20524 lines
1.2 MiB
20524 lines
1.2 MiB
|
||
MD GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
|
||
Version 01, 18 October 1851
|
||
|
||
Copyright 2023 Stef Dunlap <kindrobot@tilde.team>
|
||
|
||
1. Permissions
|
||
|
||
Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose
|
||
with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice
|
||
and this permission notice appear in all copies.
|
||
|
||
2. Warranty
|
||
|
||
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES WITH
|
||
REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND
|
||
FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT,
|
||
INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS
|
||
OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER
|
||
TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF
|
||
THIS SOFTWARE.
|
||
|
||
3. Moby-Dick, or the Whale, by Herman Melville
|
||
|
||
CONTENTS
|
||
|
||
|
||
ETYMOLOGY.
|
||
|
||
EXTRACTS (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian).
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 1. Loomings.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 2. The Carpet-Bag.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 3. The Spouter-Inn.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 4. The Counterpane.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 5. Breakfast.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 6. The Street.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 7. The Chapel.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 8. The Pulpit.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 9. The Sermon.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 10. A Bosom Friend.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 11. Nightgown.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 12. Biographical.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 13. Wheelbarrow.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 14. Nantucket.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 15. Chowder.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 16. The Ship.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 17. The Ramadan.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 18. His Mark.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 19. The Prophet.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 20. All Astir.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 21. Going Aboard.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 22. Merry Christmas.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 23. The Lee Shore.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 24. The Advocate.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 25. Postscript.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 26. Knights and Squires.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 27. Knights and Squires.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 28. Ahab.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 29. Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 30. The Pipe.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 31. Queen Mab.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 32. Cetology.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 33. The Specksnyder.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 34. The Cabin-Table.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 35. The Mast-Head.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 36. The Quarter-Deck.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 37. Sunset.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 38. Dusk.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 39. First Night-Watch.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 40. Midnight, Forecastle.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 41. Moby Dick.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of the Whale.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 43. Hark!
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 44. The Chart.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 45. The Affidavit.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 46. Surmises.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 47. The Mat-Maker.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 48. The First Lowering.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 49. The Hyena.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 50. Ahab’s Boat and Crew. Fedallah.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 51. The Spirit-Spout.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 52. The Albatross.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 53. The Gam.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 54. The Town-Ho’s Story.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 55. Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 56. Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True Pictures
|
||
of Whaling Scenes.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 57. Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone;
|
||
in Mountains; in Stars.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 58. Brit.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 59. Squid.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 60. The Line.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 61. Stubb Kills a Whale.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 62. The Dart.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 63. The Crotch.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 64. Stubb’s Supper.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 65. The Whale as a Dish.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 66. The Shark Massacre.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 67. Cutting In.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 68. The Blanket.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 69. The Funeral.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 70. The Sphynx.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 71. The Jeroboam’s Story.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 72. The Monkey-Rope.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 73. Stubb and Flask kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk over
|
||
Him.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 74. The Sperm Whale’s Head—Contrasted View.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 75. The Right Whale’s Head—Contrasted View.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 76. The Battering-Ram.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 77. The Great Heidelburgh Tun.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 78. Cistern and Buckets.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 79. The Prairie.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 80. The Nut.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 81. The Pequod Meets The Virgin.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 82. The Honor and Glory of Whaling.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 83. Jonah Historically Regarded.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 84. Pitchpoling.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 85. The Fountain.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 86. The Tail.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 87. The Grand Armada.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 88. Schools and Schoolmasters.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 89. Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 90. Heads or Tails.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 91. The Pequod Meets The Rose-Bud.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 92. Ambergris.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 93. The Castaway.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 94. A Squeeze of the Hand.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 95. The Cassock.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 96. The Try-Works.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 97. The Lamp.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 98. Stowing Down and Clearing Up.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 99. The Doubloon.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 100. Leg and Arm.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 101. The Decanter.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 102. A Bower in the Arsacides.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 103. Measurement of The Whale’s Skeleton.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 104. The Fossil Whale.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 105. Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish?—Will He Perish?
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 106. Ahab’s Leg.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 107. The Carpenter.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 108. Ahab and the Carpenter.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 109. Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 110. Queequeg in His Coffin.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 111. The Pacific.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 112. The Blacksmith.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 113. The Forge.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 114. The Gilder.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 115. The Pequod Meets The Bachelor.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 116. The Dying Whale.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 117. The Whale Watch.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 118. The Quadrant.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 119. The Candles.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 120. The Deck Towards the End of the First Night Watch.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 121. Midnight.—The Forecastle Bulwarks.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 122. Midnight Aloft.—Thunder and Lightning.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 123. The Musket.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 124. The Needle.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 125. The Log and Line.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 126. The Life-Buoy.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 127. The Deck.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 128. The Pequod Meets The Rachel.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 129. The Cabin.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 130. The Hat.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 131. The Pequod Meets The Delight.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 132. The Symphony.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 133. The Chase—First Day.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 134. The Chase—Second Day.
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 135. The Chase.—Third Day.
|
||
|
||
Epilogue
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Original Transcriber’s Notes:
|
||
|
||
This text is a combination of etexts, one from the now-defunct ERIS project at
|
||
Virginia Tech and one from Project Gutenberg’s archives. The proofreaders of
|
||
this version are indebted to The University of Adelaide Library for preserving
|
||
the Virginia Tech version. The resulting etext was compared with a public domain
|
||
hard copy version of the text.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
ETYMOLOGY. (Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School.)
|
||
|
||
The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was
|
||
ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly
|
||
embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He
|
||
loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.
|
||
|
||
“While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what name a
|
||
whale-fish is to be called in our tongue, leaving out, through ignorance, the
|
||
letter H, which almost alone maketh up the signification of the word, you
|
||
deliver that which is not true.” —Hackluyt.
|
||
|
||
“WHALE. * * * Sw. and Dan. hval. This animal is named from roundness or rolling;
|
||
for in Dan. hvalt is arched or vaulted.” —Webster’s Dictionary.
|
||
|
||
“WHALE. * * * It is more immediately from the Dut. and Ger. Wallen; A.S.
|
||
Walw-ian, to roll, to wallow.” —Richardson’s Dictionary. חו, Hebrew.
|
||
ϰητος, Greek. CETUS, Latin. WHŒL, Anglo-Saxon. HVALT, Danish. WAL,
|
||
Dutch. HWAL, Swedish. HVALUR, Icelandic. WHALE, English. BALEINE,
|
||
French. BALLENA, Spanish. PEKEE-NUEE-NUEE, Fegee. PEHEE-NUEE-NUEE,
|
||
Erromangoan.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
EXTRACTS. (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian).
|
||
|
||
It will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a poor
|
||
devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long Vaticans and
|
||
street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to whales he
|
||
could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane. Therefore you must
|
||
not, in every case at least, take the higgledy-piggledy whale statements,
|
||
however authentic, in these extracts, for veritable gospel cetology. Far from
|
||
it. As touching the ancient authors generally, as well as the poets here
|
||
appearing, these extracts are solely valuable or entertaining, as affording a
|
||
glancing bird’s eye view of what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied,
|
||
and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and generations, including our own.
|
||
|
||
So fare thee well, poor devil of a Sub-Sub, whose commentator I am. Thou
|
||
belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world will ever
|
||
warm; and for whom even Pale Sherry would be too rosy-strong; but with whom one
|
||
sometimes loves to sit, and feel poor-devilish, too; and grow convivial upon
|
||
tears; and say to them bluntly, with full eyes and empty glasses, and in not
|
||
altogether unpleasant sadness—Give it up, Sub-Subs! For by how much the more
|
||
pains ye take to please the world, by so much the more shall ye for ever go
|
||
thankless! Would that I could clear out Hampton Court and the Tuileries for ye!
|
||
But gulp down your tears and hie aloft to the royal-mast with your hearts; for
|
||
your friends who have gone before are clearing out the seven-storied heavens,
|
||
and making refugees of long-pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, against your
|
||
coming. Here ye strike but splintered hearts together—there, ye shall strike
|
||
unsplinterable glasses! EXTRACTS.
|
||
|
||
“And God created great whales.” —Genesis.
|
||
|
||
“Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him; One would think the deep to be
|
||
hoary.” —Job.
|
||
|
||
“Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.” —Jonah.
|
||
|
||
“There go the ships; there is that Leviathan whom thou hast made to play
|
||
therein.” —Psalms.
|
||
|
||
“In that day, the Lord with his sore, and great, and strong sword, shall punish
|
||
Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that crooked serpent; and he
|
||
shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.” —Isaiah.
|
||
|
||
“And what thing soever besides cometh within the chaos of this monster’s mouth,
|
||
be it beast, boat, or stone, down it goes all incontinently that foul great
|
||
swallow of his, and perisheth in the bottomless gulf of his paunch.” —Holland’s
|
||
Plutarch’s Morals.
|
||
|
||
“The Indian Sea breedeth the most and the biggest fishes that are: among which
|
||
the Whales and Whirlpooles called Balaene, take up as much in length as four
|
||
acres or arpens of land.” —Holland’s Pliny.
|
||
|
||
“Scarcely had we proceeded two days on the sea, when about sunrise a great many
|
||
Whales and other monsters of the sea, appeared. Among the former, one was of a
|
||
most monstrous size.... This came towards us, open-mouthed, raising the waves on
|
||
all sides, and beating the sea before him into a foam.” —Tooke’s Lucian. “The
|
||
True History.”
|
||
|
||
“He visited this country also with a view of catching horse-whales, which had
|
||
bones of very great value for their teeth, of which he brought some to the
|
||
king.... The best whales were catched in his own country, of which some were
|
||
forty-eight, some fifty yards long. He said that he was one of six who had
|
||
killed sixty in two days.” —Other or Other’s verbal narrative taken down from
|
||
his mouth by King Alfred, A.D. 890.
|
||
|
||
“And whereas all the other things, whether beast or vessel, that enter into the
|
||
dreadful gulf of this monster’s (whale’s) mouth, are immediately lost and
|
||
swallowed up, the sea-gudgeon retires into it in great security, and there
|
||
sleeps.” —MONTAIGNE. —Apology for Raimond Sebond.
|
||
|
||
“Let us fly, let us fly! Old Nick take me if it is not Leviathan described by
|
||
the noble prophet Moses in the life of patient Job.” —Rabelais.
|
||
|
||
“This whale’s liver was two cartloads.” —Stowe’s Annals.
|
||
|
||
“The great Leviathan that maketh the seas to seethe like boiling pan.” —Lord
|
||
Bacon’s Version of the Psalms.
|
||
|
||
“Touching that monstrous bulk of the whale or ork we have received nothing
|
||
certain. They grow exceeding fat, insomuch that an incredible quantity of oil
|
||
will be extracted out of one whale.” —Ibid. “History of Life and Death.”
|
||
|
||
“The sovereignest thing on earth is parmacetti for an inward bruise.” —King
|
||
Henry.
|
||
|
||
“Very like a whale.” —Hamlet.
|
||
|
||
“Which to secure, no skill of leach’s art Mote him availle, but to returne
|
||
againe To his wound’s worker, that with lowly dart, Dinting his breast, had
|
||
bred his restless paine, Like as the wounded whale to shore flies thro’ the
|
||
maine.” —The Fairie Queen.
|
||
|
||
“Immense as whales, the motion of whose vast bodies can in a peaceful calm
|
||
trouble the ocean till it boil.” —Sir William Davenant. Preface to Gondibert.
|
||
|
||
“What spermacetti is, men might justly doubt, since the learned Hosmannus in his
|
||
work of thirty years, saith plainly, Nescio quid sit.” —Sir T. Browne. Of Sperma
|
||
Ceti and the Sperma Ceti Whale. Vide his V. E.
|
||
|
||
“Like Spencer’s Talus with his modern flail He threatens ruin with his
|
||
ponderous tail. ... Their fixed jav’lins in his side he wears, And on his
|
||
back a grove of pikes appears.” —Waller’s Battle of the Summer Islands.
|
||
|
||
“By art is created that great Leviathan, called a Commonwealth or State—(in
|
||
Latin, Civitas) which is but an artificial man.” —Opening sentence of Hobbes’s
|
||
Leviathan.
|
||
|
||
“Silly Mansoul swallowed it without chewing, as if it had been a sprat in the
|
||
mouth of a whale.” —Pilgrim’s Progress.
|
||
|
||
“That sea beast Leviathan, which God of all his works Created hugest that
|
||
swim the ocean stream.” —Paradise Lost.
|
||
|
||
—“There Leviathan, Hugest of living creatures, in the deep Stretched like a
|
||
promontory sleeps or swims, And seems a moving land; and at his gills Draws
|
||
in, and at his breath spouts out a sea.” —Ibid.
|
||
|
||
“The mighty whales which swim in a sea of water, and have a sea of oil swimming
|
||
in them.” —Fuller’s Profane and Holy State.
|
||
|
||
“So close behind some promontory lie The huge Leviathan to attend their
|
||
prey, And give no chance, but swallow in the fry, Which through their
|
||
gaping jaws mistake the way.” —Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis.
|
||
|
||
“While the whale is floating at the stern of the ship, they cut off his head,
|
||
and tow it with a boat as near the shore as it will come; but it will be aground
|
||
in twelve or thirteen feet water.” —Thomas Edge’s Ten Voyages to Spitzbergen, in
|
||
Purchas.
|
||
|
||
“In their way they saw many whales sporting in the ocean, and in wantonness
|
||
fuzzing up the water through their pipes and vents, which nature has placed on
|
||
their shoulders.” —Sir T. Herbert’s Voyages into Asia and Africa. Harris Coll.
|
||
|
||
“Here they saw such huge troops of whales, that they were forced to proceed with
|
||
a great deal of caution for fear they should run their ship upon them.”
|
||
—Schouten’s Sixth Circumnavigation.
|
||
|
||
“We set sail from the Elbe, wind N.E. in the ship called The
|
||
Jonas-in-the-Whale.... Some say the whale can’t open his mouth, but that is a
|
||
fable.... They frequently climb up the masts to see whether they can see a
|
||
whale, for the first discoverer has a ducat for his pains.... I was told of a
|
||
whale taken near Shetland, that had above a barrel of herrings in his belly....
|
||
One of our harpooneers told me that he caught once a whale in Spitzbergen that
|
||
was white all over.” —A Voyage to Greenland, A.D. 1671. Harris Coll.
|
||
|
||
“Several whales have come in upon this coast (Fife) Anno 1652, one eighty feet
|
||
in length of the whale-bone kind came in, which (as I was informed), besides a
|
||
vast quantity of oil, did afford 500 weight of baleen. The jaws of it stand for
|
||
a gate in the garden of Pitferren.” —Sibbald’s Fife and Kinross.
|
||
|
||
“Myself have agreed to try whether I can master and kill this Sperma-ceti whale,
|
||
for I could never hear of any of that sort that was killed by any man, such is
|
||
his fierceness and swiftness.” —Richard Strafford’s Letter from the Bermudas.
|
||
Phil. Trans. A.D. 1668.
|
||
|
||
“Whales in the sea God’s voice obey.” —N. E. Primer.
|
||
|
||
“We saw also abundance of large whales, there being more in those southern seas,
|
||
as I may say, by a hundred to one; than we have to the northward of us.”
|
||
—Captain Cowley’s Voyage round the Globe, A.D. 1729.
|
||
|
||
“... and the breath of the whale is frequently attended with such an
|
||
insupportable smell, as to bring on a disorder of the brain.” —Ulloa’s South
|
||
America.
|
||
|
||
“To fifty chosen sylphs of special note, We trust the important charge, the
|
||
petticoat. Oft have we known that seven-fold fence to fail, Tho’ stuffed
|
||
with hoops and armed with ribs of whale.” —Rape of the Lock.
|
||
|
||
“If we compare land animals in respect to magnitude, with those that take up
|
||
their abode in the deep, we shall find they will appear contemptible in the
|
||
comparison. The whale is doubtless the largest animal in creation.” —Goldsmith,
|
||
Nat. Hist.
|
||
|
||
“If you should write a fable for little fishes, you would make them speak like
|
||
great whales.” —Goldsmith to Johnson.
|
||
|
||
“In the afternoon we saw what was supposed to be a rock, but it was found to be
|
||
a dead whale, which some Asiatics had killed, and were then towing ashore. They
|
||
seemed to endeavor to conceal themselves behind the whale, in order to avoid
|
||
being seen by us.” —Cook’s Voyages.
|
||
|
||
“The larger whales, they seldom venture to attack. They stand in so great dread
|
||
of some of them, that when out at sea they are afraid to mention even their
|
||
names, and carry dung, lime-stone, juniper-wood, and some other articles of the
|
||
same nature in their boats, in order to terrify and prevent their too near
|
||
approach.” —Uno Von Troil’s Letters on Banks’s and Solander’s Voyage to Iceland
|
||
in 1772.
|
||
|
||
“The Spermacetti Whale found by the Nantuckois, is an active, fierce animal, and
|
||
requires vast address and boldness in the fishermen.” —Thomas Jefferson’s Whale
|
||
Memorial to the French minister in 1778.
|
||
|
||
“And pray, sir, what in the world is equal to it?” —Edmund Burke’s reference in
|
||
Parliament to the Nantucket Whale-Fishery.
|
||
|
||
“Spain—a great whale stranded on the shores of Europe.” —Edmund Burke.
|
||
(somewhere.)
|
||
|
||
“A tenth branch of the king’s ordinary revenue, said to be grounded on the
|
||
consideration of his guarding and protecting the seas from pirates and robbers,
|
||
is the right to royal fish, which are whale and sturgeon. And these, when either
|
||
thrown ashore or caught near the coast, are the property of the king.”
|
||
—Blackstone.
|
||
|
||
“Soon to the sport of death the crews repair: Rodmond unerring o’er his
|
||
head suspends The barbed steel, and every turn attends.” —Falconer’s
|
||
Shipwreck.
|
||
|
||
“Bright shone the roofs, the domes, the spires, And rockets blew self
|
||
driven, To hang their momentary fire Around the vault of heaven.
|
||
|
||
“So fire with water to compare, The ocean serves on high, Up-spouted by a
|
||
whale in air, To express unwieldy joy.” —Cowper, on the Queen’s Visit to
|
||
London.
|
||
|
||
“Ten or fifteen gallons of blood are thrown out of the heart at a stroke, with
|
||
immense velocity.” —John Hunter’s account of the dissection of a whale. (A small
|
||
sized one.)
