diff --git a/EmpowerPlant.xcodeproj/project.pbxproj b/EmpowerPlant.xcodeproj/project.pbxproj
index d526ae6..0d2cab0 100644
--- a/EmpowerPlant.xcodeproj/project.pbxproj
+++ b/EmpowerPlant.xcodeproj/project.pbxproj
@@ -8,6 +8,7 @@
 
 /* Begin PBXBuildFile section */
 		674899180B469D888700A555 /* Pods_EmpowerPlant.framework in Frameworks */ = {isa = PBXBuildFile; fileRef = 74014747DE857D26E9BD7B24 /* Pods_EmpowerPlant.framework */; };
+		846BEA1C2ABE611A0032F77F /* mobydick.txt in Resources */ = {isa = PBXBuildFile; fileRef = 846BEA1B2ABE611A0032F77F /* mobydick.txt */; };
 		843BD60F2AD08CE900B0098F /* Utils.swift in Sources */ = {isa = PBXBuildFile; fileRef = 843BD60E2AD08CE900B0098F /* Utils.swift */; };
 		8B21663C29D3F8C80009C890 /* RandomErrors.swift in Sources */ = {isa = PBXBuildFile; fileRef = 8B21663B29D3F8C80009C890 /* RandomErrors.swift */; };
 		8BA3AB382A20212C00BE1EA8 /* CartViewControllerTests.swift in Sources */ = {isa = PBXBuildFile; fileRef = 8BA3AB372A20212C00BE1EA8 /* CartViewControllerTests.swift */; };
@@ -41,6 +42,7 @@
 		843BD60E2AD08CE900B0098F /* Utils.swift */ = {isa = PBXFileReference; lastKnownFileType = sourcecode.swift; path = Utils.swift; sourceTree = "<group>"; };
 		846BEA1A2ABE46880032F77F /* upload-symbols.sh */ = {isa = PBXFileReference; lastKnownFileType = text.script.sh; path = "upload-symbols.sh"; sourceTree = "<group>"; };
 		8474F0482ACCE2D800F21E06 /* deploy_project.sh */ = {isa = PBXFileReference; lastKnownFileType = text.script.sh; path = deploy_project.sh; sourceTree = "<group>"; };
+		846BEA1B2ABE611A0032F77F /* mobydick.txt */ = {isa = PBXFileReference; lastKnownFileType = text; path = mobydick.txt; sourceTree = "<group>"; };
 		8474F04D2ACE54F300F21E06 /* .github */ = {isa = PBXFileReference; lastKnownFileType = folder; path = .github; sourceTree = "<group>"; };
 		84A264182AA9155800A62A88 /* Makefile */ = {isa = PBXFileReference; lastKnownFileType = sourcecode.make; path = Makefile; sourceTree = "<group>"; };
 		84A264192AA915B100A62A88 /* Brewfile */ = {isa = PBXFileReference; lastKnownFileType = text; path = Brewfile; sourceTree = "<group>"; };
@@ -135,6 +137,7 @@
 				843BD60E2AD08CE900B0098F /* Utils.swift */,
 				D15FCDA727E00F0D00258BF3 /* Model.xcdatamodeld */,
 				D17C73CB27D82EB8006650AF /* EmpowerPlantViewController.swift */,
+				846BEA1B2ABE611A0032F77F /* mobydick.txt */,
 				D19EBE6E2805ED52007022DC /* ShoppingCart.swift */,
 				D17C73CE27D82ED1006650AF /* CartViewController.swift */,
 				D17C73BB27D8291D006650AF /* Assets.xcassets */,
@@ -243,6 +246,7 @@
 			isa = PBXResourcesBuildPhase;
 			buildActionMask = 2147483647;
 			files = (
+				846BEA1C2ABE611A0032F77F /* mobydick.txt in Resources */,
 				D17C73BF27D8291D006650AF /* LaunchScreen.storyboard in Resources */,
 				D17C73BC27D8291D006650AF /* Assets.xcassets in Resources */,
 				D17C73BA27D8291D006650AF /* Main.storyboard in Resources */,
diff --git a/EmpowerPlant/Base.lproj/Main.storyboard b/EmpowerPlant/Base.lproj/Main.storyboard
index aaa2b0a..fd7e3d8 100644
--- a/EmpowerPlant/Base.lproj/Main.storyboard
+++ b/EmpowerPlant/Base.lproj/Main.storyboard
@@ -141,7 +141,7 @@
                                                 </subviews>
                                             </stackView>
                                             <stackView opaque="NO" contentMode="scaleToFill" axis="vertical" alignment="center" translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints="NO" id="KlN-al-BhV">
-                                                <rect key="frame" x="199" y="0.0" width="199" height="276"/>
+                                                <rect key="frame" x="199" y="0.0" width="199" height="310.5"/>
                                                 <subviews>
                                                     <button opaque="NO" contentMode="scaleToFill" contentHorizontalAlignment="center" contentVerticalAlignment="center" buttonType="system" lineBreakMode="middleTruncation" translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints="NO" id="esb-g7-ouy">
                                                         <rect key="frame" x="34" y="0.0" width="131.5" height="34.5"/>
@@ -199,8 +199,16 @@
                                                             <action selector="unwrapCrash:" destination="VXN-aD-u60" eventType="touchUpInside" id="1ao-hi-gPI"/>
                                                         </connections>
                                                     </button>
+                                                    <button opaque="NO" contentMode="scaleToFill" contentHorizontalAlignment="center" contentVerticalAlignment="center" buttonType="system" lineBreakMode="middleTruncation" translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints="NO" id="Yrg-wG-isT">
+                                                        <rect key="frame" x="5" y="241.5" width="189.5" height="34.5"/>
+                                                        <state key="normal" title="Button"/>
+                                                        <buttonConfiguration key="configuration" style="plain" title="Regex on main thread"/>
+                                                        <connections>
+                                                            <action selector="regexOnMainThread:" destination="VXN-aD-u60" eventType="touchUpInside" id="abO-hY-sPP"/>
+                                                        </connections>
+                                                    </button>
                                                     <button opaque="NO" contentMode="scaleToFill" contentHorizontalAlignment="center" contentVerticalAlignment="center" buttonType="system" lineBreakMode="middleTruncation" translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints="NO" id="YJc-z6-Cm2">
-                                                        <rect key="frame" x="6.5" y="241.5" width="186.5" height="34.5"/>
+                                                        <rect key="frame" x="6.5" y="276" width="186.5" height="34.5"/>
                                                         <state key="normal" title="Button"/>
                                                         <buttonConfiguration key="configuration" style="plain" title="JSON on main thread"/>
                                                         <connections>
@@ -269,11 +277,5 @@
         <systemColor name="systemBackgroundColor">
             <color white="1" alpha="1" colorSpace="custom" customColorSpace="genericGamma22GrayColorSpace"/>
         </systemColor>
-        <systemColor name="systemGreenColor">
-            <color red="0.20392156859999999" green="0.78039215689999997" blue="0.34901960780000002" alpha="1" colorSpace="custom" customColorSpace="sRGB"/>
-        </systemColor>
-        <systemColor name="systemYellowColor">
-            <color red="1" green="0.80000000000000004" blue="0.0" alpha="1" colorSpace="custom" customColorSpace="sRGB"/>
-        </systemColor>
     </resources>
 </document>
diff --git a/EmpowerPlant/ListAppViewController.swift b/EmpowerPlant/ListAppViewController.swift
index 7ac673b..fcf4f28 100644
--- a/EmpowerPlant/ListAppViewController.swift
+++ b/EmpowerPlant/ListAppViewController.swift
@@ -277,4 +277,12 @@ class ListAppViewController: UIViewController {
             }
         }
     }
+
+    @IBAction func regexOnMainThread(_ sender: Any) {
+        let string = try! String(contentsOf: Bundle.main.url(forResource: "mobydick", withExtension: "txt")!)
+        let regex = try! NSRegularExpression(pattern: "([Tt]he)?.*([Ww]hale)")
+        let span = SentrySDK.startTransaction(name: "test", operation: "regex-on-main")
+        regex.matches(in: string, range: NSMakeRange(0, string.count))
+        span.finish()
+    }
 }
diff --git a/EmpowerPlant/mobydick.txt b/EmpowerPlant/mobydick.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f411b48
--- /dev/null
+++ b/EmpowerPlant/mobydick.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,22315 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Moby-Dick; or The Whale, by Herman Melville
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: Moby-Dick; or The Whale
+
+Author: Herman Melville
+
+Release Date: June, 2001 [eBook #2701]
+[Most recently updated: August 18, 2021]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Daniel Lazarus, Jonesey, and David Widger
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MOBY-DICK; OR THE WHALE ***
+
+
+
+
+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_.
+  WHALE,              _Icelandic_.
+  WHALE,              _English_.
+  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_
+1_st_, 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_ 31_st_, 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_
+3_d_, 1833. THIS TABLET Is erected to his Memory BY HIS WIDOW.
+
+Shaking off the sleet from my ice-glazed hat and jacket, I seated
+myself near the door, and turning sideways was surprised to see
+Queequeg near me. Affected by the solemnity of the scene, there was a
+wondering gaze of incredulous curiosity in his countenance. This savage
+was the only person present who seemed to notice my entrance; because
+he was the only one who could not read, and, therefore, was not reading
+those frigid inscriptions on the wall. Whether any of the relatives of
+the seamen whose names appeared there were now among the congregation,
+I knew not; but so many are the unrecorded accidents in the fishery,
+and so plainly did several women present wear the countenance if not
+the trappings of some unceasing grief, that I feel sure that here
+before me were assembled those, in whose unhealing hearts the sight of
+those bleak tablets sympathetically caused the old wounds to bleed
+afresh.
+
+Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing
+among flowers can say—here, _here_ lies my beloved; ye know not the
+desolation that broods in bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in
+those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in
+those immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids and unbidden
+infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse
+resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a
+grave. As well might those tablets stand in the cave of Elephanta as
+here.
+
+In what census of living creatures, the dead of mankind are included;
+why it is that a universal proverb says of them, that they tell no
+tales, though containing more secrets than the Goodwin Sands; how it is
+that to his name who yesterday departed for the other world, we prefix
+so significant and infidel a word, and yet do not thus entitle him, if
+he but embarks for the remotest Indies of this living earth; why the
+Life Insurance Companies pay death-forfeitures upon immortals; in what
+eternal, unstirring paralysis, and deadly, hopeless trance, yet lies
+antique Adam who died sixty round centuries ago; how it is that we
+still refuse to be comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are
+dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why all the living so strive to hush all
+the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify
+a whole city. All these things are not without their meanings.
+
+But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these
+dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.
+
+It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a
+Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky
+light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who
+had gone before me. Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But
+somehow I grew merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine
+chance for promotion, it seems—aye, a stove boat will make me an
+immortal by brevet. Yes, there is death in this business of whaling—a
+speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what
+then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death.
+Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true
+substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too
+much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking
+that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees
+of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is
+not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat
+and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.
+
+
+CHAPTER 8. The Pulpit.
+
+I had not been seated very long ere a man of a certain venerable
+robustness entered; immediately as the storm-pelted door flew back upon
+admitting him, a quick regardful eyeing of him by all the congregation,
+sufficiently attested that this fine old man was the chaplain. Yes, it
+was the famous Father Mapple, so called by the whalemen, among whom he
+was a very great favourite. He had been a sailor and a harpooneer in
+his youth, but for many years past had dedicated his life to the
+ministry. At the time I now write of, Father Mapple was in the hardy
+winter of a healthy old age; that sort of old age which seems merging
+into a second flowering youth, for among all the fissures of his
+wrinkles, there shone certain mild gleams of a newly developing
+bloom—the spring verdure peeping forth even beneath February’s snow. No
+one having previously heard his history, could for the first time
+behold Father Mapple without the utmost interest, because there were
+certain engrafted clerical peculiarities about him, imputable to that
+adventurous maritime life he had led. When he entered I observed that
+he carried no umbrella, and certainly had not come in his carriage, for
+his tarpaulin hat ran down with melting sleet, and his great pilot
+cloth jacket seemed almost to drag him to the floor with the weight of
+the water it had absorbed. However, hat and coat and overshoes were one
+by one removed, and hung up in a little space in an adjacent corner;
+when, arrayed in a decent suit, he quietly approached the pulpit.
+
+Like most old fashioned pulpits, it was a very lofty one, and since a
+regular stairs to such a height would, by its long angle with the
+floor, seriously contract the already small area of the chapel, the
+architect, it seemed, had acted upon the hint of Father Mapple, and
+finished the pulpit without a stairs, substituting a perpendicular side
+ladder, like those used in mounting a ship from a boat at sea. The wife
+of a whaling captain had provided the chapel with a handsome pair of
+red worsted man-ropes for this ladder, which, being itself nicely
+headed, and stained with a mahogany colour, the whole contrivance,
+considering what manner of chapel it was, seemed by no means in bad
+taste. Halting for an instant at the foot of the ladder, and with both
+hands grasping the ornamental knobs of the man-ropes, Father Mapple
+cast a look upwards, and then with a truly sailor-like but still
+reverential dexterity, hand over hand, mounted the steps as if
+ascending the main-top of his vessel.
+
+The perpendicular parts of this side ladder, as is usually the case
+with swinging ones, were of cloth-covered rope, only the rounds were of
+wood, so that at every step there was a joint. At my first glimpse of
+the pulpit, it had not escaped me that however convenient for a ship,
+these joints in the present instance seemed unnecessary. For I was not
+prepared to see Father Mapple after gaining the height, slowly turn
+round, and stooping over the pulpit, deliberately drag up the ladder
+step by step, till the whole was deposited within, leaving him
+impregnable in his little Quebec.
+
+I pondered some time without fully comprehending the reason for this.
+Father Mapple enjoyed such a wide reputation for sincerity and
+sanctity, that I could not suspect him of courting notoriety by any
+mere tricks of the stage. No, thought I, there must be some sober
+reason for this thing; furthermore, it must symbolize something unseen.
+Can it be, then, that by that act of physical isolation, he signifies
+his spiritual withdrawal for the time, from all outward worldly ties
+and connexions? Yes, for replenished with the meat and wine of the
+word, to the faithful man of God, this pulpit, I see, is a
+self-containing stronghold—a lofty Ehrenbreitstein, with a perennial
+well of water within the walls.
+
+But the side ladder was not the only strange feature of the place,
+borrowed from the chaplain’s former sea-farings. Between the marble
+cenotaphs on either hand of the pulpit, the wall which formed its back
+was adorned with a large painting representing a gallant ship beating
+against a terrible storm off a lee coast of black rocks and snowy
+breakers. But high above the flying scud and dark-rolling clouds, there
+floated a little isle of sunlight, from which beamed forth an angel’s
+face; and this bright face shed a distinct spot of radiance upon the
+ship’s tossed deck, something like that silver plate now inserted into
+the Victory’s plank where Nelson fell. “Ah, noble ship,” the angel
+seemed to say, “beat on, beat on, thou noble ship, and bear a hardy
+helm; for lo! the sun is breaking through; the clouds are rolling
+off—serenest azure is at hand.”
+
+Nor was the pulpit itself without a trace of the same sea-taste that
+had achieved the ladder and the picture. Its panelled front was in the
+likeness of a ship’s bluff bows, and the Holy Bible rested on a
+projecting piece of scroll work, fashioned after a ship’s fiddle-headed
+beak.
+
+What could be more full of meaning?—for the pulpit is ever this earth’s
+foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the
+world. From thence it is the storm of God’s quick wrath is first
+descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt. From thence it is
+the God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for favourable winds.
+Yes, the world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete;
+and the pulpit is its prow.
+
+
+CHAPTER 9. The Sermon.
+
+Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of unassuming authority ordered
+the scattered people to condense. “Starboard gangway, there! side away
+to larboard—larboard gangway to starboard! Midships! midships!”
+
+There was a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots among the benches, and a
+still slighter shuffling of women’s shoes, and all was quiet again, and
+every eye on the preacher.
+
+He paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit’s bows, folded his
+large brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and
+offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying
+at the bottom of the sea.
+
+This ended, in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of a
+bell in a ship that is foundering at sea in a fog—in such tones he
+commenced reading the following hymn; but changing his manner towards
+the concluding stanzas, burst forth with a pealing exultation and joy—
+
+
+  “The ribs and terrors in the whale, Arched over me a dismal gloom,
+  While all God’s sun-lit waves rolled by, And lift me deepening down
+  to doom.
+
+  “I saw the opening maw of hell, With endless pains and sorrows there;
+  Which none but they that feel can tell— Oh, I was plunging to
+  despair.
+
+  “In black distress, I called my God, When I could scarce believe him
+  mine, He bowed his ear to my complaints— No more the whale did me
+  confine.
+
+  “With speed he flew to my relief, As on a radiant dolphin borne;
+  Awful, yet bright, as lightning shone The face of my Deliverer God.
+
+  “My song for ever shall record That terrible, that joyful hour; I
+  give the glory to my God, His all the mercy and the power.”
+
+
+
+
+Nearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled high above the
+howling of the storm. A brief pause ensued; the preacher slowly turned
+over the leaves of the Bible, and at last, folding his hand down upon
+the proper page, said: “Beloved shipmates, clinch the last verse of the
+first chapter of Jonah—‘And God had prepared a great fish to swallow up
+Jonah.’”
+
+“Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters—four yarns—is one
+of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what
+depths of the soul does Jonah’s deep sealine sound! what a pregnant
+lesson to us is this prophet! What a noble thing is that canticle in
+the fish’s belly! How billow-like and boisterously grand! We feel the
+floods surging over us; we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the
+waters; sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is about us! But _what_
+is this lesson that the book of Jonah teaches? Shipmates, it is a
+two-stranded lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful men, and a lesson to
+me as a pilot of the living God. As sinful men, it is a lesson to us
+all, because it is a story of the sin, hard-heartedness, suddenly
+awakened fears, the swift punishment, repentance, prayers, and finally
+the deliverance and joy of Jonah. As with all sinners among men, the
+sin of this son of Amittai was in his wilful disobedience of the
+command of God—never mind now what that command was, or how
+conveyed—which he found a hard command. But all the things that God
+would have us do are hard for us to do—remember that—and hence, he
+oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we
+must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein
+the hardness of obeying God consists.
+
+“With this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah still further flouts at
+God, by seeking to flee from Him. He thinks that a ship made by men
+will carry him into countries where God does not reign, but only the
+Captains of this earth. He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and seeks
+a ship that’s bound for Tarshish. There lurks, perhaps, a hitherto
+unheeded meaning here. By all accounts Tarshish could have been no
+other city than the modern Cadiz. That’s the opinion of learned men.
+And where is Cadiz, shipmates? Cadiz is in Spain; as far by water, from
+Joppa, as Jonah could possibly have sailed in those ancient days, when
+the Atlantic was an almost unknown sea. Because Joppa, the modern
+Jaffa, shipmates, is on the most easterly coast of the Mediterranean,
+the Syrian; and Tarshish or Cadiz more than two thousand miles to the
+westward from that, just outside the Straits of Gibraltar. See ye not
+then, shipmates, that Jonah sought to flee world-wide from God?
+Miserable man! Oh! most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with
+slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God; prowling among the
+shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas. So
+disordered, self-condemning is his look, that had there been policemen
+in those days, Jonah, on the mere suspicion of something wrong, had
+been arrested ere he touched a deck. How plainly he’s a fugitive! no
+baggage, not a hat-box, valise, or carpet-bag,—no friends accompany him
+to the wharf with their adieux. At last, after much dodging search, he
+finds the Tarshish ship receiving the last items of her cargo; and as
+he steps on board to see its Captain in the cabin, all the sailors for
+the moment desist from hoisting in the goods, to mark the stranger’s
+evil eye. Jonah sees this; but in vain he tries to look all ease and
+confidence; in vain essays his wretched smile. Strong intuitions of the
+man assure the mariners he can be no innocent. In their gamesome but
+still serious way, one whispers to the other—“Jack, he’s robbed a
+widow;” or, “Joe, do you mark him; he’s a bigamist;” or, “Harry lad, I
+guess he’s the adulterer that broke jail in old Gomorrah, or belike,
+one of the missing murderers from Sodom.” Another runs to read the bill
+that’s stuck against the spile upon the wharf to which the ship is
+moored, offering five hundred gold coins for the apprehension of a
+parricide, and containing a description of his person. He reads, and
+looks from Jonah to the bill; while all his sympathetic shipmates now
+crowd round Jonah, prepared to lay their hands upon him. Frighted Jonah
+trembles, and summoning all his boldness to his face, only looks so
+much the more a coward. He will not confess himself suspected; but that
+itself is strong suspicion. So he makes the best of it; and when the
+sailors find him not to be the man that is advertised, they let him
+pass, and he descends into the cabin.
