playbot/LICENSE

20524 lines
1.2 MiB
Raw Blame History

This file contains ambiguous Unicode characters!

This file contains ambiguous Unicode characters that may be confused with others in your current locale. If your use case is intentional and legitimate, you can safely ignore this warning. Use the Escape button to highlight these characters.

MD GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
Version 01, 18 October 1851
Copyright 2023 Stef Dunlap <kindrobot@tilde.team>
1. Permissions
Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose
with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice
and this permission notice appear in all copies.
2. Warranty
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES WITH
REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND
FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT,
INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS
OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER
TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF
THIS SOFTWARE.
3. Moby-Dick, or the Whale, by Herman Melville
CONTENTS
ETYMOLOGY.
EXTRACTS (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian).
CHAPTER 1. Loomings.
CHAPTER 2. The Carpet-Bag.
CHAPTER 3. The Spouter-Inn.
CHAPTER 4. The Counterpane.
CHAPTER 5. Breakfast.
CHAPTER 6. The Street.
CHAPTER 7. The Chapel.
CHAPTER 8. The Pulpit.
CHAPTER 9. The Sermon.
CHAPTER 10. A Bosom Friend.
CHAPTER 11. Nightgown.
CHAPTER 12. Biographical.
CHAPTER 13. Wheelbarrow.
CHAPTER 14. Nantucket.
CHAPTER 15. Chowder.
CHAPTER 16. The Ship.
CHAPTER 17. The Ramadan.
CHAPTER 18. His Mark.
CHAPTER 19. The Prophet.
CHAPTER 20. All Astir.
CHAPTER 21. Going Aboard.
CHAPTER 22. Merry Christmas.
CHAPTER 23. The Lee Shore.
CHAPTER 24. The Advocate.
CHAPTER 25. Postscript.
CHAPTER 26. Knights and Squires.
CHAPTER 27. Knights and Squires.
CHAPTER 28. Ahab.
CHAPTER 29. Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb.
CHAPTER 30. The Pipe.
CHAPTER 31. Queen Mab.
CHAPTER 32. Cetology.
CHAPTER 33. The Specksnyder.
CHAPTER 34. The Cabin-Table.
CHAPTER 35. The Mast-Head.
CHAPTER 36. The Quarter-Deck.
CHAPTER 37. Sunset.
CHAPTER 38. Dusk.
CHAPTER 39. First Night-Watch.
CHAPTER 40. Midnight, Forecastle.
CHAPTER 41. Moby Dick.
CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of the Whale.
CHAPTER 43. Hark!
CHAPTER 44. The Chart.
CHAPTER 45. The Affidavit.
CHAPTER 46. Surmises.
CHAPTER 47. The Mat-Maker.
CHAPTER 48. The First Lowering.
CHAPTER 49. The Hyena.
CHAPTER 50. Ahabs Boat and Crew. Fedallah.
CHAPTER 51. The Spirit-Spout.
CHAPTER 52. The Albatross.
CHAPTER 53. The Gam.
CHAPTER 54. The Town-Hos Story.
CHAPTER 55. Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales.
CHAPTER 56. Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True Pictures
of Whaling Scenes.
CHAPTER 57. Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone;
in Mountains; in Stars.
CHAPTER 58. Brit.
CHAPTER 59. Squid.
CHAPTER 60. The Line.
CHAPTER 61. Stubb Kills a Whale.
CHAPTER 62. The Dart.
CHAPTER 63. The Crotch.
CHAPTER 64. Stubbs Supper.
CHAPTER 65. The Whale as a Dish.
CHAPTER 66. The Shark Massacre.
CHAPTER 67. Cutting In.
CHAPTER 68. The Blanket.
CHAPTER 69. The Funeral.
CHAPTER 70. The Sphynx.
CHAPTER 71. The Jeroboams Story.
CHAPTER 72. The Monkey-Rope.
CHAPTER 73. Stubb and Flask kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk over
Him.
CHAPTER 74. The Sperm Whales Head—Contrasted View.
CHAPTER 75. The Right Whales Head—Contrasted View.
CHAPTER 76. The Battering-Ram.
CHAPTER 77. The Great Heidelburgh Tun.
CHAPTER 78. Cistern and Buckets.
CHAPTER 79. The Prairie.
CHAPTER 80. The Nut.
CHAPTER 81. The Pequod Meets The Virgin.
CHAPTER 82. The Honor and Glory of Whaling.
CHAPTER 83. Jonah Historically Regarded.
CHAPTER 84. Pitchpoling.
CHAPTER 85. The Fountain.
CHAPTER 86. The Tail.
CHAPTER 87. The Grand Armada.
CHAPTER 88. Schools and Schoolmasters.
CHAPTER 89. Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish.
CHAPTER 90. Heads or Tails.
CHAPTER 91. The Pequod Meets The Rose-Bud.
CHAPTER 92. Ambergris.
CHAPTER 93. The Castaway.
CHAPTER 94. A Squeeze of the Hand.
CHAPTER 95. The Cassock.
CHAPTER 96. The Try-Works.
CHAPTER 97. The Lamp.
CHAPTER 98. Stowing Down and Clearing Up.
CHAPTER 99. The Doubloon.
CHAPTER 100. Leg and Arm.
CHAPTER 101. The Decanter.
CHAPTER 102. A Bower in the Arsacides.
CHAPTER 103. Measurement of The Whales Skeleton.
CHAPTER 104. The Fossil Whale.
CHAPTER 105. Does the Whales Magnitude Diminish?—Will He Perish?
CHAPTER 106. Ahabs Leg.
CHAPTER 107. The Carpenter.
CHAPTER 108. Ahab and the Carpenter.
CHAPTER 109. Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin.
CHAPTER 110. Queequeg in His Coffin.
CHAPTER 111. The Pacific.
CHAPTER 112. The Blacksmith.
CHAPTER 113. The Forge.
CHAPTER 114. The Gilder.
CHAPTER 115. The Pequod Meets The Bachelor.
CHAPTER 116. The Dying Whale.
CHAPTER 117. The Whale Watch.
CHAPTER 118. The Quadrant.
CHAPTER 119. The Candles.
CHAPTER 120. The Deck Towards the End of the First Night Watch.
CHAPTER 121. Midnight.—The Forecastle Bulwarks.
CHAPTER 122. Midnight Aloft.—Thunder and Lightning.
CHAPTER 123. The Musket.
CHAPTER 124. The Needle.
CHAPTER 125. The Log and Line.
CHAPTER 126. The Life-Buoy.
CHAPTER 127. The Deck.
CHAPTER 128. The Pequod Meets The Rachel.
CHAPTER 129. The Cabin.
CHAPTER 130. The Hat.
CHAPTER 131. The Pequod Meets The Delight.
CHAPTER 132. The Symphony.
CHAPTER 133. The Chase—First Day.
CHAPTER 134. The Chase—Second Day.
CHAPTER 135. The Chase.—Third Day.
Epilogue
Original Transcribers Notes:
This text is a combination of etexts, one from the now-defunct ERIS project at
Virginia Tech and one from Project Gutenbergs archives. The proofreaders of
this version are indebted to The University of Adelaide Library for preserving
the Virginia Tech version. The resulting etext was compared with a public domain
hard copy version of the text.
ETYMOLOGY. (Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School.)
The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was
ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly
embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He
loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.
“While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what name a
whale-fish is to be called in our tongue, leaving out, through ignorance, the
letter H, which almost alone maketh up the signification of the word, you
deliver that which is not true.” —Hackluyt.
“WHALE. * * * Sw. and Dan. hval. This animal is named from roundness or rolling;
for in Dan. hvalt is arched or vaulted.” —Websters Dictionary.
“WHALE. * * * It is more immediately from the Dut. and Ger. Wallen; A.S.