|
||
|
||
“The aorta of a whale is larger in the bore than the main pipe of the
|
||
water-works at London Bridge, and the water roaring in its passage through that
|
||
pipe is inferior in impetus and velocity to the blood gushing from the whale’s
|
||
heart.” —Paley’s Theology.
|
||
|
||
“The whale is a mammiferous animal without hind feet.” —Baron Cuvier.
|
||
|
||
“In 40 degrees south, we saw Spermacetti Whales, but did not take any till the
|
||
first of May, the sea being then covered with them.” —Colnett’s Voyage for the
|
||
Purpose of Extending the Spermaceti Whale Fishery.
|
||
|
||
“In the free element beneath me swam, Floundered and dived, in play, in
|
||
chace, in battle, Fishes of every colour, form, and kind; Which language
|
||
cannot paint, and mariner Had never seen; from dread Leviathan To insect
|
||
millions peopling every wave: Gather’d in shoals immense, like floating
|
||
islands, Led by mysterious instincts through that waste And trackless
|
||
region, though on every side Assaulted by voracious enemies, Whales,
|
||
sharks, and monsters, arm’d in front or jaw, With swords, saws, spiral
|
||
horns, or hooked fangs.” —Montgomery’s World before the Flood.
|
||
|
||
“Io! Paean! Io! sing. To the finny people’s king. Not a mightier whale
|
||
than this In the vast Atlantic is; Not a fatter fish than he, Flounders
|
||
round the Polar Sea.” —Charles Lamb’s Triumph of the Whale.
|
||
|
||
“In the year 1690 some persons were on a high hill observing the whales spouting
|
||
and sporting with each other, when one observed: there—pointing to the sea—is a
|
||
green pasture where our children’s grand-children will go for bread.” —Obed
|
||
Macy’s History of Nantucket.
|
||
|
||
“I built a cottage for Susan and myself and made a gateway in the form of a
|
||
Gothic Arch, by setting up a whale’s jaw bones.” —Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales.
|
||
|
||
“She came to bespeak a monument for her first love, who had been killed by a
|
||
whale in the Pacific ocean, no less than forty years ago.” —Ibid.
|
||
|
||
“No, Sir, ’tis a Right Whale,” answered Tom; “I saw his sprout; he threw up a
|
||
pair of as pretty rainbows as a Christian would wish to look at. He’s a raal
|
||
oil-butt, that fellow!” —Cooper’s Pilot.
|
||
|
||
“The papers were brought in, and we saw in the Berlin Gazette that whales had
|
||
been introduced on the stage there.” —Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe.
|
||
|
||
“My God! Mr. Chace, what is the matter?” I answered, “we have been stove by a
|
||
whale.” —“Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Whale Ship Essex of Nantucket, which
|
||
was attacked and finally destroyed by a large Sperm Whale in the Pacific Ocean.”
|
||
By Owen Chace of Nantucket, first mate of said vessel. New York, 1821.
|
||
|
||
“A mariner sat in the shrouds one night, The wind was piping free; Now
|
||
bright, now dimmed, was the moonlight pale, And the phospher gleamed in the
|
||
wake of the whale, As it floundered in the sea.” —Elizabeth Oakes Smith.
|
||
|
||
“The quantity of line withdrawn from the boats engaged in the capture of this
|
||
one whale, amounted altogether to 10,440 yards or nearly six English miles....
|
||
|
||
“Sometimes the whale shakes its tremendous tail in the air, which, cracking like
|
||
a whip, resounds to the distance of three or four miles.” —Scoresby.
|
||
|
||
“Mad with the agonies he endures from these fresh attacks, the infuriated Sperm
|
||
Whale rolls over and over; he rears his enormous head, and with wide expanded
|
||
jaws snaps at everything around him; he rushes at the boats with his head; they
|
||
are propelled before him with vast swiftness, and sometimes utterly
|
||
destroyed.... It is a matter of great astonishment that the consideration of the
|
||
habits of so interesting, and, in a commercial point of view, so important an
|
||
animal (as the Sperm Whale) should have been so entirely neglected, or should
|
||
have excited so little curiosity among the numerous, and many of them competent
|
||
observers, that of late years, must have possessed the most abundant and the
|
||
most convenient opportunities of witnessing their habitudes.” —Thomas Beale’s
|
||
History of the Sperm Whale, 1839.
|
||
|
||
“The Cachalot” (Sperm Whale) “is not only better armed than the True Whale”
|
||
(Greenland or Right Whale) “in possessing a formidable weapon at either
|
||
extremity of its body, but also more frequently displays a disposition to employ
|
||
these weapons offensively and in manner at once so artful, bold, and
|
||
mischievous, as to lead to its being regarded as the most dangerous to attack of
|
||
all the known species of the whale tribe.” —Frederick Debell Bennett’s Whaling
|
||
Voyage Round the Globe, 1840.
|
||
|
||
October 13. “There she blows,” was sung out from the mast-head. “Where
|
||
away?” demanded the captain. “Three points off the lee bow, sir.” “Raise
|
||
up your wheel. Steady!” “Steady, sir.” “Mast-head ahoy! Do you see that
|
||
whale now?” “Ay ay, sir! A shoal of Sperm Whales! There she blows!
|
||
There she breaches!” “Sing out! sing out every time!” “Ay Ay, sir! There
|
||
she blows! there—there—thar she blows—bowes—bo-o-os!” “How far off?” “Two
|
||
miles and a half.” “Thunder and lightning! so near! Call all hands.” —J.
|
||
Ross Browne’s Etchings of a Whaling Cruize. 1846.
|
||
|
||
“The Whale-ship Globe, on board of which vessel occurred the horrid transactions
|
||
we are about to relate, belonged to the island of Nantucket.” —“Narrative of the
|
||
Globe Mutiny,” by Lay and Hussey survivors. A.D. 1828.
|
||
|
||
Being once pursued by a whale which he had wounded, he parried the assault for
|
||
some time with a lance; but the furious monster at length rushed on the boat;
|
||
himself and comrades only being preserved by leaping into the water when they
|
||
saw the onset was inevitable.” —Missionary Journal of Tyerman and Bennett.
|
||
|
||
“Nantucket itself,” said Mr. Webster, “is a very striking and peculiar portion
|
||
of the National interest. There is a population of eight or nine thousand
|
||
persons living here in the sea, adding largely every year to the National wealth
|
||
by the boldest and most persevering industry.” —Report of Daniel Webster’s
|
||
Speech in the U. S. Senate, on the application for the Erection of a Breakwater
|
||
at Nantucket. 1828.
|
||
|
||
“The whale fell directly over him, and probably killed him in a moment.” —“The
|
||
Whale and his Captors, or The Whaleman’s Adventures and the Whale’s Biography,
|
||
gathered on the Homeward Cruise of the Commodore Preble.” By Rev. Henry T.
|
||
Cheever.
|
||
|
||
“If you make the least damn bit of noise,” replied Samuel, “I will send you to
|
||
hell.” —Life of Samuel Comstock (the mutineer), by his brother, William
|
||
Comstock. Another Version of the whale-ship Globe narrative.
|
||
|
||
“The voyages of the Dutch and English to the Northern Ocean, in order, if
|
||
possible, to discover a passage through it to India, though they failed of their
|
||
main object, laid-open the haunts of the whale.” —McCulloch’s Commercial
|
||
Dictionary.
|
||
|
||
“These things are reciprocal; the ball rebounds, only to bound forward again;
|
||
for now in laying open the haunts of the whale, the whalemen seem to have
|
||
indirectly hit upon new clews to that same mystic North-West Passage.” —From
|
||
“Something” unpublished.
|
||
|
||
“It is impossible to meet a whale-ship on the ocean without being struck by her
|
||
near appearance. The vessel under short sail, with look-outs at the mast-heads,
|
||
eagerly scanning the wide expanse around them, has a totally different air from
|
||
those engaged in regular voyage.” —Currents and Whaling. U.S. Ex. Ex.
|
||
|
||
“Pedestrians in the vicinity of London and elsewhere may recollect having seen
|
||
large curved bones set upright in the earth, either to form arches over
|
||
gateways, or entrances to alcoves, and they may perhaps have been told that
|
||
these were the ribs of whales.” —Tales of a Whale Voyager to the Arctic Ocean.
|
||
|
||
“It was not till the boats returned from the pursuit of these whales, that the
|
||
whites saw their ship in bloody possession of the savages enrolled among the
|
||
crew.” —Newspaper Account of the Taking and Retaking of the Whale-Ship Hobomack.
|
||
|
||
“It is generally well known that out of the crews of Whaling vessels (American)
|
||
few ever return in the ships on board of which they departed.” —Cruise in a
|
||
Whale Boat.
|
||
|
||
“Suddenly a mighty mass emerged from the water, and shot up perpendicularly into
|
||
the air. It was the whale.” —Miriam Coffin or the Whale Fisherman.
|
||
|
||
“The Whale is harpooned to be sure; but bethink you, how you would manage a
|
||
powerful unbroken colt, with the mere appliance of a rope tied to the root of
|
||
his tail.” —A Chapter on Whaling in Ribs and Trucks.
|
||
|
||
“On one occasion I saw two of these monsters (whales) probably male and female,
|
||
slowly swimming, one after the other, within less than a stone’s throw of the
|
||
shore” (Terra Del Fuego), “over which the beech tree extended its branches.”
|
||
—Darwin’s Voyage of a Naturalist.
|
||
|
||
“‘Stern all!’ exclaimed the mate, as upon turning his head, he saw the distended
|
||
jaws of a large Sperm Whale close to the head of the boat, threatening it with
|
||
instant destruction;—‘Stern all, for your lives!’” —Wharton the Whale Killer.
|
||
|
||
“So be cheery, my lads, let your hearts never fail, While the bold harpooneer is
|
||
striking the whale!” —Nantucket Song.
|
||
|
||
“Oh, the rare old Whale, mid storm and gale In his ocean home will be A
|
||
giant in might, where might is right, And King of the boundless sea.”
|
||
—Whale Song.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 1. Loomings.
|
||
|
||
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or
|
||
no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought
|
||
I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I
|
||
have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find
|
||
myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in
|
||
my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses,
|
||
and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my
|
||
hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to
|
||
prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking
|
||
people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
|
||
This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato
|
||
throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing
|
||
surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some
|
||
time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.
|
||
|
||
There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as
|
||
Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left,
|
||
the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is the battery, where that
|
||
noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous
|
||
were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.
|
||
|
||
Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to
|
||
Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?—Posted
|
||
like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of
|
||
mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated
|
||
upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some
|
||
high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep.
|
||
But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster—tied to
|
||
counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green
|
||
fields gone? What do they here?
|
||
|
||
But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly
|
||
bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of
|
||
the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice.
|
||
No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling
|
||
in. And there they stand—miles of them—leagues. Inlanders all, they come from
|
||
lanes and alleys, streets and avenues—north, east, south, and west. Yet here
|
||
they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the
|
||
compasses of all those ships attract them thither?
|
||
|
||
Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost
|
||
any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves
|
||
you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most
|
||
absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his
|
||
legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water
|
||
there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American
|
||
desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a
|
||
metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded
|
||
for ever.
|
||
|
||
But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest,
|
||
quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the
|
||
Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a
|
||
hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his
|
||
meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy
|
||
smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping
|
||
spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies
|
||
thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon
|
||
this shepherd’s head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd’s eye were fixed
|
||
upon the magic stream before him. Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores
|
||
on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies—what is the one charm
|
||
wanting?—Water—there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract
|
||
of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet
|
||
of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether
|
||
to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian
|
||
trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust
|
||
healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your
|
||
first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration,
|
||
when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did
|
||
the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity,
|
||
and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still
|
||
deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp
|
||
the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was
|
||
drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is
|
||
the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
|
||
|
||
Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to grow
|
||
hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs, I do not mean
|
||
to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger. For to go as a
|
||
passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have
|
||
something in it. Besides, passengers get sea-sick—grow quarrelsome—don’t sleep
|
||
of nights—do not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing;—no, I never go as a
|
||
passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a
|
||
Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction of such
|
||
offices to those who like them. For my part, I abominate all honorable
|
||
respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever. It is
|
||
quite as much as I can do to take care of myself, without taking care of ships,
|
||
barques, brigs, schooners, and what not. And as for going as cook,—though I
|
||
confess there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of officer on
|
||
ship-board—yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls;—though once broiled,
|
||
judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who
|
||
will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I
|
||
will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled ibis
|
||
and roasted river horse, that you see the mummies of those creatures in their
|
||
huge bake-houses the pyramids.
|
||
|
||
No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down
|
||
into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order
|
||
me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May
|
||
meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one’s
|
||
sense of honor, particularly if you come of an old established family in the
|
||
land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if
|
||
just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as
|
||
a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The
|
||
transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and
|
||
requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and
|
||
bear it. But even this wears off in time.
|
||
|
||
What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and
|
||
sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in
|
||
the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks
|
||
anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks
|
||
in that particular instance? Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that. Well, then,
|
||
however the old sea-captains may order me about—however they may thump and punch
|
||
me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that
|
||
everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way—either in a
|
||
physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is
|
||
passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be
|
||
content.
|
||
|
||
Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me
|
||
for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever
|
||
heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the
|
||
difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is
|
||
perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed
|
||
upon us. But being paid,—what will compare with it? The urbane activity with
|
||
which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so
|
||
earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no
|
||
account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves
|
||
to perdition!
|
||
|
||
Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and
|
||
pure air of the fore-castle deck. For as in this world, head winds are far more
|
||
prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean
|
||
maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his
|
||
atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he
|
||
breathes it first; but not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their
|
||
leaders in many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect
|
||
it. But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a
|
||
merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling voyage;
|
||
this the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the constant
|
||
surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me in some
|
||
unaccountable way—he can better answer than any one else. And, doubtless, my
|
||
going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence
|
||
that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and
|
||
solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill
|
||
must have run something like this:
|
||
|
||
“Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States. “WHALING
|
||
VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL. “BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN.”
|
||
|
||
Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates,
|
||
put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down
|
||
for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel
|
||
comedies, and jolly parts in farces—though I cannot tell why this was exactly;
|
||
yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into
|
||
the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various
|
||
disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling
|
||
me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased
|
||
freewill and discriminating judgment.
|
||
|
||
Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself.
|
||
Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. Then the wild
|
||
and distant seas where he rolled his island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless
|
||
perils of the whale; these, with all the attending marvels of a thousand
|
||
Patagonian sights and sounds, helped to sway me to my wish. With other men,
|
||
perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am
|
||
tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden
|
||
seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to
|
||
perceive a horror, and could still be social with it—would they let me—since it
|
||
is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges
|
||
in.
|
||
|
||
By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great
|
||
flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed
|
||
me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless
|
||
processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom,
|
||
like a snow hill in the air.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 2. The Carpet-Bag.
|
||
|
||
I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm, and
|
||
started for Cape Horn and the Pacific. Quitting the good city of old Manhatto, I
|
||
duly arrived in New Bedford. It was a Saturday night in December. Much was I
|
||
disappointed upon learning that the little packet for Nantucket had already
|
||
sailed, and that no way of reaching that place would offer, till the following
|
||
Monday.
|
||
|
||
As most young candidates for the pains and penalties of whaling stop at this
|
||
same New Bedford, thence to embark on their voyage, it may as well be related
|
||
that I, for one, had no idea of so doing. For my mind was made up to sail in no
|
||
other than a Nantucket craft, because there was a fine, boisterous something
|
||
about everything connected with that famous old island, which amazingly pleased
|
||
me. Besides though New Bedford has of late been gradually monopolising the
|
||
business of whaling, and though in this matter poor old Nantucket is now much
|
||
behind her, yet Nantucket was her great original—the Tyre of this Carthage;—the
|
||
place where the first dead American whale was stranded. Where else but from
|
||
Nantucket did those aboriginal whalemen, the Red-Men, first sally out in canoes
|
||
to give chase to the Leviathan? And where but from Nantucket, too, did that
|
||
first adventurous little sloop put forth, partly laden with imported
|
||
cobblestones—so goes the story—to throw at the whales, in order to discover when
|
||
they were nigh enough to risk a harpoon from the bowsprit?
|
||
|
||
Now having a night, a day, and still another night following before me in New
|
||
Bedford, ere I could embark for my destined port, it became a matter of
|
||
concernment where I was to eat and sleep meanwhile. It was a very
|
||
dubious-looking, nay, a very dark and dismal night, bitingly cold and cheerless.
|
||
I knew no one in the place. With anxious grapnels I had sounded my pocket, and
|
||
only brought up a few pieces of silver,—So, wherever you go, Ishmael, said I to
|
||
myself, as I stood in the middle of a dreary street shouldering my bag, and
|
||
comparing the gloom towards the north with the darkness towards the
|
||
south—wherever in your wisdom you may conclude to lodge for the night, my dear
|
||
Ishmael, be sure to inquire the price, and don’t be too particular.
|
||
|
||
With halting steps I paced the streets, and passed the sign of “The Crossed
|
||
Harpoons”—but it looked too expensive and jolly there. Further on, from the
|
||
bright red windows of the “Sword-Fish Inn,” there came such fervent rays, that
|
||
it seemed to have melted the packed snow and ice from before the house, for
|
||
everywhere else the congealed frost lay ten inches thick in a hard, asphaltic
|
||
pavement,—rather weary for me, when I struck my foot against the flinty
|
||
projections, because from hard, remorseless service the soles of my boots were
|
||
in a most miserable plight. Too expensive and jolly, again thought I, pausing
|
||
one moment to watch the broad glare in the street, and hear the sounds of the
|
||
tinkling glasses within. But go on, Ishmael, said I at last; don’t you hear? get
|
||
away from before the door; your patched boots are stopping the way. So on I
|
||
went. I now by instinct followed the streets that took me waterward, for there,
|
||
doubtless, were the cheapest, if not the cheeriest inns.
|
||
|
||
Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand, and here
|
||
and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb. At this hour of the
|
||
night, of the last day of the week, that quarter of the town proved all but
|
||
deserted. But presently I came to a smoky light proceeding from a low, wide
|
||
building, the door of which stood invitingly open. It had a careless look, as if
|
||
it were meant for the uses of the public; so, entering, the first thing I did
|
||
was to stumble over an ash-box in the porch. Ha! thought I, ha, as the flying
|
||
particles almost choked me, are these ashes from that destroyed city, Gomorrah?