+
+“‘Who’s there?’ cries the Captain at his busy desk, hurriedly making
+out his papers for the Customs—‘Who’s there?’ Oh! how that harmless
+question mangles Jonah! For the instant he almost turns to flee again.
+But he rallies. ‘I seek a passage in this ship to Tarshish; how soon
+sail ye, sir?’ Thus far the busy Captain had not looked up to Jonah,
+though the man now stands before him; but no sooner does he hear that
+hollow voice, than he darts a scrutinizing glance. ‘We sail with the
+next coming tide,’ at last he slowly answered, still intently eyeing
+him. ‘No sooner, sir?’—‘Soon enough for any honest man that goes a
+passenger.’ Ha! Jonah, that’s another stab. But he swiftly calls away
+the Captain from that scent. ‘I’ll sail with ye,’—he says,—‘the passage
+money how much is that?—I’ll pay now.’ For it is particularly written,
+shipmates, as if it were a thing not to be overlooked in this history,
+‘that he paid the fare thereof’ ere the craft did sail. And taken with
+the context, this is full of meaning.
+
+“Now Jonah’s Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects
+crime in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless. In
+this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and
+without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all
+frontiers. So Jonah’s Captain prepares to test the length of Jonah’s
+purse, ere he judge him openly. He charges him thrice the usual sum;
+and it’s assented to. Then the Captain knows that Jonah is a fugitive;
+but at the same time resolves to help a flight that paves its rear with
+gold. Yet when Jonah fairly takes out his purse, prudent suspicions
+still molest the Captain. He rings every coin to find a counterfeit.
+Not a forger, any way, he mutters; and Jonah is put down for his
+passage. ‘Point out my state-room, Sir,’ says Jonah now, ‘I’m
+travel-weary; I need sleep.’ ‘Thou lookest like it,’ says the Captain,
+‘there’s thy room.’ Jonah enters, and would lock the door, but the lock
+contains no key. Hearing him foolishly fumbling there, the Captain
+laughs lowly to himself, and mutters something about the doors of
+convicts’ cells being never allowed to be locked within. All dressed
+and dusty as he is, Jonah throws himself into his berth, and finds the
+little state-room ceiling almost resting on his forehead. The air is
+close, and Jonah gasps. Then, in that contracted hole, sunk, too,
+beneath the ship’s water-line, Jonah feels the heralding presentiment
+of that stifling hour, when the whale shall hold him in the smallest of
+his bowels’ wards.
+
+“Screwed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly
+oscillates in Jonah’s room; and the ship, heeling over towards the
+wharf with the weight of the last bales received, the lamp, flame and
+all, though in slight motion, still maintains a permanent obliquity
+with reference to the room; though, in truth, infallibly straight
+itself, it but made obvious the false, lying levels among which it
+hung. The lamp alarms and frightens Jonah; as lying in his berth his
+tormented eyes roll round the place, and this thus far successful
+fugitive finds no refuge for his restless glance. But that
+contradiction in the lamp more and more appals him. The floor, the
+ceiling, and the side, are all awry. ‘Oh! so my conscience hangs in
+me!’ he groans, ‘straight upwards, so it burns; but the chambers of my
+soul are all in crookedness!’
+
+“Like one who after a night of drunken revelry hies to his bed, still
+reeling, but with conscience yet pricking him, as the plungings of the
+Roman race-horse but so much the more strike his steel tags into him;
+as one who in that miserable plight still turns and turns in giddy
+anguish, praying God for annihilation until the fit be passed; and at
+last amid the whirl of woe he feels, a deep stupor steals over him, as
+over the man who bleeds to death, for conscience is the wound, and
+there’s naught to staunch it; so, after sore wrestlings in his berth,
+Jonah’s prodigy of ponderous misery drags him drowning down to sleep.
+
+“And now the time of tide has come; the ship casts off her cables; and
+from the deserted wharf the uncheered ship for Tarshish, all careening,
+glides to sea. That ship, my friends, was the first of recorded
+smugglers! the contraband was Jonah. But the sea rebels; he will not
+bear the wicked burden. A dreadful storm comes on, the ship is like to
+break. But now when the boatswain calls all hands to lighten her; when
+boxes, bales, and jars are clattering overboard; when the wind is
+shrieking, and the men are yelling, and every plank thunders with
+trampling feet right over Jonah’s head; in all this raging tumult,
+Jonah sleeps his hideous sleep. He sees no black sky and raging sea,
+feels not the reeling timbers, and little hears he or heeds he the far
+rush of the mighty whale, which even now with open mouth is cleaving
+the seas after him. Aye, shipmates, Jonah was gone down into the sides
+of the ship—a berth in the cabin as I have taken it, and was fast
+asleep. But the frightened master comes to him, and shrieks in his dead
+ear, ‘What meanest thou, O, sleeper! arise!’ Startled from his lethargy
+by that direful cry, Jonah staggers to his feet, and stumbling to the
+deck, grasps a shroud, to look out upon the sea. But at that moment he
+is sprung upon by a panther billow leaping over the bulwarks. Wave
+after wave thus leaps into the ship, and finding no speedy vent runs
+roaring fore and aft, till the mariners come nigh to drowning while yet
+afloat. And ever, as the white moon shows her affrighted face from the
+steep gullies in the blackness overhead, aghast Jonah sees the rearing
+bowsprit pointing high upward, but soon beat downward again towards the
+tormented deep.
+
+“Terrors upon terrors run shouting through his soul. In all his
+cringing attitudes, the God-fugitive is now too plainly known. The
+sailors mark him; more and more certain grow their suspicions of him,
+and at last, fully to test the truth, by referring the whole matter to
+high Heaven, they fall to casting lots, to see for whose cause this
+great tempest was upon them. The lot is Jonah’s; that discovered, then
+how furiously they mob him with their questions. ‘What is thine
+occupation? Whence comest thou? Thy country? What people? But mark now,
+my shipmates, the behavior of poor Jonah. The eager mariners but ask
+him who he is, and where from; whereas, they not only receive an answer
+to those questions, but likewise another answer to a question not put
+by them, but the unsolicited answer is forced from Jonah by the hard
+hand of God that is upon him.
+
+“‘I am a Hebrew,’ he cries—and then—‘I fear the Lord the God of Heaven
+who hath made the sea and the dry land!’ Fear him, O Jonah? Aye, well
+mightest thou fear the Lord God _then!_ Straightway, he now goes on to
+make a full confession; whereupon the mariners became more and more
+appalled, but still are pitiful. For when Jonah, not yet supplicating
+God for mercy, since he but too well knew the darkness of his
+deserts,—when wretched Jonah cries out to them to take him and cast him
+forth into the sea, for he knew that for _his_ sake this great tempest
+was upon them; they mercifully turn from him, and seek by other means
+to save the ship. But all in vain; the indignant gale howls louder;
+then, with one hand raised invokingly to God, with the other they not
+unreluctantly lay hold of Jonah.
+
+“And now behold Jonah taken up as an anchor and dropped into the sea;
+when instantly an oily calmness floats out from the east, and the sea
+is still, as Jonah carries down the gale with him, leaving smooth water
+behind. He goes down in the whirling heart of such a masterless
+commotion that he scarce heeds the moment when he drops seething into
+the yawning jaws awaiting him; and the whale shoots-to all his ivory
+teeth, like so many white bolts, upon his prison. Then Jonah prayed
+unto the Lord out of the fish’s belly. But observe his prayer, and
+learn a weighty lesson. For sinful as he is, Jonah does not weep and
+wail for direct deliverance. He feels that his dreadful punishment is
+just. He leaves all his deliverance to God, contenting himself with
+this, that spite of all his pains and pangs, he will still look towards
+His holy temple. And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance;
+not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment. And how pleasing
+to God was this conduct in Jonah, is shown in the eventual deliverance
+of him from the sea and the whale. Shipmates, I do not place Jonah
+before you to be copied for his sin but I do place him before you as a
+model for repentance. Sin not; but if you do, take heed to repent of it
+like Jonah.”
+
+While he was speaking these words, the howling of the shrieking,
+slanting storm without seemed to add new power to the preacher, who,
+when describing Jonah’s sea-storm, seemed tossed by a storm himself.
+His deep chest heaved as with a ground-swell; his tossed arms seemed
+the warring elements at work; and the thunders that rolled away from
+off his swarthy brow, and the light leaping from his eye, made all his
+simple hearers look on him with a quick fear that was strange to them.
+
+There now came a lull in his look, as he silently turned over the
+leaves of the Book once more; and, at last, standing motionless, with
+closed eyes, for the moment, seemed communing with God and himself.
+
+But again he leaned over towards the people, and bowing his head lowly,
+with an aspect of the deepest yet manliest humility, he spake these
+words:
+
+“Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon you; both his hands press
+upon me. I have read ye by what murky light may be mine the lesson that
+Jonah teaches to all sinners; and therefore to ye, and still more to
+me, for I am a greater sinner than ye. And now how gladly would I come
+down from this mast-head and sit on the hatches there where you sit,
+and listen as you listen, while some one of you reads _me_ that other
+and more awful lesson which Jonah teaches to _me_, as a pilot of the
+living God. How being an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of true
+things, and bidden by the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the
+ears of a wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at the hostility he should
+raise, fled from his mission, and sought to escape his duty and his God
+by taking ship at Joppa. But God is everywhere; Tarshish he never
+reached. As we have seen, God came upon him in the whale, and swallowed
+him down to living gulfs of doom, and with swift slantings tore him
+along ‘into the midst of the seas,’ where the eddying depths sucked him
+ten thousand fathoms down, and ‘the weeds were wrapped about his head,’
+and all the watery world of woe bowled over him. Yet even then beyond
+the reach of any plummet—‘out of the belly of hell’—when the whale
+grounded upon the ocean’s utmost bones, even then, God heard the
+engulphed, repenting prophet when he cried. Then God spake unto the
+fish; and from the shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the whale
+came breeching up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the
+delights of air and earth; and ‘vomited out Jonah upon the dry land;’
+when the word of the Lord came a second time; and Jonah, bruised and
+beaten—his ears, like two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring
+of the ocean—Jonah did the Almighty’s bidding. And what was that,
+shipmates? To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was it!
+
+“This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to that pilot of
+the living God who slights it. Woe to him whom this world charms from
+Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God
+has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than
+to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe
+to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor! Woe to him who would
+not be true, even though to be false were salvation! Yea, woe to him
+who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is
+himself a castaway!”
+
+He dropped and fell away from himself for a moment; then lifting his
+face to them again, showed a deep joy in his eyes, as he cried out with
+a heavenly enthusiasm,—“But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of
+every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight,
+than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the main-truck higher than
+the kelson is low? Delight is to him—a far, far upward, and inward
+delight—who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever
+stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him whose strong
+arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world has
+gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the
+truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out
+from under the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight,—top-gallant
+delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his
+God, and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to him, whom all the
+waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake
+from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness
+will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final
+breath—O Father!—chiefly known to me by Thy rod—mortal or immortal,
+here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world’s,
+or mine own. Yet this is nothing: I leave eternity to Thee; for what is
+man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?”
+
+He said no more, but slowly waving a benediction, covered his face with
+his hands, and so remained kneeling, till all the people had departed,
+and he was left alone in the place.
+
+
+CHAPTER 10. A Bosom Friend.
+
+Returning to the Spouter-Inn from the Chapel, I found Queequeg there
+quite alone; he having left the Chapel before the benediction some
+time. He was sitting on a bench before the fire, with his feet on the
+stove hearth, and in one hand was holding close up to his face that
+little negro idol of his; peering hard into its face, and with a
+jack-knife gently whittling away at its nose, meanwhile humming to
+himself in his heathenish way.
+
+But being now interrupted, he put up the image; and pretty soon, going
+to the table, took up a large book there, and placing it on his lap
+began counting the pages with deliberate regularity; at every fiftieth
+page—as I fancied—stopping a moment, looking vacantly around him, and
+giving utterance to a long-drawn gurgling whistle of astonishment. He
+would then begin again at the next fifty; seeming to commence at number
+one each time, as though he could not count more than fifty, and it was
+only by such a large number of fifties being found together, that his
+astonishment at the multitude of pages was excited.
+
+With much interest I sat watching him. Savage though he was, and
+hideously marred about the face—at least to my taste—his countenance
+yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You
+cannot hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I
+saw the traces of a simple honest heart; and in his large, deep eyes,
+fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a
+thousand devils. And besides all this, there was a certain lofty
+bearing about the Pagan, which even his uncouthness could not
+altogether maim. He looked like a man who had never cringed and never
+had had a creditor. Whether it was, too, that his head being shaved,
+his forehead was drawn out in freer and brighter relief, and looked
+more expansive than it otherwise would, this I will not venture to
+decide; but certain it was his head was phrenologically an excellent
+one. It may seem ridiculous, but it reminded me of General Washington’s
+head, as seen in the popular busts of him. It had the same long
+regularly graded retreating slope from above the brows, which were
+likewise very projecting, like two long promontories thickly wooded on
+top. Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.
+
+Whilst I was thus closely scanning him, half-pretending meanwhile to be
+looking out at the storm from the casement, he never heeded my
+presence, never troubled himself with so much as a single glance; but
+appeared wholly occupied with counting the pages of the marvellous
+book. Considering how sociably we had been sleeping together the night
+previous, and especially considering the affectionate arm I had found
+thrown over me upon waking in the morning, I thought this indifference
+of his very strange. But savages are strange beings; at times you do
+not know exactly how to take them. At first they are overawing; their
+calm self-collectedness of simplicity seems a Socratic wisdom. I had
+noticed also that Queequeg never consorted at all, or but very little,
+with the other seamen in the inn. He made no advances whatever;
+appeared to have no desire to enlarge the circle of his acquaintances.
+All this struck me as mighty singular; yet, upon second thoughts, there
+was something almost sublime in it. Here was a man some twenty thousand
+miles from home, by the way of Cape Horn, that is—which was the only
+way he could get there—thrown among people as strange to him as though
+he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his ease;
+preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship;
+always equal to himself. Surely this was a touch of fine philosophy;
+though no doubt he had never heard there was such a thing as that. But,
+perhaps, to be true philosophers, we mortals should not be conscious of
+so living or so striving. So soon as I hear that such or such a man
+gives himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the
+dyspeptic old woman, he must have “broken his digester.”
+
+As I sat there in that now lonely room; the fire burning low, in that
+mild stage when, after its first intensity has warmed the air, it then
+only glows to be looked at; the evening shades and phantoms gathering
+round the casements, and peering in upon us silent, solitary twain; the
+storm booming without in solemn swells; I began to be sensible of
+strange feelings. I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart
+and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing
+savage had redeemed it. There he sat, his very indifference speaking a
+nature in which there lurked no civilized hypocrisies and bland
+deceits. Wild he was; a very sight of sights to see; yet I began to
+feel myself mysteriously drawn towards him. And those same things that
+would have repelled most others, they were the very magnets that thus
+drew me. I’ll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness
+has proved but hollow courtesy. I drew my bench near him, and made some
+friendly signs and hints, doing my best to talk with him meanwhile. At
+first he little noticed these advances; but presently, upon my
+referring to his last night’s hospitalities, he made out to ask me
+whether we were again to be bedfellows. I told him yes; whereat I
+thought he looked pleased, perhaps a little complimented.
+
+We then turned over the book together, and I endeavored to explain to
+him the purpose of the printing, and the meaning of the few pictures
+that were in it. Thus I soon engaged his interest; and from that we
+went to jabbering the best we could about the various outer sights to
+be seen in this famous town. Soon I proposed a social smoke; and,
+producing his pouch and tomahawk, he quietly offered me a puff. And
+then we sat exchanging puffs from that wild pipe of his, and keeping it
+regularly passing between us.
+
+If there yet lurked any ice of indifference towards me in the Pagan’s
+breast, this pleasant, genial smoke we had, soon thawed it out, and
+left us cronies. He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and
+unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his
+forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that
+henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country’s phrase, that we
+were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be. In a
+countryman, this sudden flame of friendship would have seemed far too
+premature, a thing to be much distrusted; but in this simple savage
+those old rules would not apply.
+
+After supper, and another social chat and smoke, we went to our room
+together. He made me a present of his embalmed head; took out his
+enormous tobacco wallet, and groping under the tobacco, drew out some
+thirty dollars in silver; then spreading them on the table, and
+mechanically dividing them into two equal portions, pushed one of them
+towards me, and said it was mine. I was going to remonstrate; but he
+silenced me by pouring them into my trowsers’ pockets. I let them stay.
+He then went about his evening prayers, took out his idol, and removed
+the paper fireboard. By certain signs and symptoms, I thought he seemed
+anxious for me to join him; but well knowing what was to follow, I
+deliberated a moment whether, in case he invited me, I would comply or
+otherwise.
+
+I was a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible
+Presbyterian Church. How then could I unite with this wild idolator in
+worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship? thought I. Do you
+suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and
+earth—pagans and all included—can possibly be jealous of an
+insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! But what is worship?—to do
+the will of God—_that_ is worship. And what is the will of God?—to do
+to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me—_that_ is
+the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish
+that this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular
+Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him
+in his; ergo, I must turn idolator. So I kindled the shavings; helped
+prop up the innocent little idol; offered him burnt biscuit with
+Queequeg; salamed before him twice or thrice; kissed his nose; and that
+done, we undressed and went to bed, at peace with our own consciences
+and all the world. But we did not go to sleep without some little chat.
+
+How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential
+disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the
+very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often
+lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our
+hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair.
+
+
+CHAPTER 11. Nightgown.
+
+We had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and
+Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs
+over mine, and then drawing them back; so entirely sociable and free
+and easy were we; when, at last, by reason of our confabulations, what
+little nappishness remained in us altogether departed, and we felt like
+getting up again, though day-break was yet some way down the future.
+
+Yes, we became very wakeful; so much so that our recumbent position
+began to grow wearisome, and by little and little we found ourselves
+sitting up; the clothes well tucked around us, leaning against the
+head-board with our four knees drawn up close together, and our two
+noses bending over them, as if our kneepans were warming-pans. We felt
+very nice and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of doors;
+indeed out of bed-clothes too, seeing that there was no fire in the
+room. The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some
+small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world
+that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If
+you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been
+so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But
+if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown
+of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general
+consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For
+this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire,
+which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height
+of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket
+between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there
+you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.
+
+We had been sitting in this crouching manner for some time, when all at
+once I thought I would open my eyes; for when between sheets, whether
+by day or by night, and whether asleep or awake, I have a way of always
+keeping my eyes shut, in order the more to concentrate the snugness of
+being in bed. Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright
+except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper
+element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey
+part. Upon opening my eyes then, and coming out of my own pleasant and
+self-created darkness into the imposed and coarse outer gloom of the
+unilluminated twelve-o’clock-at-night, I experienced a disagreeable
+revulsion. Nor did I at all object to the hint from Queequeg that
+perhaps it were best to strike a light, seeing that we were so wide
+awake; and besides he felt a strong desire to have a few quiet puffs
+from his Tomahawk. Be it said, that though I had felt such a strong
+repugnance to his smoking in the bed the night before, yet see how
+elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them.
+For now I liked nothing better than to have Queequeg smoking by me,
+even in bed, because he seemed to be full of such serene household joy
+then. I no more felt unduly concerned for the landlord’s policy of
+insurance. I was only alive to the condensed confidential
+comfortableness of sharing a pipe and a blanket with a real friend.
+With our shaggy jackets drawn about our shoulders, we now passed the
+Tomahawk from one to the other, till slowly there grew over us a blue
+hanging tester of smoke, illuminated by the flame of the new-lit lamp.
+
+Whether it was that this undulating tester rolled the savage away to
+far distant scenes, I know not, but he now spoke of his native island;
+and, eager to hear his history, I begged him to go on and tell it. He
+gladly complied. Though at the time I but ill comprehended not a few of
+his words, yet subsequent disclosures, when I had become more familiar
+with his broken phraseology, now enable me to present the whole story
+such as it may prove in the mere skeleton I give.
+
+
+CHAPTER 12. Biographical.
+
+Queequeg was a native of Rokovoko, an island far away to the West and
+South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.
+
+When a new-hatched savage running wild about his native woodlands in a
+grass clout, followed by the nibbling goats, as if he were a green
+sapling; even then, in Queequeg’s ambitious soul, lurked a strong
+desire to see something more of Christendom than a specimen whaler or
+two. His father was a High Chief, a King; his uncle a High Priest; and
+on the maternal side he boasted aunts who were the wives of
+unconquerable warriors. There was excellent blood in his veins—royal
+stuff; though sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal propensity he
+nourished in his untutored youth.
