from the scuttle in which he leaned, and went to his pivot-hole, he
|
||
suddenly thrust out his face fiercely, snuffing up the sea air as a sagacious
|
||
ship’s dog will, in drawing nigh to some barbarous isle. He declared that a
|
||
whale must be near. Soon that peculiar odor, sometimes to a great distance given
|
||
forth by the living sperm whale, was palpable to all the watch; nor was any
|
||
mariner surprised when, after inspecting the compass, and then the dog-vane, and
|
||
then ascertaining the precise bearing of the odor as nearly as possible, Ahab
|
||
rapidly ordered the ship’s course to be slightly altered, and the sail to be
|
||
shortened.
|
||
|
||
The acute policy dictating these movements was sufficiently vindicated at
|
||
daybreak, by the sight of a long sleek on the sea directly and lengthwise ahead,
|
||
smooth as oil, and resembling in the pleated watery wrinkles bordering it, the
|
||
polished metallic-like marks of some swift tide-rip, at the mouth of a deep,
|
||
rapid stream.
|
||
|
||
“Man the mast-heads! Call all hands!”
|
||
|
||
Thundering with the butts of three clubbed handspikes on the forecastle deck,
|
||
Daggoo roused the sleepers with such judgment claps that they seemed to exhale
|
||
from the scuttle, so instantaneously did they appear with their clothes in their
|
||
hands.
|
||
|
||
“What d’ye see?” cried Ahab, flattening his face to the sky.
|
||
|
||
“Nothing, nothing sir!” was the sound hailing down in reply.
|
||
|
||
“T’gallant sails!—stunsails! alow and aloft, and on both sides!”
|
||
|
||
All sail being set, he now cast loose the life-line, reserved for swaying him to
|
||
the main royal-mast head; and in a few moments they were hoisting him thither,
|
||
when, while but two thirds of the way aloft, and while peering ahead through the
|
||
horizontal vacancy between the main-top-sail and top-gallant-sail, he raised a
|
||
gull-like cry in the air. “There she blows!—there she blows! A hump like a
|
||
snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!”
|
||
|
||
Fired by the cry which seemed simultaneously taken up by the three look-outs,
|
||
the men on deck rushed to the rigging to behold the famous whale they had so
|
||
long been pursuing. Ahab had now gained his final perch, some feet above the
|
||
other look-outs, Tashtego standing just beneath him on the cap of the
|
||
top-gallant-mast, so that the Indian’s head was almost on a level with Ahab’s
|
||
heel. From this height the whale was now seen some mile or so ahead, at every
|
||
roll of the sea revealing his high sparkling hump, and regularly jetting his
|
||
silent spout into the air. To the credulous mariners it seemed the same silent
|
||
spout they had so long ago beheld in the moonlit Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
|
||
|
||
“And did none of ye see it before?” cried Ahab, hailing the perched men all
|
||
around him.
|
||
|
||
“I saw him almost that same instant, sir, that Captain Ahab did, and I cried
|
||
out,” said Tashtego.
|
||
|
||
“Not the same instant; not the same—no, the doubloon is mine, Fate reserved the
|
||
doubloon for me. I only; none of ye could have raised the White Whale first.
|
||
There she blows!—there she blows!—there she blows! There again!—there again!” he
|
||
cried, in long-drawn, lingering, methodic tones, attuned to the gradual
|
||
prolongings of the whale’s visible jets. “He’s going to sound! In stunsails!
|
||
Down top-gallant-sails! Stand by three boats. Mr. Starbuck, remember, stay on
|
||
board, and keep the ship. Helm there! Luff, luff a point! So; steady, man,
|
||
steady! There go flukes! No, no; only black water! All ready the boats there?
|
||
Stand by, stand by! Lower me, Mr. Starbuck; lower, lower,—quick, quicker!” and
|
||
he slid through the air to the deck.
|
||
|
||
“He is heading straight to leeward, sir,” cried Stubb, “right away from us;
|
||
cannot have seen the ship yet.”
|
||
|
||
“Be dumb, man! Stand by the braces! Hard down the helm!—brace up! Shiver
|
||
her!—shiver her!—So; well that! Boats, boats!”
|
||
|
||
Soon all the boats but Starbuck’s were dropped; all the boat-sails set—all the
|
||
paddles plying; with rippling swiftness, shooting to leeward; and Ahab heading
|
||
the onset. A pale, death-glimmer lit up Fedallah’s sunken eyes; a hideous motion
|
||
gnawed his mouth.
|
||
|
||
Like noiseless nautilus shells, their light prows sped through the sea; but only
|
||
slowly they neared the foe. As they neared him, the ocean grew still more
|
||
smooth; seemed drawing a carpet over its waves; seemed a noon-meadow, so
|
||
serenely it spread. At length the breathless hunter came so nigh his seemingly
|
||
unsuspecting prey, that his entire dazzling hump was distinctly visible, sliding
|
||
along the sea as if an isolated thing, and continually set in a revolving ring
|
||
of finest, fleecy, greenish foam. He saw the vast, involved wrinkles of the
|
||
slightly projecting head beyond. Before it, far out on the soft Turkish-rugged
|
||
waters, went the glistening white shadow from his broad, milky forehead, a
|
||
musical rippling playfully accompanying the shade; and behind, the blue waters
|
||
interchangeably flowed over into the moving valley of his steady wake; and on
|
||
either hand bright bubbles arose and danced by his side. But these were broken
|
||
again by the light toes of hundreds of gay fowl softly feathering the sea,
|
||
alternate with their fitful flight; and like to some flag-staff rising from the
|
||
painted hull of an argosy, the tall but shattered pole of a recent lance
|
||
projected from the white whale’s back; and at intervals one of the cloud of
|
||
soft-toed fowls hovering, and to and fro skimming like a canopy over the fish,
|
||
silently perched and rocked on this pole, the long tail feathers streaming like
|
||
pennons.
|
||
|
||
A gentle joyousness—a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the
|
||
gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europa
|
||
clinging to his graceful horns; his lovely, leering eyes sideways intent upon
|
||
the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness, rippling straight for the nuptial
|
||
bower in Crete; not Jove, not that great majesty Supreme! did surpass the
|
||
glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam.
|
||
|
||
On each soft side—coincident with the parted swell, that but once leaving him,
|
||
then flowed so wide away—on each bright side, the whale shed off enticings. No
|
||
wonder there had been some among the hunters who namelessly transported and
|
||
allured by all this serenity, had ventured to assail it; but had fatally found
|
||
that quietude but the vesture of tornadoes. Yet calm, enticing calm, oh, whale!
|
||
thou glidest on, to all who for the first time eye thee, no matter how many in
|
||
that same way thou may’st have bejuggled and destroyed before.
|
||
|
||
And thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical sea, among waves
|
||
whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture, Moby Dick moved on,
|
||
still withholding from sight the full terrors of his submerged trunk, entirely
|
||
hiding the wrenched hideousness of his jaw. But soon the fore part of him slowly
|
||
rose from the water; for an instant his whole marbleized body formed a high
|
||
arch, like Virginia’s Natural Bridge, and warningly waving his bannered flukes
|
||
in the air, the grand god revealed himself, sounded, and went out of sight.
|
||
Hoveringly halting, and dipping on the wing, the white sea-fowls longingly
|
||
lingered over the agitated pool that he left.
|
||
|
||
With oars apeak, and paddles down, the sheets of their sails adrift, the three
|
||
boats now stilly floated, awaiting Moby Dick’s reappearance.
|
||
|
||
“An hour,” said Ahab, standing rooted in his boat’s stern; and he gazed beyond
|
||
the whale’s place, towards the dim blue spaces and wide wooing vacancies to
|
||
leeward. It was only an instant; for again his eyes seemed whirling round in his
|
||
head as he swept the watery circle. The breeze now freshened; the sea began to
|
||
swell.
|
||
|
||
“The birds!—the birds!” cried Tashtego.