|
||
But “The Crossed Harpoons,” and “The Sword-Fish?”—this, then must needs be the
|
||
sign of “The Trap.” However, I picked myself up and hearing a loud voice within,
|
||
pushed on and opened a second, interior door.
|
||
|
||
It seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred black faces
|
||
turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a black Angel of Doom was
|
||
beating a book in a pulpit. It was a negro church; and the preacher’s text was
|
||
about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing
|
||
there. Ha, Ishmael, muttered I, backing out, Wretched entertainment at the sign
|
||
of ‘The Trap!’
|
||
|
||
Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of light not far from the docks, and
|
||
heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a swinging sign over
|
||
the door with a white painting upon it, faintly representing a tall straight jet
|
||
of misty spray, and these words underneath—“The Spouter Inn:—Peter Coffin.”
|
||
|
||
Coffin?—Spouter?—Rather ominous in that particular connexion, thought I. But it
|
||
is a common name in Nantucket, they say, and I suppose this Peter here is an
|
||
emigrant from there. As the light looked so dim, and the place, for the time,
|
||
looked quiet enough, and the dilapidated little wooden house itself looked as if
|
||
it might have been carted here from the ruins of some burnt district, and as the
|
||
swinging sign had a poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, I thought that here
|
||
was the very spot for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea coffee.
|
||
|
||
It was a queer sort of place—a gable-ended old house, one side palsied as it
|
||
were, and leaning over sadly. It stood on a sharp bleak corner, where that
|
||
tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up a worse howling than ever it did about poor
|
||
Paul’s tossed craft. Euroclydon, nevertheless, is a mighty pleasant zephyr to
|
||
any one in-doors, with his feet on the hob quietly toasting for bed. “In judging
|
||
of that tempestuous wind called Euroclydon,” says an old writer—of whose works I
|
||
possess the only copy extant—“it maketh a marvellous difference, whether thou
|
||
lookest out at it from a glass window where the frost is all on the outside, or
|
||
whether thou observest it from that sashless window, where the frost is on both
|
||
sides, and of which the wight Death is the only glazier.” True enough, thought
|
||
I, as this passage occurred to my mind—old black-letter, thou reasonest well.
|
||
Yes, these eyes are windows, and this body of mine is the house. What a pity
|
||
they didn’t stop up the chinks and the crannies though, and thrust in a little
|
||
lint here and there. But it’s too late to make any improvements now. The
|
||
universe is finished; the copestone is on, and the chips were carted off a
|
||
million years ago. Poor Lazarus there, chattering his teeth against the
|
||
curbstone for his pillow, and shaking off his tatters with his shiverings, he
|
||
might plug up both ears with rags, and put a corn-cob into his mouth, and yet
|
||
that would not keep out the tempestuous Euroclydon. Euroclydon! says old Dives,
|
||
in his red silken wrapper—(he had a redder one afterwards) pooh, pooh! What a
|
||
fine frosty night; how Orion glitters; what northern lights! Let them talk of
|
||
their oriental summer climes of everlasting conservatories; give me the
|
||
privilege of making my own summer with my own coals.
|
||
|
||
But what thinks Lazarus? Can he warm his blue hands by holding them up to the
|
||
grand northern lights? Would not Lazarus rather be in Sumatra than here? Would
|
||
he not far rather lay him down lengthwise along the line of the equator; yea, ye
|
||
gods! go down to the fiery pit itself, in order to keep out this frost?
|
||
|
||
Now, that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before the door of
|
||
Dives, this is more wonderful than that an iceberg should be moored to one of
|
||
the Moluccas. Yet Dives himself, he too lives like a Czar in an ice palace made
|
||
of frozen sighs, and being a president of a temperance society, he only drinks
|
||
the tepid tears of orphans.
|
||
|
||
But no more of this blubbering now, we are going a-whaling, and there is plenty
|
||
of that yet to come. Let us scrape the ice from our frosted feet, and see what
|
||
sort of a place this “Spouter” may be.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 3. The Spouter-Inn.
|
||
|
||
Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide, low,
|
||
straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of
|
||
some condemned old craft. On one side hung a very large oilpainting so
|
||
thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal crosslights by
|
||
which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic
|
||
visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way
|
||
arrive at an understanding of its purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades
|
||
and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in
|
||
the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched.
|
||
But by dint of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and
|
||
especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you
|
||
at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might not be
|
||
altogether unwarranted.
|
||
|
||
But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black
|
||
mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim,
|
||
perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy
|
||
picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of
|
||
indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you
|
||
to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that
|
||
marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea
|
||
would dart you through.—It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale.—It’s the
|
||
unnatural combat of the four primal elements.—It’s a blasted heath.—It’s a
|
||
Hyperborean winter scene.—It’s the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time.
|
||
But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the
|
||
picture’s midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop;
|
||
does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great
|
||
leviathan himself?
|
||
|
||
In fact, the artist’s design seemed this: a final theory of my own, partly based
|
||
upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom I conversed upon the
|
||
subject. The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the
|
||
half-foundered ship weltering there with its three dismantled masts alone
|
||
visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is
|
||
in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads.
|
||
|
||
The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish array of
|
||
monstrous clubs and spears. Some were thickly set with glittering teeth
|
||
resembling ivory saws; others were tufted with knots of human hair; and one was
|
||
sickle-shaped, with a vast handle sweeping round like the segment made in the
|
||
new-mown grass by a long-armed mower. You shuddered as you gazed, and wondered
|
||
what monstrous cannibal and savage could ever have gone a death-harvesting with
|
||
such a hacking, horrifying implement. Mixed with these were rusty old whaling
|
||
lances and harpoons all broken and deformed. Some were storied weapons. With
|
||
this once long lance, now wildly elbowed, fifty years ago did Nathan Swain kill
|
||
fifteen whales between a sunrise and a sunset. And that harpoon—so like a
|
||
corkscrew now—was flung in Javan seas, and run away with by a whale, years
|
||
afterwards slain off the Cape of Blanco. The original iron entered nigh the
|
||
tail, and, like a restless needle sojourning in the body of a man, travelled
|
||
full forty feet, and at last was found imbedded in the hump.
|
||
|
||
Crossing this dusky entry, and on through yon low-arched way—cut through what in
|
||
old times must have been a great central chimney with fireplaces all round—you
|
||
enter the public room. A still duskier place is this, with such low ponderous
|
||
beams above, and such old wrinkled planks beneath, that you would almost fancy
|
||
you trod some old craft’s cockpits, especially of such a howling night, when
|
||
this corner-anchored old ark rocked so furiously. On one side stood a long, low,
|
||
shelf-like table covered with cracked glass cases, filled with dusty rarities
|
||
gathered from this wide world’s remotest nooks. Projecting from the further
|
||
angle of the room stands a dark-looking den—the bar—a rude attempt at a right
|
||
whale’s head. Be that how it may, there stands the vast arched bone of the
|
||
whale’s jaw, so wide, a coach might almost drive beneath it. Within are shabby
|
||
shelves, ranged round with old decanters, bottles, flasks; and in those jaws of
|
||
swift destruction, like another cursed Jonah (by which name indeed they called
|
||
him), bustles a little withered old man, who, for their money, dearly sells the
|
||
sailors deliriums and death.
|
||
|
||
Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. Though true
|
||
cylinders without—within, the villanous green goggling glasses deceitfully
|
||
tapered downwards to a cheating bottom. Parallel meridians rudely pecked into
|
||
the glass, surround these footpads’ goblets. Fill to this mark, and your charge
|
||
is but a penny; to this a penny more; and so on to the full glass—the Cape Horn
|
||
measure, which you may gulp down for a shilling.
|
||
|
||
Upon entering the place I found a number of young seamen gathered about a table,
|
||
examining by a dim light divers specimens of skrimshander. I sought the
|
||
landlord, and telling him I desired to be accommodated with a room, received for
|
||
answer that his house was full—not a bed unoccupied. “But avast,” he added,
|
||
tapping his forehead, “you haint no objections to sharing a harpooneer’s
|
||
blanket, have ye? I s’pose you are goin’ a-whalin’, so you’d better get used to
|
||
that sort of thing.”
|
||
|
||
I told him that I never liked to sleep two in a bed; that if I should ever do
|
||
so, it would depend upon who the harpooneer might be, and that if he (the
|
||
landlord) really had no other place for me, and the harpooneer was not decidedly
|
||
objectionable, why rather than wander further about a strange town on so bitter
|
||
a night, I would put up with the half of any decent man’s blanket.
|
||
|
||
“I thought so. All right; take a seat. Supper?—you want supper? Supper’ll be
|
||
ready directly.”
|
||
|
||
I sat down on an old wooden settle, carved all over like a bench on the Battery.
|
||
At one end a ruminating tar was still further adorning it with his jack-knife,
|
||
stooping over and diligently working away at the space between his legs. He was
|
||
trying his hand at a ship under full sail, but he didn’t make much headway, I
|
||
thought.
|
||
|
||
At last some four or five of us were summoned to our meal in an adjoining room.
|
||
It was cold as Iceland—no fire at all—the landlord said he couldn’t afford it.
|
||
Nothing but two dismal tallow candles, each in a winding sheet. We were fain to
|
||
button up our monkey jackets, and hold to our lips cups of scalding tea with our
|
||
half frozen fingers. But the fare was of the most substantial kind—not only meat
|
||
and potatoes, but dumplings; good heavens! dumplings for supper! One young
|
||
fellow in a green box coat, addressed himself to these dumplings in a most
|
||
direful manner.
|
||
|
||
“My boy,” said the landlord, “you’ll have the nightmare to a dead sartainty.”
|
||
|
||
“Landlord,” I whispered, “that aint the harpooneer is it?”
|
||
|
||
“Oh, no,” said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny, “the harpooneer is a
|
||
dark complexioned chap. He never eats dumplings, he don’t—he eats nothing but
|
||
steaks, and he likes ’em rare.”
|
||
|
||
“The devil he does,” says I. “Where is that harpooneer? Is he here?”
|
||
|
||
“He’ll be here afore long,” was the answer.
|
||
|
||
I could not help it, but I began to feel suspicious of this “dark complexioned”
|
||
harpooneer. At any rate, I made up my mind that if it so turned out that we
|
||
should sleep together, he must undress and get into bed before I did.
|
||
|
||
Supper over, the company went back to the bar-room, when, knowing not what else
|
||
to do with myself, I resolved to spend the rest of the evening as a looker on.
|
||
|
||
Presently a rioting noise was heard without. Starting up, the landlord cried,
|
||
“That’s the Grampus’s crew. I seed her reported in the offing this morning; a
|
||
three years’ voyage, and a full ship. Hurrah, boys; now we’ll have the latest
|
||
news from the Feegees.”
|
||
|
||
A tramping of sea boots was heard in the entry; the door was flung open, and in
|
||
rolled a wild set of mariners enough. Enveloped in their shaggy watch coats, and
|
||
with their heads muffled in woollen comforters, all bedarned and ragged, and
|
||
their beards stiff with icicles, they seemed an eruption of bears from Labrador.
|
||
They had just landed from their boat, and this was the first house they entered.
|
||
No wonder, then, that they made a straight wake for the whale’s mouth—the
|
||
bar—when the wrinkled little old Jonah, there officiating, soon poured them out
|
||
brimmers all round. One complained of a bad cold in his head, upon which Jonah
|
||
mixed him a pitch-like potion of gin and molasses, which he swore was a
|
||
sovereign cure for all colds and catarrhs whatsoever, never mind of how long
|
||
standing, or whether caught off the coast of Labrador, or on the weather side of
|
||
an ice-island.
|
||
|
||
The liquor soon mounted into their heads, as it generally does even with the
|
||
arrantest topers newly landed from sea, and they began capering about most
|
||
obstreperously.
|
||
|
||
I observed, however, that one of them held somewhat aloof, and though he seemed
|
||
desirous not to spoil the hilarity of his shipmates by his own sober face, yet
|
||
upon the whole he refrained from making as much noise as the rest. This man
|
||
interested me at once; and since the sea-gods had ordained that he should soon
|
||
become my shipmate (though but a sleeping-partner one, so far as this narrative
|
||
is concerned), I will here venture upon a little description of him. He stood
|
||
full six feet in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a coffer-dam. I
|
||
have seldom seen such brawn in a man. His face was deeply brown and burnt,
|
||
making his white teeth dazzling by the contrast; while in the deep shadows of
|
||
his eyes floated some reminiscences that did not seem to give him much joy. His
|
||
voice at once announced that he was a Southerner, and from his fine stature, I
|
||
thought he must be one of those tall mountaineers from the Alleghanian Ridge in
|
||
Virginia. When the revelry of his companions had mounted to its height, this man
|
||
slipped away unobserved, and I saw no more of him till he became my comrade on
|
||
the sea. In a few minutes, however, he was missed by his shipmates, and being,
|
||
it seems, for some reason a huge favourite with them, they raised a cry of
|
||
“Bulkington! Bulkington! where’s Bulkington?” and darted out of the house in
|
||
pursuit of him.
|
||
|
||
It was now about nine o’clock, and the room seeming almost supernaturally quiet
|
||
after these orgies, I began to congratulate myself upon a little plan that had
|
||
occurred to me just previous to the entrance of the seamen.
|
||
|
||
No man prefers to sleep two in a bed. In fact, you would a good deal rather not
|
||
sleep with your own brother. I don’t know how it is, but people like to be
|
||
private when they are sleeping. And when it comes to sleeping with an unknown
|
||
stranger, in a strange inn, in a strange town, and that stranger a harpooneer,
|
||
then your objections indefinitely multiply. Nor was there any earthly reason why
|
||
I as a sailor should sleep two in a bed, more than anybody else; for sailors no
|
||
more sleep two in a bed at sea, than bachelor Kings do ashore. To be sure they
|
||
all sleep together in one apartment, but you have your own hammock, and cover
|
||
yourself with your own blanket, and sleep in your own skin.
|
||
|
||
The more I pondered over this harpooneer, the more I abominated the thought of
|
||
sleeping with him. It was fair to presume that being a harpooneer, his linen or
|
||
woollen, as the case might be, would not be of the tidiest, certainly none of
|
||
the finest. I began to twitch all over. Besides, it was getting late, and my
|
||
decent harpooneer ought to be home and going bedwards. Suppose now, he should
|
||
tumble in upon me at midnight—how could I tell from what vile hole he had been
|
||
coming?
|
||
|
||
“Landlord! I’ve changed my mind about that harpooneer.—I shan’t sleep with him.
|
||
I’ll try the bench here.”
|
||
|
||
“Just as you please; I’m sorry I can’t spare ye a tablecloth for a mattress, and
|
||
it’s a plaguy rough board here”—feeling of the knots and notches. “But wait a
|
||
bit, Skrimshander; I’ve got a carpenter’s plane there in the bar—wait, I say,
|
||
and I’ll make ye snug enough.” So saying he procured the plane; and with his old
|
||
silk handkerchief first dusting the bench, vigorously set to planing away at my
|
||
bed, the while grinning like an ape. The shavings flew right and left; till at
|
||
last the plane-iron came bump against an indestructible knot. The landlord was
|
||
near spraining his wrist, and I told him for heaven’s sake to quit—the bed was
|
||
soft enough to suit me, and I did not know how all the planing in the world
|
||
could make eider down of a pine plank. So gathering up the shavings with another
|
||
grin, and throwing them into the great stove in the middle of the room, he went
|
||
about his business, and left me in a brown study.
|
||
|
||
I now took the measure of the bench, and found that it was a foot too short; but
|
||
that could be mended with a chair. But it was a foot too narrow, and the other
|
||
bench in the room was about four inches higher than the planed one—so there was
|
||
no yoking them. I then placed the first bench lengthwise along the only clear
|
||
space against the wall, leaving a little interval between, for my back to settle
|
||
down in. But I soon found that there came such a draught of cold air over me
|
||
from under the sill of the window, that this plan would never do at all,
|
||
especially as another current from the rickety door met the one from the window,
|
||
and both together formed a series of small whirlwinds in the immediate vicinity
|
||
of the spot where I had thought to spend the night.
|
||
|
||
The devil fetch that harpooneer, thought I, but stop, couldn’t I steal a march
|
||
on him—bolt his door inside, and jump into his bed, not to be wakened by the
|
||
most violent knockings? It seemed no bad idea; but upon second thoughts I
|
||
dismissed it. For who could tell but what the next morning, so soon as I popped
|
||
out of the room, the harpooneer might be standing in the entry, all ready to
|
||
knock me down!
|
||
|
||
Still, looking round me again, and seeing no possible chance of spending a
|
||
sufferable night unless in some other person’s bed, I began to think that after
|
||
all I might be cherishing unwarrantable prejudices against this unknown
|
||
harpooneer. Thinks I, I’ll wait awhile; he must be dropping in before long. I’ll
|
||
have a good look at him then, and perhaps we may become jolly good bedfellows
|
||
after all—there’s no telling.
|
||
|
||
But though the other boarders kept coming in by ones, twos, and threes, and
|
||
going to bed, yet no sign of my harpooneer.
|
||
|
||
“Landlord!” said I, “what sort of a chap is he—does he always keep such late
|
||
hours?” It was now hard upon twelve o’clock.
|
||
|
||
The landlord chuckled again with his lean chuckle, and seemed to be mightily
|
||
tickled at something beyond my comprehension. “No,” he answered, “generally he’s
|
||
an early bird—airley to bed and airley to rise—yes, he’s the bird what catches
|
||
the worm. But to-night he went out a peddling, you see, and I don’t see what on
|
||
airth keeps him so late, unless, may be, he can’t sell his head.”
|
||
|
||
“Can’t sell his head?—What sort of a bamboozingly story is this you are telling
|
||
me?” getting into a towering rage. “Do you pretend to say, landlord, that this
|
||
harpooneer is actually engaged this blessed Saturday night, or rather Sunday
|
||
morning, in peddling his head around this town?”
|
||
|
||
“That’s precisely it,” said the landlord, “and I told him he couldn’t sell it
|
||
here, the market’s overstocked.”
|
||
|
||
“With what?” shouted I.
|
||
|
||
“With heads to be sure; ain’t there too many heads in the world?”