+
+A Sag Harbor ship visited his father’s bay, and Queequeg sought a
+passage to Christian lands. But the ship, having her full complement of
+seamen, spurned his suit; and not all the King his father’s influence
+could prevail. But Queequeg vowed a vow. Alone in his canoe, he paddled
+off to a distant strait, which he knew the ship must pass through when
+she quitted the island. On one side was a coral reef; on the other a
+low tongue of land, covered with mangrove thickets that grew out into
+the water. Hiding his canoe, still afloat, among these thickets, with
+its prow seaward, he sat down in the stern, paddle low in hand; and
+when the ship was gliding by, like a flash he darted out; gained her
+side; with one backward dash of his foot capsized and sank his canoe;
+climbed up the chains; and throwing himself at full length upon the
+deck, grappled a ring-bolt there, and swore not to let it go, though
+hacked in pieces.
+
+In vain the captain threatened to throw him overboard; suspended a
+cutlass over his naked wrists; Queequeg was the son of a King, and
+Queequeg budged not. Struck by his desperate dauntlessness, and his
+wild desire to visit Christendom, the captain at last relented, and
+told him he might make himself at home. But this fine young savage—this
+sea Prince of Wales, never saw the Captain’s cabin. They put him down
+among the sailors, and made a whaleman of him. But like Czar Peter
+content to toil in the shipyards of foreign cities, Queequeg disdained
+no seeming ignominy, if thereby he might happily gain the power of
+enlightening his untutored countrymen. For at bottom—so he told me—he
+was actuated by a profound desire to learn among the Christians, the
+arts whereby to make his people still happier than they were; and more
+than that, still better than they were. But, alas! the practices of
+whalemen soon convinced him that even Christians could be both
+miserable and wicked; infinitely more so, than all his father’s
+heathens. Arrived at last in old Sag Harbor; and seeing what the
+sailors did there; and then going on to Nantucket, and seeing how they
+spent their wages in _that_ place also, poor Queequeg gave it up for
+lost. Thought he, it’s a wicked world in all meridians; I’ll die a
+pagan.
+
+And thus an old idolator at heart, he yet lived among these Christians,
+wore their clothes, and tried to talk their gibberish. Hence the queer
+ways about him, though now some time from home.
+
+By hints, I asked him whether he did not propose going back, and having
+a coronation; since he might now consider his father dead and gone, he
+being very old and feeble at the last accounts. He answered no, not
+yet; and added that he was fearful Christianity, or rather Christians,
+had unfitted him for ascending the pure and undefiled throne of thirty
+pagan Kings before him. But by and by, he said, he would return,—as
+soon as he felt himself baptized again. For the nonce, however, he
+proposed to sail about, and sow his wild oats in all four oceans. They
+had made a harpooneer of him, and that barbed iron was in lieu of a
+sceptre now.
+
+I asked him what might be his immediate purpose, touching his future
+movements. He answered, to go to sea again, in his old vocation. Upon
+this, I told him that whaling was my own design, and informed him of my
+intention to sail out of Nantucket, as being the most promising port
+for an adventurous whaleman to embark from. He at once resolved to
+accompany me to that island, ship aboard the same vessel, get into the
+same watch, the same boat, the same mess with me, in short to share my
+every hap; with both my hands in his, boldly dip into the Potluck of
+both worlds. To all this I joyously assented; for besides the affection
+I now felt for Queequeg, he was an experienced harpooneer, and as such,
+could not fail to be of great usefulness to one, who, like me, was
+wholly ignorant of the mysteries of whaling, though well acquainted
+with the sea, as known to merchant seamen.
+
+His story being ended with his pipe’s last dying puff, Queequeg
+embraced me, pressed his forehead against mine, and blowing out the
+light, we rolled over from each other, this way and that, and very soon
+were sleeping.
+
+
+CHAPTER 13. Wheelbarrow.
+
+Next morning, Monday, after disposing of the embalmed head to a barber,
+for a block, I settled my own and comrade’s bill; using, however, my
+comrade’s money. The grinning landlord, as well as the boarders, seemed
+amazingly tickled at the sudden friendship which had sprung up between
+me and Queequeg—especially as Peter Coffin’s cock and bull stories
+about him had previously so much alarmed me concerning the very person
+whom I now companied with.
+
+We borrowed a wheelbarrow, and embarking our things, including my own
+poor carpet-bag, and Queequeg’s canvas sack and hammock, away we went
+down to “the Moss,” the little Nantucket packet schooner moored at the
+wharf. As we were going along the people stared; not at Queequeg so
+much—for they were used to seeing cannibals like him in their
+streets,—but at seeing him and me upon such confidential terms. But we
+heeded them not, going along wheeling the barrow by turns, and Queequeg
+now and then stopping to adjust the sheath on his harpoon barbs. I
+asked him why he carried such a troublesome thing with him ashore, and
+whether all whaling ships did not find their own harpoons. To this, in
+substance, he replied, that though what I hinted was true enough, yet
+he had a particular affection for his own harpoon, because it was of
+assured stuff, well tried in many a mortal combat, and deeply intimate
+with the hearts of whales. In short, like many inland reapers and
+mowers, who go into the farmers’ meadows armed with their own
+scythes—though in no wise obliged to furnish them—even so, Queequeg,
+for his own private reasons, preferred his own harpoon.
+
+Shifting the barrow from my hand to his, he told me a funny story about
+the first wheelbarrow he had ever seen. It was in Sag Harbor. The
+owners of his ship, it seems, had lent him one, in which to carry his
+heavy chest to his boarding house. Not to seem ignorant about the
+thing—though in truth he was entirely so, concerning the precise way in
+which to manage the barrow—Queequeg puts his chest upon it; lashes it
+fast; and then shoulders the barrow and marches up the wharf. “Why,”
+said I, “Queequeg, you might have known better than that, one would
+think. Didn’t the people laugh?”
+
+Upon this, he told me another story. The people of his island of
+Rokovoko, it seems, at their wedding feasts express the fragrant water
+of young cocoanuts into a large stained calabash like a punchbowl; and
+this punchbowl always forms the great central ornament on the braided
+mat where the feast is held. Now a certain grand merchant ship once
+touched at Rokovoko, and its commander—from all accounts, a very
+stately punctilious gentleman, at least for a sea captain—this
+commander was invited to the wedding feast of Queequeg’s sister, a
+pretty young princess just turned of ten. Well; when all the wedding
+guests were assembled at the bride’s bamboo cottage, this Captain
+marches in, and being assigned the post of honor, placed himself over
+against the punchbowl, and between the High Priest and his majesty the
+King, Queequeg’s father. Grace being said,—for those people have their
+grace as well as we—though Queequeg told me that unlike us, who at such
+times look downwards to our platters, they, on the contrary, copying
+the ducks, glance upwards to the great Giver of all feasts—Grace, I
+say, being said, the High Priest opens the banquet by the immemorial
+ceremony of the island; that is, dipping his consecrated and
+consecrating fingers into the bowl before the blessed beverage
+circulates. Seeing himself placed next the Priest, and noting the
+ceremony, and thinking himself—being Captain of a ship—as having plain
+precedence over a mere island King, especially in the King’s own
+house—the Captain coolly proceeds to wash his hands in the
+punchbowl;—taking it I suppose for a huge finger-glass. “Now,” said
+Queequeg, “what you tink now?—Didn’t our people laugh?”
+
+At last, passage paid, and luggage safe, we stood on board the
+schooner. Hoisting sail, it glided down the Acushnet river. On one
+side, New Bedford rose in terraces of streets, their ice-covered trees
+all glittering in the clear, cold air. Huge hills and mountains of
+casks on casks were piled upon her wharves, and side by side the
+world-wandering whale ships lay silent and safely moored at last; while
+from others came a sound of carpenters and coopers, with blended noises
+of fires and forges to melt the pitch, all betokening that new cruises
+were on the start; that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only
+begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on,
+for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness
+of all earthly effort.
+
+Gaining the more open water, the bracing breeze waxed fresh; the little
+Moss tossed the quick foam from her bows, as a young colt his
+snortings. How I snuffed that Tartar air!—how I spurned that turnpike
+earth!—that common highway all over dented with the marks of slavish
+heels and hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea
+which will permit no records.
+
+At the same foam-fountain, Queequeg seemed to drink and reel with me.
+His dusky nostrils swelled apart; he showed his filed and pointed
+teeth. On, on we flew; and our offing gained, the Moss did homage to
+the blast; ducked and dived her bows as a slave before the Sultan.
+Sideways leaning, we sideways darted; every ropeyarn tingling like a
+wire; the two tall masts buckling like Indian canes in land tornadoes.
+So full of this reeling scene were we, as we stood by the plunging
+bowsprit, that for some time we did not notice the jeering glances of
+the passengers, a lubber-like assembly, who marvelled that two fellow
+beings should be so companionable; as though a white man were anything
+more dignified than a whitewashed negro. But there were some boobies
+and bumpkins there, who, by their intense greenness, must have come
+from the heart and centre of all verdure. Queequeg caught one of these
+young saplings mimicking him behind his back. I thought the bumpkin’s
+hour of doom was come. Dropping his harpoon, the brawny savage caught
+him in his arms, and by an almost miraculous dexterity and strength,
+sent him high up bodily into the air; then slightly tapping his stern
+in mid-somerset, the fellow landed with bursting lungs upon his feet,
+while Queequeg, turning his back upon him, lighted his tomahawk pipe
+and passed it to me for a puff.
+
+“Capting! Capting!” yelled the bumpkin, running towards that officer;
+“Capting, Capting, here’s the devil.”
+
+“Hallo, _you_ sir,” cried the Captain, a gaunt rib of the sea, stalking
+up to Queequeg, “what in thunder do you mean by that? Don’t you know
+you might have killed that chap?”
+
+“What him say?” said Queequeg, as he mildly turned to me.
+
+“He say,” said I, “that you came near kill-e that man there,” pointing
+to the still shivering greenhorn.
+
+“Kill-e,” cried Queequeg, twisting his tattooed face into an unearthly
+expression of disdain, “ah! him bevy small-e fish-e; Queequeg no kill-e
+so small-e fish-e; Queequeg kill-e big whale!”
+
+“Look you,” roared the Captain, “I’ll kill-e _you_, you cannibal, if
+you try any more of your tricks aboard here; so mind your eye.”
+
+But it so happened just then, that it was high time for the Captain to
+mind his own eye. The prodigious strain upon the main-sail had parted
+the weather-sheet, and the tremendous boom was now flying from side to
+side, completely sweeping the entire after part of the deck. The poor
+fellow whom Queequeg had handled so roughly, was swept overboard; all
+hands were in a panic; and to attempt snatching at the boom to stay it,
+seemed madness. It flew from right to left, and back again, almost in
+one ticking of a watch, and every instant seemed on the point of
+snapping into splinters. Nothing was done, and nothing seemed capable
+of being done; those on deck rushed towards the bows, and stood eyeing
+the boom as if it were the lower jaw of an exasperated whale. In the
+midst of this consternation, Queequeg dropped deftly to his knees, and
+crawling under the path of the boom, whipped hold of a rope, secured
+one end to the bulwarks, and then flinging the other like a lasso,
+caught it round the boom as it swept over his head, and at the next
+jerk, the spar was that way trapped, and all was safe. The schooner was
+run into the wind, and while the hands were clearing away the stern
+boat, Queequeg, stripped to the waist, darted from the side with a long
+living arc of a leap. For three minutes or more he was seen swimming
+like a dog, throwing his long arms straight out before him, and by
+turns revealing his brawny shoulders through the freezing foam. I
+looked at the grand and glorious fellow, but saw no one to be saved.
+The greenhorn had gone down. Shooting himself perpendicularly from the
+water, Queequeg, now took an instant’s glance around him, and seeming
+to see just how matters were, dived down and disappeared. A few minutes
+more, and he rose again, one arm still striking out, and with the other
+dragging a lifeless form. The boat soon picked them up. The poor
+bumpkin was restored. All hands voted Queequeg a noble trump; the
+captain begged his pardon. From that hour I clove to Queequeg like a
+barnacle; yea, till poor Queequeg took his last long dive.
+
+Was there ever such unconsciousness? He did not seem to think that he
+at all deserved a medal from the Humane and Magnanimous Societies. He
+only asked for water—fresh water—something to wipe the brine off; that
+done, he put on dry clothes, lighted his pipe, and leaning against the
+bulwarks, and mildly eyeing those around him, seemed to be saying to
+himself—“It’s a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians. We
+cannibals must help these Christians.”
+
+
+CHAPTER 14. Nantucket.
+
+Nothing more happened on the passage worthy the mentioning; so, after a
+fine run, we safely arrived in Nantucket.
+
+Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner of
+the world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more lonely
+than the Eddystone lighthouse. Look at it—a mere hillock, and elbow of
+sand; all beach, without a background. There is more sand there than
+you would use in twenty years as a substitute for blotting paper. Some
+gamesome wights will tell you that they have to plant weeds there, they
+don’t grow naturally; that they import Canada thistles; that they have
+to send beyond seas for a spile to stop a leak in an oil cask; that
+pieces of wood in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true
+cross in Rome; that people there plant toadstools before their houses,
+to get under the shade in summer time; that one blade of grass makes an
+oasis, three blades in a day’s walk a prairie; that they wear quicksand
+shoes, something like Laplander snow-shoes; that they are so shut up,
+belted about, every way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island
+of by the ocean, that to their very chairs and tables small clams will
+sometimes be found adhering, as to the backs of sea turtles. But these
+extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no Illinois.
+
+Look now at the wondrous traditional story of how this island was
+settled by the red-men. Thus goes the legend. In olden times an eagle
+swooped down upon the New England coast, and carried off an infant
+Indian in his talons. With loud lament the parents saw their child
+borne out of sight over the wide waters. They resolved to follow in the
+same direction. Setting out in their canoes, after a perilous passage
+they discovered the island, and there they found an empty ivory
+casket,—the poor little Indian’s skeleton.
+
+What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should
+take to the sea for a livelihood! They first caught crabs and quohogs
+in the sand; grown bolder, they waded out with nets for mackerel; more
+experienced, they pushed off in boats and captured cod; and at last,
+launching a navy of great ships on the sea, explored this watery world;
+put an incessant belt of circumnavigations round it; peeped in at
+Behring’s Straits; and in all seasons and all oceans declared
+everlasting war with the mightiest animated mass that has survived the
+flood; most monstrous and most mountainous! That Himmalehan, salt-sea
+Mastodon, clothed with such portentousness of unconscious power, that
+his very panics are more to be dreaded than his most fearless and
+malicious assaults!
+
+And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from
+their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like
+so many Alexanders; parcelling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific,
+and Indian oceans, as the three pirate powers did Poland. Let America
+add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English
+overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun;
+two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s. For the sea
+is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires; other seamen having but a
+right of way through it. Merchant ships are but extension bridges;
+armed ones but floating forts; even pirates and privateers, though
+following the sea as highwaymen the road, they but plunder other ships,
+other fragments of the land like themselves, without seeking to draw
+their living from the bottomless deep itself. The Nantucketer, he alone
+resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to
+it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation.
+_There_ is his home; _there_ lies his business, which a Noah’s flood
+would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China.
+He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among
+the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years
+he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells
+like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman.
+With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to
+sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight
+of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his
+very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.
+
+
+CHAPTER 15. Chowder.
+
+It was quite late in the evening when the little Moss came snugly to
+anchor, and Queequeg and I went ashore; so we could attend to no
+business that day, at least none but a supper and a bed. The landlord
+of the Spouter-Inn had recommended us to his cousin Hosea Hussey of the
+Try Pots, whom he asserted to be the proprietor of one of the best kept
+hotels in all Nantucket, and moreover he had assured us that Cousin
+Hosea, as he called him, was famous for his chowders. In short, he
+plainly hinted that we could not possibly do better than try pot-luck
+at the Try Pots. But the directions he had given us about keeping a
+yellow warehouse on our starboard hand till we opened a white church to
+the larboard, and then keeping that on the larboard hand till we made a
+corner three points to the starboard, and that done, then ask the first
+man we met where the place was: these crooked directions of his very
+much puzzled us at first, especially as, at the outset, Queequeg
+insisted that the yellow warehouse—our first point of departure—must be
+left on the larboard hand, whereas I had understood Peter Coffin to say
+it was on the starboard. However, by dint of beating about a little in
+the dark, and now and then knocking up a peaceable inhabitant to
+inquire the way, we at last came to something which there was no
+mistaking.
+
+Two enormous wooden pots painted black, and suspended by asses’ ears,
+swung from the cross-trees of an old top-mast, planted in front of an
+old doorway. The horns of the cross-trees were sawed off on the other
+side, so that this old top-mast looked not a little like a gallows.
+Perhaps I was over sensitive to such impressions at the time, but I
+could not help staring at this gallows with a vague misgiving. A sort
+of crick was in my neck as I gazed up to the two remaining horns; yes,
+_two_ of them, one for Queequeg, and one for me. It’s ominous, thinks
+I. A Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my first whaling port;
+tombstones staring at me in the whalemen’s chapel; and here a gallows!
+and a pair of prodigious black pots too! Are these last throwing out
+oblique hints touching Tophet?
+
+I was called from these reflections by the sight of a freckled woman
+with yellow hair and a yellow gown, standing in the porch of the inn,
+under a dull red lamp swinging there, that looked much like an injured
+eye, and carrying on a brisk scolding with a man in a purple woollen
+shirt.
+
+“Get along with ye,” said she to the man, “or I’ll be combing ye!”
+
+“Come on, Queequeg,” said I, “all right. There’s Mrs. Hussey.”
+
+And so it turned out; Mr. Hosea Hussey being from home, but leaving
+Mrs. Hussey entirely competent to attend to all his affairs. Upon
+making known our desires for a supper and a bed, Mrs. Hussey,
+postponing further scolding for the present, ushered us into a little
+room, and seating us at a table spread with the relics of a recently
+concluded repast, turned round to us and said—“Clam or Cod?”
+
+“What’s that about Cods, ma’am?” said I, with much politeness.
+
+“Clam or Cod?” she repeated.
+
+“A clam for supper? a cold clam; is _that_ what you mean, Mrs. Hussey?”
+says I, “but that’s a rather cold and clammy reception in the winter
+time, ain’t it, Mrs. Hussey?”
+
+But being in a great hurry to resume scolding the man in the purple
+Shirt, who was waiting for it in the entry, and seeming to hear nothing
+but the word “clam,” Mrs. Hussey hurried towards an open door leading
+to the kitchen, and bawling out “clam for two,” disappeared.
+
+“Queequeg,” said I, “do you think that we can make out a supper for us
+both on one clam?”
+
+However, a warm savory steam from the kitchen served to belie the
+apparently cheerless prospect before us. But when that smoking chowder
+came in, the mystery was delightfully explained. Oh, sweet friends!
+hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than
+hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut up
+into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully
+seasoned with pepper and salt. Our appetites being sharpened by the
+frosty voyage, and in particular, Queequeg seeing his favourite fishing
+food before him, and the chowder being surpassingly excellent, we
+despatched it with great expedition: when leaning back a moment and
+bethinking me of Mrs. Hussey’s clam and cod announcement, I thought I
+would try a little experiment. Stepping to the kitchen door, I uttered
+the word “cod” with great emphasis, and resumed my seat. In a few
+moments the savoury steam came forth again, but with a different
+flavor, and in good time a fine cod-chowder was placed before us.
+
+We resumed business; and while plying our spoons in the bowl, thinks I
+to myself, I wonder now if this here has any effect on the head? What’s
+that stultifying saying about chowder-headed people? “But look,
+Queequeg, ain’t that a live eel in your bowl? Where’s your harpoon?”
+
+Fishiest of all fishy places was the Try Pots, which well deserved its
+name; for the pots there were always boiling chowders. Chowder for
+breakfast, and chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper, till you
+began to look for fish-bones coming through your clothes. The area
+before the house was paved with clam-shells. Mrs. Hussey wore a
+polished necklace of codfish vertebra; and Hosea Hussey had his account
+books bound in superior old shark-skin. There was a fishy flavor to the
+milk, too, which I could not at all account for, till one morning
+happening to take a stroll along the beach among some fishermen’s
+boats, I saw Hosea’s brindled cow feeding on fish remnants, and
+marching along the sand with each foot in a cod’s decapitated head,
+looking very slip-shod, I assure ye.
+
+Supper concluded, we received a lamp, and directions from Mrs. Hussey
+concerning the nearest way to bed; but, as Queequeg was about to
+precede me up the stairs, the lady reached forth her arm, and demanded
+his harpoon; she allowed no harpoon in her chambers. “Why not?” said I;
+“every true whaleman sleeps with his harpoon—but why not?” “Because
+it’s dangerous,” says she. “Ever since young Stiggs coming from that
+unfort’nt v’y’ge of his, when he was gone four years and a half, with
+only three barrels of _ile_, was found dead in my first floor back,
+with his harpoon in his side; ever since then I allow no boarders to
+take sich dangerous weepons in their rooms at night. So, Mr. Queequeg”
+(for she had learned his name), “I will just take this here iron, and
+keep it for you till morning. But the chowder; clam or cod to-morrow
+for breakfast, men?”