Walw-ian, to roll, to wallow.” —Richardsons Dictionary. חו, Hebrew.
ϰητος, Greek. CETUS, Latin. WHŒL, Anglo-Saxon. HVALT, Danish. WAL,
Dutch. HWAL, Swedish. HVALUR, Icelandic. WHALE, English. BALEINE,
French. BALLENA, Spanish. PEKEE-NUEE-NUEE, Fegee. PEHEE-NUEE-NUEE,
Erromangoan.
EXTRACTS. (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian).
It will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a poor
devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long Vaticans and
street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to whales he
could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane. Therefore you must
not, in every case at least, take the higgledy-piggledy whale statements,
however authentic, in these extracts, for veritable gospel cetology. Far from
it. As touching the ancient authors generally, as well as the poets here
appearing, these extracts are solely valuable or entertaining, as affording a
glancing birds eye view of what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied,
and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and generations, including our own.
So fare thee well, poor devil of a Sub-Sub, whose commentator I am. Thou
belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world will ever
warm; and for whom even Pale Sherry would be too rosy-strong; but with whom one
sometimes loves to sit, and feel poor-devilish, too; and grow convivial upon
tears; and say to them bluntly, with full eyes and empty glasses, and in not
altogether unpleasant sadness—Give it up, Sub-Subs! For by how much the more
pains ye take to please the world, by so much the more shall ye for ever go
thankless! Would that I could clear out Hampton Court and the Tuileries for ye!
But gulp down your tears and hie aloft to the royal-mast with your hearts; for
your friends who have gone before are clearing out the seven-storied heavens,
and making refugees of long-pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, against your
coming. Here ye strike but splintered hearts together—there, ye shall strike
unsplinterable glasses! EXTRACTS.
“And God created great whales.” —Genesis.
“Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him; One would think the deep to be
hoary.” —Job.
“Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.” —Jonah.
“There go the ships; there is that Leviathan whom thou hast made to play
therein.” —Psalms.
“In that day, the Lord with his sore, and great, and strong sword, shall punish
Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that crooked serpent; and he
shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.” —Isaiah.
“And what thing soever besides cometh within the chaos of this monsters mouth,
be it beast, boat, or stone, down it goes all incontinently that foul great
swallow of his, and perisheth in the bottomless gulf of his paunch.” —Hollands
Plutarchs Morals.
“The Indian Sea breedeth the most and the biggest fishes that are: among which
the Whales and Whirlpooles called Balaene, take up as much in length as four
acres or arpens of land.” —Hollands Pliny.
“Scarcely had we proceeded two days on the sea, when about sunrise a great many
Whales and other monsters of the sea, appeared. Among the former, one was of a
most monstrous size.... This came towards us, open-mouthed, raising the waves on
all sides, and beating the sea before him into a foam.” —Tookes Lucian. “The
True History.”
“He visited this country also with a view of catching horse-whales, which had
bones of very great value for their teeth, of which he brought some to the
king.... The best whales were catched in his own country, of which some were
forty-eight, some fifty yards long. He said that he was one of six who had
killed sixty in two days.” —Other or Others verbal narrative taken down from
his mouth by King Alfred, A.D. 890.
“And whereas all the other things, whether beast or vessel, that enter into the
dreadful gulf of this monsters (whales) mouth, are immediately lost and
swallowed up, the sea-gudgeon retires into it in great security, and there
sleeps.” —MONTAIGNE. —Apology for Raimond Sebond.
“Let us fly, let us fly! Old Nick take me if it is not Leviathan described by
the noble prophet Moses in the life of patient Job.” —Rabelais.
“This whales liver was two cartloads.” —Stowes Annals.
“The great Leviathan that maketh the seas to seethe like boiling pan.” —Lord
Bacons Version of the Psalms.
“Touching that monstrous bulk of the whale or ork we have received nothing
certain. They grow exceeding fat, insomuch that an incredible quantity of oil
will be extracted out of one whale.” —Ibid. “History of Life and Death.”
“The sovereignest thing on earth is parmacetti for an inward bruise.” —King
Henry.
“Very like a whale.” —Hamlet.
“Which to secure, no skill of leachs art Mote him availle, but to returne
againe To his wounds worker, that with lowly dart, Dinting his breast, had
bred his restless paine, Like as the wounded whale to shore flies thro the
maine.” —The Fairie Queen.
“Immense as whales, the motion of whose vast bodies can in a peaceful calm
trouble the ocean till it boil.” —Sir William Davenant. Preface to Gondibert.
“What spermacetti is, men might justly doubt, since the learned Hosmannus in his
work of thirty years, saith plainly, Nescio quid sit.” —Sir T. Browne. Of Sperma
Ceti and the Sperma Ceti Whale. Vide his V. E.
“Like Spencers Talus with his modern flail He threatens ruin with his
ponderous tail. ... Their fixed javlins in his side he wears, And on his
back a grove of pikes appears.” —Wallers Battle of the Summer Islands.
“By art is created that great Leviathan, called a Commonwealth or State—(in
Latin, Civitas) which is but an artificial man.” —Opening sentence of Hobbess
Leviathan.
“Silly Mansoul swallowed it without chewing, as if it had been a sprat in the
mouth of a whale.” —Pilgrims Progress.
“That sea beast Leviathan, which God of all his works Created hugest that
swim the ocean stream.” —Paradise Lost.
—“There Leviathan, Hugest of living creatures, in the deep Stretched like a
promontory sleeps or swims, And seems a moving land; and at his gills Draws
in, and at his breath spouts out a sea.” —Ibid.
“The mighty whales which swim in a sea of water, and have a sea of oil swimming
in them.” —Fullers Profane and Holy State.
“So close behind some promontory lie The huge Leviathan to attend their
prey, And give no chance, but swallow in the fry, Which through their
gaping jaws mistake the way.” —Drydens Annus Mirabilis.
“While the whale is floating at the stern of the ship, they cut off his head,
and tow it with a boat as near the shore as it will come; but it will be aground
in twelve or thirteen feet water.” —Thomas Edges Ten Voyages to Spitzbergen, in
Purchas.
“In their way they saw many whales sporting in the ocean, and in wantonness
fuzzing up the water through their pipes and vents, which nature has placed on
their shoulders.” —Sir T. Herberts Voyages into Asia and Africa. Harris Coll.
“Here they saw such huge troops of whales, that they were forced to proceed with
a great deal of caution for fear they should run their ship upon them.”
—Schoutens Sixth Circumnavigation.
“We set sail from the Elbe, wind N.E. in the ship called The
Jonas-in-the-Whale.... Some say the whale cant open his mouth, but that is a
fable.... They frequently climb up the masts to see whether they can see a
whale, for the first discoverer has a ducat for his pains.... I was told of a
whale taken near Shetland, that had above a barrel of herrings in his belly....
One of our harpooneers told me that he caught once a whale in Spitzbergen that
was white all over.” —A Voyage to Greenland, A.D. 1671. Harris Coll.
“Several whales have come in upon this coast (Fife) Anno 1652, one eighty feet
in length of the whale-bone kind came in, which (as I was informed), besides a
vast quantity of oil, did afford 500 weight of baleen. The jaws of it stand for
a gate in the garden of Pitferren.” —Sibbalds Fife and Kinross.
“Myself have agreed to try whether I can master and kill this Sperma-ceti whale,
for I could never hear of any of that sort that was killed by any man, such is
his fierceness and swiftness.” —Richard Straffords Letter from the Bermudas.
Phil. Trans. A.D. 1668.
“Whales in the sea Gods voice obey.” —N. E. Primer.
“We saw also abundance of large whales, there being more in those southern seas,
as I may say, by a hundred to one; than we have to the northward of us.”
—Captain Cowleys Voyage round the Globe, A.D. 1729.