|
||
|
||
“I tell you what it is, landlord,” said I quite calmly, “you’d better stop
|
||
spinning that yarn to me—I’m not green.”
|
||
|
||
“May be not,” taking out a stick and whittling a toothpick, “but I rayther guess
|
||
you’ll be done brown if that ere harpooneer hears you a slanderin’ his head.”
|
||
|
||
“I’ll break it for him,” said I, now flying into a passion again at this
|
||
unaccountable farrago of the landlord’s.
|
||
|
||
“It’s broke a’ready,” said he.
|
||
|
||
“Broke,” said I—“broke, do you mean?”
|
||
|
||
“Sartain, and that’s the very reason he can’t sell it, I guess.”
|
||
|
||
“Landlord,” said I, going up to him as cool as Mt. Hecla in a
|
||
snow-storm—“landlord, stop whittling. You and I must understand one another, and
|
||
that too without delay. I come to your house and want a bed; you tell me you can
|
||
only give me half a one; that the other half belongs to a certain harpooneer.
|
||
And about this harpooneer, whom I have not yet seen, you persist in telling me
|
||
the most mystifying and exasperating stories tending to beget in me an
|
||
uncomfortable feeling towards the man whom you design for my bedfellow—a sort of
|
||
connexion, landlord, which is an intimate and confidential one in the highest
|
||
degree. I now demand of you to speak out and tell me who and what this
|
||
harpooneer is, and whether I shall be in all respects safe to spend the night
|
||
with him. And in the first place, you will be so good as to unsay that story
|
||
about selling his head, which if true I take to be good evidence that this
|
||
harpooneer is stark mad, and I’ve no idea of sleeping with a madman; and you,
|
||
sir, you I mean, landlord, you, sir, by trying to induce me to do so knowingly,
|
||
would thereby render yourself liable to a criminal prosecution.”
|
||
|
||
“Wall,” said the landlord, fetching a long breath, “that’s a purty long sarmon
|
||
for a chap that rips a little now and then. But be easy, be easy, this here
|
||
harpooneer I have been tellin’ you of has just arrived from the south seas,
|
||
where he bought up a lot of ’balmed New Zealand heads (great curios, you know),
|
||
and he’s sold all on ’em but one, and that one he’s trying to sell to-night,
|
||
cause to-morrow’s Sunday, and it would not do to be sellin’ human heads about
|
||
the streets when folks is goin’ to churches. He wanted to, last Sunday, but I
|
||
stopped him just as he was goin’ out of the door with four heads strung on a
|
||
string, for all the airth like a string of inions.”
|
||
|
||
This account cleared up the otherwise unaccountable mystery, and showed that the
|
||
landlord, after all, had had no idea of fooling me—but at the same time what
|
||
could I think of a harpooneer who stayed out of a Saturday night clean into the
|
||
holy Sabbath, engaged in such a cannibal business as selling the heads of dead
|
||
idolators?
|
||
|
||
“Depend upon it, landlord, that harpooneer is a dangerous man.”
|
||
|
||
“He pays reg’lar,” was the rejoinder. “But come, it’s getting dreadful late, you
|
||
had better be turning flukes—it’s a nice bed; Sal and me slept in that ere bed
|
||
the night we were spliced. There’s plenty of room for two to kick about in that
|
||
bed; it’s an almighty big bed that. Why, afore we give it up, Sal used to put
|
||
our Sam and little Johnny in the foot of it. But I got a dreaming and sprawling
|
||
about one night, and somehow, Sam got pitched on the floor, and came near
|
||
breaking his arm. Arter that, Sal said it wouldn’t do. Come along here, I’ll
|
||
give ye a glim in a jiffy;” and so saying he lighted a candle and held it
|
||
towards me, offering to lead the way. But I stood irresolute; when looking at a
|
||
clock in the corner, he exclaimed “I vum it’s Sunday—you won’t see that
|
||
harpooneer to-night; he’s come to anchor somewhere—come along then; do come;
|
||
won’t ye come?”
|
||
|
||
I considered the matter a moment, and then up stairs we went, and I was ushered
|
||
into a small room, cold as a clam, and furnished, sure enough, with a prodigious
|
||
bed, almost big enough indeed for any four harpooneers to sleep abreast.
|
||
|
||
“There,” said the landlord, placing the candle on a crazy old sea chest that did
|
||
double duty as a wash-stand and centre table; “there, make yourself comfortable
|
||
now, and good night to ye.” I turned round from eyeing the bed, but he had
|
||
disappeared.
|
||
|
||
Folding back the counterpane, I stooped over the bed. Though none of the most
|
||
elegant, it yet stood the scrutiny tolerably well. I then glanced round the
|
||
room; and besides the bedstead and centre table, could see no other furniture
|
||
belonging to the place, but a rude shelf, the four walls, and a papered
|
||
fireboard representing a man striking a whale. Of things not properly belonging
|
||
to the room, there was a hammock lashed up, and thrown upon the floor in one
|
||
corner; also a large seaman’s bag, containing the harpooneer’s wardrobe, no
|
||
doubt in lieu of a land trunk. Likewise, there was a parcel of outlandish bone
|
||
fish hooks on the shelf over the fire-place, and a tall harpoon standing at the
|
||
head of the bed.
|
||
|
||
But what is this on the chest? I took it up, and held it close to the light, and
|
||
felt it, and smelt it, and tried every way possible to arrive at some
|
||
satisfactory conclusion concerning it. I can compare it to nothing but a large
|
||
door mat, ornamented at the edges with little tinkling tags something like the
|
||
stained porcupine quills round an Indian moccasin. There was a hole or slit in
|
||
the middle of this mat, as you see the same in South American ponchos. But could
|
||
it be possible that any sober harpooneer would get into a door mat, and parade
|
||
the streets of any Christian town in that sort of guise? I put it on, to try it,
|
||
and it weighed me down like a hamper, being uncommonly shaggy and thick, and I
|
||
thought a little damp, as though this mysterious harpooneer had been wearing it
|
||
of a rainy day. I went up in it to a bit of glass stuck against the wall, and I
|
||
never saw such a sight in my life. I tore myself out of it in such a hurry that
|
||
I gave myself a kink in the neck.
|
||
|
||
I sat down on the side of the bed, and commenced thinking about this
|
||
head-peddling harpooneer, and his door mat. After thinking some time on the
|
||
bed-side, I got up and took off my monkey jacket, and then stood in the middle
|
||
of the room thinking. I then took off my coat, and thought a little more in my
|
||
shirt sleeves. But beginning to feel very cold now, half undressed as I was, and
|
||
remembering what the landlord said about the harpooneer’s not coming home at all
|
||
that night, it being so very late, I made no more ado, but jumped out of my
|
||
pantaloons and boots, and then blowing out the light tumbled into bed, and
|
||
commended myself to the care of heaven.
|
||
|
||
Whether that mattress was stuffed with corn-cobs or broken crockery, there is no
|
||
telling, but I rolled about a good deal, and could not sleep for a long time. At
|
||
last I slid off into a light doze, and had pretty nearly made a good offing
|
||
towards the land of Nod, when I heard a heavy footfall in the passage, and saw a
|
||
glimmer of light come into the room from under the door.
|
||
|
||
Lord save me, thinks I, that must be the harpooneer, the infernal head-peddler.
|
||
But I lay perfectly still, and resolved not to say a word till spoken to.
|
||
Holding a light in one hand, and that identical New Zealand head in the other,
|
||
the stranger entered the room, and without looking towards the bed, placed his
|
||
candle a good way off from me on the floor in one corner, and then began working
|
||
away at the knotted cords of the large bag I before spoke of as being in the
|
||
room. I was all eagerness to see his face, but he kept it averted for some time
|
||
while employed in unlacing the bag’s mouth. This accomplished, however, he
|
||
turned round—when, good heavens! what a sight! Such a face! It was of a dark,
|
||
purplish, yellow colour, here and there stuck over with large blackish looking
|
||
squares. Yes, it’s just as I thought, he’s a terrible bedfellow; he’s been in a
|
||
fight, got dreadfully cut, and here he is, just from the surgeon. But at that
|
||
moment he chanced to turn his face so towards the light, that I plainly saw they
|
||
could not be sticking-plasters at all, those black squares on his cheeks. They
|
||
were stains of some sort or other. At first I knew not what to make of this; but
|
||
soon an inkling of the truth occurred to me. I remembered a story of a white
|
||
man—a whaleman too—who, falling among the cannibals, had been tattooed by them.
|
||
I concluded that this harpooneer, in the course of his distant voyages, must
|
||
have met with a similar adventure. And what is it, thought I, after all! It’s
|
||
only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin. But then, what to
|
||
make of his unearthly complexion, that part of it, I mean, lying round about,
|
||
and completely independent of the squares of tattooing. To be sure, it might be
|
||
nothing but a good coat of tropical tanning; but I never heard of a hot sun’s
|
||
tanning a white man into a purplish yellow one. However, I had never been in the
|
||
South Seas; and perhaps the sun there produced these extraordinary effects upon
|
||
the skin. Now, while all these ideas were passing through me like lightning,
|
||
this harpooneer never noticed me at all. But, after some difficulty having
|
||
opened his bag, he commenced fumbling in it, and presently pulled out a sort of
|
||
tomahawk, and a seal-skin wallet with the hair on. Placing these on the old
|
||
chest in the middle of the room, he then took the New Zealand head—a ghastly
|
||
thing enough—and crammed it down into the bag. He now took off his hat—a new
|
||
beaver hat—when I came nigh singing out with fresh surprise. There was no hair
|
||
on his head—none to speak of at least—nothing but a small scalp-knot twisted up
|
||
on his forehead. His bald purplish head now looked for all the world like a
|
||
mildewed skull. Had not the stranger stood between me and the door, I would have
|
||
bolted out of it quicker than ever I bolted a dinner.
|
||
|
||
Even as it was, I thought something of slipping out of the window, but it was
|
||
the second floor back. I am no coward, but what to make of this head-peddling
|
||
purple rascal altogether passed my comprehension. Ignorance is the parent of
|
||
fear, and being completely nonplussed and confounded about the stranger, I
|
||
confess I was now as much afraid of him as if it was the devil himself who had
|
||
thus broken into my room at the dead of night. In fact, I was so afraid of him
|
||
that I was not game enough just then to address him, and demand a satisfactory
|
||
answer concerning what seemed inexplicable in him.
|
||
|
||
Meanwhile, he continued the business of undressing, and at last showed his chest
|
||
and arms. As I live, these covered parts of him were checkered with the same
|
||
squares as his face; his back, too, was all over the same dark squares; he
|
||
seemed to have been in a Thirty Years’ War, and just escaped from it with a
|
||
sticking-plaster shirt. Still more, his very legs were marked, as if a parcel of
|
||
dark green frogs were running up the trunks of young palms. It was now quite
|
||
plain that he must be some abominable savage or other shipped aboard of a
|
||
whaleman in the South Seas, and so landed in this Christian country. I quaked to
|
||
think of it. A peddler of heads too—perhaps the heads of his own brothers. He
|
||
might take a fancy to mine—heavens! look at that tomahawk!
|
||
|
||
But there was no time for shuddering, for now the savage went about something
|
||
that completely fascinated my attention, and convinced me that he must indeed be
|
||
a heathen. Going to his heavy grego, or wrapall, or dreadnaught, which he had
|
||
previously hung on a chair, he fumbled in the pockets, and produced at length a
|
||
curious little deformed image with a hunch on its back, and exactly the colour
|
||
of a three days’ old Congo baby. Remembering the embalmed head, at first I
|
||
almost thought that this black manikin was a real baby preserved in some similar
|
||
manner. But seeing that it was not at all limber, and that it glistened a good
|
||
deal like polished ebony, I concluded that it must be nothing but a wooden idol,
|
||
which indeed it proved to be. For now the savage goes up to the empty
|
||
fire-place, and removing the papered fire-board, sets up this little
|
||
hunch-backed image, like a tenpin, between the andirons. The chimney jambs and
|
||
all the bricks inside were very sooty, so that I thought this fire-place made a
|
||
very appropriate little shrine or chapel for his Congo idol.
|
||
|
||
I now screwed my eyes hard towards the half hidden image, feeling but ill at
|
||
ease meantime—to see what was next to follow. First he takes about a double
|
||
handful of shavings out of his grego pocket, and places them carefully before
|
||
the idol; then laying a bit of ship biscuit on top and applying the flame from
|
||
the lamp, he kindled the shavings into a sacrificial blaze. Presently, after
|
||
many hasty snatches into the fire, and still hastier withdrawals of his fingers
|
||
(whereby he seemed to be scorching them badly), he at last succeeded in drawing
|
||
out the biscuit; then blowing off the heat and ashes a little, he made a polite
|
||
offer of it to the little negro. But the little devil did not seem to fancy such
|
||
dry sort of fare at all; he never moved his lips. All these strange antics were
|
||
accompanied by still stranger guttural noises from the devotee, who seemed to be
|
||
praying in a sing-song or else singing some pagan psalmody or other, during
|
||
which his face twitched about in the most unnatural manner. At last
|
||
extinguishing the fire, he took the idol up very unceremoniously, and bagged it
|
||
again in his grego pocket as carelessly as if he were a sportsman bagging a dead
|
||
woodcock.
|
||
|
||
All these queer proceedings increased my uncomfortableness, and seeing him now
|
||
exhibiting strong symptoms of concluding his business operations, and jumping
|
||
into bed with me, I thought it was high time, now or never, before the light was
|
||
put out, to break the spell in which I had so long been bound.
|
||
|
||
But the interval I spent in deliberating what to say, was a fatal one. Taking up
|
||
his tomahawk from the table, he examined the head of it for an instant, and then
|
||
holding it to the light, with his mouth at the handle, he puffed out great
|
||
clouds of tobacco smoke. The next moment the light was extinguished, and this
|
||
wild cannibal, tomahawk between his teeth, sprang into bed with me. I sang out,
|
||
I could not help it now; and giving a sudden grunt of astonishment he began
|
||
feeling me.
|
||
|
||
Stammering out something, I knew not what, I rolled away from him against the
|
||
wall, and then conjured him, whoever or whatever he might be, to keep quiet, and
|
||
let me get up and light the lamp again. But his guttural responses satisfied me
|
||
at once that he but ill comprehended my meaning.
|
||
|
||
“Who-e debel you?”—he at last said—“you no speak-e, dam-me, I kill-e.” And so
|
||
saying the lighted tomahawk began flourishing about me in the dark.
|
||
|
||
“Landlord, for God’s sake, Peter Coffin!” shouted I. “Landlord! Watch! Coffin!
|
||
Angels! save me!”
|
||
|
||
“Speak-e! tell-ee me who-ee be, or dam-me, I kill-e!” again growled the
|
||
cannibal, while his horrid flourishings of the tomahawk scattered the hot
|
||
tobacco ashes about me till I thought my linen would get on fire. But thank
|
||
heaven, at that moment the landlord came into the room light in hand, and
|
||
leaping from the bed I ran up to him.
|
||
|
||
“Don’t be afraid now,” said he, grinning again, “Queequeg here wouldn’t harm a
|
||
hair of your head.”
|
||
|
||
“Stop your grinning,” shouted I, “and why didn’t you tell me that that infernal
|
||
harpooneer was a cannibal?”
|
||
|
||
“I thought ye know’d it;—didn’t I tell ye, he was a peddlin’ heads around
|
||
town?—but turn flukes again and go to sleep. Queequeg, look here—you sabbee me,
|
||
I sabbee—you this man sleepe you—you sabbee?”
|
||
|
||
“Me sabbee plenty”—grunted Queequeg, puffing away at his pipe and sitting up in
|
||
bed.
|
||
|
||
“You gettee in,” he added, motioning to me with his tomahawk, and throwing the
|
||
clothes to one side. He really did this in not only a civil but a really kind
|
||
and charitable way. I stood looking at him a moment. For all his tattooings he
|
||
was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal. What’s all this fuss I have
|
||
been making about, thought I to myself—the man’s a human being just as I am: he
|
||
has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep
|
||
with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
|
||
|
||
“Landlord,” said I, “tell him to stash his tomahawk there, or pipe, or whatever
|
||
you call it; tell him to stop smoking, in short, and I will turn in with him.
|
||
But I don’t fancy having a man smoking in bed with me. It’s dangerous. Besides,
|
||
I ain’t insured.”
|
||
|
||
This being told to Queequeg, he at once complied, and again politely motioned me
|
||
to get into bed—rolling over to one side as much as to say—“I won’t touch a leg
|
||
of ye.”
|
||
|
||
“Good night, landlord,” said I, “you may go.”
|
||
|
||
I turned in, and never slept better in my life.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 4. The Counterpane.
|
||
|
||
Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg’s arm thrown over me
|
||
in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been
|
||
his wife. The counterpane was of patchwork, full of odd little parti-coloured
|
||
squares and triangles; and this arm of his tattooed all over with an
|
||
interminable Cretan labyrinth of a figure, no two parts of which were of one
|
||
precise shade—owing I suppose to his keeping his arm at sea unmethodically in
|
||
sun and shade, his shirt sleeves irregularly rolled up at various times—this
|
||
same arm of his, I say, looked for all the world like a strip of that same
|
||
patchwork quilt. Indeed, partly lying on it as the arm did when I first awoke, I
|
||
could hardly tell it from the quilt, they so blended their hues together; and it
|
||
was only by the sense of weight and pressure that I could tell that Queequeg was
|
||
hugging me.
|
||
|
||
My sensations were strange. Let me try to explain them. When I was a child, I
|
||
well remember a somewhat similar circumstance that befell me; whether it was a
|
||
reality or a dream, I never could entirely settle. The circumstance was this. I
|
||
had been cutting up some caper or other—I think it was trying to crawl up the
|
||
chimney, as I had seen a little sweep do a few days previous; and my stepmother
|
||
who, somehow or other, was all the time whipping me, or sending me to bed
|
||
supperless,—my mother dragged me by the legs out of the chimney and packed me
|
||
off to bed, though it was only two o’clock in the afternoon of the 21st June,
|
||
the longest day in the year in our hemisphere. I felt dreadfully. But there was
|
||
no help for it, so up stairs I went to my little room in the third floor,
|
||
undressed myself as slowly as possible so as to kill time, and with a bitter
|
||
sigh got between the sheets.