+
+“Both,” says I; “and let’s have a couple of smoked herring by way of
+variety.”
+
+
+CHAPTER 16. The Ship.
+
+In bed we concocted our plans for the morrow. But to my surprise and no
+small concern, Queequeg now gave me to understand, that he had been
+diligently consulting Yojo—the name of his black little god—and Yojo
+had told him two or three times over, and strongly insisted upon it
+everyway, that instead of our going together among the whaling-fleet in
+harbor, and in concert selecting our craft; instead of this, I say,
+Yojo earnestly enjoined that the selection of the ship should rest
+wholly with me, inasmuch as Yojo purposed befriending us; and, in order
+to do so, had already pitched upon a vessel, which, if left to myself,
+I, Ishmael, should infallibly light upon, for all the world as though
+it had turned out by chance; and in that vessel I must immediately ship
+myself, for the present irrespective of Queequeg.
+
+I have forgotten to mention that, in many things, Queequeg placed great
+confidence in the excellence of Yojo’s judgment and surprising forecast
+of things; and cherished Yojo with considerable esteem, as a rather
+good sort of god, who perhaps meant well enough upon the whole, but in
+all cases did not succeed in his benevolent designs.
+
+Now, this plan of Queequeg’s, or rather Yojo’s, touching the selection
+of our craft; I did not like that plan at all. I had not a little
+relied upon Queequeg’s sagacity to point out the whaler best fitted to
+carry us and our fortunes securely. But as all my remonstrances
+produced no effect upon Queequeg, I was obliged to acquiesce; and
+accordingly prepared to set about this business with a determined
+rushing sort of energy and vigor, that should quickly settle that
+trifling little affair. Next morning early, leaving Queequeg shut up
+with Yojo in our little bedroom—for it seemed that it was some sort of
+Lent or Ramadan, or day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer with
+Queequeg and Yojo that day; _how_ it was I never could find out, for,
+though I applied myself to it several times, I never could master his
+liturgies and XXXIX Articles—leaving Queequeg, then, fasting on his
+tomahawk pipe, and Yojo warming himself at his sacrificial fire of
+shavings, I sallied out among the shipping. After much prolonged
+sauntering and many random inquiries, I learnt that there were three
+ships up for three-years’ voyages—The Devil-dam, the Tit-bit, and the
+Pequod. _Devil-Dam_, I do not know the origin of; _Tit-bit_ is obvious;
+_Pequod_, you will no doubt remember, was the name of a celebrated
+tribe of Massachusetts Indians; now extinct as the ancient Medes. I
+peered and pryed about the Devil-dam; from her, hopped over to the
+Tit-bit; and finally, going on board the Pequod, looked around her for
+a moment, and then decided that this was the very ship for us.
+
+You may have seen many a quaint craft in your day, for aught I
+know;—square-toed luggers; mountainous Japanese junks; butter-box
+galliots, and what not; but take my word for it, you never saw such a
+rare old craft as this same rare old Pequod. She was a ship of the old
+school, rather small if anything; with an old-fashioned claw-footed
+look about her. Long seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons and
+calms of all four oceans, her old hull’s complexion was darkened like a
+French grenadier’s, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia. Her
+venerable bows looked bearded. Her masts—cut somewhere on the coast of
+Japan, where her original ones were lost overboard in a gale—her masts
+stood stiffly up like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne. Her
+ancient decks were worn and wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped
+flag-stone in Canterbury Cathedral where Becket bled. But to all these
+her old antiquities, were added new and marvellous features, pertaining
+to the wild business that for more than half a century she had
+followed. Old Captain Peleg, many years her chief-mate, before he
+commanded another vessel of his own, and now a retired seaman, and one
+of the principal owners of the Pequod,—this old Peleg, during the term
+of his chief-mateship, had built upon her original grotesqueness, and
+inlaid it, all over, with a quaintness both of material and device,
+unmatched by anything except it be Thorkill-Hake’s carved buckler or
+bedstead. She was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his
+neck heavy with pendants of polished ivory. She was a thing of
+trophies. A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased
+bones of her enemies. All round, her unpanelled, open bulwarks were
+garnished like one continuous jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the
+sperm whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her old hempen thews
+and tendons to. Those thews ran not through base blocks of land wood,
+but deftly travelled over sheaves of sea-ivory. Scorning a turnstile
+wheel at her reverend helm, she sported there a tiller; and that tiller
+was in one mass, curiously carved from the long narrow lower jaw of her
+hereditary foe. The helmsman who steered by that tiller in a tempest,
+felt like the Tartar, when he holds back his fiery steed by clutching
+its jaw. A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things
+are touched with that.
+
+Now when I looked about the quarter-deck, for some one having
+authority, in order to propose myself as a candidate for the voyage, at
+first I saw nobody; but I could not well overlook a strange sort of
+tent, or rather wigwam, pitched a little behind the main-mast. It
+seemed only a temporary erection used in port. It was of a conical
+shape, some ten feet high; consisting of the long, huge slabs of limber
+black bone taken from the middle and highest part of the jaws of the
+right-whale. Planted with their broad ends on the deck, a circle of
+these slabs laced together, mutually sloped towards each other, and at
+the apex united in a tufted point, where the loose hairy fibres waved
+to and fro like the top-knot on some old Pottowottamie Sachem’s head. A
+triangular opening faced towards the bows of the ship, so that the
+insider commanded a complete view forward.
+
+And half concealed in this queer tenement, I at length found one who by
+his aspect seemed to have authority; and who, it being noon, and the
+ship’s work suspended, was now enjoying respite from the burden of
+command. He was seated on an old-fashioned oaken chair, wriggling all
+over with curious carving; and the bottom of which was formed of a
+stout interlacing of the same elastic stuff of which the wigwam was
+constructed.
+
+There was nothing so very particular, perhaps, about the appearance of
+the elderly man I saw; he was brown and brawny, like most old seamen,
+and heavily rolled up in blue pilot-cloth, cut in the Quaker style;
+only there was a fine and almost microscopic net-work of the minutest
+wrinkles interlacing round his eyes, which must have arisen from his
+continual sailings in many hard gales, and always looking to
+windward;—for this causes the muscles about the eyes to become pursed
+together. Such eye-wrinkles are very effectual in a scowl.
+
+“Is this the Captain of the Pequod?” said I, advancing to the door of
+the tent.
+
+“Supposing it be the captain of the Pequod, what dost thou want of
+him?” he demanded.
+
+“I was thinking of shipping.”
+
+“Thou wast, wast thou? I see thou art no Nantucketer—ever been in a
+stove boat?”
+
+“No, Sir, I never have.”
+
+“Dost know nothing at all about whaling, I dare say—eh?
+
+“Nothing, Sir; but I have no doubt I shall soon learn. I’ve been
+several voyages in the merchant service, and I think that—”
+
+“Merchant service be damned. Talk not that lingo to me. Dost see that
+leg?—I’ll take that leg away from thy stern, if ever thou talkest of
+the marchant service to me again. Marchant service indeed! I suppose
+now ye feel considerable proud of having served in those marchant
+ships. But flukes! man, what makes thee want to go a whaling, eh?—it
+looks a little suspicious, don’t it, eh?—Hast not been a pirate, hast
+thou?—Didst not rob thy last Captain, didst thou?—Dost not think of
+murdering the officers when thou gettest to sea?”
+
+I protested my innocence of these things. I saw that under the mask of
+these half humorous innuendoes, this old seaman, as an insulated
+Quakerish Nantucketer, was full of his insular prejudices, and rather
+distrustful of all aliens, unless they hailed from Cape Cod or the
+Vineyard.
+
+“But what takes thee a-whaling? I want to know that before I think of
+shipping ye.”
+
+“Well, sir, I want to see what whaling is. I want to see the world.”
+
+“Want to see what whaling is, eh? Have ye clapped eye on Captain Ahab?”
+
+“Who is Captain Ahab, sir?”
+
+“Aye, aye, I thought so. Captain Ahab is the Captain of this ship.”
+
+“I am mistaken then. I thought I was speaking to the Captain himself.”
+
+“Thou art speaking to Captain Peleg—that’s who ye are speaking to,
+young man. It belongs to me and Captain Bildad to see the Pequod fitted
+out for the voyage, and supplied with all her needs, including crew. We
+are part owners and agents. But as I was going to say, if thou wantest
+to know what whaling is, as thou tellest ye do, I can put ye in a way
+of finding it out before ye bind yourself to it, past backing out. Clap
+eye on Captain Ahab, young man, and thou wilt find that he has only one
+leg.”
+
+“What do you mean, sir? Was the other one lost by a whale?”
+
+“Lost by a whale! Young man, come nearer to me: it was devoured, chewed
+up, crunched by the monstrousest parmacetty that ever chipped a
+boat!—ah, ah!”
+
+I was a little alarmed by his energy, perhaps also a little touched at
+the hearty grief in his concluding exclamation, but said as calmly as I
+could, “What you say is no doubt true enough, sir; but how could I know
+there was any peculiar ferocity in that particular whale, though indeed
+I might have inferred as much from the simple fact of the accident.”
+
+“Look ye now, young man, thy lungs are a sort of soft, d’ye see; thou
+dost not talk shark a bit. _Sure_, ye’ve been to sea before now; sure
+of that?”
+
+“Sir,” said I, “I thought I told you that I had been four voyages in
+the merchant—”
+
+“Hard down out of that! Mind what I said about the marchant
+service—don’t aggravate me—I won’t have it. But let us understand each
+other. I have given thee a hint about what whaling is; do ye yet feel
+inclined for it?”
+
+“I do, sir.”
+
+“Very good. Now, art thou the man to pitch a harpoon down a live
+whale’s throat, and then jump after it? Answer, quick!”
+
+“I am, sir, if it should be positively indispensable to do so; not to
+be got rid of, that is; which I don’t take to be the fact.”
+
+“Good again. Now then, thou not only wantest to go a-whaling, to find
+out by experience what whaling is, but ye also want to go in order to
+see the world? Was not that what ye said? I thought so. Well then, just
+step forward there, and take a peep over the weather-bow, and then back
+to me and tell me what ye see there.”
+
+For a moment I stood a little puzzled by this curious request, not
+knowing exactly how to take it, whether humorously or in earnest. But
+concentrating all his crow’s feet into one scowl, Captain Peleg started
+me on the errand.
+
+Going forward and glancing over the weather bow, I perceived that the
+ship swinging to her anchor with the flood-tide, was now obliquely
+pointing towards the open ocean. The prospect was unlimited, but
+exceedingly monotonous and forbidding; not the slightest variety that I
+could see.
+
+“Well, what’s the report?” said Peleg when I came back; “what did ye
+see?”
+
+“Not much,” I replied—“nothing but water; considerable horizon though,
+and there’s a squall coming up, I think.”
+
+“Well, what does thou think then of seeing the world? Do ye wish to go
+round Cape Horn to see any more of it, eh? Can’t ye see the world where
+you stand?”
+
+I was a little staggered, but go a-whaling I must, and I would; and the
+Pequod was as good a ship as any—I thought the best—and all this I now
+repeated to Peleg. Seeing me so determined, he expressed his
+willingness to ship me.
+
+“And thou mayest as well sign the papers right off,” he added—“come
+along with ye.” And so saying, he led the way below deck into the
+cabin.
+
+Seated on the transom was what seemed to me a most uncommon and
+surprising figure. It turned out to be Captain Bildad, who along with
+Captain Peleg was one of the largest owners of the vessel; the other
+shares, as is sometimes the case in these ports, being held by a crowd
+of old annuitants; widows, fatherless children, and chancery wards;
+each owning about the value of a timber head, or a foot of plank, or a
+nail or two in the ship. People in Nantucket invest their money in
+whaling vessels, the same way that you do yours in approved state
+stocks bringing in good interest.
+
+Now, Bildad, like Peleg, and indeed many other Nantucketers, was a
+Quaker, the island having been originally settled by that sect; and to
+this day its inhabitants in general retain in an uncommon measure the
+peculiarities of the Quaker, only variously and anomalously modified by
+things altogether alien and heterogeneous. For some of these same
+Quakers are the most sanguinary of all sailors and whale-hunters. They
+are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance.
+
+So that there are instances among them of men, who, named with
+Scripture names—a singularly common fashion on the island—and in
+childhood naturally imbibing the stately dramatic thee and thou of the
+Quaker idiom; still, from the audacious, daring, and boundless
+adventure of their subsequent lives, strangely blend with these
+unoutgrown peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes of character, not
+unworthy a Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman. And when
+these things unite in a man of greatly superior natural force, with a
+globular brain and a ponderous heart; who has also by the stillness and
+seclusion of many long night-watches in the remotest waters, and
+beneath constellations never seen here at the north, been led to think
+untraditionally and independently; receiving all nature’s sweet or
+savage impressions fresh from her own virgin voluntary and confiding
+breast, and thereby chiefly, but with some help from accidental
+advantages, to learn a bold and nervous lofty language—that man makes
+one in a whole nation’s census—a mighty pageant creature, formed for
+noble tragedies. Nor will it at all detract from him, dramatically
+regarded, if either by birth or other circumstances, he have what seems
+a half wilful overruling morbidness at the bottom of his nature. For
+all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be
+sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.
+But, as yet we have not to do with such an one, but with quite another;
+and still a man, who, if indeed peculiar, it only results again from
+another phase of the Quaker, modified by individual circumstances.
+
+Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a well-to-do, retired whaleman.
+But unlike Captain Peleg—who cared not a rush for what are called
+serious things, and indeed deemed those self-same serious things the
+veriest of all trifles—Captain Bildad had not only been originally
+educated according to the strictest sect of Nantucket Quakerism, but
+all his subsequent ocean life, and the sight of many unclad, lovely
+island creatures, round the Horn—all that had not moved this native
+born Quaker one single jot, had not so much as altered one angle of his
+vest. Still, for all this immutableness, was there some lack of common
+consistency about worthy Captain Bildad. Though refusing, from
+conscientious scruples, to bear arms against land invaders, yet himself
+had illimitably invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn
+foe to human bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled
+tuns upon tuns of leviathan gore. How now in the contemplative evening
+of his days, the pious Bildad reconciled these things in the
+reminiscence, I do not know; but it did not seem to concern him much,
+and very probably he had long since come to the sage and sensible
+conclusion that a man’s religion is one thing, and this practical world
+quite another. This world pays dividends. Rising from a little
+cabin-boy in short clothes of the drabbest drab, to a harpooneer in a
+broad shad-bellied waistcoat; from that becoming boat-header,
+chief-mate, and captain, and finally a ship owner; Bildad, as I hinted
+before, had concluded his adventurous career by wholly retiring from
+active life at the goodly age of sixty, and dedicating his remaining
+days to the quiet receiving of his well-earned income.
+
+Now, Bildad, I am sorry to say, had the reputation of being an
+incorrigible old hunks, and in his sea-going days, a bitter, hard
+task-master. They told me in Nantucket, though it certainly seems a
+curious story, that when he sailed the old Categut whaleman, his crew,
+upon arriving home, were mostly all carried ashore to the hospital,
+sore exhausted and worn out. For a pious man, especially for a Quaker,
+he was certainly rather hard-hearted, to say the least. He never used
+to swear, though, at his men, they said; but somehow he got an
+inordinate quantity of cruel, unmitigated hard work out of them. When
+Bildad was a chief-mate, to have his drab-coloured eye intently looking
+at you, made you feel completely nervous, till you could clutch
+something—a hammer or a marling-spike, and go to work like mad, at
+something or other, never mind what. Indolence and idleness perished
+before him. His own person was the exact embodiment of his utilitarian
+character. On his long, gaunt body, he carried no spare flesh, no
+superfluous beard, his chin having a soft, economical nap to it, like
+the worn nap of his broad-brimmed hat.
+
+Such, then, was the person that I saw seated on the transom when I
+followed Captain Peleg down into the cabin. The space between the decks
+was small; and there, bolt-upright, sat old Bildad, who always sat so,
+and never leaned, and this to save his coat tails. His broad-brim was
+placed beside him; his legs were stiffly crossed; his drab vesture was
+buttoned up to his chin; and spectacles on nose, he seemed absorbed in
+reading from a ponderous volume.
+
+“Bildad,” cried Captain Peleg, “at it again, Bildad, eh? Ye have been
+studying those Scriptures, now, for the last thirty years, to my
+certain knowledge. How far ye got, Bildad?”
+
+As if long habituated to such profane talk from his old shipmate,
+Bildad, without noticing his present irreverence, quietly looked up,
+and seeing me, glanced again inquiringly towards Peleg.
+
+“He says he’s our man, Bildad,” said Peleg, “he wants to ship.”
+
+“Dost thee?” said Bildad, in a hollow tone, and turning round to me.
+
+“I _dost_,” said I unconsciously, he was so intense a Quaker.
+
+“What do ye think of him, Bildad?” said Peleg.
+
+“He’ll do,” said Bildad, eyeing me, and then went on spelling away at
+his book in a mumbling tone quite audible.
+
+I thought him the queerest old Quaker I ever saw, especially as Peleg,
+his friend and old shipmate, seemed such a blusterer. But I said
+nothing, only looking round me sharply. Peleg now threw open a chest,
+and drawing forth the ship’s articles, placed pen and ink before him,
+and seated himself at a little table. I began to think it was high time
+to settle with myself at what terms I would be willing to engage for
+the voyage. I was already aware that in the whaling business they paid
+no wages; but all hands, including the captain, received certain shares
+of the profits called _lays_, and that these lays were proportioned to
+the degree of importance pertaining to the respective duties of the
+ship’s company. I was also aware that being a green hand at whaling, my
+own lay would not be very large; but considering that I was used to the
+sea, could steer a ship, splice a rope, and all that, I made no doubt
+that from all I had heard I should be offered at least the 275th
+lay—that is, the 275th part of the clear net proceeds of the voyage,
+whatever that might eventually amount to. And though the 275th lay was
+what they call a rather _long lay_, yet it was better than nothing; and
+if we had a lucky voyage, might pretty nearly pay for the clothing I
+would wear out on it, not to speak of my three years’ beef and board,
+for which I would not have to pay one stiver.
+
+It might be thought that this was a poor way to accumulate a princely
+fortune—and so it was, a very poor way indeed. But I am one of those
+that never take on about princely fortunes, and am quite content if the
+world is ready to board and lodge me, while I am putting up at this
+grim sign of the Thunder Cloud. Upon the whole, I thought that the
+275th lay would be about the fair thing, but would not have been
+surprised had I been offered the 200th, considering I was of a
+broad-shouldered make.
+
+But one thing, nevertheless, that made me a little distrustful about
+receiving a generous share of the profits was this: Ashore, I had heard
+something of both Captain Peleg and his unaccountable old crony Bildad;
+how that they being the principal proprietors of the Pequod, therefore
+the other and more inconsiderable and scattered owners, left nearly the
+whole management of the ship’s affairs to these two. And I did not know
+but what the stingy old Bildad might have a mighty deal to say about
+shipping hands, especially as I now found him on board the Pequod,
+quite at home there in the cabin, and reading his Bible as if at his
+own fireside. Now while Peleg was vainly trying to mend a pen with his
+jack-knife, old Bildad, to my no small surprise, considering that he
+was such an interested party in these proceedings; Bildad never heeded
+us, but went on mumbling to himself out of his book, “_Lay_ not up for
+yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth—”
+
+“Well, Captain Bildad,” interrupted Peleg, “what d’ye say, what lay
+shall we give this young man?”
+
+“Thou knowest best,” was the sepulchral reply, “the seven hundred and
+seventy-seventh wouldn’t be too much, would it?—‘where moth and rust do
+corrupt, but _lay_—’”
+
+_Lay_, indeed, thought I, and such a lay! the seven hundred and
+seventy-seventh! Well, old Bildad, you are determined that I, for one,
+shall not _lay_ up many _lays_ here below, where moth and rust do
+corrupt. It was an exceedingly _long lay_ that, indeed; and though from
+the magnitude of the figure it might at first deceive a landsman, yet
+the slightest consideration will show that though seven hundred and
+seventy-seven is a pretty large number, yet, when you come to make a
+_teenth_ of it, you will then see, I say, that the seven hundred and
+seventy-seventh part of a farthing is a good deal less than seven
+hundred and seventy-seven gold doubloons; and so I thought at the time.
+
+“Why, blast your eyes, Bildad,” cried Peleg, “thou dost not want to
+swindle this young man! he must have more than that.”
+
+“Seven hundred and seventy-seventh,” again said Bildad, without lifting
+his eyes; and then went on mumbling—“for where your treasure is, there
+will your heart be also.”
+
+“I am going to put him down for the three hundredth,” said Peleg, “do
+ye hear that, Bildad! The three hundredth lay, I say.”