“... and the breath of the whale is frequently attended with such an
insupportable smell, as to bring on a disorder of the brain.” —Ulloas South
America.
“To fifty chosen sylphs of special note, We trust the important charge, the
petticoat. Oft have we known that seven-fold fence to fail, Tho stuffed
with hoops and armed with ribs of whale.” —Rape of the Lock.
“If we compare land animals in respect to magnitude, with those that take up
their abode in the deep, we shall find they will appear contemptible in the
comparison. The whale is doubtless the largest animal in creation.” —Goldsmith,
Nat. Hist.
“If you should write a fable for little fishes, you would make them speak like
great whales.” —Goldsmith to Johnson.
“In the afternoon we saw what was supposed to be a rock, but it was found to be
a dead whale, which some Asiatics had killed, and were then towing ashore. They
seemed to endeavor to conceal themselves behind the whale, in order to avoid
being seen by us.” —Cooks Voyages.
“The larger whales, they seldom venture to attack. They stand in so great dread
of some of them, that when out at sea they are afraid to mention even their
names, and carry dung, lime-stone, juniper-wood, and some other articles of the
same nature in their boats, in order to terrify and prevent their too near
approach.” —Uno Von Troils Letters on Bankss and Solanders Voyage to Iceland
in 1772.
“The Spermacetti Whale found by the Nantuckois, is an active, fierce animal, and
requires vast address and boldness in the fishermen.” —Thomas Jeffersons Whale
Memorial to the French minister in 1778.
“And pray, sir, what in the world is equal to it?” —Edmund Burkes reference in
Parliament to the Nantucket Whale-Fishery.
“Spain—a great whale stranded on the shores of Europe.” —Edmund Burke.
(somewhere.)
“A tenth branch of the kings ordinary revenue, said to be grounded on the
consideration of his guarding and protecting the seas from pirates and robbers,
is the right to royal fish, which are whale and sturgeon. And these, when either
thrown ashore or caught near the coast, are the property of the king.”
—Blackstone.
“Soon to the sport of death the crews repair: Rodmond unerring oer his
head suspends The barbed steel, and every turn attends.” —Falconers
Shipwreck.
“Bright shone the roofs, the domes, the spires, And rockets blew self
driven, To hang their momentary fire Around the vault of heaven.
“So fire with water to compare, The ocean serves on high, Up-spouted by a
whale in air, To express unwieldy joy.” —Cowper, on the Queens Visit to
London.
“Ten or fifteen gallons of blood are thrown out of the heart at a stroke, with
immense velocity.” —John Hunters account of the dissection of a whale. (A small
sized one.)
“The aorta of a whale is larger in the bore than the main pipe of the
water-works at London Bridge, and the water roaring in its passage through that
pipe is inferior in impetus and velocity to the blood gushing from the whales
heart.” —Paleys Theology.
“The whale is a mammiferous animal without hind feet.” —Baron Cuvier.
“In 40 degrees south, we saw Spermacetti Whales, but did not take any till the
first of May, the sea being then covered with them.” —Colnetts Voyage for the
Purpose of Extending the 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: Gatherd in shoals immense, like floating
islands, Led by mysterious instincts through that waste And trackless
region, though on every side Assaulted by voracious enemies, Whales,
sharks, and monsters, armd in front or jaw, With swords, saws, spiral
horns, or hooked fangs.” —Montgomerys World before the Flood.
“Io! Paean! Io! sing. To the finny peoples king. Not a mightier whale
than this In the vast Atlantic is; Not a fatter fish than he, Flounders
round the Polar Sea.” —Charles Lambs Triumph of the Whale.
“In the year 1690 some persons were on a high hill observing the whales spouting
and sporting with each other, when one observed: there—pointing to the sea—is a
green pasture where our childrens grand-children will go for bread.” —Obed
Macys History of Nantucket.
“I built a cottage for Susan and myself and made a gateway in the form of a
Gothic Arch, by setting up a whales jaw bones.” —Hawthornes Twice Told Tales.
“She came to bespeak a monument for her first love, who had been killed by a
whale in the Pacific ocean, no less than forty years ago.” —Ibid.
“No, Sir, tis a Right Whale,” answered Tom; “I saw his sprout; he threw up a
pair of as pretty rainbows as a Christian would wish to look at. Hes a raal
oil-butt, that fellow!” —Coopers Pilot.
“The papers were brought in, and we saw in the Berlin Gazette that whales had
been introduced on the stage there.” —Eckermanns Conversations with Goethe.
“My God! Mr. Chace, what is the matter?” I answered, “we have been stove by a
whale.” —“Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Whale Ship Essex of Nantucket, which
was attacked and finally destroyed by a large Sperm Whale in the Pacific Ocean.”
By Owen Chace of Nantucket, first mate of said vessel. New York, 1821.
“A mariner sat in the shrouds one night, The wind was piping free; Now
bright, now dimmed, was the moonlight pale, And the phospher gleamed in the
wake of the whale, As it floundered in the sea.” —Elizabeth Oakes Smith.
“The quantity of line withdrawn from the boats engaged in the capture of this
one whale, amounted altogether to 10,440 yards or nearly six English miles....
“Sometimes the whale shakes its tremendous tail in the air, which, cracking like
a whip, resounds to the distance of three or four miles.” —Scoresby.
“Mad with the agonies he endures from these fresh attacks, the infuriated Sperm
Whale rolls over and over; he rears his enormous head, and with wide expanded
jaws snaps at everything around him; he rushes at the boats with his head; they
are propelled before him with vast swiftness, and sometimes utterly
destroyed.... It is a matter of great astonishment that the consideration of the
habits of so interesting, and, in a commercial point of view, so important an
animal (as the Sperm Whale) should have been so entirely neglected, or should
have excited so little curiosity among the numerous, and many of them competent
observers, that of late years, must have possessed the most abundant and the
most convenient opportunities of witnessing their habitudes.” —Thomas Beales
History of the Sperm Whale, 1839.
“The Cachalot” (Sperm Whale) “is not only better armed than the True Whale”
(Greenland or Right Whale) “in possessing a formidable weapon at either
extremity of its body, but also more frequently displays a disposition to employ
these weapons offensively and in manner at once so artful, bold, and
mischievous, as to lead to its being regarded as the most dangerous to attack of
all the known species of the whale tribe.” —Frederick Debell Bennetts Whaling
Voyage Round the Globe, 1840.
October 13. “There she blows,” was sung out from the mast-head. “Where
away?” demanded the captain. “Three points off the lee bow, sir.” “Raise
up your wheel. Steady!” “Steady, sir.” “Mast-head ahoy! Do you see that
whale now?” “Ay ay, sir! A shoal of Sperm Whales! There she blows!
There she breaches!” “Sing out! sing out every time!” “Ay Ay, sir! There
she blows! 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 Brownes Etchings of a Whaling Cruize. 1846.
“The Whale-ship Globe, on board of which vessel occurred the horrid transactions
we are about to relate, belonged to the island of Nantucket.” —“Narrative of the
Globe Mutiny,” by Lay and Hussey survivors. A.D. 1828.
Being once pursued by a whale which he had wounded, he parried the assault for
some time with a lance; but the furious monster at length rushed on the boat;
himself and comrades only being preserved by leaping into the water when they
saw the onset was inevitable.” —Missionary Journal of Tyerman and Bennett.
“Nantucket itself,” said Mr. Webster, “is a very striking and peculiar portion
of the National interest. There is a population of eight or nine thousand
persons living here in the sea, adding largely every year to the National wealth
by the boldest and most persevering industry.” —Report of Daniel Websters
Speech in the U. S. Senate, on the application for the Erection of a Breakwater
at Nantucket. 1828.
“The whale fell directly over him, and probably killed him in a moment.” —“The
Whale and his Captors, or The Whalemans Adventures and the Whales Biography,
gathered on the Homeward Cruise of the Commodore Preble.” By Rev. Henry T.