|
||
|
||
I lay there dismally calculating that sixteen entire hours must elapse before I
|
||
could hope for a resurrection. Sixteen hours in bed! the small of my back ached
|
||
to think of it. And it was so light too; the sun shining in at the window, and a
|
||
great rattling of coaches in the streets, and the sound of gay voices all over
|
||
the house. I felt worse and worse—at last I got up, dressed, and softly going
|
||
down in my stockinged feet, sought out my stepmother, and suddenly threw myself
|
||
at her feet, beseeching her as a particular favour to give me a good slippering
|
||
for my misbehaviour; anything indeed but condemning me to lie abed such an
|
||
unendurable length of time. But she was the best and most conscientious of
|
||
stepmothers, and back I had to go to my room. For several hours I lay there
|
||
broad awake, feeling a great deal worse than I have ever done since, even from
|
||
the greatest subsequent misfortunes. At last I must have fallen into a troubled
|
||
nightmare of a doze; and slowly waking from it—half steeped in dreams—I opened
|
||
my eyes, and the before sun-lit room was now wrapped in outer darkness.
|
||
Instantly I felt a shock running through all my frame; nothing was to be seen,
|
||
and nothing was to be heard; but a supernatural hand seemed placed in mine. My
|
||
arm hung over the counterpane, and the nameless, unimaginable, silent form or
|
||
phantom, to which the hand belonged, seemed closely seated by my bed-side. For
|
||
what seemed ages piled on ages, I lay there, frozen with the most awful fears,
|
||
not daring to drag away my hand; yet ever thinking that if I could but stir it
|
||
one single inch, the horrid spell would be broken. I knew not how this
|
||
consciousness at last glided away from me; but waking in the morning, I
|
||
shudderingly remembered it all, and for days and weeks and months afterwards I
|
||
lost myself in confounding attempts to explain the mystery. Nay, to this very
|
||
hour, I often puzzle myself with it.
|
||
|
||
Now, take away the awful fear, and my sensations at feeling the supernatural
|
||
hand in mine were very similar, in their strangeness, to those which I
|
||
experienced on waking up and seeing Queequeg’s pagan arm thrown round me. But at
|
||
length all the past night’s events soberly recurred, one by one, in fixed
|
||
reality, and then I lay only alive to the comical predicament. For though I
|
||
tried to move his arm—unlock his bridegroom clasp—yet, sleeping as he was, he
|
||
still hugged me tightly, as though naught but death should part us twain. I now
|
||
strove to rouse him—“Queequeg!”—but his only answer was a snore. I then rolled
|
||
over, my neck feeling as if it were in a horse-collar; and suddenly felt a
|
||
slight scratch. Throwing aside the counterpane, there lay the tomahawk sleeping
|
||
by the savage’s side, as if it were a hatchet-faced baby. A pretty pickle,
|
||
truly, thought I; abed here in a strange house in the broad day, with a cannibal
|
||
and a tomahawk! “Queequeg!—in the name of goodness, Queequeg, wake!” At length,
|
||
by dint of much wriggling, and loud and incessant expostulations upon the
|
||
unbecomingness of his hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of style, I
|
||
succeeded in extracting a grunt; and presently, he drew back his arm, shook
|
||
himself all over like a Newfoundland dog just from the water, and sat up in bed,
|
||
stiff as a pike-staff, looking at me, and rubbing his eyes as if he did not
|
||
altogether remember how I came to be there, though a dim consciousness of
|
||
knowing something about me seemed slowly dawning over him. Meanwhile, I lay
|
||
quietly eyeing him, having no serious misgivings now, and bent upon narrowly
|
||
observing so curious a creature. When, at last, his mind seemed made up touching
|
||
the character of his bedfellow, and he became, as it were, reconciled to the
|
||
fact; he jumped out upon the floor, and by certain signs and sounds gave me to
|
||
understand that, if it pleased me, he would dress first and then leave me to
|
||
dress afterwards, leaving the whole apartment to myself. Thinks I, Queequeg,
|
||
under the circumstances, this is a very civilized overture; but, the truth is,
|
||
these savages have an innate sense of delicacy, say what you will; it is
|
||
marvellous how essentially polite they are. I pay this particular compliment to
|
||
Queequeg, because he treated me with so much civility and consideration, while I
|
||
was guilty of great rudeness; staring at him from the bed, and watching all his
|
||
toilette motions; for the time my curiosity getting the better of my breeding.
|
||
Nevertheless, a man like Queequeg you don’t see every day, he and his ways were
|
||
well worth unusual regarding.
|
||
|
||
He commenced dressing at top by donning his beaver hat, a very tall one, by the
|
||
by, and then—still minus his trowsers—he hunted up his boots. What under the
|
||
heavens he did it for, I cannot tell, but his next movement was to crush
|
||
himself—boots in hand, and hat on—under the bed; when, from sundry violent
|
||
gaspings and strainings, I inferred he was hard at work booting himself; though
|
||
by no law of propriety that I ever heard of, is any man required to be private
|
||
when putting on his boots. But Queequeg, do you see, was a creature in the
|
||
transition stage—neither caterpillar nor butterfly. He was just enough civilized
|
||
to show off his outlandishness in the strangest possible manners. His education
|
||
was not yet completed. He was an undergraduate. If he had not been a small
|
||
degree civilized, he very probably would not have troubled himself with boots at
|
||
all; but then, if he had not been still a savage, he never would have dreamt of
|
||
getting under the bed to put them on. At last, he emerged with his hat very much
|
||
dented and crushed down over his eyes, and began creaking and limping about the
|
||
room, as if, not being much accustomed to boots, his pair of damp, wrinkled
|
||
cowhide ones—probably not made to order either—rather pinched and tormented him
|
||
at the first go off of a bitter cold morning.
|
||
|
||
Seeing, now, that there were no curtains to the window, and that the street
|
||
being very narrow, the house opposite commanded a plain view into the room, and
|
||
observing more and more the indecorous figure that Queequeg made, staving about
|
||
with little else but his hat and boots on; I begged him as well as I could, to
|
||
accelerate his toilet somewhat, and particularly to get into his pantaloons as
|
||
soon as possible. He complied, and then proceeded to wash himself. At that time
|
||
in the morning any Christian would have washed his face; but Queequeg, to my
|
||
amazement, contented himself with restricting his ablutions to his chest, arms,
|
||
and hands. He then donned his waistcoat, and taking up a piece of hard soap on
|
||
the wash-stand centre table, dipped it into water and commenced lathering his
|
||
face. I was watching to see where he kept his razor, when lo and behold, he
|
||
takes the harpoon from the bed corner, slips out the long wooden stock,
|
||
unsheathes the head, whets it a little on his boot, and striding up to the bit
|
||
of mirror against the wall, begins a vigorous scraping, or rather harpooning of
|
||
his cheeks. Thinks I, Queequeg, this is using Rogers’s best cutlery with a
|
||
vengeance. Afterwards I wondered the less at this operation when I came to know
|
||
of what fine steel the head of a harpoon is made, and how exceedingly sharp the
|
||
long straight edges are always kept.
|
||
|
||
The rest of his toilet was soon achieved, and he proudly marched out of the
|
||
room, wrapped up in his great pilot monkey jacket, and sporting his harpoon like
|
||
a marshal’s baton.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 5. Breakfast.
|
||
|
||
I quickly followed suit, and descending into the bar-room accosted the grinning
|
||
landlord very pleasantly. I cherished no malice towards him, though he had been
|
||
skylarking with me not a little in the matter of my bedfellow.
|
||
|
||
However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good
|
||
thing; the more’s the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford
|
||
stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him
|
||
cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way. And the man that has
|
||
anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than
|
||
you perhaps think for.
|
||
|
||
The bar-room was now full of the boarders who had been dropping in the night
|
||
previous, and whom I had not as yet had a good look at. They were nearly all
|
||
whalemen; chief mates, and second mates, and third mates, and sea carpenters,
|
||
and sea coopers, and sea blacksmiths, and harpooneers, and ship keepers; a brown
|
||
and brawny company, with bosky beards; an unshorn, shaggy set, all wearing
|
||
monkey jackets for morning gowns.
|
||
|
||
You could pretty plainly tell how long each one had been ashore. This young
|
||
fellow’s healthy cheek is like a sun-toasted pear in hue, and would seem to
|
||
smell almost as musky; he cannot have been three days landed from his Indian
|
||
voyage. That man next him looks a few shades lighter; you might say a touch of
|
||
satin wood is in him. In the complexion of a third still lingers a tropic tawn,
|
||
but slightly bleached withal; he doubtless has tarried whole weeks ashore. But
|
||
who could show a cheek like Queequeg? which, barred with various tints, seemed
|
||
like the Andes’ western slope, to show forth in one array, contrasting climates,
|
||
zone by zone.
|
||
|
||
“Grub, ho!” now cried the landlord, flinging open a door, and in we went to
|
||
breakfast.
|
||
|
||
They say that men who have seen the world, thereby become quite at ease in
|
||
manner, quite self-possessed in company. Not always, though: Ledyard, the great
|
||
New England traveller, and Mungo Park, the Scotch one; of all men, they
|
||
possessed the least assurance in the parlor. But perhaps the mere crossing of
|
||
Siberia in a sledge drawn by dogs as Ledyard did, or the taking a long solitary
|
||
walk on an empty stomach, in the negro heart of Africa, which was the sum of
|
||
poor Mungo’s performances—this kind of travel, I say, may not be the very best
|
||
mode of attaining a high social polish. Still, for the most part, that sort of
|
||
thing is to be had anywhere.
|
||
|
||
These reflections just here are occasioned by the circumstance that after we
|
||
were all seated at the table, and I was preparing to hear some good stories
|
||
about whaling; to my no small surprise, nearly every man maintained a profound
|
||
silence. And not only that, but they looked embarrassed. Yes, here were a set of
|
||
sea-dogs, many of whom without the slightest bashfulness had boarded great
|
||
whales on the high seas—entire strangers to them—and duelled them dead without
|
||
winking; and yet, here they sat at a social breakfast table—all of the same
|
||
calling, all of kindred tastes—looking round as sheepishly at each other as
|
||
though they had never been out of sight of some sheepfold among the Green
|
||
Mountains. A curious sight; these bashful bears, these timid warrior whalemen!
|
||
|
||
But as for Queequeg—why, Queequeg sat there among them—at the head of the table,
|
||
too, it so chanced; as cool as an icicle. To be sure I cannot say much for his
|
||
breeding. His greatest admirer could not have cordially justified his bringing
|
||
his harpoon into breakfast with him, and using it there without ceremony;
|
||
reaching over the table with it, to the imminent jeopardy of many heads, and
|
||
grappling the beefsteaks towards him. But that was certainly very coolly done by
|
||
him, and every one knows that in most people’s estimation, to do anything coolly
|
||
is to do it genteelly.
|
||
|
||
We will not speak of all Queequeg’s peculiarities here; how he eschewed coffee
|
||
and hot rolls, and applied his undivided attention to beefsteaks, done rare.
|
||
Enough, that when breakfast was over he withdrew like the rest into the public
|
||
room, lighted his tomahawk-pipe, and was sitting there quietly digesting and
|
||
smoking with his inseparable hat on, when I sallied out for a stroll.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 6. The Street.
|
||
|
||
If I had been astonished at first catching a glimpse of so outlandish an
|
||
individual as Queequeg circulating among the polite society of a civilized town,
|
||
that astonishment soon departed upon taking my first daylight stroll through the
|
||
streets of New Bedford.
|
||
|
||
In thoroughfares nigh the docks, any considerable seaport will frequently offer
|
||
to view the queerest looking nondescripts from foreign parts. Even in Broadway
|
||
and Chestnut streets, Mediterranean mariners will sometimes jostle the
|
||
affrighted ladies. Regent Street is not unknown to Lascars and Malays; and at
|
||
Bombay, in the Apollo Green, live Yankees have often scared the natives. But New
|
||
Bedford beats all Water Street and Wapping. In these last-mentioned haunts you
|
||
see only sailors; but in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at street
|
||
corners; savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh.
|
||
It makes a stranger stare.
|
||
|
||
But, besides the Feegeeans, Tongatobooarrs, Erromanggoans, Pannangians, and
|
||
Brighggians, and, besides the wild specimens of the whaling-craft which unheeded
|
||
reel about the streets, you will see other sights still more curious, certainly
|
||
more comical. There weekly arrive in this town scores of green Vermonters and
|
||
New Hampshire men, all athirst for gain and glory in the fishery. They are
|
||
mostly young, of stalwart frames; fellows who have felled forests, and now seek
|
||
to drop the axe and snatch the whale-lance. Many are as green as the Green
|
||
Mountains whence they came. In some things you would think them but a few hours
|
||
old. Look there! that chap strutting round the corner. He wears a beaver hat and
|
||
swallow-tailed coat, girdled with a sailor-belt and sheath-knife. Here comes
|
||
another with a sou’-wester and a bombazine cloak.
|
||
|
||
No town-bred dandy will compare with a country-bred one—I mean a downright
|
||
bumpkin dandy—a fellow that, in the dog-days, will mow his two acres in buckskin
|
||
gloves for fear of tanning his hands. Now when a country dandy like this takes
|
||
it into his head to make a distinguished reputation, and joins the great
|
||
whale-fishery, you should see the comical things he does upon reaching the
|
||
seaport. In bespeaking his sea-outfit, he orders bell-buttons to his waistcoats;
|
||
straps to his canvas trowsers. Ah, poor Hay-Seed! how bitterly will burst those
|
||
straps in the first howling gale, when thou art driven, straps, buttons, and
|
||
all, down the throat of the tempest.
|
||
|
||
But think not that this famous town has only harpooneers, cannibals, and
|
||
bumpkins to show her visitors. Not at all. Still New Bedford is a queer place.
|
||
Had it not been for us whalemen, that tract of land would this day perhaps have
|
||
been in as howling condition as the coast of Labrador. As it is, parts of her
|
||
back country are enough to frighten one, they look so bony. The town itself is
|
||
perhaps the dearest place to live in, in all New England. It is a land of oil,
|
||
true enough: but not like Canaan; a land, also, of corn and wine. The streets do
|
||
not run with milk; nor in the spring-time do they pave them with fresh eggs.
|
||
Yet, in spite of this, nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like
|
||
houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford. Whence came they?
|
||
how planted upon this once scraggy scoria of a country?
|
||
|
||
Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty mansion, and
|
||
your question will be answered. Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens
|
||
came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. One and all, they were
|
||
harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea. Can Herr Alexander
|
||
perform a feat like that?
|
||
|
||
In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their daughters,
|
||
and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises a-piece. You must go to New
|
||
Bedford to see a brilliant wedding; for, they say, they have reservoirs of oil
|
||
in every house, and every night recklessly burn their lengths in spermaceti
|
||
candles.
|
||
|
||
In summer time, the town is sweet to see; full of fine maples—long avenues of
|
||
green and gold. And in August, high in air, the beautiful and bountiful
|
||
horse-chestnuts, candelabra-wise, proffer the passer-by their tapering upright
|
||
cones of congregated blossoms. So omnipotent is art; which in many a district of
|
||
New Bedford has superinduced bright terraces of flowers upon the barren refuse
|
||
rocks thrown aside at creation’s final day.
|
||
|
||
And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses. But roses
|
||
only bloom in summer; whereas the fine carnation of their cheeks is perennial as
|
||
sunlight in the seventh heavens. Elsewhere match that bloom of theirs, ye
|
||
cannot, save in Salem, where they tell me the young girls breathe such musk,
|
||
their sailor sweethearts smell them miles off shore, as though they were drawing
|
||
nigh the odorous Moluccas instead of the Puritanic sands.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 7. The Chapel.
|
||
|
||
In this same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman’s Chapel, and few are the moody
|
||
fishermen, shortly bound for the Indian Ocean or Pacific, who fail to make a
|
||
Sunday visit to the spot. I am sure that I did not.
|
||
|
||
Returning from my first morning stroll, I again sallied out upon this special
|
||
errand. The sky had changed from clear, sunny cold, to driving sleet and mist.
|
||
Wrapping myself in my shaggy jacket of the cloth called bearskin, I fought my
|
||
way against the stubborn storm. Entering, I found a small scattered congregation
|
||
of sailors, and sailors’ wives and widows. A muffled silence reigned, only
|
||
broken at times by the shrieks of the storm. Each silent worshipper seemed
|
||
purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and
|
||
incommunicable. The chaplain had not yet arrived; and there these silent islands
|
||
of men and women sat steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets, with black
|
||
borders, masoned into the wall on either side the pulpit. Three of them ran
|
||
something like the following, but I do not pretend to quote:—
|
||
|
||
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF JOHN TALBOT, Who, at the age of eighteen, was lost
|
||
overboard, Near the Isle of Desolation, off Patagonia, November 1st, 1836. THIS
|
||
TABLET Is erected to his Memory BY HIS SISTER.
|
||
|
||
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF ROBERT LONG, WILLIS ELLERY, NATHAN COLEMAN, WALTER
|
||
CANNY, SETH MACY, AND SAMUEL GLEIG, Forming one of the boats’ crews OF THE SHIP
|
||
ELIZA Who were towed out of sight by a Whale, On the Off-shore Ground in the
|
||
PACIFIC, December 31st, 1839. THIS MARBLE Is here placed by their surviving
|
||
SHIPMATES.
|
||
|
||
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF The late CAPTAIN EZEKIEL HARDY, Who in the bows of his
|
||
boat was killed by a Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan, August 3d, 1833. THIS
|
||
TABLET Is erected to his Memory BY HIS WIDOW.
|
||
|
||
Shaking off the sleet from my ice-glazed hat and jacket, I seated myself near
|
||
the door, and turning sideways was surprised to see Queequeg near me. Affected
|
||
by the solemnity of the scene, there was a wondering gaze of incredulous
|
||
curiosity in his countenance. This savage was the only person present who seemed
|
||
to notice my entrance; because he was the only one who could not read, and,
|
||
therefore, was not reading those frigid inscriptions on the wall. Whether any of
|
||
the relatives of the seamen whose names appeared there were now among the
|
||
congregation, I knew not; but so many are the unrecorded accidents in the
|
||
fishery, and so plainly did several women present wear the countenance if not
|
||
the trappings of some unceasing grief, that I feel sure that here before me were
|
||
assembled those, in whose unhealing hearts the sight of those bleak tablets
|
||
sympathetically caused the old wounds to bleed afresh.