|
||
|
||
In long Indian file, as when herons take wing, the white birds were now all
|
||
flying towards Ahab’s boat; and when within a few yards began fluttering over
|
||
the water there, wheeling round and round, with joyous, expectant cries. Their
|
||
vision was keener than man’s; Ahab could discover no sign in the sea. But
|
||
suddenly as he peered down and down into its depths, he profoundly saw a white
|
||
living spot no bigger than a white weasel, with wonderful celerity uprising, and
|
||
magnifying as it rose, till it turned, and then there were plainly revealed two
|
||
long crooked rows of white, glistening teeth, floating up from the
|
||
undiscoverable bottom. It was Moby Dick’s open mouth and scrolled jaw; his vast,
|
||
shadowed bulk still half blending with the blue of the sea. The glittering mouth
|
||
yawned beneath the boat like an open-doored marble tomb; and giving one sidelong
|
||
sweep with his steering oar, Ahab whirled the craft aside from this tremendous
|
||
apparition. Then, calling upon Fedallah to change places with him, went forward
|
||
to the bows, and seizing Perth’s harpoon, commanded his crew to grasp their oars
|
||
and stand by to stern.
|
||
|
||
Now, by reason of this timely spinning round the boat upon its axis, its bow, by
|
||
anticipation, was made to face the whale’s head while yet under water. But as if
|
||
perceiving this stratagem, Moby Dick, with that malicious intelligence ascribed
|
||
to him, sidelingly transplanted himself, as it were, in an instant, shooting his
|
||
pleated head lengthwise beneath the boat.
|
||
|
||
Through and through; through every plank and each rib, it thrilled for an
|
||
instant, the whale obliquely lying on his back, in the manner of a biting shark,
|
||
slowly and feelingly taking its bows full within his mouth, so that the long,
|
||
narrow, scrolled lower jaw curled high up into the open air, and one of the
|
||
teeth caught in a row-lock. The bluish pearl-white of the inside of the jaw was
|
||
within six inches of Ahab’s head, and reached higher than that. In this attitude
|
||
the White Whale now shook the slight cedar as a mildly cruel cat her mouse. With
|
||
unastonished eyes Fedallah gazed, and crossed his arms; but the tiger-yellow
|
||
crew were tumbling over each other’s heads to gain the uttermost stern.
|
||
|
||
And now, while both elastic gunwales were springing in and out, as the whale
|
||
dallied with the doomed craft in this devilish way; and from his body being
|
||
submerged beneath the boat, he could not be darted at from the bows, for the
|
||
bows were almost inside of him, as it were; and while the other boats
|
||
involuntarily paused, as before a quick crisis impossible to withstand, then it
|
||
was that monomaniac Ahab, furious with this tantalizing vicinity of his foe,
|
||
which placed him all alive and helpless in the very jaws he hated; frenzied with
|
||
all this, he seized the long bone with his naked hands, and wildly strove to
|
||
wrench it from its gripe. As now he thus vainly strove, the jaw slipped from
|
||
him; the frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped, as both jaws, like an
|
||
enormous shears, sliding further aft, bit the craft completely in twain, and
|
||
locked themselves fast again in the sea, midway between the two floating wrecks.
|
||
These floated aside, the broken ends drooping, the crew at the stern-wreck
|
||
clinging to the gunwales, and striving to hold fast to the oars to lash them
|
||
across.
|
||
|
||
At that preluding moment, ere the boat was yet snapped, Ahab, the first to
|
||
perceive the whale’s intent, by the crafty upraising of his head, a movement
|
||
that loosed his hold for the time; at that moment his hand had made one final
|
||
effort to push the boat out of the bite. But only slipping further into the
|
||
whale’s mouth, and tilting over sideways as it slipped, the boat had shaken off
|
||
his hold on the jaw; spilled him out of it, as he leaned to the push; and so he
|
||
fell flat-faced upon the sea.
|
||
|
||
Ripplingly withdrawing from his prey, Moby Dick now lay at a little distance,
|
||
vertically thrusting his oblong white head up and down in the billows; and at
|
||
the same time slowly revolving his whole spindled body; so that when his vast
|
||
wrinkled forehead rose—some twenty or more feet out of the water—the now rising
|
||
swells, with all their confluent waves, dazzlingly broke against it;
|
||
vindictively tossing their shivered spray still higher into the air.* So, in a
|
||
gale, the but half baffled Channel billows only recoil from the base of the
|
||
Eddystone, triumphantly to overleap its summit with their scud.
|
||
|
||
*This motion is peculiar to the sperm whale. It receives its designation
|
||
(pitchpoling) from its being likened to that preliminary up-and-down poise of
|
||
the whale-lance, in the exercise called pitchpoling, previously described. By
|
||
this motion the whale must best and most comprehensively view whatever objects
|
||
may be encircling him.
|
||
|
||
But soon resuming his horizontal attitude, Moby Dick swam swiftly round and
|
||
round the wrecked crew; sideways churning the water in his vengeful wake, as if
|
||
lashing himself up to still another and more deadly assault. The sight of the
|
||
splintered boat seemed to madden him, as the blood of grapes and mulberries cast
|
||
before Antiochus’s elephants in the book of Maccabees. Meanwhile Ahab half
|
||
smothered in the foam of the whale’s insolent tail, and too much of a cripple to
|
||
swim,—though he could still keep afloat, even in the heart of such a whirlpool
|
||
as that; helpless Ahab’s head was seen, like a tossed bubble which the least
|
||
chance shock might burst. From the boat’s fragmentary stern, Fedallah
|
||
incuriously and mildly eyed him; the clinging crew, at the other drifting end,
|
||
could not succor him; more than enough was it for them to look to themselves.
|
||
For so revolvingly appalling was the White Whale’s aspect, and so planetarily
|
||
swift the ever-contracting circles he made, that he seemed horizontally swooping
|
||
upon them. And though the other boats, unharmed, still hovered hard by; still
|
||
they dared not pull into the eddy to strike, lest that should be the signal for
|
||
the instant destruction of the jeopardized castaways, Ahab and all; nor in that
|
||
case could they themselves hope to escape. With straining eyes, then, they
|
||
remained on the outer edge of the direful zone, whose centre had now become the
|
||
old man’s head.
|
||
|
||
Meantime, from the beginning all this had been descried from the ship’s mast
|
||
heads; and squaring her yards, she had borne down upon the scene; and was now so
|
||
nigh, that Ahab in the water hailed her!—“Sail on the”—but that moment a
|
||
breaking sea dashed on him from Moby Dick, and whelmed him for the time. But
|
||
struggling out of it again, and chancing to rise on a towering crest, he
|
||
shouted,—“Sail on the whale!—Drive him off!”
|
||
|
||
The Pequod’s prows were pointed; and breaking up the charmed circle, she
|
||
effectually parted the white whale from his victim. As he sullenly swam off, the
|
||
boats flew to the rescue.
|
||
|
||
Dragged into Stubb’s boat with blood-shot, blinded eyes, the white brine caking
|
||
in his wrinkles; the long tension of Ahab’s bodily strength did crack, and
|
||
helplessly he yielded to his body’s doom: for a time, lying all crushed in the
|
||
bottom of Stubb’s boat, like one trodden under foot of herds of elephants. Far
|
||
inland, nameless wails came from him, as desolate sounds from out ravines.
|
||
|
||
But this intensity of his physical prostration did but so much the more
|
||
abbreviate it. In an instant’s compass, great hearts sometimes condense to one
|
||
deep pang, the sum total of those shallow pains kindly diffused through feebler
|
||
men’s whole lives. And so, such hearts, though summary in each one suffering;
|
||
still, if the gods decree it, in their life-time aggregate a whole age of woe,
|
||
wholly made up of instantaneous intensities; for even in their pointless
|
||
centres, those noble natures contain the entire circumferences of inferior
|
||
souls.
|
||
|
||
“The harpoon,” said Ahab, half way rising, and draggingly leaning on one bended
|
||
arm—“is it safe?”
|
||
|
||
“Aye, sir, for it was not darted; this is it,” said Stubb, showing it.
|
||
|
||
“Lay it before me;—any missing men?”
|
||
|
||
“One, two, three, four, five;—there were five oars, sir, and here are five men.”
|
||
|
||
“That’s good.—Help me, man; I wish to stand. So, so, I see him! there! there!
|
||
going to leeward still; what a leaping spout!—Hands off from me! The eternal sap
|
||
runs up in Ahab’s bones again! Set the sail; out oars; the helm!”