Cheever.
“If you make the least damn bit of noise,” replied Samuel, “I will send you to
hell.” —Life of Samuel Comstock (the mutineer), by his brother, William
Comstock. Another Version of the whale-ship Globe narrative.
“The voyages of the Dutch and English to the Northern Ocean, in order, if
possible, to discover a passage through it to India, though they failed of their
main object, laid-open the haunts of the whale.” —McCullochs Commercial
Dictionary.
“These things are reciprocal; the ball rebounds, only to bound forward again;
for now in laying open the haunts of the whale, the whalemen seem to have
indirectly hit upon new clews to that same mystic North-West Passage.” —From
“Something” unpublished.
“It is impossible to meet a whale-ship on the ocean without being struck by her
near appearance. The vessel under short sail, with look-outs at the mast-heads,
eagerly scanning the wide expanse around them, has a totally different air from
those engaged in regular voyage.” —Currents and Whaling. U.S. Ex. Ex.
“Pedestrians in the vicinity of London and elsewhere may recollect having seen
large curved bones set upright in the earth, either to form arches over
gateways, or entrances to alcoves, and they may perhaps have been told that
these were the ribs of whales.” —Tales of a Whale Voyager to the Arctic Ocean.
“It was not till the boats returned from the pursuit of these whales, that the
whites saw their ship in bloody possession of the savages enrolled among the
crew.” —Newspaper Account of the Taking and Retaking of the Whale-Ship Hobomack.
“It is generally well known that out of the crews of Whaling vessels (American)
few ever return in the ships on board of which they departed.” —Cruise in a
Whale Boat.
“Suddenly a mighty mass emerged from the water, and shot up perpendicularly into
the air. It was the whale.” —Miriam Coffin or the Whale Fisherman.
“The Whale is harpooned to be sure; but bethink you, how you would manage a
powerful unbroken colt, with the mere appliance of a rope tied to the root of
his tail.” —A Chapter on Whaling in Ribs and Trucks.
“On one occasion I saw two of these monsters (whales) probably male and female,
slowly swimming, one after the other, within less than a stones throw of the
shore” (Terra Del Fuego), “over which the beech tree extended its branches.”
—Darwins Voyage of a Naturalist.
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
peoples 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 shepherds head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherds 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—dont 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 ones
sense of honor, particularly if you come of an old established family in the
land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if
just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as
a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The
transition is a keen one, I assure you, from 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 aint 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 others shoulder-blades, and be
content.
Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me
for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever
heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the
difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is
perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed
upon us. But being paid,—what will compare with it? The urbane activity with
which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so
earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no
account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves
to perdition!
Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and
pure air of the 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 dont 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; dont you hear? get
away from before the door; your patched boots are stopping the way. So on I
went. I now by instinct followed the streets that took me waterward, for there,
doubtless, were the cheapest, if not the cheeriest inns.
Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand, and here
and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb. At this hour of the
night, of the last day of the week, that quarter of the town proved all but
deserted. But presently I came to a smoky light proceeding from a low, wide
building, the door of which stood invitingly open. It had a careless look, as if
it were meant for the uses of the public; so, entering, the first thing I did
was to stumble over an ash-box in the porch. Ha! thought I, ha, as the flying
particles almost choked me, are these ashes from that destroyed city, Gomorrah?
But “The Crossed Harpoons,” and “The Sword-Fish?”—this, then must needs be the
sign of “The Trap.” However, I picked myself up and hearing a loud voice within,
pushed on and opened a second, interior door.
It seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred black faces
turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a black Angel of Doom was
beating a book in a pulpit. It was a negro church; and the preachers text was
about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing
there. Ha, Ishmael, muttered I, backing out, Wretched entertainment at the sign
of The Trap!
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
Pauls tossed craft. Euroclydon, nevertheless, is a mighty pleasant zephyr to
any one in-doors, with his feet on the hob quietly toasting for bed. “In judging
of that tempestuous wind called Euroclydon,” says an old 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 didnt stop up the chinks and the crannies though, and thrust in a little
lint here and there. But its too late to make any improvements now. The
universe is finished; the copestone is on, and the chips were carted off a
million years ago. Poor Lazarus there, chattering his teeth against the
curbstone for his pillow, and shaking off his tatters with his shiverings, he
might plug up both ears with rags, and put a corn-cob into his mouth, and yet
that would not keep out the tempestuous Euroclydon. Euroclydon! says old Dives,
in his red silken wrapper—(he had a redder one afterwards) pooh, pooh! What a
fine frosty night; how Orion glitters; what northern lights! Let them talk of
their oriental summer climes of everlasting conservatories; give me the
privilege of making my own summer with my own coals.
But what thinks Lazarus? Can he warm his blue hands by holding them up to the
grand northern lights? Would not Lazarus rather be in Sumatra than here? Would
he not far rather lay him down lengthwise along the line of the equator; yea, ye
gods! go down to the fiery pit itself, in order to keep out this frost?
Now, that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before the door of
Dives, this is more wonderful than that an iceberg should be moored to one of
the Moluccas. Yet Dives himself, he too lives like a Czar in an ice palace made
of frozen sighs, and being a president of a temperance society, he only drinks
the tepid tears of orphans.
But no more of this blubbering now, we are going a-whaling, and there is plenty
of that yet to come. Let us scrape the ice from our frosted feet, and see what
sort of a place this “Spouter” may be.
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.—Its the Black Sea in a midnight gale.—Its the
unnatural combat of the four primal elements.—Its a blasted heath.—Its a
Hyperborean winter scene.—Its the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time.
But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the
pictures midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop;
does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great
leviathan himself?
In fact, the artists design seemed this: a final theory of my own, partly based
upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom I conversed upon the
subject. The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the
half-foundered ship weltering there with its three dismantled masts alone
visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is
in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads.
The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish array of
monstrous clubs and spears. Some were thickly set with glittering teeth
resembling ivory saws; others were tufted with knots of human hair; and one was
sickle-shaped, with a vast handle sweeping round like the segment made in the
new-mown grass by a long-armed mower. You shuddered as you gazed, and wondered
what monstrous cannibal and savage could ever have gone a death-harvesting with
such a hacking, horrifying implement. Mixed with these were rusty old whaling
lances and harpoons all broken and deformed. Some were storied weapons. With
this once long lance, now wildly elbowed, fifty years ago did Nathan Swain kill
fifteen whales between a sunrise and a sunset. And that 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 crafts cockpits, especially of such a howling night, when
this corner-anchored old ark rocked so furiously. On one side stood a long, low,
shelf-like table covered with cracked glass cases, filled with dusty rarities
gathered from this wide worlds remotest nooks. Projecting from the further
angle of the room stands a dark-looking den—the bar—a rude attempt at a right
whales head. Be that how it may, there stands the vast arched bone of the
whales jaw, so wide, a coach might almost drive beneath it. Within are shabby
shelves, ranged round with old decanters, bottles, flasks; and in those jaws of
swift destruction, like another cursed Jonah (by which name indeed they called
him), bustles a little withered old man, who, for their money, dearly sells the
sailors deliriums and death.
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 harpooneers
blanket, have ye? I spose you are goin a-whalin, so youd better get used to
that sort of thing.”
I told him that I never liked to sleep two in a bed; that if I should ever do
so, it would depend upon who the harpooneer might be, and that if he (the
landlord) really had no other place for me, and the harpooneer was not decidedly
objectionable, why rather than wander further about a strange town on so bitter
a night, I would put up with the half of any decent mans blanket.
“I thought so. All right; take a seat. Supper?—you want supper? Supperll be
ready directly.”
I sat down on an old wooden settle, carved all over like a bench on the Battery.