+
+Bildad laid down his book, and turning solemnly towards him said,
+“Captain Peleg, thou hast a generous heart; but thou must consider the
+duty thou owest to the other owners of this ship—widows and orphans,
+many of them—and that if we too abundantly reward the labors of this
+young man, we may be taking the bread from those widows and those
+orphans. The seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay, Captain Peleg.”
+
+“Thou Bildad!” roared Peleg, starting up and clattering about the
+cabin. “Blast ye, Captain Bildad, if I had followed thy advice in these
+matters, I would afore now had a conscience to lug about that would be
+heavy enough to founder the largest ship that ever sailed round Cape
+Horn.”
+
+“Captain Peleg,” said Bildad steadily, “thy conscience may be drawing
+ten inches of water, or ten fathoms, I can’t tell; but as thou art
+still an impenitent man, Captain Peleg, I greatly fear lest thy
+conscience be but a leaky one; and will in the end sink thee foundering
+down to the fiery pit, Captain Peleg.”
+
+“Fiery pit! fiery pit! ye insult me, man; past all natural bearing, ye
+insult me. It’s an all-fired outrage to tell any human creature that
+he’s bound to hell. Flukes and flames! Bildad, say that again to me,
+and start my soul-bolts, but I’ll—I’ll—yes, I’ll swallow a live goat
+with all his hair and horns on. Out of the cabin, ye canting,
+drab-coloured son of a wooden gun—a straight wake with ye!”
+
+As he thundered out this he made a rush at Bildad, but with a
+marvellous oblique, sliding celerity, Bildad for that time eluded him.
+
+Alarmed at this terrible outburst between the two principal and
+responsible owners of the ship, and feeling half a mind to give up all
+idea of sailing in a vessel so questionably owned and temporarily
+commanded, I stepped aside from the door to give egress to Bildad, who,
+I made no doubt, was all eagerness to vanish from before the awakened
+wrath of Peleg. But to my astonishment, he sat down again on the
+transom very quietly, and seemed to have not the slightest intention of
+withdrawing. He seemed quite used to impenitent Peleg and his ways. As
+for Peleg, after letting off his rage as he had, there seemed no more
+left in him, and he, too, sat down like a lamb, though he twitched a
+little as if still nervously agitated. “Whew!” he whistled at last—“the
+squall’s gone off to leeward, I think. Bildad, thou used to be good at
+sharpening a lance, mend that pen, will ye. My jack-knife here needs
+the grindstone. That’s he; thank ye, Bildad. Now then, my young man,
+Ishmael’s thy name, didn’t ye say? Well then, down ye go here, Ishmael,
+for the three hundredth lay.”
+
+“Captain Peleg,” said I, “I have a friend with me who wants to ship
+too—shall I bring him down to-morrow?”
+
+“To be sure,” said Peleg. “Fetch him along, and we’ll look at him.”
+
+“What lay does he want?” groaned Bildad, glancing up from the book in
+which he had again been burying himself.
+
+“Oh! never thee mind about that, Bildad,” said Peleg. “Has he ever
+whaled it any?” turning to me.
+
+“Killed more whales than I can count, Captain Peleg.”
+
+“Well, bring him along then.”
+
+And, after signing the papers, off I went; nothing doubting but that I
+had done a good morning’s work, and that the Pequod was the identical
+ship that Yojo had provided to carry Queequeg and me round the Cape.
+
+But I had not proceeded far, when I began to bethink me that the
+Captain with whom I was to sail yet remained unseen by me; though,
+indeed, in many cases, a whale-ship will be completely fitted out, and
+receive all her crew on board, ere the captain makes himself visible by
+arriving to take command; for sometimes these voyages are so prolonged,
+and the shore intervals at home so exceedingly brief, that if the
+captain have a family, or any absorbing concernment of that sort, he
+does not trouble himself much about his ship in port, but leaves her to
+the owners till all is ready for sea. However, it is always as well to
+have a look at him before irrevocably committing yourself into his
+hands. Turning back I accosted Captain Peleg, inquiring where Captain
+Ahab was to be found.
+
+“And what dost thou want of Captain Ahab? It’s all right enough; thou
+art shipped.”
+
+“Yes, but I should like to see him.”
+
+“But I don’t think thou wilt be able to at present. I don’t know
+exactly what’s the matter with him; but he keeps close inside the
+house; a sort of sick, and yet he don’t look so. In fact, he ain’t
+sick; but no, he isn’t well either. Any how, young man, he won’t always
+see me, so I don’t suppose he will thee. He’s a queer man, Captain
+Ahab—so some think—but a good one. Oh, thou’lt like him well enough; no
+fear, no fear. He’s a grand, ungodly, god-like man, Captain Ahab;
+doesn’t speak much; but, when he does speak, then you may well listen.
+Mark ye, be forewarned; Ahab’s above the common; Ahab’s been in
+colleges, as well as ’mong the cannibals; been used to deeper wonders
+than the waves; fixed his fiery lance in mightier, stranger foes than
+whales. His lance! aye, the keenest and the surest that out of all our
+isle! Oh! he ain’t Captain Bildad; no, and he ain’t Captain Peleg;
+_he’s Ahab_, boy; and Ahab of old, thou knowest, was a crowned king!”
+
+“And a very vile one. When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did
+they not lick his blood?”
+
+“Come hither to me—hither, hither,” said Peleg, with a significance in
+his eye that almost startled me. “Look ye, lad; never say that on board
+the Pequod. Never say it anywhere. Captain Ahab did not name himself.
+’Twas a foolish, ignorant whim of his crazy, widowed mother, who died
+when he was only a twelvemonth old. And yet the old squaw Tistig, at
+Gayhead, said that the name would somehow prove prophetic. And,
+perhaps, other fools like her may tell thee the same. I wish to warn
+thee. It’s a lie. I know Captain Ahab well; I’ve sailed with him as
+mate years ago; I know what he is—a good man—not a pious, good man,
+like Bildad, but a swearing good man—something like me—only there’s a
+good deal more of him. Aye, aye, I know that he was never very jolly;
+and I know that on the passage home, he was a little out of his mind
+for a spell; but it was the sharp shooting pains in his bleeding stump
+that brought that about, as any one might see. I know, too, that ever
+since he lost his leg last voyage by that accursed whale, he’s been a
+kind of moody—desperate moody, and savage sometimes; but that will all
+pass off. And once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee, young
+man, it’s better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad
+one. So good-bye to thee—and wrong not Captain Ahab, because he happens
+to have a wicked name. Besides, my boy, he has a wife—not three voyages
+wedded—a sweet, resigned girl. Think of that; by that sweet girl that
+old man has a child: hold ye then there can be any utter, hopeless harm
+in Ahab? No, no, my lad; stricken, blasted, if he be, Ahab has his
+humanities!”
+
+As I walked away, I was full of thoughtfulness; what had been
+incidentally revealed to me of Captain Ahab, filled me with a certain
+wild vagueness of painfulness concerning him. And somehow, at the time,
+I felt a sympathy and a sorrow for him, but for I don’t know what,
+unless it was the cruel loss of his leg. And yet I also felt a strange
+awe of him; but that sort of awe, which I cannot at all describe, was
+not exactly awe; I do not know what it was. But I felt it; and it did
+not disincline me towards him; though I felt impatience at what seemed
+like mystery in him, so imperfectly as he was known to me then.
+However, my thoughts were at length carried in other directions, so
+that for the present dark Ahab slipped my mind.
+
+
+CHAPTER 17. The Ramadan.
+
+As Queequeg’s Ramadan, or Fasting and Humiliation, was to continue all
+day, I did not choose to disturb him till towards night-fall; for I
+cherish the greatest respect towards everybody’s religious obligations,
+never mind how comical, and could not find it in my heart to undervalue
+even a congregation of ants worshipping a toad-stool; or those other
+creatures in certain parts of our earth, who with a degree of
+footmanism quite unprecedented in other planets, bow down before the
+torso of a deceased landed proprietor merely on account of the
+inordinate possessions yet owned and rented in his name.
+
+I say, we good Presbyterian Christians should be charitable in these
+things, and not fancy ourselves so vastly superior to other mortals,
+pagans and what not, because of their half-crazy conceits on these
+subjects. There was Queequeg, now, certainly entertaining the most
+absurd notions about Yojo and his Ramadan;—but what of that? Queequeg
+thought he knew what he was about, I suppose; he seemed to be content;
+and there let him rest. All our arguing with him would not avail; let
+him be, I say: and Heaven have mercy on us all—Presbyterians and Pagans
+alike—for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and
+sadly need mending.
+
+Towards evening, when I felt assured that all his performances and
+rituals must be over, I went up to his room and knocked at the door;
+but no answer. I tried to open it, but it was fastened inside.
+“Queequeg,” said I softly through the key-hole:—all silent. “I say,
+Queequeg! why don’t you speak? It’s I—Ishmael.” But all remained still
+as before. I began to grow alarmed. I had allowed him such abundant
+time; I thought he might have had an apoplectic fit. I looked through
+the key-hole; but the door opening into an odd corner of the room, the
+key-hole prospect was but a crooked and sinister one. I could only see
+part of the foot-board of the bed and a line of the wall, but nothing
+more. I was surprised to behold resting against the wall the wooden
+shaft of Queequeg’s harpoon, which the landlady the evening previous
+had taken from him, before our mounting to the chamber. That’s strange,
+thought I; but at any rate, since the harpoon stands yonder, and he
+seldom or never goes abroad without it, therefore he must be inside
+here, and no possible mistake.
+
+“Queequeg!—Queequeg!”—all still. Something must have happened.
+Apoplexy! I tried to burst open the door; but it stubbornly resisted.
+Running down stairs, I quickly stated my suspicions to the first person
+I met—the chamber-maid. “La! la!” she cried, “I thought something must
+be the matter. I went to make the bed after breakfast, and the door was
+locked; and not a mouse to be heard; and it’s been just so silent ever
+since. But I thought, may be, you had both gone off and locked your
+baggage in for safe keeping. La! la, ma’am!—Mistress! murder! Mrs.
+Hussey! apoplexy!”—and with these cries, she ran towards the kitchen, I
+following.
+
+Mrs. Hussey soon appeared, with a mustard-pot in one hand and a
+vinegar-cruet in the other, having just broken away from the occupation
+of attending to the castors, and scolding her little black boy
+meantime.
+
+“Wood-house!” cried I, “which way to it? Run for God’s sake, and fetch
+something to pry open the door—the axe!—the axe! he’s had a stroke;
+depend upon it!”—and so saying I was unmethodically rushing up stairs
+again empty-handed, when Mrs. Hussey interposed the mustard-pot and
+vinegar-cruet, and the entire castor of her countenance.
+
+“What’s the matter with you, young man?”
+
+“Get the axe! For God’s sake, run for the doctor, some one, while I pry
+it open!”
+
+“Look here,” said the landlady, quickly putting down the vinegar-cruet,
+so as to have one hand free; “look here; are you talking about prying
+open any of my doors?”—and with that she seized my arm. “What’s the
+matter with you? What’s the matter with you, shipmate?”
+
+In as calm, but rapid a manner as possible, I gave her to understand
+the whole case. Unconsciously clapping the vinegar-cruet to one side of
+her nose, she ruminated for an instant; then exclaimed—“No! I haven’t
+seen it since I put it there.” Running to a little closet under the
+landing of the stairs, she glanced in, and returning, told me that
+Queequeg’s harpoon was missing. “He’s killed himself,” she cried. “It’s
+unfort’nate Stiggs done over again—there goes another counterpane—God
+pity his poor mother!—it will be the ruin of my house. Has the poor lad
+a sister? Where’s that girl?—there, Betty, go to Snarles the Painter,
+and tell him to paint me a sign, with—“no suicides permitted here, and
+no smoking in the parlor;”—might as well kill both birds at once. Kill?
+The Lord be merciful to his ghost! What’s that noise there? You, young
+man, avast there!”
+
+And running up after me, she caught me as I was again trying to force
+open the door.
+
+“I don’t allow it; I won’t have my premises spoiled. Go for the
+locksmith, there’s one about a mile from here. But avast!” putting her
+hand in her side-pocket, “here’s a key that’ll fit, I guess; let’s
+see.” And with that, she turned it in the lock; but, alas! Queequeg’s
+supplemental bolt remained unwithdrawn within.
+
+“Have to burst it open,” said I, and was running down the entry a
+little, for a good start, when the landlady caught at me, again vowing
+I should not break down her premises; but I tore from her, and with a
+sudden bodily rush dashed myself full against the mark.
+
+With a prodigious noise the door flew open, and the knob slamming
+against the wall, sent the plaster to the ceiling; and there, good
+heavens! there sat Queequeg, altogether cool and self-collected; right
+in the middle of the room; squatting on his hams, and holding Yojo on
+top of his head. He looked neither one way nor the other way, but sat
+like a carved image with scarce a sign of active life.
+
+“Queequeg,” said I, going up to him, “Queequeg, what’s the matter with
+you?”
+
+“He hain’t been a sittin’ so all day, has he?” said the landlady.
+
+But all we said, not a word could we drag out of him; I almost felt
+like pushing him over, so as to change his position, for it was almost
+intolerable, it seemed so painfully and unnaturally constrained;
+especially, as in all probability he had been sitting so for upwards of
+eight or ten hours, going too without his regular meals.
+
+“Mrs. Hussey,” said I, “he’s _alive_ at all events; so leave us, if you
+please, and I will see to this strange affair myself.”
+
+Closing the door upon the landlady, I endeavored to prevail upon
+Queequeg to take a chair; but in vain. There he sat; and all he could
+do—for all my polite arts and blandishments—he would not move a peg,
+nor say a single word, nor even look at me, nor notice my presence in
+the slightest way.
+
+I wonder, thought I, if this can possibly be a part of his Ramadan; do
+they fast on their hams that way in his native island. It must be so;
+yes, it’s part of his creed, I suppose; well, then, let him rest; he’ll
+get up sooner or later, no doubt. It can’t last for ever, thank God,
+and his Ramadan only comes once a year; and I don’t believe it’s very
+punctual then.
+
+I went down to supper. After sitting a long time listening to the long
+stories of some sailors who had just come from a plum-pudding voyage,
+as they called it (that is, a short whaling-voyage in a schooner or
+brig, confined to the north of the line, in the Atlantic Ocean only);
+after listening to these plum-puddingers till nearly eleven o’clock, I
+went up stairs to go to bed, feeling quite sure by this time Queequeg
+must certainly have brought his Ramadan to a termination. But no; there
+he was just where I had left him; he had not stirred an inch. I began
+to grow vexed with him; it seemed so downright senseless and insane to
+be sitting there all day and half the night on his hams in a cold room,
+holding a piece of wood on his head.
+
+“For heaven’s sake, Queequeg, get up and shake yourself; get up and
+have some supper. You’ll starve; you’ll kill yourself, Queequeg.” But
+not a word did he reply.
+
+Despairing of him, therefore, I determined to go to bed and to sleep;
+and no doubt, before a great while, he would follow me. But previous to
+turning in, I took my heavy bearskin jacket, and threw it over him, as
+it promised to be a very cold night; and he had nothing but his
+ordinary round jacket on. For some time, do all I would, I could not
+get into the faintest doze. I had blown out the candle; and the mere
+thought of Queequeg—not four feet off—sitting there in that uneasy
+position, stark alone in the cold and dark; this made me really
+wretched. Think of it; sleeping all night in the same room with a wide
+awake pagan on his hams in this dreary, unaccountable Ramadan!
+
+But somehow I dropped off at last, and knew nothing more till break of
+day; when, looking over the bedside, there squatted Queequeg, as if he
+had been screwed down to the floor. But as soon as the first glimpse of
+sun entered the window, up he got, with stiff and grating joints, but
+with a cheerful look; limped towards me where I lay; pressed his
+forehead again against mine; and said his Ramadan was over.
+
+Now, as I before hinted, I have no objection to any person’s religion,
+be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any
+other person, because that other person don’t believe it also. But when
+a man’s religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment
+to him; and, in fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to
+lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual aside and
+argue the point with him.
+
+And just so I now did with Queequeg. “Queequeg,” said I, “get into bed
+now, and lie and listen to me.” I then went on, beginning with the rise
+and progress of the primitive religions, and coming down to the various
+religions of the present time, during which time I labored to show
+Queequeg that all these Lents, Ramadans, and prolonged ham-squattings
+in cold, cheerless rooms were stark nonsense; bad for the health;
+useless for the soul; opposed, in short, to the obvious laws of Hygiene
+and common sense. I told him, too, that he being in other things such
+an extremely sensible and sagacious savage, it pained me, very badly
+pained me, to see him now so deplorably foolish about this ridiculous
+Ramadan of his. Besides, argued I, fasting makes the body cave in;
+hence the spirit caves in; and all thoughts born of a fast must
+necessarily be half-starved. This is the reason why most dyspeptic
+religionists cherish such melancholy notions about their hereafters. In
+one word, Queequeg, said I, rather digressively; hell is an idea first
+born on an undigested apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated
+through the hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans.
+
+I then asked Queequeg whether he himself was ever troubled with
+dyspepsia; expressing the idea very plainly, so that he could take it
+in. He said no; only upon one memorable occasion. It was after a great
+feast given by his father the king, on the gaining of a great battle
+wherein fifty of the enemy had been killed by about two o’clock in the
+afternoon, and all cooked and eaten that very evening.
+
+“No more, Queequeg,” said I, shuddering; “that will do;” for I knew the
+inferences without his further hinting them. I had seen a sailor who
+had visited that very island, and he told me that it was the custom,
+when a great battle had been gained there, to barbecue all the slain in
+the yard or garden of the victor; and then, one by one, they were
+placed in great wooden trenchers, and garnished round like a pilau,
+with breadfruit and cocoanuts; and with some parsley in their mouths,
+were sent round with the victor’s compliments to all his friends, just
+as though these presents were so many Christmas turkeys.
+
+After all, I do not think that my remarks about religion made much
+impression upon Queequeg. Because, in the first place, he somehow
+seemed dull of hearing on that important subject, unless considered
+from his own point of view; and, in the second place, he did not more
+than one third understand me, couch my ideas simply as I would; and,
+finally, he no doubt thought he knew a good deal more about the true
+religion than I did. He looked at me with a sort of condescending
+concern and compassion, as though he thought it a great pity that such
+a sensible young man should be so hopelessly lost to evangelical pagan
+piety.
+
+At last we rose and dressed; and Queequeg, taking a prodigiously hearty
+breakfast of chowders of all sorts, so that the landlady should not
+make much profit by reason of his Ramadan, we sallied out to board the
+Pequod, sauntering along, and picking our teeth with halibut bones.
+
+
+CHAPTER 18. His Mark.
+
+As we were walking down the end of the wharf towards the ship, Queequeg
+carrying his harpoon, Captain Peleg in his gruff voice loudly hailed us
+from his wigwam, saying he had not suspected my friend was a cannibal,
+and furthermore announcing that he let no cannibals on board that
+craft, unless they previously produced their papers.
+
+“What do you mean by that, Captain Peleg?” said I, now jumping on the
+bulwarks, and leaving my comrade standing on the wharf.
+
+“I mean,” he replied, “he must show his papers.”
+
+“Yes,” said Captain Bildad in his hollow voice, sticking his head from
+behind Peleg’s, out of the wigwam. “He must show that he’s converted.
+Son of darkness,” he added, turning to Queequeg, “art thou at present
+in communion with any Christian church?”
+
+“Why,” said I, “he’s a member of the first Congregational Church.” Here
+be it said, that many tattooed savages sailing in Nantucket ships at
+last come to be converted into the churches.
+
+“First Congregational Church,” cried Bildad, “what! that worships in
+Deacon Deuteronomy Coleman’s meeting-house?” and so saying, taking out
+his spectacles, he rubbed them with his great yellow bandana
+handkerchief, and putting them on very carefully, came out of the
+wigwam, and leaning stiffly over the bulwarks, took a good long look at
+Queequeg.
+
+“How long hath he been a member?” he then said, turning to me; “not
+very long, I rather guess, young man.”
+
+“No,” said Peleg, “and he hasn’t been baptized right either, or it
+would have washed some of that devil’s blue off his face.”
+
+“Do tell, now,” cried Bildad, “is this Philistine a regular member of
+Deacon Deuteronomy’s meeting? I never saw him going there, and I pass
+it every Lord’s day.”
+
+“I don’t know anything about Deacon Deuteronomy or his meeting,” said
+I; “all I know is, that Queequeg here is a born member of the First
+Congregational Church. He is a deacon himself, Queequeg is.”
+
+“Young man,” said Bildad sternly, “thou art skylarking with me—explain
+thyself, thou young Hittite. What church dost thee mean? answer me.”
+
+Finding myself thus hard pushed, I replied. “I mean, sir, the same
+ancient Catholic Church to which you and I, and Captain Peleg there,
+and Queequeg here, and all of us, and every mother’s son and soul of us
+belong; the great and everlasting First Congregation of this whole
+worshipping world; we all belong to that; only some of us cherish some
+queer crotchets no ways touching the grand belief; in _that_ we all
+join hands.”