|
||
|
||
It is often the case that when a boat is stove, its crew, being picked up by
|
||
another boat, help to work that second boat; and the chase is thus continued
|
||
with what is called double-banked oars. It was thus now. But the added power of
|
||
the boat did not equal the added power of the whale, for he seemed to have
|
||
treble-banked his every fin; swimming with a velocity which plainly showed, that
|
||
if now, under these circumstances, pushed on, the chase would prove an
|
||
indefinitely prolonged, if not a hopeless one; nor could any crew endure for so
|
||
long a period, such an unintermitted, intense straining at the oar; a thing
|
||
barely tolerable only in some one brief vicissitude. The ship itself, then, as
|
||
it sometimes happens, offered the most promising intermediate means of
|
||
overtaking the chase. Accordingly, the boats now made for her, and were soon
|
||
swayed up to their cranes—the two parts of the wrecked boat having been
|
||
previously secured by her—and then hoisting everything to her side, and stacking
|
||
her canvas high up, and sideways outstretching it with stun-sails, like the
|
||
double-jointed wings of an albatross; the Pequod bore down in the leeward wake
|
||
of Moby-Dick. At the well known, methodic intervals, the whale’s glittering
|
||
spout was regularly announced from the manned mast-heads; and when he would be
|
||
reported as just gone down, Ahab would take the time, and then pacing the deck,
|
||
binnacle-watch in hand, so soon as the last second of the allotted hour expired,
|
||
his voice was heard.—“Whose is the doubloon now? D’ye see him?” and if the reply
|
||
was, No, sir! straightway he commanded them to lift him to his perch. In this
|
||
way the day wore on; Ahab, now aloft and motionless; anon, unrestingly pacing
|
||
the planks.
|
||
|
||
As he was thus walking, uttering no sound, except to hail the men aloft, or to
|
||
bid them hoist a sail still higher, or to spread one to a still greater
|
||
breadth—thus to and fro pacing, beneath his slouched hat, at every turn he
|
||
passed his own wrecked boat, which had been dropped upon the quarter-deck, and
|
||
lay there reversed; broken bow to shattered stern. At last he paused before it;
|
||
and as in an already over-clouded sky fresh troops of clouds will sometimes sail
|
||
across, so over the old man’s face there now stole some such added gloom as
|
||
this.
|
||
|
||
Stubb saw him pause; and perhaps intending, not vainly, though, to evince his
|
||
own unabated fortitude, and thus keep up a valiant place in his Captain’s mind,
|
||
he advanced, and eyeing the wreck exclaimed—“The thistle the ass refused; it
|
||
pricked his mouth too keenly, sir; ha! ha!”
|
||
|
||
“What soulless thing is this that laughs before a wreck? Man, man! did I not
|
||
know thee brave as fearless fire (and as mechanical) I could swear thou wert a
|
||
poltroon. Groan nor laugh should be heard before a wreck.”
|
||
|
||
“Aye, sir,” said Starbuck drawing near, “’tis a solemn sight; an omen, and an
|
||
ill one.”
|
||
|
||
“Omen? omen?—the dictionary! If the gods think to speak outright to man, they
|
||
will honorably speak outright; not shake their heads, and give an old wives’
|
||
darkling hint.—Begone! Ye two are the opposite poles of one thing; Starbuck is
|
||
Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck; and ye two are all mankind; and Ahab
|
||
stands alone among the millions of the peopled earth, nor gods nor men his
|
||
neighbors! Cold, cold—I shiver!—How now? Aloft there! D’ye see him? Sing out for
|
||
every spout, though he spout ten times a second!”
|
||
|
||
The day was nearly done; only the hem of his golden robe was rustling. Soon, it
|
||
was almost dark, but the look-out men still remained unset.
|
||
|
||
“Can’t see the spout now, sir;—too dark”—cried a voice from the air.
|
||
|
||
“How heading when last seen?”
|
||
|
||
“As before, sir,—straight to leeward.”
|
||
|
||
“Good! he will travel slower now ’tis night. Down royals and top-gallant
|
||
stun-sails, Mr. Starbuck. We must not run over him before morning; he’s making a
|
||
passage now, and may heave-to a while. Helm there! keep her full before the
|
||
wind!—Aloft! come down!—Mr. Stubb, send a fresh hand to the fore-mast head, and
|
||
see it manned till morning.”—Then advancing towards the doubloon in the
|
||
main-mast—“Men, this gold is mine, for I earned it; but I shall let it abide
|
||
here till the White Whale is dead; and then, whosoever of ye first raises him,
|
||
upon the day he shall be killed, this gold is that man’s; and if on that day I
|
||
shall again raise him, then, ten times its sum shall be divided among all of ye!
|
||
Away now!—the deck is thine, sir!”
|
||
|
||
And so saying, he placed himself half way within the scuttle, and slouching his
|
||
hat, stood there till dawn, except when at intervals rousing himself to see how
|
||
the night wore on.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 134. The Chase—Second Day.
|
||
|
||
At day-break, the three mast-heads were punctually manned afresh.
|
||
|
||
“D’ye see him?” cried Ahab after allowing a little space for the light to
|
||
spread.
|
||
|
||
“See nothing, sir.”
|
||
|
||
“Turn up all hands and make sail! he travels faster than I thought for;—the
|
||
top-gallant sails!—aye, they should have been kept on her all night. But no
|
||
matter—’tis but resting for the rush.”
|
||
|
||
Here be it said, that this pertinacious pursuit of one particular whale,
|
||
continued through day into night, and through night into day, is a thing by no
|
||
means unprecedented in the South sea fishery. For such is the wonderful skill,
|
||
prescience of experience, and invincible confidence acquired by some great
|
||
natural geniuses among the Nantucket commanders; that from the simple
|
||
observation of a whale when last descried, they will, under certain given
|
||
circumstances, pretty accurately foretell both the direction in which he will
|
||
continue to swim for a time, while out of sight, as well as his probable rate of
|
||
progression during that period. And, in these cases, somewhat as a pilot, when
|
||
about losing sight of a coast, whose general trending he well knows, and which
|
||
he desires shortly to return to again, but at some further point; like as this
|
||
pilot stands by his compass, and takes the precise bearing of the cape at
|
||
present visible, in order the more certainly to hit aright the remote, unseen
|
||
headland, eventually to be visited: so does the fisherman, at his compass, with
|
||
the whale; for after being chased, and diligently marked, through several hours
|
||
of daylight, then, when night obscures the fish, the creature’s future wake
|
||
through the darkness is almost as established to the sagacious mind of the
|
||
hunter, as the pilot’s coast is to him. So that to this hunter’s wondrous skill,
|
||
the proverbial evanescence of a thing writ in water, a wake, is to all desired
|
||
purposes well nigh as reliable as the steadfast land. And as the mighty iron
|
||
Leviathan of the modern railway is so familiarly known in its every pace, that,
|
||
with watches in their hands, men time his rate as doctors that of a baby’s
|
||
pulse; and lightly say of it, the up train or the down train will reach such or
|
||
such a spot, at such or such an hour; even so, almost, there are occasions when
|
||
these Nantucketers time that other Leviathan of the deep, according to the
|
||
observed humor of his speed; and say to themselves, so many hours hence this
|
||
whale will have gone two hundred miles, will have about reached this or that
|
||
degree of latitude or longitude. But to render this acuteness at all successful
|
||
in the end, the wind and the sea must be the whaleman’s allies; for of what
|
||
present avail to the becalmed or windbound mariner is the skill that assures him
|
||
he is exactly ninety-three leagues and a quarter from his port? Inferable from
|
||
these statements, are many collateral subtile matters touching the chase of
|
||
whales.
|
||
|
||
The ship tore on; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a cannon-ball,
|
||
missent, becomes a plough-share and turns up the level field.
|
||
|
||
“By salt and hemp!” cried Stubb, “but this swift motion of the deck creeps up
|
||
one’s legs and tingles at the heart. This ship and I are two brave fellows!—Ha,
|
||
ha! Some one take me up, and launch me, spine-wise, on the sea,—for by
|
||
live-oaks! my spine’s a keel. Ha, ha! we go the gait that leaves no dust
|
||
behind!”
|
||
|
||
“There she blows—she blows!—she blows!—right ahead!” was now the mast-head cry.
|
||
|
||
“Aye, aye!” cried Stubb, “I knew it—ye can’t escape—blow on and split your
|
||
spout, O whale! the mad fiend himself is after ye! blow your trump—blister your
|
||
lungs!—Ahab will dam off your blood, as a miller shuts his watergate upon the
|
||
stream!”