At one end a ruminating tar was still further adorning it with his jack-knife,
stooping over and diligently working away at the space between his legs. He was
trying his hand at a ship under full sail, but he didnt make much headway, I
thought.
At last some four or five of us were summoned to our meal in an adjoining room.
It was cold as Iceland—no fire at all—the landlord said he couldnt afford it.
Nothing but two dismal tallow candles, each in a winding sheet. We were fain to
button up our monkey jackets, and hold to our lips cups of scalding tea with our
half frozen fingers. But the fare was of the most substantial 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, “youll have the nightmare to a dead sartainty.”
“Landlord,” I whispered, “that aint the harpooneer is it?”
“Oh, no,” said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny, “the harpooneer is a
dark complexioned chap. He never eats dumplings, he dont—he eats nothing but
steaks, and he likes em rare.”
“The devil he does,” says I. “Where is that harpooneer? Is he here?”
“Hell be here afore long,” was the answer.
I could not help it, but I began to feel suspicious of this “dark complexioned”
harpooneer. At any rate, I made up my mind that if it so turned out that we
should sleep together, he must undress and get into bed before I did.
Supper over, the company went back to the bar-room, when, knowing not what else
to do with myself, I resolved to spend the rest of the evening as a looker on.
Presently a rioting noise was heard without. Starting up, the landlord cried,
“Thats the Grampuss crew. I seed her reported in the offing this morning; a
three years voyage, and a full ship. Hurrah, boys; now well have the latest
news from the Feegees.”
A tramping of sea boots was heard in the entry; the door was flung open, and in
rolled a wild set of mariners enough. Enveloped in their shaggy watch coats, and
with their heads muffled in woollen comforters, all bedarned and ragged, and
their beards stiff with icicles, they seemed an eruption of bears from Labrador.
They had just landed from their boat, and this was the first house they entered.
No wonder, then, that they made a straight wake for the whales 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! wheres Bulkington?” and darted out of the house in
pursuit of him.
It was now about nine oclock, and the room seeming almost supernaturally quiet
after these orgies, I began to congratulate myself upon a little plan that had
occurred to me just previous to the entrance of the seamen.
No man prefers to sleep two in a bed. In fact, you would a good deal rather not
sleep with your own brother. I dont know how it is, but people like to be
private when they are sleeping. And when it comes to sleeping with an unknown
stranger, in a strange inn, in a strange town, and that stranger a harpooneer,
then your objections indefinitely multiply. Nor was there any earthly reason why
I as a sailor should sleep two in a bed, more than anybody else; for sailors no
more sleep two in a bed at sea, than bachelor Kings do ashore. To be sure they
all sleep together in one apartment, but you have your own hammock, and cover
yourself with your own blanket, and sleep in your own skin.
The more I pondered over this harpooneer, the more I abominated the thought of
sleeping with him. It was fair to presume that being a harpooneer, his linen or
woollen, as the case might be, would not be of the tidiest, certainly none of
the finest. I began to twitch all over. Besides, it was getting late, and my
decent harpooneer ought to be home and going bedwards. Suppose now, he should
tumble in upon me at midnight—how could I tell from what vile hole he had been
coming?
“Landlord! Ive changed my mind about that harpooneer.—I shant sleep with him.
Ill try the bench here.”
“Just as you please; Im sorry I cant spare ye a tablecloth for a mattress, and
its a plaguy rough board here”—feeling of the knots and notches. “But wait a
bit, Skrimshander; Ive got a carpenters plane there in the bar—wait, I say,
and Ill make ye snug enough.” So saying he procured the plane; and with his old
silk handkerchief first dusting the bench, vigorously set to planing away at my
bed, the while grinning like an ape. The shavings flew right and left; till at
last the plane-iron came bump against an indestructible knot. The landlord was
near spraining his wrist, and I told him for heavens sake to 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, couldnt 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 persons bed, I began to think that after
all I might be cherishing unwarrantable prejudices against this unknown
harpooneer. Thinks I, Ill wait awhile; he must be dropping in before long. Ill
have a good look at him then, and perhaps we may become jolly good bedfellows
after all—theres 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 oclock.
The landlord chuckled again with his lean chuckle, and seemed to be mightily
tickled at something beyond my comprehension. “No,” he answered, “generally hes
an early bird—airley to bed and airley to rise—yes, hes the bird what catches
the worm. But to-night he went out a peddling, you see, and I dont see what on
airth keeps him so late, unless, may be, he cant sell his head.”
“Cant sell his head?—What sort of a bamboozingly story is this you are telling
me?” getting into a towering rage. “Do you pretend to say, landlord, that this
harpooneer is actually engaged this blessed Saturday night, or rather Sunday
morning, in peddling his head around this town?”
“Thats precisely it,” said the landlord, “and I told him he couldnt sell it
here, the markets overstocked.”
“With what?” shouted I.
“With heads to be sure; aint there too many heads in the world?”
“I tell you what it is, landlord,” said I quite calmly, “youd better stop
spinning that yarn to me—Im not green.”
“May be not,” taking out a stick and whittling a toothpick, “but I rayther guess
youll be done brown if that ere harpooneer hears you a slanderin his head.”
“Ill break it for him,” said I, now flying into a passion again at this
unaccountable farrago of the landlords.
“Its broke aready,” said he.
“Broke,” said I—“broke, do you mean?”
“Sartain, and thats the very reason he cant sell it, I guess.”
“Landlord,” said I, going up to him as cool as Mt. Hecla in a
snow-storm—“landlord, stop whittling. You and I must understand one another, and
that too without delay. I come to your house and want a bed; you tell me you can
only give me half a one; that the other half belongs to a certain harpooneer.
And about this harpooneer, whom I have not yet seen, you persist in telling me
the most mystifying and exasperating stories tending to beget in me an
uncomfortable feeling towards the man whom you design for my 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 Ive no idea of sleeping with a madman; and you,
sir, you I mean, landlord, you, sir, by trying to induce me to do so knowingly,
would thereby render yourself liable to a criminal prosecution.”
“Wall,” said the landlord, fetching a long breath, “thats a purty long sarmon
for a chap that rips a little now and then. But be easy, be easy, this here
harpooneer I have been tellin you of has just arrived from the south seas,
where he bought up a lot of balmed New Zealand heads (great curios, you know),
and hes sold all on em but one, and that one hes trying to sell to-night,
cause to-morrows Sunday, and it would not do to be sellin human heads about
the streets when folks is goin to churches. He wanted to, last Sunday, but I
stopped him just as he was goin out of the door with four heads strung on a
string, for all the airth like a string of inions.”
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 reglar,” was the rejoinder. “But come, its getting dreadful late, you
had better be turning flukes—its a nice bed; Sal and me slept in that ere bed
the night we were spliced. Theres plenty of room for two to kick about in that
bed; its an almighty big bed that. Why, afore we give it up, Sal used to put
our Sam and little Johnny in the foot of it. But I got a dreaming and sprawling
about one night, and somehow, Sam got pitched on the floor, and came near
breaking his arm. Arter that, Sal said it wouldnt do. Come along here, Ill
give ye a glim in a jiffy;” and so saying he lighted a candle and held it
towards me, offering to lead the way. But I stood irresolute; when looking at a
clock in the corner, he exclaimed “I vum its Sunday—you wont see that
harpooneer to-night; hes come to anchor somewhere—come along then; do come;
wont ye come?”
I considered the matter a moment, and then up stairs we went, and I was ushered
into a small room, cold as a clam, and furnished, sure enough, with a prodigious
bed, almost big enough indeed for any four harpooneers to sleep abreast.
“There,” said the landlord, placing the candle on a crazy old sea chest that did
double duty as a wash-stand and centre table; “there, make yourself comfortable
now, and good night to ye.” I turned round from eyeing the bed, but he had
disappeared.