|
||
|
||
Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing among flowers
|
||
can say—here, here lies my beloved; ye know not the desolation that broods in
|
||
bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which
|
||
cover no ashes! What despair in those immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids
|
||
and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and
|
||
refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a
|
||
grave. As well might those tablets stand in the cave of Elephanta as here.
|
||
|
||
In what census of living creatures, the dead of mankind are included; why it is
|
||
that a universal proverb says of them, that they tell no tales, though
|
||
containing more secrets than the Goodwin Sands; how it is that to his name who
|
||
yesterday departed for the other world, we prefix so significant and infidel a
|
||
word, and yet do not thus entitle him, if he but embarks for the remotest Indies
|
||
of this living earth; why the Life Insurance Companies pay death-forfeitures
|
||
upon immortals; in what eternal, unstirring paralysis, and deadly, hopeless
|
||
trance, yet lies antique Adam who died sixty round centuries ago; how it is that
|
||
we still refuse to be comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are
|
||
dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why all the living so strive to hush all the
|
||
dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city.
|
||
All these things are not without their meanings.
|
||
|
||
But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts
|
||
she gathers her most vital hope.
|
||
|
||
It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a Nantucket
|
||
voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky light of that
|
||
darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who had gone before me. Yes,
|
||
Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But somehow I grew merry again. Delightful
|
||
inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion, it seems—aye, a stove boat
|
||
will make me an immortal by brevet. Yes, there is death in this business of
|
||
whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what
|
||
then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks
|
||
that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that
|
||
in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun
|
||
through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks
|
||
my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take
|
||
it I say, it is not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a
|
||
stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself
|
||
cannot.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 8. The Pulpit.
|
||
|
||
I had not been seated very long ere a man of a certain venerable robustness
|
||
entered; immediately as the storm-pelted door flew back upon admitting him, a
|
||
quick regardful eyeing of him by all the congregation, sufficiently attested
|
||
that this fine old man was the chaplain. Yes, it was the famous Father Mapple,
|
||
so called by the whalemen, among whom he was a very great favourite. He had been
|
||
a sailor and a harpooneer in his youth, but for many years past had dedicated
|
||
his life to the ministry. At the time I now write of, Father Mapple was in the
|
||
hardy winter of a healthy old age; that sort of old age which seems merging into
|
||
a second flowering youth, for among all the fissures of his wrinkles, there
|
||
shone certain mild gleams of a newly developing bloom—the spring verdure peeping
|
||
forth even beneath February’s snow. No one having previously heard his history,
|
||
could for the first time behold Father Mapple without the utmost interest,
|
||
because there were certain engrafted clerical peculiarities about him, imputable
|
||
to that adventurous maritime life he had led. When he entered I observed that he
|
||
carried no umbrella, and certainly had not come in his carriage, for his
|
||
tarpaulin hat ran down with melting sleet, and his great pilot cloth jacket
|
||
seemed almost to drag him to the floor with the weight of the water it had
|
||
absorbed. However, hat and coat and overshoes were one by one removed, and hung
|
||
up in a little space in an adjacent corner; when, arrayed in a decent suit, he
|
||
quietly approached the pulpit.
|
||
|
||
Like most old fashioned pulpits, it was a very lofty one, and since a regular
|
||
stairs to such a height would, by its long angle with the floor, seriously
|
||
contract the already small area of the chapel, the architect, it seemed, had
|
||
acted upon the hint of Father Mapple, and finished the pulpit without a stairs,
|
||
substituting a perpendicular side ladder, like those used in mounting a ship
|
||
from a boat at sea. The wife of a whaling captain had provided the chapel with a
|
||
handsome pair of red worsted man-ropes for this ladder, which, being itself
|
||
nicely headed, and stained with a mahogany colour, the whole contrivance,
|
||
considering what manner of chapel it was, seemed by no means in bad taste.
|
||
Halting for an instant at the foot of the ladder, and with both hands grasping
|
||
the ornamental knobs of the man-ropes, Father Mapple cast a look upwards, and
|
||
then with a truly sailor-like but still reverential dexterity, hand over hand,
|
||
mounted the steps as if ascending the main-top of his vessel.
|
||
|
||
The perpendicular parts of this side ladder, as is usually the case with
|
||
swinging ones, were of cloth-covered rope, only the rounds were of wood, so that
|
||
at every step there was a joint. At my first glimpse of the pulpit, it had not
|
||
escaped me that however convenient for a ship, these joints in the present
|
||
instance seemed unnecessary. For I was not prepared to see Father Mapple after
|
||
gaining the height, slowly turn round, and stooping over the pulpit,
|
||
deliberately drag up the ladder step by step, till the whole was deposited
|
||
within, leaving him impregnable in his little Quebec.
|
||
|
||
I pondered some time without fully comprehending the reason for this. Father
|
||
Mapple enjoyed such a wide reputation for sincerity and sanctity, that I could
|
||
not suspect him of courting notoriety by any mere tricks of the stage. No,
|
||
thought I, there must be some sober reason for this thing; furthermore, it must
|
||
symbolize something unseen. Can it be, then, that by that act of physical
|
||
isolation, he signifies his spiritual withdrawal for the time, from all outward
|
||
worldly ties and connexions? Yes, for replenished with the meat and wine of the
|
||
word, to the faithful man of God, this pulpit, I see, is a self-containing
|
||
stronghold—a lofty Ehrenbreitstein, with a perennial well of water within the
|
||
walls.
|
||
|
||
But the side ladder was not the only strange feature of the place, borrowed from
|
||
the chaplain’s former sea-farings. Between the marble cenotaphs on either hand
|
||
of the pulpit, the wall which formed its back was adorned with a large painting
|
||
representing a gallant ship beating against a terrible storm off a lee coast of
|
||
black rocks and snowy breakers. But high above the flying scud and dark-rolling
|
||
clouds, there floated a little isle of sunlight, from which beamed forth an
|
||
angel’s face; and this bright face shed a distinct spot of radiance upon the
|
||
ship’s tossed deck, something like that silver plate now inserted into the
|
||
Victory’s plank where Nelson fell. “Ah, noble ship,” the angel seemed to say,
|
||
“beat on, beat on, thou noble ship, and bear a hardy helm; for lo! the sun is
|
||
breaking through; the clouds are rolling off—serenest azure is at hand.”
|
||
|
||
Nor was the pulpit itself without a trace of the same sea-taste that had
|
||
achieved the ladder and the picture. Its panelled front was in the likeness of a
|
||
ship’s bluff bows, and the Holy Bible rested on a projecting piece of scroll
|
||
work, fashioned after a ship’s fiddle-headed beak.
|
||
|
||
What could be more full of meaning?—for the pulpit is ever this earth’s foremost
|
||
part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world. From thence it
|
||
is the storm of God’s quick wrath is first descried, and the bow must bear the
|
||
earliest brunt. From thence it is the God of breezes fair or foul is first
|
||
invoked for favourable winds. Yes, the world’s a ship on its passage out, and
|
||
not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 9. The Sermon.
|
||
|
||
Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of unassuming authority ordered the
|
||
scattered people to condense. “Starboard gangway, there! side away to
|
||
larboard—larboard gangway to starboard! Midships! midships!”
|
||
|
||
There was a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots among the benches, and a still
|
||
slighter shuffling of women’s shoes, and all was quiet again, and every eye on
|
||
the preacher.
|
||
|
||
He paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit’s bows, folded his large brown
|
||
hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and offered a prayer so deeply
|
||
devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea.
|
||
|
||
This ended, in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of a bell in a
|
||
ship that is foundering at sea in a fog—in such tones he commenced reading the
|
||
following hymn; but changing his manner towards the concluding stanzas, burst
|
||
forth with a pealing exultation and joy—
|
||
|
||
“The ribs and terrors in the whale, Arched over me a dismal gloom, While
|
||
all God’s sun-lit waves rolled by, And lift me deepening down to doom.
|
||
|
||
“I saw the opening maw of hell, With endless pains and sorrows there; Which
|
||
none but they that feel can tell— Oh, I was plunging to despair.
|
||
|
||
“In black distress, I called my God, When I could scarce believe him mine,
|
||
He bowed his ear to my complaints— No more the whale did me confine.
|
||
|
||
“With speed he flew to my relief, As on a radiant dolphin borne; Awful, yet
|
||
bright, as lightning shone The face of my Deliverer God.
|
||
|
||
“My song for ever shall record That terrible, that joyful hour; I give the
|
||
glory to my God, His all the mercy and the power.”
|
||
|
||
|
||
Nearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled high above the howling of
|
||
the storm. A brief pause ensued; the preacher slowly turned over the leaves of
|
||
the Bible, and at last, folding his hand down upon the proper page, said:
|
||
“Beloved shipmates, clinch the last verse of the first chapter of Jonah—‘And God
|
||
had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.’”
|
||
|
||
“Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters—four yarns—is one of the
|
||
smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the
|
||
soul does Jonah’s deep sealine sound! what a pregnant lesson to us is this
|
||
prophet! What a noble thing is that canticle in the fish’s belly! How
|
||
billow-like and boisterously grand! We feel the floods surging over us; we sound
|
||
with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters; sea-weed and all the slime of the
|
||
sea is about us! But what is this lesson that the book of Jonah teaches?
|
||
Shipmates, it is a two-stranded lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful men, and a
|
||
lesson to me as a pilot of the living God. As sinful men, it is a lesson to us
|
||
all, because it is a story of the sin, hard-heartedness, suddenly awakened
|
||
fears, the swift punishment, repentance, prayers, and finally the deliverance
|
||
and joy of Jonah. As with all sinners among men, the sin of this son of Amittai
|
||
was in his wilful disobedience of the command of God—never mind now what that
|
||
command was, or how conveyed—which he found a hard command. But all the things
|
||
that God would have us do are hard for us to do—remember that—and hence, he
|
||
oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we must
|
||
disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness
|
||
of obeying God consists.
|
||
|
||
“With this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah still further flouts at God, by
|
||
seeking to flee from Him. He thinks that a ship made by men will carry him into
|
||
countries where God does not reign, but only the Captains of this earth. He
|
||
skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and seeks a ship that’s bound for Tarshish.
|
||
There lurks, perhaps, a hitherto unheeded meaning here. By all accounts Tarshish
|
||
could have been no other city than the modern Cadiz. That’s the opinion of
|
||
learned men. And where is Cadiz, shipmates? Cadiz is in Spain; as far by water,
|
||
from Joppa, as Jonah could possibly have sailed in those ancient days, when the
|
||
Atlantic was an almost unknown sea. Because Joppa, the modern Jaffa, shipmates,
|
||
is on the most easterly coast of the Mediterranean, the Syrian; and Tarshish or
|
||
Cadiz more than two thousand miles to the westward from that, just outside the
|
||
Straits of Gibraltar. See ye not then, shipmates, that Jonah sought to flee
|
||
world-wide from God? Miserable man! Oh! most contemptible and worthy of all
|
||
scorn; with slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God; prowling among
|
||
the shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas. So disordered,
|
||
self-condemning is his look, that had there been policemen in those days, Jonah,
|
||
on the mere suspicion of something wrong, had been arrested ere he touched a
|
||
deck. How plainly he’s a fugitive! no baggage, not a hat-box, valise, or
|
||
carpet-bag,—no friends accompany him to the wharf with their adieux. At last,
|
||
after much dodging search, he finds the Tarshish ship receiving the last items
|
||
of her cargo; and as he steps on board to see its Captain in the cabin, all the
|
||
sailors for the moment desist from hoisting in the goods, to mark the stranger’s
|
||
evil eye. Jonah sees this; but in vain he tries to look all ease and confidence;
|
||
in vain essays his wretched smile. Strong intuitions of the man assure the
|
||
mariners he can be no innocent. In their gamesome but still serious way, one
|
||
whispers to the other—“Jack, he’s robbed a widow;” or, “Joe, do you mark him;
|
||
he’s a bigamist;” or, “Harry lad, I guess he’s the adulterer that broke jail in
|
||
old Gomorrah, or belike, one of the missing murderers from Sodom.” Another runs
|
||
to read the bill that’s stuck against the spile upon the wharf to which the ship
|
||
is moored, offering five hundred gold coins for the apprehension of a parricide,
|
||
and containing a description of his person. He reads, and looks from Jonah to
|
||
the bill; while all his sympathetic shipmates now crowd round Jonah, prepared to
|
||
lay their hands upon him. Frighted Jonah trembles, and summoning all his
|
||
boldness to his face, only looks so much the more a coward. He will not confess
|
||
himself suspected; but that itself is strong suspicion. So he makes the best of
|
||
it; and when the sailors find him not to be the man that is advertised, they let
|
||
him pass, and he descends into the cabin.
|
||
|
||
“‘Who’s there?’ cries the Captain at his busy desk, hurriedly making out his
|
||
papers for the Customs—‘Who’s there?’ Oh! how that harmless question mangles
|
||
Jonah! For the instant he almost turns to flee again. But he rallies. ‘I seek a
|
||
passage in this ship to Tarshish; how soon sail ye, sir?’ Thus far the busy
|
||
Captain had not looked up to Jonah, though the man now stands before him; but no
|
||
sooner does he hear that hollow voice, than he darts a scrutinizing glance. ‘We
|
||
sail with the next coming tide,’ at last he slowly answered, still intently
|
||
eyeing him. ‘No sooner, sir?’—‘Soon enough for any honest man that goes a
|
||
passenger.’ Ha! Jonah, that’s another stab. But he swiftly calls away the
|
||
Captain from that scent. ‘I’ll sail with ye,’—he says,—‘the passage money how
|
||
much is that?—I’ll pay now.’ For it is particularly written, shipmates, as if it
|
||
were a thing not to be overlooked in this history, ‘that he paid the fare
|
||
thereof’ ere the craft did sail. And taken with the context, this is full of
|
||
meaning.
|
||
|
||
“Now Jonah’s Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects crime in any,
|
||
but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless. In this world, shipmates,
|
||
sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue,
|
||
if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers. So Jonah’s Captain prepares to test
|
||
the length of Jonah’s purse, ere he judge him openly. He charges him thrice the
|
||
usual sum; and it’s assented to. Then the Captain knows that Jonah is a
|
||
fugitive; but at the same time resolves to help a flight that paves its rear
|
||
with gold. Yet when Jonah fairly takes out his purse, prudent suspicions still
|
||
molest the Captain. He rings every coin to find a counterfeit. Not a forger, any
|
||
way, he mutters; and Jonah is put down for his passage. ‘Point out my
|
||
state-room, Sir,’ says Jonah now, ‘I’m travel-weary; I need sleep.’ ‘Thou
|
||
lookest like it,’ says the Captain, ‘there’s thy room.’ Jonah enters, and would
|
||
lock the door, but the lock contains no key. Hearing him foolishly fumbling
|
||
there, the Captain laughs lowly to himself, and mutters something about the
|
||
doors of convicts’ cells being never allowed to be locked within. All dressed
|
||
and dusty as he is, Jonah throws himself into his berth, and finds the little
|
||
state-room ceiling almost resting on his forehead. The air is close, and Jonah
|
||
gasps. Then, in that contracted hole, sunk, too, beneath the ship’s water-line,
|
||
Jonah feels the heralding presentiment of that stifling hour, when the whale
|
||
shall hold him in the smallest of his bowels’ wards.
|
||
|
||
“Screwed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly oscillates in
|
||
Jonah’s room; and the ship, heeling over towards the wharf with the weight of
|
||
the last bales received, the lamp, flame and all, though in slight motion, still
|
||
maintains a permanent obliquity with reference to the room; though, in truth,
|
||
infallibly straight itself, it but made obvious the false, lying levels among
|
||
which it hung. The lamp alarms and frightens Jonah; as lying in his berth his
|
||
tormented eyes roll round the place, and this thus far successful fugitive finds
|
||
no refuge for his restless glance. But that contradiction in the lamp more and
|
||
more appals him. The floor, the ceiling, and the side, are all awry. ‘Oh! so my
|
||
conscience hangs in me!’ he groans, ‘straight upwards, so it burns; but the
|
||
chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!’
|
||
|
||
“Like one who after a night of drunken revelry hies to his bed, still reeling,
|
||
but with conscience yet pricking him, as the plungings of the Roman race-horse
|
||
but so much the more strike his steel tags into him; as one who in that
|
||
miserable plight still turns and turns in giddy anguish, praying God for
|
||
annihilation until the fit be passed; and at last amid the whirl of woe he
|
||
feels, a deep stupor steals over him, as over the man who bleeds to death, for
|
||
conscience is the wound, and there’s naught to staunch it; so, after sore
|
||
wrestlings in his berth, Jonah’s prodigy of ponderous misery drags him drowning
|
||
down to sleep.
|
||
|
||
“And now the time of tide has come; the ship casts off her cables; and from the
|
||
deserted wharf the uncheered ship for Tarshish, all careening, glides to sea.
|
||
That ship, my friends, was the first of recorded smugglers! the contraband was
|
||
Jonah. But the sea rebels; he will not bear the wicked burden. A dreadful storm
|
||
comes on, the ship is like to break. But now when the boatswain calls all hands
|
||
to lighten her; when boxes, bales, and jars are clattering overboard; when the
|
||
wind is shrieking, and the men are yelling, and every plank thunders with
|
||
trampling feet right over Jonah’s head; in all this raging tumult, Jonah sleeps
|
||
his hideous sleep. He sees no black sky and raging sea, feels not the reeling
|
||
timbers, and little hears he or heeds he the far rush of the mighty whale, which
|
||
even now with open mouth is cleaving the seas after him. Aye, shipmates, Jonah
|
||
was gone down into the sides of the ship—a berth in the cabin as I have taken
|
||
it, and was fast asleep. But the frightened master comes to him, and shrieks in
|
||
his dead ear, ‘What meanest thou, O, sleeper! arise!’ Startled from his lethargy
|
||
by that direful cry, Jonah staggers to his feet, and stumbling to the deck,
|
||
grasps a shroud, to look out upon the sea. But at that moment he is sprung upon
|
||
by a panther billow leaping over the bulwarks. Wave after wave thus leaps into
|
||
the ship, and finding no speedy vent runs roaring fore and aft, till the
|
||
mariners come nigh to drowning while yet afloat. And ever, as the white moon
|
||
shows her affrighted face from the steep gullies in the blackness overhead,
|
||
aghast Jonah sees the rearing bowsprit pointing high upward, but soon beat
|
||
downward again towards the tormented deep.