|
||
|
||
And Stubb did but speak out for well nigh all that crew. The frenzies of the
|
||
chase had by this time worked them bubblingly up, like old wine worked anew.
|
||
Whatever pale fears and forebodings some of them might have felt before; these
|
||
were not only now kept out of sight through the growing awe of Ahab, but they
|
||
were broken up, and on all sides routed, as timid prairie hares that scatter
|
||
before the bounding bison. The hand of Fate had snatched all their souls; and by
|
||
the stirring perils of the previous day; the rack of the past night’s suspense;
|
||
the fixed, unfearing, blind, reckless way in which their wild craft went
|
||
plunging towards its flying mark; by all these things, their hearts were bowled
|
||
along. The wind that made great bellies of their sails, and rushed the vessel on
|
||
by arms invisible as irresistible; this seemed the symbol of that unseen agency
|
||
which so enslaved them to the race.
|
||
|
||
They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all; though it
|
||
was put together of all contrasting things—oak, and maple, and pine wood; iron,
|
||
and pitch, and hemp—yet all these ran into each other in the one concrete hull,
|
||
which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long central keel; even
|
||
so, all the individualities of the crew, this man’s valor, that man’s fear;
|
||
guilt and guiltiness, all varieties were welded into oneness, and were all
|
||
directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to.
|
||
|
||
The rigging lived. The mast-heads, like the tops of tall palms, were
|
||
outspreadingly tufted with arms and legs. Clinging to a spar with one hand, some
|
||
reached forth the other with impatient wavings; others, shading their eyes from
|
||
the vivid sunlight, sat far out on the rocking yards; all the spars in full
|
||
bearing of mortals, ready and ripe for their fate. Ah! how they still strove
|
||
through that infinite blueness to seek out the thing that might destroy them!
|
||
|
||
“Why sing ye not out for him, if ye see him?” cried Ahab, when, after the lapse
|
||
of some minutes since the first cry, no more had been heard. “Sway me up, men;
|
||
ye have been deceived; not Moby Dick casts one odd jet that way, and then
|
||
disappears.”
|
||
|
||
It was even so; in their headlong eagerness, the men had mistaken some other
|
||
thing for the whale-spout, as the event itself soon proved; for hardly had Ahab
|
||
reached his perch; hardly was the rope belayed to its pin on deck, when he
|
||
struck the key-note to an orchestra, that made the air vibrate as with the
|
||
combined discharges of rifles. The triumphant halloo of thirty buckskin lungs
|
||
was heard, as—much nearer to the ship than the place of the imaginary jet, less
|
||
than a mile ahead—Moby Dick bodily burst into view! For not by any calm and
|
||
indolent spoutings; not by the peaceable gush of that mystic fountain in his
|
||
head, did the White Whale now reveal his vicinity; but by the far more wondrous
|
||
phenomenon of breaching. Rising with his utmost velocity from the furthest
|
||
depths, the Sperm Whale thus booms his entire bulk into the pure element of air,
|
||
and piling up a mountain of dazzling foam, shows his place to the distance of
|
||
seven miles and more. In those moments, the torn, enraged waves he shakes off,
|
||
seem his mane; in some cases, this breaching is his act of defiance.
|
||
|
||
“There she breaches! there she breaches!” was the cry, as in his immeasurable
|
||
bravadoes the White Whale tossed himself salmon-like to Heaven. So suddenly seen
|
||
in the blue plain of the sea, and relieved against the still bluer margin of the
|
||
sky, the spray that he raised, for the moment, intolerably glittered and glared
|
||
like a glacier; and stood there gradually fading and fading away from its first
|
||
sparkling intensity, to the dim mistiness of an advancing shower in a vale.
|
||
|
||
“Aye, breach your last to the sun, Moby Dick!” cried Ahab, “thy hour and thy
|
||
harpoon are at hand!—Down! down all of ye, but one man at the fore. The
|
||
boats!—stand by!”
|
||
|
||
Unmindful of the tedious rope-ladders of the shrouds, the men, like shooting
|
||
stars, slid to the deck, by the isolated backstays and halyards; while Ahab,
|
||
less dartingly, but still rapidly was dropped from his perch.
|
||
|
||
“Lower away,” he cried, so soon as he had reached his boat—a spare one, rigged
|
||
the afternoon previous. “Mr. Starbuck, the ship is thine—keep away from the
|
||
boats, but keep near them. Lower, all!”
|
||
|
||
As if to strike a quick terror into them, by this time being the first assailant
|
||
himself, Moby Dick had turned, and was now coming for the three crews. Ahab’s
|
||
boat was central; and cheering his men, he told them he would take the whale
|
||
head-and-head,—that is, pull straight up to his forehead,—a not uncommon thing;
|
||
for when within a certain limit, such a course excludes the coming onset from
|
||
the whale’s sidelong vision. But ere that close limit was gained, and while yet
|
||
all three boats were plain as the ship’s three masts to his eye; the White Whale
|
||
churning himself into furious speed, almost in an instant as it were, rushing
|
||
among the boats with open jaws, and a lashing tail, offered appalling battle on
|
||
every side; and heedless of the irons darted at him from every boat, seemed only
|
||
intent on annihilating each separate plank of which those boats were made. But
|
||
skilfully manœuvred, incessantly wheeling like trained chargers in the field;
|
||
the boats for a while eluded him; though, at times, but by a plank’s breadth;
|
||
while all the time, Ahab’s unearthly slogan tore every other cry but his to
|
||
shreds.
|
||
|
||
But at last in his untraceable evolutions, the White Whale so crossed and
|
||
recrossed, and in a thousand ways entangled the slack of the three lines now
|
||
fast to him, that they foreshortened, and, of themselves, warped the devoted
|
||
boats towards the planted irons in him; though now for a moment the whale drew
|
||
aside a little, as if to rally for a more tremendous charge. Seizing that
|
||
opportunity, Ahab first paid out more line: and then was rapidly hauling and
|
||
jerking in upon it again—hoping that way to disencumber it of some snarls—when
|
||
lo!—a sight more savage than the embattled teeth of sharks!
|
||
|
||
Caught and twisted—corkscrewed in the mazes of the line, loose harpoons and
|
||
lances, with all their bristling barbs and points, came flashing and dripping up
|
||
to the chocks in the bows of Ahab’s boat. Only one thing could be done. Seizing
|
||
the boat-knife, he critically reached within—through—and then, without—the rays
|
||
of steel; dragged in the line beyond, passed it, inboard, to the bowsman, and
|
||
then, twice sundering the rope near the chocks—dropped the intercepted fagot of
|
||
steel into the sea; and was all fast again. That instant, the White Whale made a
|
||
sudden rush among the remaining tangles of the other lines; by so doing,
|
||
irresistibly dragged the more involved boats of Stubb and Flask towards his
|
||
flukes; dashed them together like two rolling husks on a surf-beaten beach, and
|
||
then, diving down into the sea, disappeared in a boiling maelstrom, in which,
|
||
for a space, the odorous cedar chips of the wrecks danced round and round, like
|
||
the grated nutmeg in a swiftly stirred bowl of punch.
|
||
|
||
While the two crews were yet circling in the waters, reaching out after the
|
||
revolving line-tubs, oars, and other floating furniture, while aslope little
|
||
Flask bobbed up and down like an empty vial, twitching his legs upwards to
|
||
escape the dreaded jaws of sharks; and Stubb was lustily singing out for some
|
||
one to ladle him up; and while the old man’s line—now parting—admitted of his
|
||
pulling into the creamy pool to rescue whom he could;—in that wild
|
||
simultaneousness of a thousand concreted perils,—Ahab’s yet unstricken boat
|
||
seemed drawn up towards Heaven by invisible wires,—as, arrow-like, shooting
|
||
perpendicularly from the sea, the White Whale dashed his broad forehead against
|
||
its bottom, and sent it, turning over and over, into the air; till it fell
|
||
again—gunwale downwards—and Ahab and his men struggled out from under it, like
|
||
seals from a sea-side cave.