Folding back the counterpane, I stooped over the bed. Though none of the most
elegant, it yet stood the scrutiny tolerably well. I then glanced round the
room; and besides the bedstead and centre table, could see no other furniture
belonging to the place, but a rude shelf, the four walls, and a papered
fireboard representing a man striking a whale. Of things not properly belonging
to the room, there was a hammock lashed up, and thrown upon the floor in one
corner; also a large seamans bag, containing the harpooneers wardrobe, no
doubt in lieu of a land trunk. Likewise, there was a parcel of outlandish bone
fish hooks on the shelf over the fire-place, and a tall harpoon standing at the
head of the bed.
But what is this on the chest? I took it up, and held it close to the light, and
felt it, and smelt it, and tried every way possible to arrive at some
satisfactory conclusion concerning it. I can compare it to nothing but a large
door mat, ornamented at the edges with little tinkling tags something like the
stained porcupine quills round an Indian moccasin. There was a hole or slit in
the middle of this mat, as you see the same in South American ponchos. But could
it be possible that any sober harpooneer would get into a door mat, and parade
the streets of any Christian town in that sort of guise? I put it on, to try it,
and it weighed me down like a hamper, being uncommonly shaggy and thick, and I
thought a little damp, as though this mysterious harpooneer had been wearing it
of a rainy day. I went up in it to a bit of glass stuck against the wall, and I
never saw such a sight in my life. I tore myself out of it in such a hurry that
I gave myself a kink in the neck.
I sat down on the side of the bed, and commenced thinking about this
head-peddling harpooneer, and his door mat. After thinking some time on the
bed-side, I got up and took off my monkey jacket, and then stood in the middle
of the room thinking. I then took off my coat, and thought a little more in my
shirt sleeves. But beginning to feel very cold now, half undressed as I was, and
remembering what the landlord said about the harpooneers not coming home at all
that night, it being so very late, I made no more ado, but jumped out of my
pantaloons and boots, and then blowing out the light tumbled into bed, and
commended myself to the care of heaven.
Whether that mattress was stuffed with corn-cobs or broken crockery, there is no
telling, but I rolled about a good deal, and could not sleep for a long time. At
last I slid off into a light doze, and had pretty nearly made a good offing
towards the land of Nod, when I heard a heavy footfall in the passage, and saw a
glimmer of light come into the room from under the door.
Lord save me, thinks I, that must be the harpooneer, the infernal head-peddler.
But I lay perfectly still, and resolved not to say a word till spoken to.
Holding a light in one hand, and that identical New Zealand head in the other,
the stranger entered the room, and without looking towards the bed, placed his
candle a good way off from me on the floor in one corner, and then began working
away at the knotted cords of the large bag I before spoke of as being in the
room. I was all eagerness to see his face, but he kept it averted for some time
while employed in unlacing the bags mouth. This accomplished, however, he
turned 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, its just as I thought, hes a terrible bedfellow; hes been in a
fight, got dreadfully cut, and here he is, just from the surgeon. But at that
moment he chanced to turn his face so towards the light, that I plainly saw they
could not be sticking-plasters at all, those black squares on his cheeks. They
were stains of some sort or other. At first I knew not what to make of this; but
soon an inkling of the truth occurred to me. I remembered a story of a white
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! Its
only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin. But then, what to
make of his unearthly complexion, that part of it, I mean, lying round about,
and completely independent of the squares of tattooing. To be sure, it might be
nothing but a good coat of tropical tanning; but I never heard of a hot suns
tanning a white man into a purplish yellow one. However, I had never been in the
South Seas; and perhaps the sun there produced these extraordinary effects upon
the skin. Now, while all these ideas were passing through me like lightning,
this harpooneer never noticed me at all. But, after some difficulty having
opened his bag, he commenced fumbling in it, and presently pulled out a sort of
tomahawk, and a seal-skin wallet with the hair on. Placing these on the old
chest in the middle of the room, he then took the New Zealand 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 Gods sake, Peter Coffin!” shouted I. “Landlord! Watch! Coffin!
Angels! save me!”
“Speak-e! tell-ee me who-ee be, or dam-me, I kill-e!” again growled the
cannibal, while his horrid flourishings of the tomahawk scattered the hot
tobacco ashes about me till I thought my linen would get on fire. But thank
heaven, at that moment the landlord came into the room light in hand, and
leaping from the bed I ran up to him.
“Dont be afraid now,” said he, grinning again, “Queequeg here wouldnt harm a
hair of your head.”
“Stop your grinning,” shouted I, “and why didnt you tell me that that infernal
harpooneer was a cannibal?”
“I thought ye knowd it;—didnt I tell ye, he was 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. Whats all this fuss I have
been making about, thought I to myself—the mans 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 dont fancy having a man smoking in bed with me. Its dangerous. Besides,
I aint 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 wont 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 Queequegs 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 oclock 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 Queequegs pagan arm thrown round me. But at
length all the past nights 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 savages 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 dont 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 Rogerss best cutlery with a
vengeance. Afterwards I wondered the less at this operation when I came to know
of what fine steel the head of a harpoon is made, and how exceedingly sharp the
long straight edges are always kept.
The rest of his toilet was soon achieved, and he proudly marched out of the
room, wrapped up in his great pilot monkey jacket, and sporting his harpoon like
a marshals baton.
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 mores the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford
stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him
cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way. And the man that has
anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than
you perhaps think for.
The bar-room was now full of the boarders who had been dropping in the night
previous, and whom I had not as yet had a good look at. They were nearly all
whalemen; chief mates, and second mates, and third mates, and sea carpenters,
and sea coopers, and sea blacksmiths, and harpooneers, and ship keepers; a brown
and brawny company, with bosky beards; an unshorn, shaggy set, all wearing
monkey jackets for morning gowns.
You could pretty plainly tell how long each one had been ashore. This young
fellows healthy cheek is like a sun-toasted pear in hue, and would seem to
smell almost as musky; he cannot have been three days landed from his Indian
voyage. That man next him looks a few shades lighter; you might say a touch of
satin wood is in him. In the complexion of a third still lingers a tropic tawn,
but slightly bleached withal; he doubtless has tarried whole weeks ashore. But
who could show a cheek like Queequeg? which, barred with various tints, seemed
like the Andes western slope, to show forth in one array, contrasting climates,
zone by zone.
“Grub, ho!” now cried the landlord, flinging open a door, and in we went to
breakfast.
They say that men who have seen the world, thereby become quite at ease in
manner, quite self-possessed in company. Not always, though: Ledyard, the great
New England traveller, and Mungo Park, the Scotch one; of all men, they
possessed the least assurance in the parlor. But perhaps the mere crossing of
Siberia in a sledge drawn by dogs as Ledyard did, or the taking a long solitary
walk on an empty stomach, in the negro heart of Africa, which was the sum of
poor Mungos 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 peoples estimation, to do anything coolly
is to do it genteelly.
We will not speak of all Queequegs peculiarities here; how he eschewed coffee
and hot rolls, and applied his undivided attention to beefsteaks, done rare.
Enough, that when breakfast was over he withdrew like the rest into the public
room, lighted his tomahawk-pipe, and was sitting there quietly digesting and
smoking with his inseparable hat on, when I sallied out for a stroll.
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 creations final day.
And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses. But roses
only bloom in summer; whereas the fine carnation of their cheeks is perennial as
sunlight in the seventh heavens. Elsewhere match that bloom of theirs, ye
cannot, save in Salem, where they tell me the young girls breathe such musk,
their sailor sweethearts smell them miles off shore, as though they were drawing
nigh the odorous Moluccas instead of the Puritanic sands.
CHAPTER 7. The Chapel.