+
+“Splice, thou mean’st _splice_ hands,” cried Peleg, drawing nearer.
+“Young man, you’d better ship for a missionary, instead of a fore-mast
+hand; I never heard a better sermon. Deacon Deuteronomy—why Father
+Mapple himself couldn’t beat it, and he’s reckoned something. Come
+aboard, come aboard; never mind about the papers. I say, tell Quohog
+there—what’s that you call him? tell Quohog to step along. By the great
+anchor, what a harpoon he’s got there! looks like good stuff that; and
+he handles it about right. I say, Quohog, or whatever your name is, did
+you ever stand in the head of a whale-boat? did you ever strike a
+fish?”
+
+Without saying a word, Queequeg, in his wild sort of way, jumped upon
+the bulwarks, from thence into the bows of one of the whale-boats
+hanging to the side; and then bracing his left knee, and poising his
+harpoon, cried out in some such way as this:—
+
+“Cap’ain, you see him small drop tar on water dere? You see him? well,
+spose him one whale eye, well, den!” and taking sharp aim at it, he
+darted the iron right over old Bildad’s broad brim, clean across the
+ship’s decks, and struck the glistening tar spot out of sight.
+
+“Now,” said Queequeg, quietly hauling in the line, “spos-ee him whale-e
+eye; why, dad whale dead.”
+
+“Quick, Bildad,” said Peleg, his partner, who, aghast at the close
+vicinity of the flying harpoon, had retreated towards the cabin
+gangway. “Quick, I say, you Bildad, and get the ship’s papers. We must
+have Hedgehog there, I mean Quohog, in one of our boats. Look ye,
+Quohog, we’ll give ye the ninetieth lay, and that’s more than ever was
+given a harpooneer yet out of Nantucket.”
+
+So down we went into the cabin, and to my great joy Queequeg was soon
+enrolled among the same ship’s company to which I myself belonged.
+
+When all preliminaries were over and Peleg had got everything ready for
+signing, he turned to me and said, “I guess, Quohog there don’t know
+how to write, does he? I say, Quohog, blast ye! dost thou sign thy name
+or make thy mark?”
+
+But at this question, Queequeg, who had twice or thrice before taken
+part in similar ceremonies, looked no ways abashed; but taking the
+offered pen, copied upon the paper, in the proper place, an exact
+counterpart of a queer round figure which was tattooed upon his arm; so
+that through Captain Peleg’s obstinate mistake touching his
+appellative, it stood something like this:—
+
+Quohog. his X mark.
+
+Meanwhile Captain Bildad sat earnestly and steadfastly eyeing Queequeg,
+and at last rising solemnly and fumbling in the huge pockets of his
+broad-skirted drab coat, took out a bundle of tracts, and selecting one
+entitled “The Latter Day Coming; or No Time to Lose,” placed it in
+Queequeg’s hands, and then grasping them and the book with both his,
+looked earnestly into his eyes, and said, “Son of darkness, I must do
+my duty by thee; I am part owner of this ship, and feel concerned for
+the souls of all its crew; if thou still clingest to thy Pagan ways,
+which I sadly fear, I beseech thee, remain not for aye a Belial
+bondsman. Spurn the idol Bell, and the hideous dragon; turn from the
+wrath to come; mind thine eye, I say; oh! goodness gracious! steer
+clear of the fiery pit!”
+
+Something of the salt sea yet lingered in old Bildad’s language,
+heterogeneously mixed with Scriptural and domestic phrases.
+
+“Avast there, avast there, Bildad, avast now spoiling our harpooneer,”
+cried Peleg. “Pious harpooneers never make good voyagers—it takes the
+shark out of ’em; no harpooneer is worth a straw who aint pretty
+sharkish. There was young Nat Swaine, once the bravest boat-header out
+of all Nantucket and the Vineyard; he joined the meeting, and never
+came to good. He got so frightened about his plaguy soul, that he
+shrinked and sheered away from whales, for fear of after-claps, in case
+he got stove and went to Davy Jones.”
+
+“Peleg! Peleg!” said Bildad, lifting his eyes and hands, “thou thyself,
+as I myself, hast seen many a perilous time; thou knowest, Peleg, what
+it is to have the fear of death; how, then, can’st thou prate in this
+ungodly guise. Thou beliest thine own heart, Peleg. Tell me, when this
+same Pequod here had her three masts overboard in that typhoon on
+Japan, that same voyage when thou went mate with Captain Ahab, did’st
+thou not think of Death and the Judgment then?”
+
+“Hear him, hear him now,” cried Peleg, marching across the cabin, and
+thrusting his hands far down into his pockets,—“hear him, all of ye.
+Think of that! When every moment we thought the ship would sink! Death
+and the Judgment then? What? With all three masts making such an
+everlasting thundering against the side; and every sea breaking over
+us, fore and aft. Think of Death and the Judgment then? No! no time to
+think about Death then. Life was what Captain Ahab and I was thinking
+of; and how to save all hands—how to rig jury-masts—how to get into the
+nearest port; that was what I was thinking of.”
+
+Bildad said no more, but buttoning up his coat, stalked on deck, where
+we followed him. There he stood, very quietly overlooking some
+sailmakers who were mending a top-sail in the waist. Now and then he
+stooped to pick up a patch, or save an end of tarred twine, which
+otherwise might have been wasted.
+
+
+CHAPTER 19. The Prophet.
+
+“Shipmates, have ye shipped in that ship?”
+
+Queequeg and I had just left the Pequod, and were sauntering away from
+the water, for the moment each occupied with his own thoughts, when the
+above words were put to us by a stranger, who, pausing before us,
+levelled his massive forefinger at the vessel in question. He was but
+shabbily apparelled in faded jacket and patched trowsers; a rag of a
+black handkerchief investing his neck. A confluent small-pox had in all
+directions flowed over his face, and left it like the complicated
+ribbed bed of a torrent, when the rushing waters have been dried up.
+
+“Have ye shipped in her?” he repeated.
+
+“You mean the ship Pequod, I suppose,” said I, trying to gain a little
+more time for an uninterrupted look at him.
+
+“Aye, the Pequod—that ship there,” he said, drawing back his whole arm,
+and then rapidly shoving it straight out from him, with the fixed
+bayonet of his pointed finger darted full at the object.
+
+“Yes,” said I, “we have just signed the articles.”
+
+“Anything down there about your souls?”
+
+“About what?”
+
+“Oh, perhaps you hav’n’t got any,” he said quickly. “No matter though,
+I know many chaps that hav’n’t got any,—good luck to ’em; and they are
+all the better off for it. A soul’s a sort of a fifth wheel to a
+wagon.”
+
+“What are you jabbering about, shipmate?” said I.
+
+“_He’s_ got enough, though, to make up for all deficiencies of that
+sort in other chaps,” abruptly said the stranger, placing a nervous
+emphasis upon the word _he_.
+
+“Queequeg,” said I, “let’s go; this fellow has broken loose from
+somewhere; he’s talking about something and somebody we don’t know.”
+
+“Stop!” cried the stranger. “Ye said true—ye hav’n’t seen Old Thunder
+yet, have ye?”
+
+“Who’s Old Thunder?” said I, again riveted with the insane earnestness
+of his manner.
+
+“Captain Ahab.”
+
+“What! the captain of our ship, the Pequod?”
+
+“Aye, among some of us old sailor chaps, he goes by that name. Ye
+hav’n’t seen him yet, have ye?”
+
+“No, we hav’n’t. He’s sick they say, but is getting better, and will be
+all right again before long.”
+
+“All right again before long!” laughed the stranger, with a solemnly
+derisive sort of laugh. “Look ye; when Captain Ahab is all right, then
+this left arm of mine will be all right; not before.”
+
+“What do you know about him?”
+
+“What did they _tell_ you about him? Say that!”
+
+“They didn’t tell much of anything about him; only I’ve heard that he’s
+a good whale-hunter, and a good captain to his crew.”
+
+“That’s true, that’s true—yes, both true enough. But you must jump when
+he gives an order. Step and growl; growl and go—that’s the word with
+Captain Ahab. But nothing about that thing that happened to him off
+Cape Horn, long ago, when he lay like dead for three days and nights;
+nothing about that deadly skrimmage with the Spaniard afore the altar
+in Santa?—heard nothing about that, eh? Nothing about the silver
+calabash he spat into? And nothing about his losing his leg last
+voyage, according to the prophecy. Didn’t ye hear a word about them
+matters and something more, eh? No, I don’t think ye did; how could ye?
+Who knows it? Not all Nantucket, I guess. But hows’ever, mayhap, ye’ve
+heard tell about the leg, and how he lost it; aye, ye have heard of
+that, I dare say. Oh yes, _that_ every one knows a’most—I mean they
+know he’s only one leg; and that a parmacetti took the other off.”
+
+“My friend,” said I, “what all this gibberish of yours is about, I
+don’t know, and I don’t much care; for it seems to me that you must be
+a little damaged in the head. But if you are speaking of Captain Ahab,
+of that ship there, the Pequod, then let me tell you, that I know all
+about the loss of his leg.”
+
+“_All_ about it, eh—sure you do?—all?”
+
+“Pretty sure.”
+
+With finger pointed and eye levelled at the Pequod, the beggar-like
+stranger stood a moment, as if in a troubled reverie; then starting a
+little, turned and said:—“Ye’ve shipped, have ye? Names down on the
+papers? Well, well, what’s signed, is signed; and what’s to be, will
+be; and then again, perhaps it won’t be, after all. Anyhow, it’s all
+fixed and arranged a’ready; and some sailors or other must go with him,
+I suppose; as well these as any other men, God pity ’em! Morning to ye,
+shipmates, morning; the ineffable heavens bless ye; I’m sorry I stopped
+ye.”
+
+“Look here, friend,” said I, “if you have anything important to tell
+us, out with it; but if you are only trying to bamboozle us, you are
+mistaken in your game; that’s all I have to say.”
+
+“And it’s said very well, and I like to hear a chap talk up that way;
+you are just the man for him—the likes of ye. Morning to ye, shipmates,
+morning! Oh! when ye get there, tell ’em I’ve concluded not to make one
+of ’em.”
+
+“Ah, my dear fellow, you can’t fool us that way—you can’t fool us. It
+is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a
+great secret in him.”
+
+“Morning to ye, shipmates, morning.”
+
+“Morning it is,” said I. “Come along, Queequeg, let’s leave this crazy
+man. But stop, tell me your name, will you?”
+
+“Elijah.”
+
+Elijah! thought I, and we walked away, both commenting, after each
+other’s fashion, upon this ragged old sailor; and agreed that he was
+nothing but a humbug, trying to be a bugbear. But we had not gone
+perhaps above a hundred yards, when chancing to turn a corner, and
+looking back as I did so, who should be seen but Elijah following us,
+though at a distance. Somehow, the sight of him struck me so, that I
+said nothing to Queequeg of his being behind, but passed on with my
+comrade, anxious to see whether the stranger would turn the same corner
+that we did. He did; and then it seemed to me that he was dogging us,
+but with what intent I could not for the life of me imagine. This
+circumstance, coupled with his ambiguous, half-hinting, half-revealing,
+shrouded sort of talk, now begat in me all kinds of vague wonderments
+and half-apprehensions, and all connected with the Pequod; and Captain
+Ahab; and the leg he had lost; and the Cape Horn fit; and the silver
+calabash; and what Captain Peleg had said of him, when I left the ship
+the day previous; and the prediction of the squaw Tistig; and the
+voyage we had bound ourselves to sail; and a hundred other shadowy
+things.
+
+I was resolved to satisfy myself whether this ragged Elijah was really
+dogging us or not, and with that intent crossed the way with Queequeg,
+and on that side of it retraced our steps. But Elijah passed on,
+without seeming to notice us. This relieved me; and once more, and
+finally as it seemed to me, I pronounced him in my heart, a humbug.
+
+
+CHAPTER 20. All Astir.
+
+A day or two passed, and there was great activity aboard the Pequod.
+Not only were the old sails being mended, but new sails were coming on
+board, and bolts of canvas, and coils of rigging; in short, everything
+betokened that the ship’s preparations were hurrying to a close.
+Captain Peleg seldom or never went ashore, but sat in his wigwam
+keeping a sharp look-out upon the hands: Bildad did all the purchasing
+and providing at the stores; and the men employed in the hold and on
+the rigging were working till long after night-fall.
+
+On the day following Queequeg’s signing the articles, word was given at
+all the inns where the ship’s company were stopping, that their chests
+must be on board before night, for there was no telling how soon the
+vessel might be sailing. So Queequeg and I got down our traps,
+resolving, however, to sleep ashore till the last. But it seems they
+always give very long notice in these cases, and the ship did not sail
+for several days. But no wonder; there was a good deal to be done, and
+there is no telling how many things to be thought of, before the Pequod
+was fully equipped.
+
+Every one knows what a multitude of things—beds, sauce-pans, knives and
+forks, shovels and tongs, napkins, nut-crackers, and what not, are
+indispensable to the business of housekeeping. Just so with whaling,
+which necessitates a three-years’ housekeeping upon the wide ocean, far
+from all grocers, costermongers, doctors, bakers, and bankers. And
+though this also holds true of merchant vessels, yet not by any means
+to the same extent as with whalemen. For besides the great length of
+the whaling voyage, the numerous articles peculiar to the prosecution
+of the fishery, and the impossibility of replacing them at the remote
+harbors usually frequented, it must be remembered, that of all ships,
+whaling vessels are the most exposed to accidents of all kinds, and
+especially to the destruction and loss of the very things upon which
+the success of the voyage most depends. Hence, the spare boats, spare
+spars, and spare lines and harpoons, and spare everythings, almost, but
+a spare Captain and duplicate ship.
+
+At the period of our arrival at the Island, the heaviest storage of the
+Pequod had been almost completed; comprising her beef, bread, water,
+fuel, and iron hoops and staves. But, as before hinted, for some time
+there was a continual fetching and carrying on board of divers odds and
+ends of things, both large and small.
+
+Chief among those who did this fetching and carrying was Captain
+Bildad’s sister, a lean old lady of a most determined and indefatigable
+spirit, but withal very kindhearted, who seemed resolved that, if _she_
+could help it, nothing should be found wanting in the Pequod, after
+once fairly getting to sea. At one time she would come on board with a
+jar of pickles for the steward’s pantry; another time with a bunch of
+quills for the chief mate’s desk, where he kept his log; a third time
+with a roll of flannel for the small of some one’s rheumatic back.
+Never did any woman better deserve her name, which was Charity—Aunt
+Charity, as everybody called her. And like a sister of charity did this
+charitable Aunt Charity bustle about hither and thither, ready to turn
+her hand and heart to anything that promised to yield safety, comfort,
+and consolation to all on board a ship in which her beloved brother
+Bildad was concerned, and in which she herself owned a score or two of
+well-saved dollars.
+
+But it was startling to see this excellent hearted Quakeress coming on
+board, as she did the last day, with a long oil-ladle in one hand, and
+a still longer whaling lance in the other. Nor was Bildad himself nor
+Captain Peleg at all backward. As for Bildad, he carried about with him
+a long list of the articles needed, and at every fresh arrival, down
+went his mark opposite that article upon the paper. Every once in a
+while Peleg came hobbling out of his whalebone den, roaring at the men
+down the hatchways, roaring up to the riggers at the mast-head, and
+then concluded by roaring back into his wigwam.
+
+During these days of preparation, Queequeg and I often visited the
+craft, and as often I asked about Captain Ahab, and how he was, and
+when he was going to come on board his ship. To these questions they
+would answer, that he was getting better and better, and was expected
+aboard every day; meantime, the two captains, Peleg and Bildad, could
+attend to everything necessary to fit the vessel for the voyage. If I
+had been downright honest with myself, I would have seen very plainly
+in my heart that I did but half fancy being committed this way to so
+long a voyage, without once laying my eyes on the man who was to be the
+absolute dictator of it, so soon as the ship sailed out upon the open
+sea. But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he
+be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up
+his suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me. I
+said nothing, and tried to think nothing.
+
+At last it was given out that some time next day the ship would
+certainly sail. So next morning, Queequeg and I took a very early
+start.
+
+
+CHAPTER 21. Going Aboard.
+
+It was nearly six o’clock, but only grey imperfect misty dawn, when we
+drew nigh the wharf.
+
+“There are some sailors running ahead there, if I see right,” said I to
+Queequeg, “it can’t be shadows; she’s off by sunrise, I guess; come
+on!”
+
+“Avast!” cried a voice, whose owner at the same time coming close
+behind us, laid a hand upon both our shoulders, and then insinuating
+himself between us, stood stooping forward a little, in the uncertain
+twilight, strangely peering from Queequeg to me. It was Elijah.
+
+“Going aboard?”
+
+“Hands off, will you,” said I.
+
+“Lookee here,” said Queequeg, shaking himself, “go ’way!”
+
+“Ain’t going aboard, then?”
+
+“Yes, we are,” said I, “but what business is that of yours? Do you
+know, Mr. Elijah, that I consider you a little impertinent?”
+
+“No, no, no; I wasn’t aware of that,” said Elijah, slowly and
+wonderingly looking from me to Queequeg, with the most unaccountable
+glances.
+
+“Elijah,” said I, “you will oblige my friend and me by withdrawing. We
+are going to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and would prefer not to be
+detained.”
+
+“Ye be, be ye? Coming back afore breakfast?”
+
+“He’s cracked, Queequeg,” said I, “come on.”
+
+“Holloa!” cried stationary Elijah, hailing us when we had removed a few
+paces.
+
+“Never mind him,” said I, “Queequeg, come on.”
+
+But he stole up to us again, and suddenly clapping his hand on my
+shoulder, said—“Did ye see anything looking like men going towards that
+ship a while ago?”
+
+Struck by this plain matter-of-fact question, I answered, saying, “Yes,
+I thought I did see four or five men; but it was too dim to be sure.”
+
+“Very dim, very dim,” said Elijah. “Morning to ye.”
+
+Once more we quitted him; but once more he came softly after us; and
+touching my shoulder again, said, “See if you can find ’em now, will
+ye?
+
+“Find who?”
+
+“Morning to ye! morning to ye!” he rejoined, again moving off. “Oh! I
+was going to warn ye against—but never mind, never mind—it’s all one,
+all in the family too;—sharp frost this morning, ain’t it? Good-bye to
+ye. Shan’t see ye again very soon, I guess; unless it’s before the
+Grand Jury.” And with these cracked words he finally departed, leaving
+me, for the moment, in no small wonderment at his frantic impudence.
+
+At last, stepping on board the Pequod, we found everything in profound
+quiet, not a soul moving. The cabin entrance was locked within; the
+hatches were all on, and lumbered with coils of rigging. Going forward
+to the forecastle, we found the slide of the scuttle open. Seeing a
+light, we went down, and found only an old rigger there, wrapped in a
+tattered pea-jacket. He was thrown at whole length upon two chests, his
+face downwards and inclosed in his folded arms. The profoundest slumber
+slept upon him.
+
+“Those sailors we saw, Queequeg, where can they have gone to?” said I,
+looking dubiously at the sleeper. But it seemed that, when on the
+wharf, Queequeg had not at all noticed what I now alluded to; hence I
+would have thought myself to have been optically deceived in that
+matter, were it not for Elijah’s otherwise inexplicable question. But I
+beat the thing down; and again marking the sleeper, jocularly hinted to
+Queequeg that perhaps we had best sit up with the body; telling him to
+establish himself accordingly. He put his hand upon the sleeper’s rear,
+as though feeling if it was soft enough; and then, without more ado,
+sat quietly down there.
+
+“Gracious! Queequeg, don’t sit there,” said I.
+
+“Oh! perry dood seat,” said Queequeg, “my country way; won’t hurt him
+face.”
+
+“Face!” said I, “call that his face? very benevolent countenance then;
+but how hard he breathes, he’s heaving himself; get off, Queequeg, you
+are heavy, it’s grinding the face of the poor. Get off, Queequeg! Look,
+he’ll twitch you off soon. I wonder he don’t wake.”
+
+Queequeg removed himself to just beyond the head of the sleeper, and
+lighted his tomahawk pipe. I sat at the feet. We kept the pipe passing
+over the sleeper, from one to the other. Meanwhile, upon questioning
+him in his broken fashion, Queequeg gave me to understand that, in his
+land, owing to the absence of settees and sofas of all sorts, the king,
+chiefs, and great people generally, were in the custom of fattening
+some of the lower orders for ottomans; and to furnish a house
+comfortably in that respect, you had only to buy up eight or ten lazy
+fellows, and lay them round in the piers and alcoves. Besides, it was
+very convenient on an excursion; much better than those garden-chairs
+which are convertible into walking-sticks; upon occasion, a chief
+calling his attendant, and desiring him to make a settee of himself
+under a spreading tree, perhaps in some damp marshy place.