|
||
|
||
The first uprising momentum of the whale—modifying its direction as he struck
|
||
the surface—involuntarily launched him along it, to a little distance from the
|
||
centre of the destruction he had made; and with his back to it, he now lay for a
|
||
moment slowly feeling with his flukes from side to side; and whenever a stray
|
||
oar, bit of plank, the least chip or crumb of the boats touched his skin, his
|
||
tail swiftly drew back, and came sideways smiting the sea. But soon, as if
|
||
satisfied that his work for that time was done, he pushed his pleated forehead
|
||
through the ocean, and trailing after him the intertangled lines, continued his
|
||
leeward way at a traveller’s methodic pace.
|
||
|
||
As before, the attentive ship having descried the whole fight, again came
|
||
bearing down to the rescue, and dropping a boat, picked up the floating
|
||
mariners, tubs, oars, and whatever else could be caught at, and safely landed
|
||
them on her decks. Some sprained shoulders, wrists, and ankles; livid
|
||
contusions; wrenched harpoons and lances; inextricable intricacies of rope;
|
||
shattered oars and planks; all these were there; but no fatal or even serious
|
||
ill seemed to have befallen any one. As with Fedallah the day before, so Ahab
|
||
was now found grimly clinging to his boat’s broken half, which afforded a
|
||
comparatively easy float; nor did it so exhaust him as the previous day’s
|
||
mishap.
|
||
|
||
But when he was helped to the deck, all eyes were fastened upon him; as instead
|
||
of standing by himself he still half-hung upon the shoulder of Starbuck, who had
|
||
thus far been the foremost to assist him. His ivory leg had been snapped off,
|
||
leaving but one short sharp splinter.
|
||
|
||
“Aye, aye, Starbuck, ’tis sweet to lean sometimes, be the leaner who he will;
|
||
and would old Ahab had leaned oftener than he has.”
|
||
|
||
“The ferrule has not stood, sir,” said the carpenter, now coming up; “I put good
|
||
work into that leg.”
|
||
|
||
“But no bones broken, sir, I hope,” said Stubb with true concern.
|
||
|
||
“Aye! and all splintered to pieces, Stubb!—d’ye see it.—But even with a broken
|
||
bone, old Ahab is untouched; and I account no living bone of mine one jot more
|
||
me, than this dead one that’s lost. Nor white whale, nor man, nor fiend, can so
|
||
much as graze old Ahab in his own proper and inaccessible being. Can any lead
|
||
touch yonder floor, any mast scrape yonder roof?—Aloft there! which way?”
|
||
|
||
“Dead to leeward, sir.”
|
||
|
||
“Up helm, then; pile on the sail again, ship keepers! down the rest of the spare
|
||
boats and rig them—Mr. Starbuck away, and muster the boat’s crews.”
|
||
|
||
“Let me first help thee towards the bulwarks, sir.”
|
||
|
||
“Oh, oh, oh! how this splinter gores me now! Accursed fate! that the
|
||
unconquerable captain in the soul should have such a craven mate!”
|
||
|
||
“Sir?”
|
||
|
||
“My body, man, not thee. Give me something for a cane—there, that shivered lance
|
||
will do. Muster the men. Surely I have not seen him yet. By heaven it cannot
|
||
be!—missing?—quick! call them all.”
|
||
|
||
The old man’s hinted thought was true. Upon mustering the company, the Parsee
|
||
was not there.
|
||
|
||
“The Parsee!” cried Stubb—“he must have been caught in——”
|
||
|
||
“The black vomit wrench thee!—run all of ye above, alow, cabin, forecastle—find
|
||
him—not gone—not gone!”
|
||
|
||
But quickly they returned to him with the tidings that the Parsee was nowhere to
|
||
be found.
|
||
|
||
“Aye, sir,” said Stubb—“caught among the tangles of your line—I thought I saw
|
||
him dragging under.”
|
||
|
||
“My line! my line? Gone?—gone? What means that little word?—What death-knell
|
||
rings in it, that old Ahab shakes as if he were the belfry. The harpoon,
|
||
too!—toss over the litter there,—d’ye see it?—the forged iron, men, the white
|
||
whale’s—no, no, no,—blistered fool! this hand did dart it!—’tis in the
|
||
fish!—Aloft there! Keep him nailed—Quick!—all hands to the rigging of the
|
||
boats—collect the oars—harpooneers! the irons, the irons!—hoist the royals
|
||
higher—a pull on all the sheets!—helm there! steady, steady for your life! I’ll
|
||
ten times girdle the unmeasured globe; yea and dive straight through it, but
|
||
I’ll slay him yet!”
|
||
|
||
“Great God! but for one single instant show thyself,” cried Starbuck; “never,
|
||
never wilt thou capture him, old man—In Jesus’ name no more of this, that’s
|
||
worse than devil’s madness. Two days chased; twice stove to splinters; thy very
|
||
leg once more snatched from under thee; thy evil shadow gone—all good angels
|
||
mobbing thee with warnings:—what more wouldst thou have?—Shall we keep chasing
|
||
this murderous fish till he swamps the last man? Shall we be dragged by him to
|
||
the bottom of the sea? Shall we be towed by him to the infernal world? Oh,
|
||
oh,—Impiety and blasphemy to hunt him more!”
|
||
|
||
“Starbuck, of late I’ve felt strangely moved to thee; ever since that hour we
|
||
both saw—thou know’st what, in one another’s eyes. But in this matter of the
|
||
whale, be the front of thy face to me as the palm of this hand—a lipless,
|
||
unfeatured blank. Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act’s immutably
|
||
decreed. ’Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean
|
||
rolled. Fool! I am the Fates’ lieutenant; I act under orders. Look thou,
|
||
underling! that thou obeyest mine.—Stand round me, men. Ye see an old man cut
|
||
down to the stump; leaning on a shivered lance; propped up on a lonely foot.
|
||
’Tis Ahab—his body’s part; but Ahab’s soul’s a centipede, that moves upon a
|
||
hundred legs. I feel strained, half stranded, as ropes that tow dismasted
|
||
frigates in a gale; and I may look so. But ere I break, ye’ll hear me crack; and
|
||
till ye hear that, know that Ahab’s hawser tows his purpose yet. Believe ye,
|
||
men, in the things called omens? Then laugh aloud, and cry encore! For ere they
|
||
drown, drowning things will twice rise to the surface; then rise again, to sink
|
||
for evermore. So with Moby Dick—two days he’s floated—tomorrow will be the
|
||
third. Aye, men, he’ll rise once more,—but only to spout his last! D’ye feel
|
||
brave men, brave?”
|
||
|
||
“As fearless fire,” cried Stubb.
|
||
|
||
“And as mechanical,” muttered Ahab. Then as the men went forward, he muttered
|
||
on: “The things called omens! And yesterday I talked the same to Starbuck there,
|
||
concerning my broken boat. Oh! how valiantly I seek to drive out of others’
|
||
hearts what’s clinched so fast in mine!—The Parsee—the Parsee!—gone, gone? and
|
||
he was to go before:—but still was to be seen again ere I could perish—How’s
|
||
that?—There’s a riddle now might baffle all the lawyers backed by the ghosts of
|
||
the whole line of judges:—like a hawk’s beak it pecks my brain. I’ll, I’ll solve
|
||
it, though!”
|
||
|
||
When dusk descended, the whale was still in sight to leeward.
|
||
|
||
So once more the sail was shortened, and everything passed nearly as on the
|
||
previous night; only, the sound of hammers, and the hum of the grindstone was
|
||
heard till nearly daylight, as the men toiled by lanterns in the complete and
|
||
careful rigging of the spare boats and sharpening their fresh weapons for the
|
||
morrow. Meantime, of the broken keel of Ahab’s wrecked craft the carpenter made
|
||
him another leg; while still as on the night before, slouched Ahab stood fixed
|
||
within his scuttle; his hid, heliotrope glance anticipatingly gone backward on
|
||
its dial; sat due eastward for the earliest sun.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 135. The Chase.—Third Day.
|
||
|
||
The morning of the third day dawned fair and fresh, and once more the solitary
|
||
night-man at the fore-mast-head was relieved by crowds of the daylight
|
||
look-outs, who dotted every mast and almost every spar.
|
||
|
||
“D’ye see him?” cried Ahab; but the whale was not yet in sight.
|
||
|
||
“In his infallible wake, though; but follow that wake, that’s all. Helm there;
|
||
steady, as thou goest, and hast been going. What a lovely day again! were it a
|
||
new-made world, and made for a summer-house to the angels, and this morning the
|
||
first of its throwing open to them, a fairer day could not dawn upon that world.