In this same New Bedford there stands a Whalemans 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 Februarys snow. No one having previously heard his history,
could for the first time behold Father Mapple without the utmost interest,
because there were certain engrafted clerical peculiarities about him, imputable
to that adventurous maritime life he had led. When he entered I observed that he
carried no umbrella, and certainly had not come in his carriage, for his
tarpaulin hat ran down with melting sleet, and his great pilot cloth jacket
seemed almost to drag him to the floor with the weight of the water it had
absorbed. However, hat and coat and overshoes were one by one removed, and hung
up in a little space in an adjacent corner; when, arrayed in a decent suit, he
quietly approached the pulpit.
Like most old fashioned pulpits, it was a very lofty one, and since a regular
stairs to such a height would, by its long angle with the floor, seriously
contract the already small area of the chapel, the architect, it seemed, had
acted upon the hint of Father Mapple, and finished the pulpit without a stairs,
substituting a perpendicular side ladder, like those used in mounting a ship
from a boat at sea. The wife of a whaling captain had provided the chapel with a
handsome pair of red worsted man-ropes for this ladder, which, being itself
nicely headed, and stained with a mahogany 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 chaplains former sea-farings. Between the marble cenotaphs on either hand
of the pulpit, the wall which formed its back was adorned with a large painting
representing a gallant ship beating against a terrible storm off a lee coast of
black rocks and snowy breakers. But high above the flying scud and dark-rolling
clouds, there floated a little isle of sunlight, from which beamed forth an
angels face; and this bright face shed a distinct spot of radiance upon the
ships tossed deck, something like that silver plate now inserted into the
Victorys plank where Nelson fell. “Ah, noble ship,” the angel seemed to say,
“beat on, beat on, thou noble ship, and bear a hardy helm; for lo! the sun is
breaking through; the clouds are rolling 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
ships bluff bows, and the Holy Bible rested on a projecting piece of scroll
work, fashioned after a ships fiddle-headed beak.
What could be more full of meaning?—for the pulpit is ever this earths foremost
part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world. From thence it
is the storm of Gods 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 worlds 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 womens shoes, and all was quiet again, and every eye on
the preacher.
He paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpits 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 Gods 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 Jonahs deep sealine sound! what a pregnant lesson to us is this
prophet! What a noble thing is that canticle in the fishs 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 thats 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. Thats 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 hes 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 strangers
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, hes robbed a widow;” or, “Joe, do you mark him;
hes a bigamist;” or, “Harry lad, I guess hes the adulterer that broke jail in
old Gomorrah, or belike, one of the missing murderers from Sodom.” Another runs
to read the bill thats 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.
Whos there? cries the Captain at his busy desk, hurriedly making out his
papers for the Customs—Whos 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, thats another stab. But he swiftly calls away the
Captain from that scent. Ill sail with ye,—he says,—the passage money how
much is that?—Ill 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 Jonahs 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 Jonahs Captain prepares to test
the length of Jonahs purse, ere he judge him openly. He charges him thrice the
usual sum; and its 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, Im travel-weary; I need sleep. Thou
lookest like it, says the Captain, theres 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 ships 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
Jonahs 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 theres naught to staunch it; so, after sore
wrestlings in his berth, Jonahs 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 Jonahs 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 Jonahs;
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 fishs 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 Jonahs
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
oceans 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 Almightys 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 worlds, or mine own. Yet this
is nothing: I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out
the lifetime of his God?”
He said no more, but slowly waving a benediction, covered his face with his
hands, and so remained kneeling, till all the people had departed, and he was
left alone in the place.
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 Washingtons 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. Ill 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 nights 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 Pagans breast,
this pleasant, genial smoke we had, soon thawed it out, and left us cronies. He
seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our
smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the
waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his countrys
phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should
be. In a countryman, this sudden flame of friendship would have seemed far too
premature, a thing to be much distrusted; but in this simple savage those old
rules would not apply.
After supper, and another social chat and smoke, we went to our room together.
He made me a present of his embalmed head; took out his enormous tobacco wallet,
and groping under the tobacco, drew out some thirty dollars in silver; then
spreading them on the table, and mechanically dividing them into two equal
portions, pushed one of them towards me, and said it was mine. I was going to
remonstrate; but he silenced me by pouring them into my trowsers pockets. I let
them stay. He then went about his evening prayers, took out his idol, and
removed the paper fireboard. By certain signs and symptoms, I thought he seemed
anxious for me to join him; but well knowing what was to follow, I deliberated a
moment whether, in case he invited me, I would comply or otherwise.
I was a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible
Presbyterian Church. How then could I unite with this wild idolator in
worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship? thought I. Do you suppose
now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and 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-oclock-at-night, I experienced a disagreeable revulsion.
Nor did I at all object to the hint from Queequeg that perhaps it were best to
strike a light, seeing that we were so wide awake; and besides he felt a strong
desire to have a few quiet puffs from his Tomahawk. Be it said, that though I
had felt such a strong repugnance to his smoking in the bed the night before,
yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them.
For now I liked nothing better than to have Queequeg smoking by me, even in bed,
because he seemed to be full of such serene household joy then. I no more felt
unduly concerned for the landlords policy of insurance. I was only alive to the
condensed confidential comfortableness of sharing a pipe and a blanket with a
real friend. With our shaggy jackets drawn about our shoulders, we now passed
the Tomahawk from one to the other, till slowly there grew over us a blue
hanging tester of smoke, illuminated by the flame of the new-lit lamp.
Whether it was that this undulating tester rolled the savage away to far distant
scenes, I know not, but he now spoke of his native island; and, eager to hear
his history, I begged him to go on and tell it. He gladly complied. Though at
the time I but ill comprehended not a few of his words, yet subsequent
disclosures, when I had become more familiar with his broken phraseology, now
enable me to present the whole story such as it may prove in the mere skeleton I
give.
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 Queequegs ambitious soul, lurked a strong desire to see something more of
Christendom than a specimen whaler or two. His father was a High Chief, a King;
his uncle a High Priest; and on the maternal side he boasted aunts who were the
wives of unconquerable warriors. There was excellent blood in his veins—royal
stuff; though sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal propensity he nourished in
his untutored youth.
A Sag Harbor ship visited his fathers bay, and Queequeg sought a passage to
Christian lands. But the ship, having her full complement of seamen, spurned his
suit; and not all the King his fathers influence could prevail. But Queequeg
vowed a vow. Alone in his canoe, he paddled off to a distant strait, which he
knew the ship must pass through when she quitted the island. On one side was a
coral reef; on the other a low tongue of land, covered with mangrove thickets
that grew out into the water. Hiding his canoe, still afloat, among these
thickets, with its prow seaward, he sat down in the stern, paddle low in hand;
and when the ship was gliding by, like a flash he darted out; gained her side;
with one backward dash of his foot capsized and sank his canoe; climbed up the
chains; and throwing himself at full length upon the deck, grappled a 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 Captains cabin.
They put him down among the sailors, and made a whaleman of him. But like Czar
Peter content to toil in the shipyards of foreign cities, Queequeg disdained no
seeming ignominy, if thereby he might happily gain the power of enlightening his
untutored countrymen. For at 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 fathers heathens.
Arrived at last in old Sag Harbor; and seeing what the sailors did there; and
then going on to Nantucket, and seeing how they spent their wages in that place
also, poor Queequeg gave it up for lost. Thought he, its a wicked world in all
meridians; Ill die a pagan.
And thus an old idolator at heart, he yet lived among these Christians, wore
their clothes, and tried to talk their gibberish. Hence the queer ways about
him, though now some time from home.
By hints, I asked him whether he did not propose going back, and having a
coronation; since he might now consider his father dead and gone, he being very
old and feeble at the last accounts. He answered no, not yet; and added that he
was fearful Christianity, or rather Christians, had unfitted him for ascending
the pure and undefiled throne of thirty pagan Kings before him. But by and by,
he said, he would return,—as soon as he felt himself baptized again. For the
nonce, however, he proposed to sail about, and sow his wild oats in all four
oceans. They had made a harpooneer of him, and that barbed iron was in lieu of a
sceptre now.