+
+While narrating these things, every time Queequeg received the tomahawk
+from me, he flourished the hatchet-side of it over the sleeper’s head.
+
+“What’s that for, Queequeg?”
+
+“Perry easy, kill-e; oh! perry easy!”
+
+He was going on with some wild reminiscences about his tomahawk-pipe,
+which, it seemed, had in its two uses both brained his foes and soothed
+his soul, when we were directly attracted to the sleeping rigger. The
+strong vapor now completely filling the contracted hole, it began to
+tell upon him. He breathed with a sort of muffledness; then seemed
+troubled in the nose; then revolved over once or twice; then sat up and
+rubbed his eyes.
+
+“Holloa!” he breathed at last, “who be ye smokers?”
+
+“Shipped men,” answered I, “when does she sail?”
+
+“Aye, aye, ye are going in her, be ye? She sails to-day. The Captain
+came aboard last night.”
+
+“What Captain?—Ahab?”
+
+“Who but him indeed?”
+
+I was going to ask him some further questions concerning Ahab, when we
+heard a noise on deck.
+
+“Holloa! Starbuck’s astir,” said the rigger. “He’s a lively chief mate,
+that; good man, and a pious; but all alive now, I must turn to.” And so
+saying he went on deck, and we followed.
+
+It was now clear sunrise. Soon the crew came on board in twos and
+threes; the riggers bestirred themselves; the mates were actively
+engaged; and several of the shore people were busy in bringing various
+last things on board. Meanwhile Captain Ahab remained invisibly
+enshrined within his cabin.
+
+
+CHAPTER 22. Merry Christmas.
+
+At length, towards noon, upon the final dismissal of the ship’s
+riggers, and after the Pequod had been hauled out from the wharf, and
+after the ever-thoughtful Charity had come off in a whale-boat, with
+her last gift—a night-cap for Stubb, the second mate, her
+brother-in-law, and a spare Bible for the steward—after all this, the
+two Captains, Peleg and Bildad, issued from the cabin, and turning to
+the chief mate, Peleg said:
+
+“Now, Mr. Starbuck, are you sure everything is right? Captain Ahab is
+all ready—just spoke to him—nothing more to be got from shore, eh?
+Well, call all hands, then. Muster ’em aft here—blast ’em!”
+
+“No need of profane words, however great the hurry, Peleg,” said
+Bildad, “but away with thee, friend Starbuck, and do our bidding.”
+
+How now! Here upon the very point of starting for the voyage, Captain
+Peleg and Captain Bildad were going it with a high hand on the
+quarter-deck, just as if they were to be joint-commanders at sea, as
+well as to all appearances in port. And, as for Captain Ahab, no sign
+of him was yet to be seen; only, they said he was in the cabin. But
+then, the idea was, that his presence was by no means necessary in
+getting the ship under weigh, and steering her well out to sea. Indeed,
+as that was not at all his proper business, but the pilot’s; and as he
+was not yet completely recovered—so they said—therefore, Captain Ahab
+stayed below. And all this seemed natural enough; especially as in the
+merchant service many captains never show themselves on deck for a
+considerable time after heaving up the anchor, but remain over the
+cabin table, having a farewell merry-making with their shore friends,
+before they quit the ship for good with the pilot.
+
+But there was not much chance to think over the matter, for Captain
+Peleg was now all alive. He seemed to do most of the talking and
+commanding, and not Bildad.
+
+“Aft here, ye sons of bachelors,” he cried, as the sailors lingered at
+the main-mast. “Mr. Starbuck, drive ’em aft.”
+
+“Strike the tent there!”—was the next order. As I hinted before, this
+whalebone marquee was never pitched except in port; and on board the
+Pequod, for thirty years, the order to strike the tent was well known
+to be the next thing to heaving up the anchor.
+
+“Man the capstan! Blood and thunder!—jump!”—was the next command, and
+the crew sprang for the handspikes.
+
+Now in getting under weigh, the station generally occupied by the pilot
+is the forward part of the ship. And here Bildad, who, with Peleg, be
+it known, in addition to his other officers, was one of the licensed
+pilots of the port—he being suspected to have got himself made a pilot
+in order to save the Nantucket pilot-fee to all the ships he was
+concerned in, for he never piloted any other craft—Bildad, I say, might
+now be seen actively engaged in looking over the bows for the
+approaching anchor, and at intervals singing what seemed a dismal stave
+of psalmody, to cheer the hands at the windlass, who roared forth some
+sort of a chorus about the girls in Booble Alley, with hearty good
+will. Nevertheless, not three days previous, Bildad had told them that
+no profane songs would be allowed on board the Pequod, particularly in
+getting under weigh; and Charity, his sister, had placed a small choice
+copy of Watts in each seaman’s berth.
+
+Meantime, overseeing the other part of the ship, Captain Peleg ripped
+and swore astern in the most frightful manner. I almost thought he
+would sink the ship before the anchor could be got up; involuntarily I
+paused on my handspike, and told Queequeg to do the same, thinking of
+the perils we both ran, in starting on the voyage with such a devil for
+a pilot. I was comforting myself, however, with the thought that in
+pious Bildad might be found some salvation, spite of his seven hundred
+and seventy-seventh lay; when I felt a sudden sharp poke in my rear,
+and turning round, was horrified at the apparition of Captain Peleg in
+the act of withdrawing his leg from my immediate vicinity. That was my
+first kick.
+
+“Is that the way they heave in the marchant service?” he roared.
+“Spring, thou sheep-head; spring, and break thy backbone! Why don’t ye
+spring, I say, all of ye—spring! Quohog! spring, thou chap with the red
+whiskers; spring there, Scotch-cap; spring, thou green pants. Spring, I
+say, all of ye, and spring your eyes out!” And so saying, he moved
+along the windlass, here and there using his leg very freely, while
+imperturbable Bildad kept leading off with his psalmody. Thinks I,
+Captain Peleg must have been drinking something to-day.
+
+At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It
+was a short, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into
+night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose
+freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor. The long rows of
+teeth on the bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; and like the white
+ivory tusks of some huge elephant, vast curving icicles depended from
+the bows.
+
+Lank Bildad, as pilot, headed the first watch, and ever and anon, as
+the old craft deep dived into the green seas, and sent the shivering
+frost all over her, and the winds howled, and the cordage rang, his
+steady notes were heard,—
+
+
+_“Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood, Stand dressed in living
+green. So to the Jews old Canaan stood, While Jordan rolled between.”_
+
+
+
+Never did those sweet words sound more sweetly to me than then. They
+were full of hope and fruition. Spite of this frigid winter night in
+the boisterous Atlantic, spite of my wet feet and wetter jacket, there
+was yet, it then seemed to me, many a pleasant haven in store; and
+meads and glades so eternally vernal, that the grass shot up by the
+spring, untrodden, unwilted, remains at midsummer.
+
+At last we gained such an offing, that the two pilots were needed no
+longer. The stout sail-boat that had accompanied us began ranging
+alongside.
+
+It was curious and not unpleasing, how Peleg and Bildad were affected
+at this juncture, especially Captain Bildad. For loath to depart, yet;
+very loath to leave, for good, a ship bound on so long and perilous a
+voyage—beyond both stormy Capes; a ship in which some thousands of his
+hard earned dollars were invested; a ship, in which an old shipmate
+sailed as captain; a man almost as old as he, once more starting to
+encounter all the terrors of the pitiless jaw; loath to say good-bye to
+a thing so every way brimful of every interest to him,—poor old Bildad
+lingered long; paced the deck with anxious strides; ran down into the
+cabin to speak another farewell word there; again came on deck, and
+looked to windward; looked towards the wide and endless waters, only
+bounded by the far-off unseen Eastern Continents; looked towards the
+land; looked aloft; looked right and left; looked everywhere and
+nowhere; and at last, mechanically coiling a rope upon its pin,
+convulsively grasped stout Peleg by the hand, and holding up a lantern,
+for a moment stood gazing heroically in his face, as much as to say,
+“Nevertheless, friend Peleg, I can stand it; yes, I can.”
+
+As for Peleg himself, he took it more like a philosopher; but for all
+his philosophy, there was a tear twinkling in his eye, when the lantern
+came too near. And he, too, did not a little run from cabin to deck—now
+a word below, and now a word with Starbuck, the chief mate.
+
+But, at last, he turned to his comrade, with a final sort of look about
+him,—“Captain Bildad—come, old shipmate, we must go. Back the main-yard
+there! Boat ahoy! Stand by to come close alongside, now! Careful,
+careful!—come, Bildad, boy—say your last. Luck to ye, Starbuck—luck to
+ye, Mr. Stubb—luck to ye, Mr. Flask—good-bye and good luck to ye
+all—and this day three years I’ll have a hot supper smoking for ye in
+old Nantucket. Hurrah and away!”
+
+“God bless ye, and have ye in His holy keeping, men,” murmured old
+Bildad, almost incoherently. “I hope ye’ll have fine weather now, so
+that Captain Ahab may soon be moving among ye—a pleasant sun is all he
+needs, and ye’ll have plenty of them in the tropic voyage ye go. Be
+careful in the hunt, ye mates. Don’t stave the boats needlessly, ye
+harpooneers; good white cedar plank is raised full three per cent.
+within the year. Don’t forget your prayers, either. Mr. Starbuck, mind
+that cooper don’t waste the spare staves. Oh! the sail-needles are in
+the green locker! Don’t whale it too much a’ Lord’s days, men; but
+don’t miss a fair chance either, that’s rejecting Heaven’s good gifts.
+Have an eye to the molasses tierce, Mr. Stubb; it was a little leaky, I
+thought. If ye touch at the islands, Mr. Flask, beware of fornication.
+Good-bye, good-bye! Don’t keep that cheese too long down in the hold,
+Mr. Starbuck; it’ll spoil. Be careful with the butter—twenty cents the
+pound it was, and mind ye, if—”
+
+“Come, come, Captain Bildad; stop palavering,—away!” and with that,
+Peleg hurried him over the side, and both dropt into the boat.
+
+Ship and boat diverged; the cold, damp night breeze blew between; a
+screaming gull flew overhead; the two hulls wildly rolled; we gave
+three heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone
+Atlantic.
+
+
+CHAPTER 23. The Lee Shore.
+
+Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, newlanded
+mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn.
+
+When on that shivering winter’s night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive
+bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her
+helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon
+the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years’ dangerous
+voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another
+tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest
+things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs;
+this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only
+say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that
+miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give
+succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort,
+hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our
+mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s
+direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land,
+though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and
+through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing,
+fights ’gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks
+all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly
+rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!
+
+Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally
+intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid
+effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the
+wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the
+treacherous, slavish shore?
+
+But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless,
+indefinite as God—so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite,
+than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For
+worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the
+terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O
+Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy
+ocean-perishing—straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!
+
+
+CHAPTER 24. The Advocate.
+
+As Queequeg and I are now fairly embarked in this business of whaling;
+and as this business of whaling has somehow come to be regarded among
+landsmen as a rather unpoetical and disreputable pursuit; therefore, I
+am all anxiety to convince ye, ye landsmen, of the injustice hereby
+done to us hunters of whales.
+
+In the first place, it may be deemed almost superfluous to establish
+the fact, that among people at large, the business of whaling is not
+accounted on a level with what are called the liberal professions. If a
+stranger were introduced into any miscellaneous metropolitan society,
+it would but slightly advance the general opinion of his merits, were
+he presented to the company as a harpooneer, say; and if in emulation
+of the naval officers he should append the initials S.W.F. (Sperm Whale
+Fishery) to his visiting card, such a procedure would be deemed
+pre-eminently presuming and ridiculous.
+
+Doubtless one leading reason why the world declines honoring us
+whalemen, is this: they think that, at best, our vocation amounts to a
+butchering sort of business; and that when actively engaged therein, we
+are surrounded by all manner of defilements. Butchers we are, that is
+true. But butchers, also, and butchers of the bloodiest badge have been
+all Martial Commanders whom the world invariably delights to honor. And
+as for the matter of the alleged uncleanliness of our business, ye
+shall soon be initiated into certain facts hitherto pretty generally
+unknown, and which, upon the whole, will triumphantly plant the sperm
+whale-ship at least among the cleanliest things of this tidy earth. But
+even granting the charge in question to be true; what disordered
+slippery decks of a whale-ship are comparable to the unspeakable
+carrion of those battle-fields from which so many soldiers return to
+drink in all ladies’ plaudits? And if the idea of peril so much
+enhances the popular conceit of the soldier’s profession; let me assure
+ye that many a veteran who has freely marched up to a battery, would
+quickly recoil at the apparition of the sperm whale’s vast tail,
+fanning into eddies the air over his head. For what are the
+comprehensible terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and
+wonders of God!
+
+But, though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it
+unwittingly pay us the profoundest homage; yea, an all-abounding
+adoration! for almost all the tapers, lamps, and candles that burn
+round the globe, burn, as before so many shrines, to our glory!
+
+But look at this matter in other lights; weigh it in all sorts of
+scales; see what we whalemen are, and have been.
+
+Why did the Dutch in De Witt’s time have admirals of their whaling
+fleets? Why did Louis XVI. of France, at his own personal expense, fit
+out whaling ships from Dunkirk, and politely invite to that town some
+score or two of families from our own island of Nantucket? Why did
+Britain between the years 1750 and 1788 pay to her whalemen in bounties
+upwards of £1,000,000? And lastly, how comes it that we whalemen of
+America now outnumber all the rest of the banded whalemen in the world;
+sail a navy of upwards of seven hundred vessels; manned by eighteen
+thousand men; yearly consuming 4,000,000 of dollars; the ships worth,
+at the time of sailing, $20,000,000! and every year importing into our
+harbors a well reaped harvest of $7,000,000. How comes all this, if
+there be not something puissant in whaling?
+
+But this is not the half; look again.
+
+I freely assert, that the cosmopolite philosopher cannot, for his life,
+point out one single peaceful influence, which within the last sixty
+years has operated more potentially upon the whole broad world, taken
+in one aggregate, than the high and mighty business of whaling. One way
+and another, it has begotten events so remarkable in themselves, and so
+continuously momentous in their sequential issues, that whaling may
+well be regarded as that Egyptian mother, who bore offspring themselves
+pregnant from her womb. It would be a hopeless, endless task to
+catalogue all these things. Let a handful suffice. For many years past
+the whale-ship has been the pioneer in ferreting out the remotest and
+least known parts of the earth. She has explored seas and archipelagoes
+which had no chart, where no Cook or Vancouver had ever sailed. If
+American and European men-of-war now peacefully ride in once savage
+harbors, let them fire salutes to the honor and glory of the
+whale-ship, which originally showed them the way, and first interpreted
+between them and the savages. They may celebrate as they will the
+heroes of Exploring Expeditions, your Cooks, your Krusensterns; but I
+say that scores of anonymous Captains have sailed out of Nantucket,
+that were as great, and greater than your Cook and your Krusenstern.
+For in their succourless empty-handedness, they, in the heathenish
+sharked waters, and by the beaches of unrecorded, javelin islands,
+battled with virgin wonders and terrors that Cook with all his marines
+and muskets would not willingly have dared. All that is made such a
+flourish of in the old South Sea Voyages, those things were but the
+life-time commonplaces of our heroic Nantucketers. Often, adventures
+which Vancouver dedicates three chapters to, these men accounted
+unworthy of being set down in the ship’s common log. Ah, the world! Oh,
+the world!
+
+Until the whale fishery rounded Cape Horn, no commerce but colonial,
+scarcely any intercourse but colonial, was carried on between Europe
+and the long line of the opulent Spanish provinces on the Pacific
+coast. It was the whaleman who first broke through the jealous policy
+of the Spanish crown, touching those colonies; and, if space permitted,
+it might be distinctly shown how from those whalemen at last eventuated
+the liberation of Peru, Chili, and Bolivia from the yoke of Old Spain,
+and the establishment of the eternal democracy in those parts.
+
+That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia, was
+given to the enlightened world by the whaleman. After its first
+blunder-born discovery by a Dutchman, all other ships long shunned
+those shores as pestiferously barbarous; but the whale-ship touched
+there. The whale-ship is the true mother of that now mighty colony.
+Moreover, in the infancy of the first Australian settlement, the
+emigrants were several times saved from starvation by the benevolent
+biscuit of the whale-ship luckily dropping an anchor in their waters.
+The uncounted isles of all Polynesia confess the same truth, and do
+commercial homage to the whale-ship, that cleared the way for the
+missionary and the merchant, and in many cases carried the primitive
+missionaries to their first destinations. If that double-bolted land,
+Japan, is ever to become hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone to whom
+the credit will be due; for already she is on the threshold.
+
+But if, in the face of all this, you still declare that whaling has no
+æsthetically noble associations connected with it, then am I ready to
+shiver fifty lances with you there, and unhorse you with a split helmet
+every time.
+
+The whale has no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler, you
+will say.
+
+_The whale no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler?_ Who
+wrote the first account of our Leviathan? Who but mighty Job! And who
+composed the first narrative of a whaling-voyage? Who, but no less a
+prince than Alfred the Great, who, with his own royal pen, took down
+the words from Other, the Norwegian whale-hunter of those times! And
+who pronounced our glowing eulogy in Parliament? Who, but Edmund Burke!
+
+True enough, but then whalemen themselves are poor devils; they have no
+good blood in their veins.
+
+_No good blood in their veins?_ They have something better than royal
+blood there. The grandmother of Benjamin Franklin was Mary Morrel;
+afterwards, by marriage, Mary Folger, one of the old settlers of
+Nantucket, and the ancestress to a long line of Folgers and
+harpooneers—all kith and kin to noble Benjamin—this day darting the
+barbed iron from one side of the world to the other.
+
+Good again; but then all confess that somehow whaling is not
+respectable.
+
+_Whaling not respectable?_ Whaling is imperial! By old English
+statutory law, the whale is declared “a royal fish.” *
+
+Oh, that’s only nominal! The whale himself has never figured in any
+grand imposing way.
+
+_The whale never figured in any grand imposing way?_ In one of the
+mighty triumphs given to a Roman general upon his entering the world’s
+capital, the bones of a whale, brought all the way from the Syrian
+coast, were the most conspicuous object in the cymballed procession.*
+
+*See subsequent chapters for something more on this head.
+
+Grant it, since you cite it; but, say what you will, there is no real
+dignity in whaling.
+
+_No dignity in whaling?_ The dignity of our calling the very heavens
+attest. Cetus is a constellation in the South! No more! Drive down your
+hat in presence of the Czar, and take it off to Queequeg! No more! I
+know a man that, in his lifetime, has taken three hundred and fifty
+whales. I account that man more honorable than that great captain of
+antiquity who boasted of taking as many walled towns.
+
+And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet
+undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute
+in that small but high hushed world which I might not be unreasonably
+ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a
+man might rather have done than to have left undone; if, at my death,
+my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in
+my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honor and the glory
+to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
+
+
+CHAPTER 25. Postscript.
+
+In behalf of the dignity of whaling, I would fain advance naught but
+substantiated facts. But after embattling his facts, an advocate who
+should wholly suppress a not unreasonable surmise, which might tell
+eloquently upon his cause—such an advocate, would he not be
+blameworthy?
+
+It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, even
+modern ones, a certain curious process of seasoning them for their
+functions is gone through. There is a saltcellar of state, so called,
+and there may be a castor of state. How they use the salt,
+precisely—who knows? Certain I am, however, that a king’s head is
+solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad. Can it be,
+though, that they anoint it with a view of making its interior run
+well, as they anoint machinery? Much might be ruminated here,
+concerning the essential dignity of this regal process, because in
+common life we esteem but meanly and contemptibly a fellow who anoints
+his hair, and palpably smells of that anointing. In truth, a mature man
+who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a
+quoggy spot in him somewhere. As a general rule, he can’t amount to
+much in his totality.
+
+But the only thing to be considered here, is this—what kind of oil is
+used at coronations? Certainly it cannot be olive oil, nor macassar
+oil, nor castor oil, nor bear’s oil, nor train oil, nor cod-liver oil.
+What then can it possibly be, but sperm oil in its unmanufactured,
+unpolluted state, the sweetest of all oils?
+
+Think of that, ye loyal Britons! we whalemen supply your kings and
+queens with coronation stuff!
+
+
+CHAPTER 26. Knights and Squires.