|
||
Here’s food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only
|
||
feels, feels, feels; that’s tingling enough for mortal man! to think’s audacity.
|
||
God only has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness
|
||
and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for
|
||
that. And yet, I’ve sometimes thought my brain was very calm—frozen calm, this
|
||
old skull cracks so, like a glass in which the contents turned to ice, and
|
||
shiver it. And still this hair is growing now; this moment growing, and heat
|
||
must breed it; but no, it’s like that sort of common grass that will grow
|
||
anywhere, between the earthy clefts of Greenland ice or in Vesuvius lava. How
|
||
the wild winds blow it; they whip it about me as the torn shreds of split sails
|
||
lash the tossed ship they cling to. A vile wind that has no doubt blown ere this
|
||
through prison corridors and cells, and wards of hospitals, and ventilated them,
|
||
and now comes blowing hither as innocent as fleeces. Out upon it!—it’s tainted.
|
||
Were I the wind, I’d blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world. I’d crawl
|
||
somewhere to a cave, and slink there. And yet, ’tis a noble and heroic thing,
|
||
the wind! who ever conquered it? In every fight it has the last and bitterest
|
||
blow. Run tilting at it, and you but run through it. Ha! a coward wind that
|
||
strikes stark naked men, but will not stand to receive a single blow. Even Ahab
|
||
is a braver thing—a nobler thing than that. Would now the wind but had a body;
|
||
but all the things that most exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things
|
||
are bodiless, but only bodiless as objects, not as agents. There’s a most
|
||
special, a most cunning, oh, a most malicious difference! And yet, I say again,
|
||
and swear it now, that there’s something all glorious and gracious in the wind.
|
||
These warm Trade Winds, at least, that in the clear heavens blow straight on, in
|
||
strong and steadfast, vigorous mildness; and veer not from their mark, however
|
||
the baser currents of the sea may turn and tack, and mightiest Mississippies of
|
||
the land swift and swerve about, uncertain where to go at last. And by the
|
||
eternal Poles! these same Trades that so directly blow my good ship on; these
|
||
Trades, or something like them—something so unchangeable, and full as strong,
|
||
blow my keeled soul along! To it! Aloft there! What d’ye see?”
|
||
|
||
“Nothing, sir.”
|
||
|
||
“Nothing! and noon at hand! The doubloon goes a-begging! See the sun! Aye, aye,
|
||
it must be so. I’ve oversailed him. How, got the start? Aye, he’s chasing me
|
||
now; not I, him—that’s bad; I might have known it, too. Fool! the lines—the
|
||
harpoons he’s towing. Aye, aye, I have run him by last night. About! about! Come
|
||
down, all of ye, but the regular look outs! Man the braces!”
|
||
|
||
Steering as she had done, the wind had been somewhat on the Pequod’s quarter, so
|
||
that now being pointed in the reverse direction, the braced ship sailed hard
|
||
upon the breeze as she rechurned the cream in her own white wake.
|
||
|
||
“Against the wind he now steers for the open jaw,” murmured Starbuck to himself,
|
||
as he coiled the new-hauled main-brace upon the rail. “God keep us, but already
|
||
my bones feel damp within me, and from the inside wet my flesh. I misdoubt me
|
||
that I disobey my God in obeying him!”
|
||
|
||
“Stand by to sway me up!” cried Ahab, advancing to the hempen basket. “We should
|
||
meet him soon.”
|
||
|
||
“Aye, aye, sir,” and straightway Starbuck did Ahab’s bidding, and once more Ahab
|
||
swung on high.
|
||
|
||
A whole hour now passed; gold-beaten out to ages. Time itself now held long
|
||
breaths with keen suspense. But at last, some three points off the weather bow,
|
||
Ahab descried the spout again, and instantly from the three mast-heads three
|
||
shrieks went up as if the tongues of fire had voiced it.
|
||
|
||
“Forehead to forehead I meet thee, this third time, Moby Dick! On deck
|
||
there!—brace sharper up; crowd her into the wind’s eye. He’s too far off to
|
||
lower yet, Mr. Starbuck. The sails shake! Stand over that helmsman with a
|
||
top-maul! So, so; he travels fast, and I must down. But let me have one more
|
||
good round look aloft here at the sea; there’s time for that. An old, old sight,
|
||
and yet somehow so young; aye, and not changed a wink since I first saw it, a
|
||
boy, from the sand-hills of Nantucket! The same!—the same!—the same to Noah as
|
||
to me. There’s a soft shower to leeward. Such lovely leewardings! They must lead
|
||
somewhere—to something else than common land, more palmy than the palms.
|
||
Leeward! the white whale goes that way; look to windward, then; the better if
|
||
the bitterer quarter. But good bye, good bye, old mast-head! What’s this?—green?
|
||
aye, tiny mosses in these warped cracks. No such green weather stains on Ahab’s
|
||
head! There’s the difference now between man’s old age and matter’s. But aye,
|
||
old mast, we both grow old together; sound in our hulls, though, are we not, my
|
||
ship? Aye, minus a leg, that’s all. By heaven this dead wood has the better of
|
||
my live flesh every way. I can’t compare with it; and I’ve known some ships made
|
||
of dead trees outlast the lives of men made of the most vital stuff of vital
|
||
fathers. What’s that he said? he should still go before me, my pilot; and yet to
|
||
be seen again? But where? Will I have eyes at the bottom of the sea, supposing I
|
||
descend those endless stairs? and all night I’ve been sailing from him, wherever
|
||
he did sink to. Aye, aye, like many more thou told’st direful truth as touching
|
||
thyself, O Parsee; but, Ahab, there thy shot fell short. Good-bye,
|
||
mast-head—keep a good eye upon the whale, the while I’m gone. We’ll talk
|
||
to-morrow, nay, to-night, when the white whale lies down there, tied by head and
|
||
tail.”
|
||
|
||
He gave the word; and still gazing round him, was steadily lowered through the
|
||
cloven blue air to the deck.
|
||
|
||
In due time the boats were lowered; but as standing in his shallop’s stern, Ahab
|
||
just hovered upon the point of the descent, he waved to the mate,—who held one
|
||
of the tackle-ropes on deck—and bade him pause.
|
||
|
||
“Starbuck!”
|
||
|
||
“Sir?”
|
||
|
||
“For the third time my soul’s ship starts upon this voyage, Starbuck.”
|
||
|
||
“Aye, sir, thou wilt have it so.”
|
||
|
||
“Some ships sail from their ports, and ever afterwards are missing, Starbuck!”
|
||
|
||
“Truth, sir: saddest truth.”
|
||
|
||
“Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of the flood;—and
|
||
I feel now like a billow that’s all one crested comb, Starbuck. I am old;—shake
|
||
hands with me, man.”
|
||
|
||
Their hands met; their eyes fastened; Starbuck’s tears the glue.
|
||
|
||
“Oh, my captain, my captain!—noble heart—go not—go not!—see, it’s a brave man
|
||
that weeps; how great the agony of the persuasion then!”
|
||
|
||
“Lower away!”—cried Ahab, tossing the mate’s arm from him. “Stand by the crew!”
|
||
|
||
In an instant the boat was pulling round close under the stern.
|
||
|
||
“The sharks! the sharks!” cried a voice from the low cabin-window there; “O
|
||
master, my master, come back!”
|
||
|
||
But Ahab heard nothing; for his own voice was high-lifted then; and the boat
|
||
leaped on.
|
||
|
||
Yet the voice spake true; for scarce had he pushed from the ship, when numbers
|
||
of sharks, seemingly rising from out the dark waters beneath the hull,
|
||
maliciously snapped at the blades of the oars, every time they dipped in the
|
||
water; and in this way accompanied the boat with their bites. It is a thing not
|
||
uncommonly happening to the whale-boats in those swarming seas; the sharks at
|
||
times apparently following them in the same prescient way that vultures hover
|
||
over the banners of marching regiments in the east. But these were the first
|
||
sharks that had been observed by the Pequod since the White Whale had been first
|
||
descried; and whether it was that Ahab’s crew were all such tiger-yellow
|
||
barbarians, and therefore their flesh more musky to the senses of the sharks—a
|
||
matter sometimes well known to affect them,—however it was, they seemed to
|
||
follow that one boat without molesting the others.