I asked him what might be his immediate purpose, touching his future movements.
He answered, to go to sea again, in his old vocation. Upon this, I told him that
whaling was my own design, and informed him of my intention to sail out of
Nantucket, as being the most promising port for an adventurous whaleman to
embark from. He at once resolved to accompany me to that island, ship aboard the
same vessel, get into the same watch, the same boat, the same mess with me, in
short to share my every hap; with both my hands in his, boldly dip into the
Potluck of both worlds. To all this I joyously assented; for besides the
affection I now felt for Queequeg, he was an experienced harpooneer, and as
such, could not fail to be of great usefulness to one, who, like me, was wholly
ignorant of the mysteries of whaling, though well acquainted with the sea, as
known to merchant seamen.
His story being ended with his pipes 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 comrades bill; using, however, my comrades money.
The grinning landlord, as well as the boarders, seemed amazingly tickled at the
sudden friendship which had sprung up between me and Queequeg—especially as
Peter Coffins cock and bull stories about him had previously so much alarmed me
concerning the very person whom I now companied with.
We borrowed a wheelbarrow, and embarking our things, including my own poor
carpet-bag, and Queequegs canvas sack and hammock, away we went down to “the
Moss,” the little Nantucket packet schooner moored at the wharf. As we were
going along the people stared; not at Queequeg so 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. Didnt the people laugh?”
Upon this, he told me another story. The people of his island of Rokovoko, it
seems, at their wedding feasts express the fragrant water of young cocoanuts
into a large stained calabash like a punchbowl; and this punchbowl always forms
the great central ornament on the braided mat where the feast is held. Now a
certain grand merchant ship once touched at Rokovoko, and its commander—from all
accounts, a very stately punctilious gentleman, at least for a sea captain—this
commander was invited to the wedding feast of Queequegs sister, a pretty young
princess just turned of ten. Well; when all the wedding guests were assembled at
the brides bamboo cottage, this Captain marches in, and being assigned the post
of honor, placed himself over against the punchbowl, and between the High Priest
and his majesty the King, Queequegs father. Grace being said,—for those people
have their grace as well as 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 Kings 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?—Didnt our
people laugh?”
At last, passage paid, and luggage safe, we stood on board the schooner.
Hoisting sail, it glided down the Acushnet river. On one side, New Bedford rose
in terraces of streets, their ice-covered trees all glittering in the clear,
cold air. Huge hills and mountains of casks on casks were piled upon her
wharves, and side by side the world-wandering whale ships lay silent and safely
moored at last; while from others came a sound of carpenters and coopers, with
blended noises of fires and forges to melt the pitch, all betokening that new
cruises were on the start; that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only
begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever
and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly
effort.
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 bumpkins hour of doom was come. Dropping his harpoon, the
brawny savage caught him in his arms, and by an almost miraculous dexterity and
strength, sent him high up bodily into the air; then slightly tapping his stern
in mid-somerset, the fellow landed with bursting lungs upon his feet, while
Queequeg, turning his back upon him, lighted his tomahawk pipe and passed it to
me for a puff.
“Capting! Capting!” yelled the bumpkin, running towards that officer; “Capting,
Capting, heres the devil.”
“Hallo, you sir,” cried the Captain, a gaunt rib of the sea, stalking up to
Queequeg, “what in thunder do you mean by that? Dont you know you might have
killed that chap?”
“What him say?” said Queequeg, as he mildly turned to me.
“He say,” said I, “that you came near kill-e that man there,” pointing to the
still shivering greenhorn.
“Kill-e,” cried Queequeg, twisting his tattooed face into an unearthly
expression of disdain, “ah! him bevy small-e fish-e; Queequeg no kill-e so
small-e fish-e; Queequeg kill-e big whale!”
“Look you,” roared the Captain, “Ill kill-e you, you cannibal, if you try any
more of your tricks aboard here; so mind your eye.”
But it so happened just then, that it was high time for the Captain to mind his
own eye. The prodigious strain upon the main-sail had parted the weather-sheet,
and the tremendous boom was now flying from side to side, completely sweeping
the entire after part of the deck. The poor fellow whom Queequeg had handled so
roughly, was swept overboard; all hands were in a panic; and to attempt
snatching at the boom to stay it, seemed madness. It flew from right to left,
and back again, almost in one ticking of a watch, and every instant seemed on
the point of snapping into splinters. Nothing was done, and nothing seemed
capable of being done; those on deck rushed towards the bows, and stood eyeing
the boom as if it were the lower jaw of an exasperated whale. In the midst of
this consternation, Queequeg dropped deftly to his knees, and crawling under the
path of the boom, whipped hold of a rope, secured one end to the bulwarks, and
then flinging the other like a lasso, caught it round the boom as it swept over
his head, and at the next jerk, the spar was that way trapped, and all was safe.
The schooner was run into the wind, and while the hands were clearing away the
stern boat, Queequeg, stripped to the waist, darted from the side with a long
living arc of a leap. For three minutes or more he was seen swimming like a dog,
throwing his long arms straight out before him, and by turns revealing his
brawny shoulders through the freezing foam. I looked at the grand and glorious
fellow, but saw no one to be saved. The greenhorn had gone down. Shooting
himself perpendicularly from the water, Queequeg, now took an instants glance
around him, and seeming to see just how matters were, dived down and
disappeared. A few minutes more, and he rose again, one arm still striking out,
and with the other dragging a lifeless form. The boat soon picked them up. The
poor bumpkin was restored. All hands voted Queequeg a noble trump; the captain
begged his pardon. From that hour I clove to Queequeg like a barnacle; yea, till
poor Queequeg took his last long dive.
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—“Its 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 dont grow naturally; that they import Canada
thistles; that they have to send beyond seas for a spile to stop a leak in an
oil cask; that pieces of wood in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the
true cross in Rome; that people there plant toadstools before their houses, to
get under the shade in summer time; that one blade of grass makes an oasis,
three blades in a days walk a prairie; that they wear quicksand shoes,
something like Laplander 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 Indians skeleton.
What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should take to the
sea for a livelihood! They first caught crabs and quohogs in the sand; grown
bolder, they waded out with nets for mackerel; more experienced, they pushed off
in boats and captured cod; and at last, launching a navy of great ships on the
sea, explored this watery world; put an incessant belt of circumnavigations
round it; peeped in at Behrings Straits; and in all seasons and all oceans
declared everlasting war with the mightiest animated mass that has survived the
flood; most monstrous and most mountainous! That Himmalehan, salt-sea Mastodon,
clothed with such portentousness of unconscious power, that his very panics are
more to be dreaded than his most fearless and malicious assaults!
And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their
ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many
Alexanders; parcelling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans,
as the three pirate powers did Poland. Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile
Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their
blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the
Nantucketers. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires; other
seamen having but a right of way through it. Merchant ships are but extension
bridges; armed ones but floating forts; even pirates and privateers, though
following the sea as highwaymen the road, they but plunder other ships, other
fragments of the land like themselves, without seeking to draw their living from
the bottomless deep itself. The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the
sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing
it as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business,
which a Noahs flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions
in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among
the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows
not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world,
more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull, that
at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at
nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him
to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.
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. Its
ominous, thinks I. A Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my first whaling port;
tombstones staring at me in the whalemens chapel; and here a gallows! and a
pair of prodigious black pots too! Are these last throwing out oblique hints
touching Tophet?
I was called from these reflections by the sight of a freckled woman with yellow
hair and a yellow gown, standing in the porch of the inn, under a dull red lamp
swinging there, that looked much like an injured eye, and carrying on a brisk
scolding with a man in a purple woollen shirt.
“Get along with ye,” said she to the man, “or Ill be combing ye!”