|
||
|
||
“Terrors upon terrors run shouting through his soul. In all his cringing
|
||
attitudes, the God-fugitive is now too plainly known. The sailors mark him; more
|
||
and more certain grow their suspicions of him, and at last, fully to test the
|
||
truth, by referring the whole matter to high Heaven, they fall to casting lots,
|
||
to see for whose cause this great tempest was upon them. The lot is Jonah’s;
|
||
that discovered, then how furiously they mob him with their questions. ‘What is
|
||
thine occupation? Whence comest thou? Thy country? What people? But mark now, my
|
||
shipmates, the behavior of poor Jonah. The eager mariners but ask him who he is,
|
||
and where from; whereas, they not only receive an answer to those questions, but
|
||
likewise another answer to a question not put by them, but the unsolicited
|
||
answer is forced from Jonah by the hard hand of God that is upon him.
|
||
|
||
“‘I am a Hebrew,’ he cries—and then—‘I fear the Lord the God of Heaven who hath
|
||
made the sea and the dry land!’ Fear him, O Jonah? Aye, well mightest thou fear
|
||
the Lord God then! Straightway, he now goes on to make a full confession;
|
||
whereupon the mariners became more and more appalled, but still are pitiful. For
|
||
when Jonah, not yet supplicating God for mercy, since he but too well knew the
|
||
darkness of his deserts,—when wretched Jonah cries out to them to take him and
|
||
cast him forth into the sea, for he knew that for his sake this great tempest
|
||
was upon them; they mercifully turn from him, and seek by other means to save
|
||
the ship. But all in vain; the indignant gale howls louder; then, with one hand
|
||
raised invokingly to God, with the other they not unreluctantly lay hold of
|
||
Jonah.
|
||
|
||
“And now behold Jonah taken up as an anchor and dropped into the sea; when
|
||
instantly an oily calmness floats out from the east, and the sea is still, as
|
||
Jonah carries down the gale with him, leaving smooth water behind. He goes down
|
||
in the whirling heart of such a masterless commotion that he scarce heeds the
|
||
moment when he drops seething into the yawning jaws awaiting him; and the whale
|
||
shoots-to all his ivory teeth, like so many white bolts, upon his prison. Then
|
||
Jonah prayed unto the Lord out of the fish’s belly. But observe his prayer, and
|
||
learn a weighty lesson. For sinful as he is, Jonah does not weep and wail for
|
||
direct deliverance. He feels that his dreadful punishment is just. He leaves all
|
||
his deliverance to God, contenting himself with this, that spite of all his
|
||
pains and pangs, he will still look towards His holy temple. And here,
|
||
shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but
|
||
grateful for punishment. And how pleasing to God was this conduct in Jonah, is
|
||
shown in the eventual deliverance of him from the sea and the whale. Shipmates,
|
||
I do not place Jonah before you to be copied for his sin but I do place him
|
||
before you as a model for repentance. Sin not; but if you do, take heed to
|
||
repent of it like Jonah.”
|
||
|
||
While he was speaking these words, the howling of the shrieking, slanting storm
|
||
without seemed to add new power to the preacher, who, when describing Jonah’s
|
||
sea-storm, seemed tossed by a storm himself. His deep chest heaved as with a
|
||
ground-swell; his tossed arms seemed the warring elements at work; and the
|
||
thunders that rolled away from off his swarthy brow, and the light leaping from
|
||
his eye, made all his simple hearers look on him with a quick fear that was
|
||
strange to them.
|
||
|
||
There now came a lull in his look, as he silently turned over the leaves of the
|
||
Book once more; and, at last, standing motionless, with closed eyes, for the
|
||
moment, seemed communing with God and himself.
|
||
|
||
But again he leaned over towards the people, and bowing his head lowly, with an
|
||
aspect of the deepest yet manliest humility, he spake these words:
|
||
|
||
“Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon you; both his hands press upon me. I
|
||
have read ye by what murky light may be mine the lesson that Jonah teaches to
|
||
all sinners; and therefore to ye, and still more to me, for I am a greater
|
||
sinner than ye. And now how gladly would I come down from this mast-head and sit
|
||
on the hatches there where you sit, and listen as you listen, while some one of
|
||
you reads me that other and more awful lesson which Jonah teaches to me, as a
|
||
pilot of the living God. How being an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of true
|
||
things, and bidden by the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of a
|
||
wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise, fled from his
|
||
mission, and sought to escape his duty and his God by taking ship at Joppa. But
|
||
God is everywhere; Tarshish he never reached. As we have seen, God came upon him
|
||
in the whale, and swallowed him down to living gulfs of doom, and with swift
|
||
slantings tore him along ‘into the midst of the seas,’ where the eddying depths
|
||
sucked him ten thousand fathoms down, and ‘the weeds were wrapped about his
|
||
head,’ and all the watery world of woe bowled over him. Yet even then beyond the
|
||
reach of any plummet—‘out of the belly of hell’—when the whale grounded upon the
|
||
ocean’s utmost bones, even then, God heard the engulphed, repenting prophet when
|
||
he cried. Then God spake unto the fish; and from the shuddering cold and
|
||
blackness of the sea, the whale came breeching up towards the warm and pleasant
|
||
sun, and all the delights of air and earth; and ‘vomited out Jonah upon the dry
|
||
land;’ when the word of the Lord came a second time; and Jonah, bruised and
|
||
beaten—his ears, like two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the
|
||
ocean—Jonah did the Almighty’s bidding. And what was that, shipmates? To preach
|
||
the Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was it!
|
||
|
||
“This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to that pilot of the living
|
||
God who slights it. Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty! Woe to
|
||
him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale!
|
||
Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal! Woe to him whose good name
|
||
is more to him than goodness! Woe to him who, in this world, courts not
|
||
dishonor! Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were
|
||
salvation! Yea, woe to him who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching
|
||
to others is himself a castaway!”
|
||
|
||
He dropped and fell away from himself for a moment; then lifting his face to
|
||
them again, showed a deep joy in his eyes, as he cried out with a heavenly
|
||
enthusiasm,—“But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a
|
||
sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is
|
||
deep. Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low? Delight is to him—a
|
||
far, far upward, and inward delight—who against the proud gods and commodores of
|
||
this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him whose
|
||
strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world has
|
||
gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and
|
||
kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes
|
||
of Senators and Judges. Delight,—top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges
|
||
no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight
|
||
is to him, whom all the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob
|
||
can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and
|
||
deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final
|
||
breath—O Father!—chiefly known to me by Thy rod—mortal or immortal, here I die.
|
||
I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world’s, or mine own. Yet this
|
||
is nothing: I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out
|
||
the lifetime of his God?”
|
||
|
||
He said no more, but slowly waving a benediction, covered his face with his
|
||
hands, and so remained kneeling, till all the people had departed, and he was
|
||
left alone in the place.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 10. A Bosom Friend.
|
||
|
||
Returning to the Spouter-Inn from the Chapel, I found Queequeg there quite
|
||
alone; he having left the Chapel before the benediction some time. He was
|
||
sitting on a bench before the fire, with his feet on the stove hearth, and in
|
||
one hand was holding close up to his face that little negro idol of his; peering
|
||
hard into its face, and with a jack-knife gently whittling away at its nose,
|
||
meanwhile humming to himself in his heathenish way.
|
||
|
||
But being now interrupted, he put up the image; and pretty soon, going to the
|
||
table, took up a large book there, and placing it on his lap began counting the
|
||
pages with deliberate regularity; at every fiftieth page—as I fancied—stopping a
|
||
moment, looking vacantly around him, and giving utterance to a long-drawn
|
||
gurgling whistle of astonishment. He would then begin again at the next fifty;
|
||
seeming to commence at number one each time, as though he could not count more
|
||
than fifty, and it was only by such a large number of fifties being found
|
||
together, that his astonishment at the multitude of pages was excited.
|
||
|
||
With much interest I sat watching him. Savage though he was, and hideously
|
||
marred about the face—at least to my taste—his countenance yet had a something
|
||
in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul. Through all
|
||
his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw the traces of a simple honest heart;
|
||
and in his large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of a
|
||
spirit that would dare a thousand devils. And besides all this, there was a
|
||
certain lofty bearing about the Pagan, which even his uncouthness could not
|
||
altogether maim. He looked like a man who had never cringed and never had had a
|
||
creditor. Whether it was, too, that his head being shaved, his forehead was
|
||
drawn out in freer and brighter relief, and looked more expansive than it
|
||
otherwise would, this I will not venture to decide; but certain it was his head
|
||
was phrenologically an excellent one. It may seem ridiculous, but it reminded me
|
||
of General Washington’s head, as seen in the popular busts of him. It had the
|
||
same long regularly graded retreating slope from above the brows, which were
|
||
likewise very projecting, like two long promontories thickly wooded on top.
|
||
Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.
|
||
|
||
Whilst I was thus closely scanning him, half-pretending meanwhile to be looking
|
||
out at the storm from the casement, he never heeded my presence, never troubled
|
||
himself with so much as a single glance; but appeared wholly occupied with
|
||
counting the pages of the marvellous book. Considering how sociably we had been
|
||
sleeping together the night previous, and especially considering the
|
||
affectionate arm I had found thrown over me upon waking in the morning, I
|
||
thought this indifference of his very strange. But savages are strange beings;
|
||
at times you do not know exactly how to take them. At first they are overawing;
|
||
their calm self-collectedness of simplicity seems a Socratic wisdom. I had
|
||
noticed also that Queequeg never consorted at all, or but very little, with the
|
||
other seamen in the inn. He made no advances whatever; appeared to have no
|
||
desire to enlarge the circle of his acquaintances. All this struck me as mighty
|
||
singular; yet, upon second thoughts, there was something almost sublime in it.
|
||
Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of Cape Horn,
|
||
that is—which was the only way he could get there—thrown among people as strange
|
||
to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at
|
||
his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship;
|
||
always equal to himself. Surely this was a touch of fine philosophy; though no
|
||
doubt he had never heard there was such a thing as that. But, perhaps, to be
|
||
true philosophers, we mortals should not be conscious of so living or so
|
||
striving. So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself out for a
|
||
philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have “broken
|
||
his digester.”
|
||
|
||
As I sat there in that now lonely room; the fire burning low, in that mild stage
|
||
when, after its first intensity has warmed the air, it then only glows to be
|
||
looked at; the evening shades and phantoms gathering round the casements, and
|
||
peering in upon us silent, solitary twain; the storm booming without in solemn
|
||
swells; I began to be sensible of strange feelings. I felt a melting in me. No
|
||
more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish
|
||
world. This soothing savage had redeemed it. There he sat, his very indifference
|
||
speaking a nature in which there lurked no civilized hypocrisies and bland
|
||
deceits. Wild he was; a very sight of sights to see; yet I began to feel myself
|
||
mysteriously drawn towards him. And those same things that would have repelled
|
||
most others, they were the very magnets that thus drew me. I’ll try a pagan
|
||
friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy. I
|
||
drew my bench near him, and made some friendly signs and hints, doing my best to
|
||
talk with him meanwhile. At first he little noticed these advances; but
|
||
presently, upon my referring to his last night’s hospitalities, he made out to
|
||
ask me whether we were again to be bedfellows. I told him yes; whereat I thought
|
||
he looked pleased, perhaps a little complimented.
|
||
|
||
We then turned over the book together, and I endeavored to explain to him the
|
||
purpose of the printing, and the meaning of the few pictures that were in it.
|
||
Thus I soon engaged his interest; and from that we went to jabbering the best we
|
||
could about the various outer sights to be seen in this famous town. Soon I
|
||
proposed a social smoke; and, producing his pouch and tomahawk, he quietly
|
||
offered me a puff. And then we sat exchanging puffs from that wild pipe of his,
|
||
and keeping it regularly passing between us.
|
||
|
||
If there yet lurked any ice of indifference towards me in the Pagan’s breast,
|
||
this pleasant, genial smoke we had, soon thawed it out, and left us cronies. He
|
||
seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our
|
||
smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the
|
||
waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country’s
|
||
phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should
|
||
be. In a countryman, this sudden flame of friendship would have seemed far too
|
||
premature, a thing to be much distrusted; but in this simple savage those old
|
||
rules would not apply.
|
||
|
||
After supper, and another social chat and smoke, we went to our room together.
|
||
He made me a present of his embalmed head; took out his enormous tobacco wallet,
|
||
and groping under the tobacco, drew out some thirty dollars in silver; then
|
||
spreading them on the table, and mechanically dividing them into two equal
|
||
portions, pushed one of them towards me, and said it was mine. I was going to
|
||
remonstrate; but he silenced me by pouring them into my trowsers’ pockets. I let
|
||
them stay. He then went about his evening prayers, took out his idol, and
|
||
removed the paper fireboard. By certain signs and symptoms, I thought he seemed
|
||
anxious for me to join him; but well knowing what was to follow, I deliberated a
|
||
moment whether, in case he invited me, I would comply or otherwise.
|
||
|
||
I was a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible
|
||
Presbyterian Church. How then could I unite with this wild idolator in
|
||
worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship? thought I. Do you suppose
|
||
now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and earth—pagans and all
|
||
included—can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood?
|
||
Impossible! But what is worship?—to do the will of God—that is worship. And what
|
||
is the will of God?—to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do
|
||
to me—that is the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I
|
||
wish that this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular
|
||
Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him in his;
|
||
ergo, I must turn idolator. So I kindled the shavings; helped prop up the
|
||
innocent little idol; offered him burnt biscuit with Queequeg; salamed before
|
||
him twice or thrice; kissed his nose; and that done, we undressed and went to
|
||
bed, at peace with our own consciences and all the world. But we did not go to
|
||
sleep without some little chat.
|
||
|
||
How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential
|
||
disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom
|
||
of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old
|
||
times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and
|
||
Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 11. Nightgown.
|
||
|
||
We had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and Queequeg
|
||
now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs over mine, and then
|
||
drawing them back; so entirely sociable and free and easy were we; when, at
|
||
last, by reason of our confabulations, what little nappishness remained in us
|
||
altogether departed, and we felt like getting up again, though day-break was yet
|
||
some way down the future.
|
||
|
||
Yes, we became very wakeful; so much so that our recumbent position began to
|
||
grow wearisome, and by little and little we found ourselves sitting up; the
|
||
clothes well tucked around us, leaning against the head-board with our four
|
||
knees drawn up close together, and our two noses bending over them, as if our
|
||
kneepans were warming-pans. We felt very nice and snug, the more so since it was
|
||
so chilly out of doors; indeed out of bed-clothes too, seeing that there was no
|
||
fire in the room. The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some
|
||
small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is
|
||
not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter
|
||
yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then
|
||
you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in
|
||
the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why
|
||
then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and
|
||
unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be
|
||
furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich.
|
||
For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket
|
||
between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie
|
||
like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.
|
||
|
||
We had been sitting in this crouching manner for some time, when all at once I
|
||
thought I would open my eyes; for when between sheets, whether by day or by
|
||
night, and whether asleep or awake, I have a way of always keeping my eyes shut,
|
||
in order the more to concentrate the snugness of being in bed. Because no man
|
||
can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness
|
||
were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial
|
||
to our clayey part. Upon opening my eyes then, and coming out of my own pleasant
|
||
and self-created darkness into the imposed and coarse outer gloom of the
|
||
unilluminated twelve-o’clock-at-night, I experienced a disagreeable revulsion.
|
||
Nor did I at all object to the hint from Queequeg that perhaps it were best to
|
||
strike a light, seeing that we were so wide awake; and besides he felt a strong
|
||
desire to have a few quiet puffs from his Tomahawk. Be it said, that though I
|
||
had felt such a strong repugnance to his smoking in the bed the night before,
|
||
yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them.
|
||
For now I liked nothing better than to have Queequeg smoking by me, even in bed,
|
||
because he seemed to be full of such serene household joy then. I no more felt
|
||
unduly concerned for the landlord’s policy of insurance. I was only alive to the
|
||
condensed confidential comfortableness of sharing a pipe and a blanket with a
|
||
real friend. With our shaggy jackets drawn about our shoulders, we now passed
|
||
the Tomahawk from one to the other, till slowly there grew over us a blue
|
||
hanging tester of smoke, illuminated by the flame of the new-lit lamp.
|
||
|
||
Whether it was that this undulating tester rolled the savage away to far distant
|
||
scenes, I know not, but he now spoke of his native island; and, eager to hear
|
||
his history, I begged him to go on and tell it. He gladly complied. Though at
|
||
the time I but ill comprehended not a few of his words, yet subsequent
|
||
disclosures, when I had become more familiar with his broken phraseology, now
|
||
enable me to present the whole story such as it may prove in the mere skeleton I
|
||
give.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 12. Biographical.
|
||
|
||
Queequeg was a native of Rokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It
|
||
is not down in any map; true places never are.
|
||
|
||
When a new-hatched savage running wild about his native woodlands in a grass
|
||
clout, followed by the nibbling goats, as if he were a green sapling; even then,
|
||
in Queequeg’s ambitious soul, lurked a strong desire to see something more of
|
||
Christendom than a specimen whaler or two. His father was a High Chief, a King;
|
||
his uncle a High Priest; and on the maternal side he boasted aunts who were the
|
||
wives of unconquerable warriors. There was excellent blood in his veins—royal
|
||
stuff; though sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal propensity he nourished in
|
||
his untutored youth.
|
||
|
||
A Sag Harbor ship visited his father’s bay, and Queequeg sought a passage to
|
||
Christian lands. But the ship, having her full complement of seamen, spurned his
|
||
suit; and not all the King his father’s influence could prevail. But Queequeg
|
||
vowed a vow. Alone in his canoe, he paddled off to a distant strait, which he
|
||
knew the ship must pass through when she quitted the island. On one side was a
|
||
coral reef; on the other a low tongue of land, covered with mangrove thickets
|
||
that grew out into the water. Hiding his canoe, still afloat, among these
|
||
thickets, with its prow seaward, he sat down in the stern, paddle low in hand;
|
||
and when the ship was gliding by, like a flash he darted out; gained her side;
|
||
with one backward dash of his foot capsized and sank his canoe; climbed up the
|
||
chains; and throwing himself at full length upon the deck, grappled a ring-bolt
|
||
there, and swore not to let it go, though hacked in pieces.