|
||
|
||
“Heart of wrought steel!” murmured Starbuck gazing over the side, and following
|
||
with his eyes the receding boat—“canst thou yet ring boldly to that
|
||
sight?—lowering thy keel among ravening sharks, and followed by them,
|
||
open-mouthed to the chase; and this the critical third day?—For when three days
|
||
flow together in one continuous intense pursuit; be sure the first is the
|
||
morning, the second the noon, and the third the evening and the end of that
|
||
thing—be that end what it may. Oh! my God! what is this that shoots through me,
|
||
and leaves me so deadly calm, yet expectant,—fixed at the top of a shudder!
|
||
Future things swim before me, as in empty outlines and skeletons; all the past
|
||
is somehow grown dim. Mary, girl! thou fadest in pale glories behind me; boy! I
|
||
seem to see but thy eyes grown wondrous blue. Strangest problems of life seem
|
||
clearing; but clouds sweep between—Is my journey’s end coming? My legs feel
|
||
faint; like his who has footed it all day. Feel thy heart,—beats it yet? Stir
|
||
thyself, Starbuck!—stave it off—move, move! speak aloud!—Mast-head there! See ye
|
||
my boy’s hand on the hill?—Crazed;—aloft there!—keep thy keenest eye upon the
|
||
boats:—mark well the whale!—Ho! again!—drive off that hawk! see! he pecks—he
|
||
tears the vane”—pointing to the red flag flying at the main-truck—“Ha! he soars
|
||
away with it!—Where’s the old man now? see’st thou that sight, oh Ahab!—shudder,
|
||
shudder!”
|
||
|
||
The boats had not gone very far, when by a signal from the mast-heads—a downward
|
||
pointed arm, Ahab knew that the whale had sounded; but intending to be near him
|
||
at the next rising, he held on his way a little sideways from the vessel; the
|
||
becharmed crew maintaining the profoundest silence, as the head-beat waves
|
||
hammered and hammered against the opposing bow.
|
||
|
||
“Drive, drive in your nails, oh ye waves! to their uttermost heads drive them
|
||
in! ye but strike a thing without a lid; and no coffin and no hearse can be
|
||
mine:—and hemp only can kill me! Ha! ha!”
|
||
|
||
Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles; then quickly
|
||
upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged berg of ice, swiftly rising to
|
||
the surface. A low rumbling sound was heard; a subterraneous hum; and then all
|
||
held their breaths; as bedraggled with trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances,
|
||
a vast form shot lengthwise, but obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in a thin
|
||
drooping veil of mist, it hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then
|
||
fell swamping back into the deep. Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters
|
||
flashed for an instant like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower
|
||
of flakes, leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble
|
||
trunk of the whale.
|
||
|
||
“Give way!” cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to the
|
||
attack; but maddened by yesterday’s fresh irons that corroded in him, Moby Dick
|
||
seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven. The wide
|
||
tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad white forehead, beneath the
|
||
transparent skin, looked knitted together; as head on, he came churning his tail
|
||
among the boats; and once more flailed them apart; spilling out the irons and
|
||
lances from the two mates’ boats, and dashing in one side of the upper part of
|
||
their bows, but leaving Ahab’s almost without a scar.
|
||
|
||
While Daggoo and Queequeg were stopping the strained planks; and as the whale
|
||
swimming out from them, turned, and showed one entire flank as he shot by them
|
||
again; at that moment a quick cry went up. Lashed round and round to the fish’s
|
||
back; pinioned in the turns upon turns in which, during the past night, the
|
||
whale had reeled the involutions of the lines around him, the half torn body of
|
||
the Parsee was seen; his sable raiment frayed to shreds; his distended eyes
|
||
turned full upon old Ahab.
|
||
|
||
The harpoon dropped from his hand.
|
||
|
||
“Befooled, befooled!”—drawing in a long lean breath—“Aye, Parsee! I see thee
|
||
again.—Aye, and thou goest before; and this, this then is the hearse that thou
|
||
didst promise. But I hold thee to the last letter of thy word. Where is the
|
||
second hearse? Away, mates, to the ship! those boats are useless now; repair
|
||
them if ye can in time, and return to me; if not, Ahab is enough to die—Down,
|
||
men! the first thing that but offers to jump from this boat I stand in, that
|
||
thing I harpoon. Ye are not other men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey
|
||
me.—Where’s the whale? gone down again?”
|
||
|
||
But he looked too nigh the boat; for as if bent upon escaping with the corpse he
|
||
bore, and as if the particular place of the last encounter had been but a stage
|
||
in his leeward voyage, Moby Dick was now again steadily swimming forward; and
|
||
had almost passed the ship,—which thus far had been sailing in the contrary
|
||
direction to him, though for the present her headway had been stopped. He seemed
|
||
swimming with his utmost velocity, and now only intent upon pursuing his own
|
||
straight path in the sea.
|
||
|
||
“Oh! Ahab,” cried Starbuck, “not too late is it, even now, the third day, to
|
||
desist. See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest
|
||
him!”
|
||
|
||
Setting sail to the rising wind, the lonely boat was swiftly impelled to
|
||
leeward, by both oars and canvas. And at last when Ahab was sliding by the
|
||
vessel, so near as plainly to distinguish Starbuck’s face as he leaned over the
|
||
rail, he hailed him to turn the vessel about, and follow him, not too swiftly,
|
||
at a judicious interval. Glancing upwards, he saw Tashtego, Queequeg, and
|
||
Daggoo, eagerly mounting to the three mast-heads; while the oarsmen were rocking
|
||
in the two staved boats which had but just been hoisted to the side, and were
|
||
busily at work in repairing them. One after the other, through the port-holes,
|
||
as he sped, he also caught flying glimpses of Stubb and Flask, busying
|
||
themselves on deck among bundles of new irons and lances. As he saw all this; as
|
||
he heard the hammers in the broken boats; far other hammers seemed driving a
|
||
nail into his heart. But he rallied. And now marking that the vane or flag was
|
||
gone from the main-mast-head, he shouted to Tashtego, who had just gained that
|
||
perch, to descend again for another flag, and a hammer and nails, and so nail it
|
||
to the mast.
|
||
|
||
Whether fagged by the three days’ running chase, and the resistance to his
|
||
swimming in the knotted hamper he bore; or whether it was some latent
|
||
deceitfulness and malice in him: whichever was true, the White Whale’s way now
|
||
began to abate, as it seemed, from the boat so rapidly nearing him once more;
|
||
though indeed the whale’s last start had not been so long a one as before. And
|
||
still as Ahab glided over the waves the unpitying sharks accompanied him; and so
|
||
pertinaciously stuck to the boat; and so continually bit at the plying oars,
|
||
that the blades became jagged and crunched, and left small splinters in the sea,
|
||
at almost every dip.
|
||
|
||
“Heed them not! those teeth but give new rowlocks to your oars. Pull on! ’tis
|
||
the better rest, the shark’s jaw than the yielding water.”
|
||
|
||
“But at every bite, sir, the thin blades grow smaller and smaller!”
|
||
|
||
“They will last long enough! pull on!—But who can tell”—he muttered—“whether
|
||
these sharks swim to feast on the whale or on Ahab?—But pull on! Aye, all alive,
|
||
now—we near him. The helm! take the helm! let me pass,”—and so saying two of the
|
||
oarsmen helped him forward to the bows of the still flying boat.
|
||
|
||
At length as the craft was cast to one side, and ran ranging along with the
|
||
White Whale’s flank, he seemed strangely oblivious of its advance—as the whale
|
||
sometimes will—and Ahab was fairly within the smoky mountain mist, which, thrown
|
||
off from the whale’s spout, curled round his great, Monadnock hump; he was even
|
||
thus close to him; when, with body arched back, and both arms lengthwise
|
||
high-lifted to the poise, he darted his fierce iron, and his far fiercer curse
|
||
into the hated whale. As both steel and curse sank to the socket, as if sucked
|
||
into a morass, Moby Dick sideways writhed; spasmodically rolled his nigh flank
|
||
against the bow, and, without staving a hole in it, so suddenly canted the boat
|
||
over, that had it not been for the elevated part of the gunwale to which he then
|
||
clung, Ahab would once more have been tossed into the sea. As it was, three of
|
||
the oarsmen—who foreknew not the precise instant of the dart, and were therefore
|
||
unprepared for its effects—these were flung out; but so fell, that, in an
|
||
instant two of them clutched the gunwale again, and rising to its level on a
|
||
combing wave, hurled themselves bodily inboard again; the third man helplessly
|
||
dropping astern, but still afloat and swimming.