|
||
|
||
In vain the captain threatened to throw him overboard; suspended a cutlass over
|
||
his naked wrists; Queequeg was the son of a King, and Queequeg budged not.
|
||
Struck by his desperate dauntlessness, and his wild desire to visit Christendom,
|
||
the captain at last relented, and told him he might make himself at home. But
|
||
this fine young savage—this sea Prince of Wales, never saw the Captain’s cabin.
|
||
They put him down among the sailors, and made a whaleman of him. But like Czar
|
||
Peter content to toil in the shipyards of foreign cities, Queequeg disdained no
|
||
seeming ignominy, if thereby he might happily gain the power of enlightening his
|
||
untutored countrymen. For at bottom—so he told me—he was actuated by a profound
|
||
desire to learn among the Christians, the arts whereby to make his people still
|
||
happier than they were; and more than that, still better than they were. But,
|
||
alas! the practices of whalemen soon convinced him that even Christians could be
|
||
both miserable and wicked; infinitely more so, than all his father’s heathens.
|
||
Arrived at last in old Sag Harbor; and seeing what the sailors did there; and
|
||
then going on to Nantucket, and seeing how they spent their wages in that place
|
||
also, poor Queequeg gave it up for lost. Thought he, it’s a wicked world in all
|
||
meridians; I’ll die a pagan.
|
||
|
||
And thus an old idolator at heart, he yet lived among these Christians, wore
|
||
their clothes, and tried to talk their gibberish. Hence the queer ways about
|
||
him, though now some time from home.
|
||
|
||
By hints, I asked him whether he did not propose going back, and having a
|
||
coronation; since he might now consider his father dead and gone, he being very
|
||
old and feeble at the last accounts. He answered no, not yet; and added that he
|
||
was fearful Christianity, or rather Christians, had unfitted him for ascending
|
||
the pure and undefiled throne of thirty pagan Kings before him. But by and by,
|
||
he said, he would return,—as soon as he felt himself baptized again. For the
|
||
nonce, however, he proposed to sail about, and sow his wild oats in all four
|
||
oceans. They had made a harpooneer of him, and that barbed iron was in lieu of a
|
||
sceptre now.
|
||
|
||
I asked him what might be his immediate purpose, touching his future movements.
|
||
He answered, to go to sea again, in his old vocation. Upon this, I told him that
|
||
whaling was my own design, and informed him of my intention to sail out of
|
||
Nantucket, as being the most promising port for an adventurous whaleman to
|
||
embark from. He at once resolved to accompany me to that island, ship aboard the
|
||
same vessel, get into the same watch, the same boat, the same mess with me, in
|
||
short to share my every hap; with both my hands in his, boldly dip into the
|
||
Potluck of both worlds. To all this I joyously assented; for besides the
|
||
affection I now felt for Queequeg, he was an experienced harpooneer, and as
|
||
such, could not fail to be of great usefulness to one, who, like me, was wholly
|
||
ignorant of the mysteries of whaling, though well acquainted with the sea, as
|
||
known to merchant seamen.
|
||
|
||
His story being ended with his pipe’s last dying puff, Queequeg embraced me,
|
||
pressed his forehead against mine, and blowing out the light, we rolled over
|
||
from each other, this way and that, and very soon were sleeping.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 13. Wheelbarrow.
|
||
|
||
Next morning, Monday, after disposing of the embalmed head to a barber, for a
|
||
block, I settled my own and comrade’s bill; using, however, my comrade’s money.
|
||
The grinning landlord, as well as the boarders, seemed amazingly tickled at the
|
||
sudden friendship which had sprung up between me and Queequeg—especially as
|
||
Peter Coffin’s cock and bull stories about him had previously so much alarmed me
|
||
concerning the very person whom I now companied with.
|
||
|
||
We borrowed a wheelbarrow, and embarking our things, including my own poor
|
||
carpet-bag, and Queequeg’s canvas sack and hammock, away we went down to “the
|
||
Moss,” the little Nantucket packet schooner moored at the wharf. As we were
|
||
going along the people stared; not at Queequeg so much—for they were used to
|
||
seeing cannibals like him in their streets,—but at seeing him and me upon such
|
||
confidential terms. But we heeded them not, going along wheeling the barrow by
|
||
turns, and Queequeg now and then stopping to adjust the sheath on his harpoon
|
||
barbs. I asked him why he carried such a troublesome thing with him ashore, and
|
||
whether all whaling ships did not find their own harpoons. To this, in
|
||
substance, he replied, that though what I hinted was true enough, yet he had a
|
||
particular affection for his own harpoon, because it was of assured stuff, well
|
||
tried in many a mortal combat, and deeply intimate with the hearts of whales. In
|
||
short, like many inland reapers and mowers, who go into the farmers’ meadows
|
||
armed with their own scythes—though in no wise obliged to furnish them—even so,
|
||
Queequeg, for his own private reasons, preferred his own harpoon.
|
||
|
||
Shifting the barrow from my hand to his, he told me a funny story about the
|
||
first wheelbarrow he had ever seen. It was in Sag Harbor. The owners of his
|
||
ship, it seems, had lent him one, in which to carry his heavy chest to his
|
||
boarding house. Not to seem ignorant about the thing—though in truth he was
|
||
entirely so, concerning the precise way in which to manage the barrow—Queequeg
|
||
puts his chest upon it; lashes it fast; and then shoulders the barrow and
|
||
marches up the wharf. “Why,” said I, “Queequeg, you might have known better than
|
||
that, one would think. Didn’t the people laugh?”
|
||
|
||
Upon this, he told me another story. The people of his island of Rokovoko, it
|
||
seems, at their wedding feasts express the fragrant water of young cocoanuts
|
||
into a large stained calabash like a punchbowl; and this punchbowl always forms
|
||
the great central ornament on the braided mat where the feast is held. Now a
|
||
certain grand merchant ship once touched at Rokovoko, and its commander—from all
|
||
accounts, a very stately punctilious gentleman, at least for a sea captain—this
|
||
commander was invited to the wedding feast of Queequeg’s sister, a pretty young
|
||
princess just turned of ten. Well; when all the wedding guests were assembled at
|
||
the bride’s bamboo cottage, this Captain marches in, and being assigned the post
|
||
of honor, placed himself over against the punchbowl, and between the High Priest
|
||
and his majesty the King, Queequeg’s father. Grace being said,—for those people
|
||
have their grace as well as we—though Queequeg told me that unlike us, who at
|
||
such times look downwards to our platters, they, on the contrary, copying the
|
||
ducks, glance upwards to the great Giver of all feasts—Grace, I say, being said,
|
||
the High Priest opens the banquet by the immemorial ceremony of the island; that
|
||
is, dipping his consecrated and consecrating fingers into the bowl before the
|
||
blessed beverage circulates. Seeing himself placed next the Priest, and noting
|
||
the ceremony, and thinking himself—being Captain of a ship—as having plain
|
||
precedence over a mere island King, especially in the King’s own house—the
|
||
Captain coolly proceeds to wash his hands in the punchbowl;—taking it I suppose
|
||
for a huge finger-glass. “Now,” said Queequeg, “what you tink now?—Didn’t our
|
||
people laugh?”
|
||
|
||
At last, passage paid, and luggage safe, we stood on board the schooner.
|
||
Hoisting sail, it glided down the Acushnet river. On one side, New Bedford rose
|
||
in terraces of streets, their ice-covered trees all glittering in the clear,
|
||
cold air. Huge hills and mountains of casks on casks were piled upon her
|
||
wharves, and side by side the world-wandering whale ships lay silent and safely
|
||
moored at last; while from others came a sound of carpenters and coopers, with
|
||
blended noises of fires and forges to melt the pitch, all betokening that new
|
||
cruises were on the start; that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only
|
||
begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever
|
||
and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly
|
||
effort.
|
||
|
||
Gaining the more open water, the bracing breeze waxed fresh; the little Moss
|
||
tossed the quick foam from her bows, as a young colt his snortings. How I
|
||
snuffed that Tartar air!—how I spurned that turnpike earth!—that common highway
|
||
all over dented with the marks of slavish heels and hoofs; and turned me to
|
||
admire the magnanimity of the sea which will permit no records.
|
||
|
||
At the same foam-fountain, Queequeg seemed to drink and reel with me. His dusky
|
||
nostrils swelled apart; he showed his filed and pointed teeth. On, on we flew;
|
||
and our offing gained, the Moss did homage to the blast; ducked and dived her
|
||
bows as a slave before the Sultan. Sideways leaning, we sideways darted; every
|
||
ropeyarn tingling like a wire; the two tall masts buckling like Indian canes in
|
||
land tornadoes. So full of this reeling scene were we, as we stood by the
|
||
plunging bowsprit, that for some time we did not notice the jeering glances of
|
||
the passengers, a lubber-like assembly, who marvelled that two fellow beings
|
||
should be so companionable; as though a white man were anything more dignified
|
||
than a whitewashed negro. But there were some boobies and bumpkins there, who,
|
||
by their intense greenness, must have come from the heart and centre of all
|
||
verdure. Queequeg caught one of these young saplings mimicking him behind his
|
||
back. I thought the bumpkin’s hour of doom was come. Dropping his harpoon, the
|
||
brawny savage caught him in his arms, and by an almost miraculous dexterity and
|
||
strength, sent him high up bodily into the air; then slightly tapping his stern
|
||
in mid-somerset, the fellow landed with bursting lungs upon his feet, while
|
||
Queequeg, turning his back upon him, lighted his tomahawk pipe and passed it to
|
||
me for a puff.
|
||
|
||
“Capting! Capting!” yelled the bumpkin, running towards that officer; “Capting,
|
||
Capting, here’s the devil.”
|
||
|
||
“Hallo, you sir,” cried the Captain, a gaunt rib of the sea, stalking up to
|
||
Queequeg, “what in thunder do you mean by that? Don’t you know you might have
|
||
killed that chap?”
|
||
|
||
“What him say?” said Queequeg, as he mildly turned to me.
|
||
|
||
“He say,” said I, “that you came near kill-e that man there,” pointing to the
|
||
still shivering greenhorn.
|
||
|
||
“Kill-e,” cried Queequeg, twisting his tattooed face into an unearthly
|
||
expression of disdain, “ah! him bevy small-e fish-e; Queequeg no kill-e so
|
||
small-e fish-e; Queequeg kill-e big whale!”
|
||
|
||
“Look you,” roared the Captain, “I’ll kill-e you, you cannibal, if you try any
|
||
more of your tricks aboard here; so mind your eye.”
|
||
|
||
But it so happened just then, that it was high time for the Captain to mind his
|
||
own eye. The prodigious strain upon the main-sail had parted the weather-sheet,
|
||
and the tremendous boom was now flying from side to side, completely sweeping
|
||
the entire after part of the deck. The poor fellow whom Queequeg had handled so
|
||
roughly, was swept overboard; all hands were in a panic; and to attempt
|
||
snatching at the boom to stay it, seemed madness. It flew from right to left,
|
||
and back again, almost in one ticking of a watch, and every instant seemed on
|
||
the point of snapping into splinters. Nothing was done, and nothing seemed
|
||
capable of being done; those on deck rushed towards the bows, and stood eyeing
|
||
the boom as if it were the lower jaw of an exasperated whale. In the midst of
|
||
this consternation, Queequeg dropped deftly to his knees, and crawling under the
|
||
path of the boom, whipped hold of a rope, secured one end to the bulwarks, and
|
||
then flinging the other like a lasso, caught it round the boom as it swept over
|
||
his head, and at the next jerk, the spar was that way trapped, and all was safe.
|
||
The schooner was run into the wind, and while the hands were clearing away the
|
||
stern boat, Queequeg, stripped to the waist, darted from the side with a long
|
||
living arc of a leap. For three minutes or more he was seen swimming like a dog,
|
||
throwing his long arms straight out before him, and by turns revealing his
|
||
brawny shoulders through the freezing foam. I looked at the grand and glorious
|
||
fellow, but saw no one to be saved. The greenhorn had gone down. Shooting
|
||
himself perpendicularly from the water, Queequeg, now took an instant’s glance
|
||
around him, and seeming to see just how matters were, dived down and
|
||
disappeared. A few minutes more, and he rose again, one arm still striking out,
|
||
and with the other dragging a lifeless form. The boat soon picked them up. The
|
||
poor bumpkin was restored. All hands voted Queequeg a noble trump; the captain
|
||
begged his pardon. From that hour I clove to Queequeg like a barnacle; yea, till
|
||
poor Queequeg took his last long dive.
|
||
|
||
Was there ever such unconsciousness? He did not seem to think that he at all
|
||
deserved a medal from the Humane and Magnanimous Societies. He only asked for
|
||
water—fresh water—something to wipe the brine off; that done, he put on dry
|
||
clothes, lighted his pipe, and leaning against the bulwarks, and mildly eyeing
|
||
those around him, seemed to be saying to himself—“It’s a mutual, joint-stock
|
||
world, in all meridians. We cannibals must help these Christians.”
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 14. Nantucket.
|
||
|
||
Nothing more happened on the passage worthy the mentioning; so, after a fine
|
||
run, we safely arrived in Nantucket.
|
||
|
||
Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner of the world
|
||
it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more lonely than the Eddystone
|
||
lighthouse. Look at it—a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a
|
||
background. There is more sand there than you would use in twenty years as a
|
||
substitute for blotting paper. Some gamesome wights will tell you that they have
|
||
to plant weeds there, they don’t grow naturally; that they import Canada
|
||
thistles; that they have to send beyond seas for a spile to stop a leak in an
|
||
oil cask; that pieces of wood in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the
|
||
true cross in Rome; that people there plant toadstools before their houses, to
|
||
get under the shade in summer time; that one blade of grass makes an oasis,
|
||
three blades in a day’s walk a prairie; that they wear quicksand shoes,
|
||
something like Laplander snow-shoes; that they are so shut up, belted about,
|
||
every way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island of by the ocean, that
|
||
to their very chairs and tables small clams will sometimes be found adhering, as
|
||
to the backs of sea turtles. But these extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is
|
||
no Illinois.
|
||
|
||
Look now at the wondrous traditional story of how this island was settled by the
|
||
red-men. Thus goes the legend. In olden times an eagle swooped down upon the New
|
||
England coast, and carried off an infant Indian in his talons. With loud lament
|
||
the parents saw their child borne out of sight over the wide waters. They
|
||
resolved to follow in the same direction. Setting out in their canoes, after a
|
||
perilous passage they discovered the island, and there they found an empty ivory
|
||
casket,—the poor little Indian’s skeleton.
|
||
|
||
What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should take to the
|
||
sea for a livelihood! They first caught crabs and quohogs in the sand; grown
|
||
bolder, they waded out with nets for mackerel; more experienced, they pushed off
|
||
in boats and captured cod; and at last, launching a navy of great ships on the
|
||
sea, explored this watery world; put an incessant belt of circumnavigations
|
||
round it; peeped in at Behring’s Straits; and in all seasons and all oceans
|
||
declared everlasting war with the mightiest animated mass that has survived the
|
||
flood; most monstrous and most mountainous! That Himmalehan, salt-sea Mastodon,
|
||
clothed with such portentousness of unconscious power, that his very panics are
|
||
more to be dreaded than his most fearless and malicious assaults!
|
||
|
||
And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their
|
||
ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many
|
||
Alexanders; parcelling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans,
|
||
as the three pirate powers did Poland. Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile
|
||
Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their
|
||
blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the
|
||
Nantucketer’s. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires; other
|
||
seamen having but a right of way through it. Merchant ships are but extension
|
||
bridges; armed ones but floating forts; even pirates and privateers, though
|
||
following the sea as highwaymen the road, they but plunder other ships, other
|
||
fragments of the land like themselves, without seeking to draw their living from
|
||
the bottomless deep itself. The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the
|
||
sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing
|
||
it as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business,
|
||
which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions
|
||
in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among
|
||
the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows
|
||
not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world,
|
||
more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull, that
|
||
at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at
|
||
nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him
|
||
to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
CHAPTER 15. Chowder.
|
||
|
||
It was quite late in the evening when the little Moss came snugly to anchor, and
|
||
Queequeg and I went ashore; so we could attend to no business that day, at least
|
||
none but a supper and a bed. The landlord of the Spouter-Inn had recommended us
|
||
to his cousin Hosea Hussey of the Try Pots, whom he asserted to be the
|
||
proprietor of one of the best kept hotels in all Nantucket, and moreover he had
|
||
assured us that Cousin Hosea, as he called him, was famous for his chowders. In
|
||
short, he plainly hinted that we could not possibly do better than try pot-luck
|
||
at the Try Pots. But the directions he had given us about keeping a yellow
|
||
warehouse on our starboard hand till we opened a white church to the larboard,
|
||
and then keeping that on the larboard hand till we made a corner three points to
|
||
the starboard, and that done, then ask the first man we met where the place was:
|
||
these crooked directions of his very much puzzled us at first, especially as, at
|
||
the outset, Queequeg insisted that the yellow warehouse—our first point of
|
||
departure—must be left on the larboard hand, whereas I had understood Peter
|
||
Coffin to say it was on the starboard. However, by dint of beating about a
|
||
little in the dark, and now and then knocking up a peaceable inhabitant to
|
||
inquire the way, we at last came to something which there was no mistaking.
|
||
|
||
Two enormous wooden pots painted black, and suspended by asses’ ears, swung from
|
||
the cross-trees of an old top-mast, planted in front of an old doorway. The
|
||
horns of the cross-trees were sawed off on the other side, so that this old
|
||
top-mast looked not a little like a gallows. Perhaps I was over sensitive to
|
||
such impressions at the time, but I could not help staring at this gallows with
|
||
a vague misgiving. A sort of crick was in my neck as I gazed up to the two
|
||
remaining horns; yes, two of them, one for Queequeg, and one for me. It’s
|
||
ominous, thinks I. A Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my first whaling port;
|
||
tombstones staring at me in the whalemen’s chapel; and here a gallows! and a
|
||
pair of prodigious black pots too! Are these last throwing out oblique hints
|
||
touching Tophet?
|
||
|
||
I was called from these reflections by the sight of a freckled woman with yellow
|
||
hair and a yellow gown, standing in the porch of the inn, under a dull red lamp
|
||
swinging there, that looked much like an injured eye, and carrying on a brisk
|
||
scolding with a man in a purple woollen shirt.
|
||
|
||
“Get along with ye,” said she to the man, “or I’ll be combing ye!”
|
||
|
||