|
||
|
||
Almost simultaneously, with a mighty volition of ungraduated, instantaneous
|
||
swiftness, the White Whale darted through the weltering sea. But when Ahab cried
|
||
out to the steersman to take new turns with the line, and hold it so; and
|
||
commanded the crew to turn round on their seats, and tow the boat up to the
|
||
mark; the moment the treacherous line felt that double strain and tug, it
|
||
snapped in the empty air!
|
||
|
||
“What breaks in me? Some sinew cracks!—’tis whole again; oars! oars! Burst in
|
||
upon him!”
|
||
|
||
Hearing the tremendous rush of the sea-crashing boat, the whale wheeled round to
|
||
present his blank forehead at bay; but in that evolution, catching sight of the
|
||
nearing black hull of the ship; seemingly seeing in it the source of all his
|
||
persecutions; bethinking it—it may be—a larger and nobler foe; of a sudden, he
|
||
bore down upon its advancing prow, smiting his jaws amid fiery showers of foam.
|
||
|
||
Ahab staggered; his hand smote his forehead. “I grow blind; hands! stretch out
|
||
before me that I may yet grope my way. Is’t night?”
|
||
|
||
“The whale! The ship!” cried the cringing oarsmen.
|
||
|
||
“Oars! oars! Slope downwards to thy depths, O sea, that ere it be for ever too
|
||
late, Ahab may slide this last, last time upon his mark! I see: the ship! the
|
||
ship! Dash on, my men! Will ye not save my ship?”
|
||
|
||
But as the oarsmen violently forced their boat through the sledge-hammering
|
||
seas, the before whale-smitten bow-ends of two planks burst through, and in an
|
||
instant almost, the temporarily disabled boat lay nearly level with the waves;
|
||
its half-wading, splashing crew, trying hard to stop the gap and bale out the
|
||
pouring water.
|
||
|
||
Meantime, for that one beholding instant, Tashtego’s mast-head hammer remained
|
||
suspended in his hand; and the red flag, half-wrapping him as with a plaid, then
|
||
streamed itself straight out from him, as his own forward-flowing heart; while
|
||
Starbuck and Stubb, standing upon the bowsprit beneath, caught sight of the
|
||
down-coming monster just as soon as he.
|
||
|
||
“The whale, the whale! Up helm, up helm! Oh, all ye sweet powers of air, now hug
|
||
me close! Let not Starbuck die, if die he must, in a woman’s fainting fit. Up
|
||
helm, I say—ye fools, the jaw! the jaw! Is this the end of all my bursting
|
||
prayers? all my life-long fidelities? Oh, Ahab, Ahab, lo, thy work. Steady!
|
||
helmsman, steady. Nay, nay! Up helm again! He turns to meet us! Oh, his
|
||
unappeasable brow drives on towards one, whose duty tells him he cannot depart.
|
||
My God, stand by me now!”
|
||
|
||
“Stand not by me, but stand under me, whoever you are that will now help Stubb;
|
||
for Stubb, too, sticks here. I grin at thee, thou grinning whale! Who ever
|
||
helped Stubb, or kept Stubb awake, but Stubb’s own unwinking eye? And now poor
|
||
Stubb goes to bed upon a mattrass that is all too soft; would it were stuffed
|
||
with brushwood! I grin at thee, thou grinning whale! Look ye, sun, moon, and
|
||
stars! I call ye assassins of as good a fellow as ever spouted up his ghost. For
|
||
all that, I would yet ring glasses with ye, would ye but hand the cup! Oh, oh!
|
||
oh, oh! thou grinning whale, but there’ll be plenty of gulping soon! Why fly ye
|
||
not, O Ahab! For me, off shoes and jacket to it; let Stubb die in his drawers! A
|
||
most mouldy and over salted death, though;—cherries! cherries! cherries! Oh,
|
||
Flask, for one red cherry ere we die!”
|
||
|
||
“Cherries? I only wish that we were where they grow. Oh, Stubb, I hope my poor
|
||
mother’s drawn my part-pay ere this; if not, few coppers will now come to her,
|
||
for the voyage is up.”
|
||
|
||
From the ship’s bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive; hammers, bits of
|
||
plank, lances, and harpoons, mechanically retained in their hands, just as they
|
||
had darted from their various employments; all their enchanted eyes intent upon
|
||
the whale, which from side to side strangely vibrating his predestinating head,
|
||
sent a broad band of overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed.
|
||
Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite
|
||
of all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote
|
||
the ship’s starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled. Some fell flat upon their
|
||
faces. Like dislodged trucks, the heads of the harpooneers aloft shook on their
|
||
bull-like necks. Through the breach, they heard the waters pour, as mountain
|
||
torrents down a flume.
|
||
|
||
“The ship! The hearse!—the second hearse!” cried Ahab from the boat; “its wood
|
||
could only be American!”
|
||
|
||
Diving beneath the settling ship, the whale ran quivering along its keel; but
|
||
turning under water, swiftly shot to the surface again, far off the other bow,
|
||
but within a few yards of Ahab’s boat, where, for a time, he lay quiescent.
|
||
|
||
“I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! let me hear thy hammer. Oh! ye
|
||
three unsurrendered spires of mine; thou uncracked keel; and only god-bullied
|
||
hull; thou firm deck, and haughty helm, and Pole-pointed prow,—death-glorious
|
||
ship! must ye then perish, and without me? Am I cut off from the last fond pride
|
||
of meanest shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel
|
||
my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your furthest
|
||
bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this
|
||
one piled comber of my death! Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but
|
||
unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at
|
||
thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all
|
||
hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to
|
||
pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus,
|
||
I give up the spear!”
|
||
|
||
The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity
|
||
the line ran through the grooves;—ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did
|
||
clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as
|
||
Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew
|
||
knew he was gone. Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope’s final end
|
||
flew out of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea,
|
||
disappeared in its depths.
|
||
|
||
For an instant, the tranced boat’s crew stood still; then turned. “The ship?
|
||
Great God, where is the ship?” Soon they through dim, bewildering mediums saw
|
||
her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous Fata Morgana; only the uppermost
|
||
masts out of water; while fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their
|
||
once lofty perches, the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking
|
||
lookouts on the sea. And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself,
|
||
and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning,
|
||
animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest
|
||
chip of the Pequod out of sight.
|
||
|
||
But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the sunken head
|
||
of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of the erect spar yet
|
||
visible, together with long streaming yards of the flag, which calmly undulated,
|
||
with ironical coincidings, over the destroying billows they almost touched;—at
|
||
that instant, a red arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open
|
||
air, in the act of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar.
|
||
A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its
|
||
natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego
|
||
there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the
|
||
hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the
|
||
submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and
|
||
so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust
|
||
upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with
|
||
his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a
|
||
living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.
|
||
|
||
Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf
|
||
beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the
|
||
sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Epilogue “AND I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE” Job.
|
||
|
||
The drama’s done. Why then here does any one step forth?—Because one did survive
|
||
the wreck.
|
||
|
||
It so chanced, that after the Parsee’s disappearance, I was he whom the Fates
|
||
ordained to take the place of Ahab’s bowsman, when that bowsman assumed the
|
||
vacant post; the same, who, when on the last day the three men were tossed from
|
||
out of the rocking boat, was dropped astern. So, floating on the margin of the
|
||
ensuing scene, and in full sight of it, when the halfspent suction of the sunk
|
||
ship reached me, I was then, but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex. When
|
||
I reached it, it had subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round, then, and ever
|
||
contracting towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly
|
||
wheeling circle, like another Ixion I did revolve. Till, gaining that vital
|
||
centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of its
|
||
cunning spring, and, owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great force, the
|
||
coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my
|
||
side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on
|
||
a soft and dirgelike main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with
|
||
padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On
|
||
the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the
|
||
devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing
|
||
children, only found another orphan. *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK
|
||
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|
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