+
+The chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and a
+Quaker by descent. He was a long, earnest man, and though born on an
+icy coast, seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his flesh being
+hard as twice-baked biscuit. Transported to the Indies, his live blood
+would not spoil like bottled ale. He must have been born in some time
+of general drought and famine, or upon one of those fast days for which
+his state is famous. Only some thirty arid summers had he seen; those
+summers had dried up all his physical superfluousness. But this, his
+thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the token of wasting anxieties
+and cares, than it seemed the indication of any bodily blight. It was
+merely the condensation of the man. He was by no means ill-looking;
+quite the contrary. His pure tight skin was an excellent fit; and
+closely wrapped up in it, and embalmed with inner health and strength,
+like a revivified Egyptian, this Starbuck seemed prepared to endure for
+long ages to come, and to endure always, as now; for be it Polar snow
+or torrid sun, like a patent chronometer, his interior vitality was
+warranted to do well in all climates. Looking into his eyes, you seemed
+to see there the yet lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he
+had calmly confronted through life. A staid, steadfast man, whose life
+for the most part was a telling pantomime of action, and not a tame
+chapter of sounds. Yet, for all his hardy sobriety and fortitude, there
+were certain qualities in him which at times affected, and in some
+cases seemed well nigh to overbalance all the rest. Uncommonly
+conscientious for a seaman, and endued with a deep natural reverence,
+the wild watery loneliness of his life did therefore strongly incline
+him to superstition; but to that sort of superstition, which in some
+organizations seems rather to spring, somehow, from intelligence than
+from ignorance. Outward portents and inward presentiments were his. And
+if at times these things bent the welded iron of his soul, much more
+did his far-away domestic memories of his young Cape wife and child,
+tend to bend him still more from the original ruggedness of his nature,
+and open him still further to those latent influences which, in some
+honest-hearted men, restrain the gush of dare-devil daring, so often
+evinced by others in the more perilous vicissitudes of the fishery. “I
+will have no man in my boat,” said Starbuck, “who is not afraid of a
+whale.” By this, he seemed to mean, not only that the most reliable and
+useful courage was that which arises from the fair estimation of the
+encountered peril, but that an utterly fearless man is a far more
+dangerous comrade than a coward.
+
+“Aye, aye,” said Stubb, the second mate, “Starbuck, there, is as
+careful a man as you’ll find anywhere in this fishery.” But we shall
+ere long see what that word “careful” precisely means when used by a
+man like Stubb, or almost any other whale hunter.
+
+Starbuck was no crusader after perils; in him courage was not a
+sentiment; but a thing simply useful to him, and always at hand upon
+all mortally practical occasions. Besides, he thought, perhaps, that in
+this business of whaling, courage was one of the great staple outfits
+of the ship, like her beef and her bread, and not to be foolishly
+wasted. Wherefore he had no fancy for lowering for whales after
+sun-down; nor for persisting in fighting a fish that too much persisted
+in fighting him. For, thought Starbuck, I am here in this critical
+ocean to kill whales for my living, and not to be killed by them for
+theirs; and that hundreds of men had been so killed Starbuck well knew.
+What doom was his own father’s? Where, in the bottomless deeps, could
+he find the torn limbs of his brother?
+
+With memories like these in him, and, moreover, given to a certain
+superstitiousness, as has been said; the courage of this Starbuck which
+could, nevertheless, still flourish, must indeed have been extreme. But
+it was not in reasonable nature that a man so organized, and with such
+terrible experiences and remembrances as he had; it was not in nature
+that these things should fail in latently engendering an element in
+him, which, under suitable circumstances, would break out from its
+confinement, and burn all his courage up. And brave as he might be, it
+was that sort of bravery chiefly, visible in some intrepid men, which,
+while generally abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or
+whales, or any of the ordinary irrational horrors of the world, yet
+cannot withstand those more terrific, because more spiritual terrors,
+which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged
+and mighty man.
+
+But were the coming narrative to reveal in any instance, the complete
+abasement of poor Starbuck’s fortitude, scarce might I have the heart
+to write it; for it is a thing most sorrowful, nay shocking, to expose
+the fall of valour in the soul. Men may seem detestable as joint
+stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be;
+men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble
+and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any
+ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their
+costliest robes. That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves, so
+far within us, that it remains intact though all the outer character
+seem gone; bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle of a
+valor-ruined man. Nor can piety itself, at such a shameful sight,
+completely stifle her upbraidings against the permitting stars. But
+this august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes,
+but that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Thou shalt
+see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that
+democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God;
+Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all
+democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!
+
+If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall
+hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic
+graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased, among
+them all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall
+touch that workman’s arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread a
+rainbow over his disastrous set of sun; then against all mortal critics
+bear me out in it, thou just Spirit of Equality, which hast spread one
+royal mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out in it, thou
+great democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict,
+Bunyan, the pale, poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly
+hammered leaves of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old
+Cervantes; Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who
+didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than a
+throne! Thou who, in all Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest
+Thy selectest champions from the kingly commons; bear me out in it, O
+God!
+
+
+CHAPTER 27. Knights and Squires.
+
+Stubb was the second mate. He was a native of Cape Cod; and hence,
+according to local usage, was called a Cape-Cod-man. A happy-go-lucky;
+neither craven nor valiant; taking perils as they came with an
+indifferent air; and while engaged in the most imminent crisis of the
+chase, toiling away, calm and collected as a journeyman joiner engaged
+for the year. Good-humored, easy, and careless, he presided over his
+whale-boat as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his
+crew all invited guests. He was as particular about the comfortable
+arrangement of his part of the boat, as an old stage-driver is about
+the snugness of his box. When close to the whale, in the very
+death-lock of the fight, he handled his unpitying lance coolly and
+off-handedly, as a whistling tinker his hammer. He would hum over his
+old rigadig tunes while flank and flank with the most exasperated
+monster. Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted the jaws of death
+into an easy chair. What he thought of death itself, there is no
+telling. Whether he ever thought of it at all, might be a question;
+but, if he ever did chance to cast his mind that way after a
+comfortable dinner, no doubt, like a good sailor, he took it to be a
+sort of call of the watch to tumble aloft, and bestir themselves there,
+about something which he would find out when he obeyed the order, and
+not sooner.
+
+What, perhaps, with other things, made Stubb such an easy-going,
+unfearing man, so cheerily trudging off with the burden of life in a
+world full of grave pedlars, all bowed to the ground with their packs;
+what helped to bring about that almost impious good-humor of his; that
+thing must have been his pipe. For, like his nose, his short, black
+little pipe was one of the regular features of his face. You would
+almost as soon have expected him to turn out of his bunk without his
+nose as without his pipe. He kept a whole row of pipes there ready
+loaded, stuck in a rack, within easy reach of his hand; and, whenever
+he turned in, he smoked them all out in succession, lighting one from
+the other to the end of the chapter; then loading them again to be in
+readiness anew. For, when Stubb dressed, instead of first putting his
+legs into his trowsers, he put his pipe into his mouth.
+
+I say this continual smoking must have been one cause, at least, of his
+peculiar disposition; for every one knows that this earthly air,
+whether ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless
+miseries of the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it; and as in
+time of the cholera, some people go about with a camphorated
+handkerchief to their mouths; so, likewise, against all mortal
+tribulations, Stubb’s tobacco smoke might have operated as a sort of
+disinfecting agent.
+
+The third mate was Flask, a native of Tisbury, in Martha’s Vineyard. A
+short, stout, ruddy young fellow, very pugnacious concerning whales,
+who somehow seemed to think that the great leviathans had personally
+and hereditarily affronted him; and therefore it was a sort of point of
+honor with him, to destroy them whenever encountered. So utterly lost
+was he to all sense of reverence for the many marvels of their majestic
+bulk and mystic ways; and so dead to anything like an apprehension of
+any possible danger from encountering them; that in his poor opinion,
+the wondrous whale was but a species of magnified mouse, or at least
+water-rat, requiring only a little circumvention and some small
+application of time and trouble in order to kill and boil. This
+ignorant, unconscious fearlessness of his made him a little waggish in
+the matter of whales; he followed these fish for the fun of it; and a
+three years’ voyage round Cape Horn was only a jolly joke that lasted
+that length of time. As a carpenter’s nails are divided into wrought
+nails and cut nails; so mankind may be similarly divided. Little Flask
+was one of the wrought ones; made to clinch tight and last long. They
+called him King-Post on board of the Pequod; because, in form, he could
+be well likened to the short, square timber known by that name in
+Arctic whalers; and which by the means of many radiating side timbers
+inserted into it, serves to brace the ship against the icy concussions
+of those battering seas.
+
+Now these three mates—Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, were momentous men.
+They it was who by universal prescription commanded three of the
+Pequod’s boats as headsmen. In that grand order of battle in which
+Captain Ahab would probably marshal his forces to descend on the
+whales, these three headsmen were as captains of companies. Or, being
+armed with their long keen whaling spears, they were as a picked trio
+of lancers; even as the harpooneers were flingers of javelins.
+
+And since in this famous fishery, each mate or headsman, like a Gothic
+Knight of old, is always accompanied by his boat-steerer or harpooneer,
+who in certain conjunctures provides him with a fresh lance, when the
+former one has been badly twisted, or elbowed in the assault; and
+moreover, as there generally subsists between the two, a close intimacy
+and friendliness; it is therefore but meet, that in this place we set
+down who the Pequod’s harpooneers were, and to what headsman each of
+them belonged.
+
+First of all was Queequeg, whom Starbuck, the chief mate, had selected
+for his squire. But Queequeg is already known.
+
+Next was Tashtego, an unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most westerly
+promontory of Martha’s Vineyard, where there still exists the last
+remnant of a village of red men, which has long supplied the
+neighboring island of Nantucket with many of her most daring
+harpooneers. In the fishery, they usually go by the generic name of
+Gay-Headers. Tashtego’s long, lean, sable hair, his high cheek bones,
+and black rounding eyes—for an Indian, Oriental in their largeness, but
+Antarctic in their glittering expression—all this sufficiently
+proclaimed him an inheritor of the unvitiated blood of those proud
+warrior hunters, who, in quest of the great New England moose, had
+scoured, bow in hand, the aboriginal forests of the main. But no longer
+snuffing in the trail of the wild beasts of the woodland, Tashtego now
+hunted in the wake of the great whales of the sea; the unerring harpoon
+of the son fitly replacing the infallible arrow of the sires. To look
+at the tawny brawn of his lithe snaky limbs, you would almost have
+credited the superstitions of some of the earlier Puritans, and
+half-believed this wild Indian to be a son of the Prince of the Powers
+of the Air. Tashtego was Stubb the second mate’s squire.
+
+Third among the harpooneers was Daggoo, a gigantic, coal-black
+negro-savage, with a lion-like tread—an Ahasuerus to behold. Suspended
+from his ears were two golden hoops, so large that the sailors called
+them ring-bolts, and would talk of securing the top-sail halyards to
+them. In his youth Daggoo had voluntarily shipped on board of a whaler,
+lying in a lonely bay on his native coast. And never having been
+anywhere in the world but in Africa, Nantucket, and the pagan harbors
+most frequented by whalemen; and having now led for many years the bold
+life of the fishery in the ships of owners uncommonly heedful of what
+manner of men they shipped; Daggoo retained all his barbaric virtues,
+and erect as a giraffe, moved about the decks in all the pomp of six
+feet five in his socks. There was a corporeal humility in looking up at
+him; and a white man standing before him seemed a white flag come to
+beg truce of a fortress. Curious to tell, this imperial negro,
+Ahasuerus Daggoo, was the Squire of little Flask, who looked like a
+chess-man beside him. As for the residue of the Pequod’s company, be it
+said, that at the present day not one in two of the many thousand men
+before the mast employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans
+born, though pretty nearly all the officers are. Herein it is the same
+with the American whale fishery as with the American army and military
+and merchant navies, and the engineering forces employed in the
+construction of the American Canals and Railroads. The same, I say,
+because in all these cases the native American liberally provides the
+brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying the muscles. No
+small number of these whaling seamen belong to the Azores, where the
+outward bound Nantucket whalers frequently touch to augment their crews
+from the hardy peasants of those rocky shores. In like manner, the
+Greenland whalers sailing out of Hull or London, put in at the Shetland
+Islands, to receive the full complement of their crew. Upon the passage
+homewards, they drop them there again. How it is, there is no telling,
+but Islanders seem to make the best whalemen. They were nearly all
+Islanders in the Pequod, _Isolatoes_ too, I call such, not
+acknowledging the common continent of men, but each _Isolato_ living on
+a separate continent of his own. Yet now, federated along one keel,
+what a set these Isolatoes were! An Anacharsis Clootz deputation from
+all the isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth, accompanying
+Old Ahab in the Pequod to lay the world’s grievances before that bar
+from which not very many of them ever come back. Black Little Pip—he
+never did—oh, no! he went before. Poor Alabama boy! On the grim
+Pequod’s forecastle, ye shall ere long see him, beating his tambourine;
+prelusive of the eternal time, when sent for, to the great quarter-deck
+on high, he was bid strike in with angels, and beat his tambourine in
+glory; called a coward here, hailed a hero there!
+
+
+CHAPTER 28. Ahab.
+
+For several days after leaving Nantucket, nothing above hatches was
+seen of Captain Ahab. The mates regularly relieved each other at the
+watches, and for aught that could be seen to the contrary, they seemed
+to be the only commanders of the ship; only they sometimes issued from
+the cabin with orders so sudden and peremptory, that after all it was
+plain they but commanded vicariously. Yes, their supreme lord and
+dictator was there, though hitherto unseen by any eyes not permitted to
+penetrate into the now sacred retreat of the cabin.
+
+Every time I ascended to the deck from my watches below, I instantly
+gazed aft to mark if any strange face were visible; for my first vague
+disquietude touching the unknown captain, now in the seclusion of the
+sea, became almost a perturbation. This was strangely heightened at
+times by the ragged Elijah’s diabolical incoherences uninvitedly
+recurring to me, with a subtle energy I could not have before conceived
+of. But poorly could I withstand them, much as in other moods I was
+almost ready to smile at the solemn whimsicalities of that outlandish
+prophet of the wharves. But whatever it was of apprehensiveness or
+uneasiness—to call it so—which I felt, yet whenever I came to look
+about me in the ship, it seemed against all warrantry to cherish such
+emotions. For though the harpooneers, with the great body of the crew,
+were a far more barbaric, heathenish, and motley set than any of the
+tame merchant-ship companies which my previous experiences had made me
+acquainted with, still I ascribed this—and rightly ascribed it—to the
+fierce uniqueness of the very nature of that wild Scandinavian vocation
+in which I had so abandonedly embarked. But it was especially the
+aspect of the three chief officers of the ship, the mates, which was
+most forcibly calculated to allay these colourless misgivings, and
+induce confidence and cheerfulness in every presentment of the voyage.
+Three better, more likely sea-officers and men, each in his own
+different way, could not readily be found, and they were every one of
+them Americans; a Nantucketer, a Vineyarder, a Cape man. Now, it being
+Christmas when the ship shot from out her harbor, for a space we had
+biting Polar weather, though all the time running away from it to the
+southward; and by every degree and minute of latitude which we sailed,
+gradually leaving that merciless winter, and all its intolerable
+weather behind us. It was one of those less lowering, but still grey
+and gloomy enough mornings of the transition, when with a fair wind the
+ship was rushing through the water with a vindictive sort of leaping
+and melancholy rapidity, that as I mounted to the deck at the call of
+the forenoon watch, so soon as I levelled my glance towards the
+taffrail, foreboding shivers ran over me. Reality outran apprehension;
+Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck.
+
+There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the
+recovery from any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when
+the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them,
+or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His
+whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an
+unalterable mould, like Cellini’s cast Perseus. Threading its way out
+from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his
+tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you
+saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that
+perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a
+great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and
+without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from
+top to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still
+greenly alive, but branded. Whether that mark was born with him, or
+whether it was the scar left by some desperate wound, no one could
+certainly say. By some tacit consent, throughout the voyage little or
+no allusion was made to it, especially by the mates. But once
+Tashtego’s senior, an old Gay-Head Indian among the crew,
+superstitiously asserted that not till he was full forty years old did
+Ahab become that way branded, and then it came upon him, not in the
+fury of any mortal fray, but in an elemental strife at sea. Yet, this
+wild hint seemed inferentially negatived, by what a grey Manxman
+insinuated, an old sepulchral man, who, having never before sailed out
+of Nantucket, had never ere this laid eye upon wild Ahab. Nevertheless,
+the old sea-traditions, the immemorial credulities, popularly invested
+this old Manxman with preternatural powers of discernment. So that no
+white sailor seriously contradicted him when he said that if ever
+Captain Ahab should be tranquilly laid out—which might hardly come to
+pass, so he muttered—then, whoever should do that last office for the
+dead, would find a birth-mark on him from crown to sole.
+
+So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and the
+livid brand which streaked it, that for the first few moments I hardly
+noted that not a little of this overbearing grimness was owing to the
+barbaric white leg upon which he partly stood. It had previously come
+to me that this ivory leg had at sea been fashioned from the polished
+bone of the sperm whale’s jaw. “Aye, he was dismasted off Japan,” said
+the old Gay-Head Indian once; “but like his dismasted craft, he shipped
+another mast without coming home for it. He has a quiver of ’em.”
+
+I was struck with the singular posture he maintained. Upon each side of
+the Pequod’s quarter deck, and pretty close to the mizzen shrouds,
+there was an auger hole, bored about half an inch or so, into the
+plank. His bone leg steadied in that hole; one arm elevated, and
+holding by a shroud; Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out
+beyond the ship’s ever-pitching prow. There was an infinity of firmest
+fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and
+fearless, forward dedication of that glance. Not a word he spoke; nor
+did his officers say aught to him; though by all their minutest
+gestures and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not
+painful, consciousness of being under a troubled master-eye. And not
+only that, but moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion
+in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some
+mighty woe.
+
+Ere long, from his first visit in the air, he withdrew into his cabin.
+But after that morning, he was every day visible to the crew; either
+standing in his pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory stool he had; or
+heavily walking the deck. As the sky grew less gloomy; indeed, began to
+grow a little genial, he became still less and less a recluse; as if,
+when the ship had sailed from home, nothing but the dead wintry
+bleakness of the sea had then kept him so secluded. And, by and by, it
+came to pass, that he was almost continually in the air; but, as yet,
+for all that he said, or perceptibly did, on the at last sunny deck, he
+seemed as unnecessary there as another mast. But the Pequod was only
+making a passage now; not regularly cruising; nearly all whaling
+preparatives needing supervision the mates were fully competent to, so
+that there was little or nothing, out of himself, to employ or excite
+Ahab, now; and thus chase away, for that one interval, the clouds that
+layer upon layer were piled upon his brow, as ever all clouds choose
+the loftiest peaks to pile themselves upon.
+
+Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling persuasiveness of the
+pleasant, holiday weather we came to, seemed gradually to charm him
+from his mood. For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and
+May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest,
+ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some
+few green sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants; so Ahab did,
+in the end, a little respond to the playful allurings of that girlish
+air. More than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look,
+which, in any other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile.
+
+
+CHAPTER 29. Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb.
+
+Some days elapsed, and ice and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now went
+rolling through the bright Quito spring, which, at sea, almost
+perpetually reigns on the threshold of the eternal August of the
+Tropic. The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing,
+redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped
+up—flaked up, with rose-water snow. The starred and stately nights
+seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely
+pride, the memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted
+suns! For sleeping man, ’twas hard to choose between such winsome days
+and such seducing nights. But all the witcheries of that unwaning
+weather did not merely lend new spells and potencies to the outward
+world. Inward they turned upon the soul, especially when the still mild
+hours of eve came on; then, memory shot her crystals as the clear ice
+most forms of noiseless twilights. And all these subtle agencies, more
+and more they wrought on Ahab’s texture.
+
+Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less
+man has to do with aught that looks like death. Among sea-commanders,
+the old greybeards will oftenest leave their berths to visit the
+night-cloaked deck. It was so with Ahab; only that now, of late, he
+seemed so much to live in the open air, that truly speaking, his visits
+were more to the cabin, than from the cabin to the planks. “It feels
+like going down into one’s tomb,”—he would mutter to himself—“for an
+old captain like me to be descending this narrow scuttle, to go to my
+grave-dug berth.”
+
+So, almost every twenty-four hours, when the watches of the night were
+set, and the band on deck sentinelled the slumbers of the band below;
+and when if a rope was to be hauled upon the forecastle, the sailors
+flung it not rudely down, as by day, but with some cautiousness dropt
+it to its place for fear of disturbing their slumbering shipmates; when
+this sort of steady quietude would begin to prevail, habitually, the
+silent steersman would watch the cabin-scuttle; and ere long the old
+man would emerge, gripping at the iron banister, to help his crippled
+way. Some considering touch of humanity was in him; for at times like
+these, he usually abstained from patrolling the quarter-deck; because
+to his wearied mates, seeking repose within six inches of his ivory
+heel, such would have been the reverberating crack and din of that bony
+step, that their dreams would have been on the crunching teeth of
+sharks. But once, the mood was on him too deep for common regardings;
+and as with heavy, lumber-like pace he was measuring the ship from
+taffrail to mainmast, Stubb, the old second mate, came up from below,
+with a certain unassured, deprecating humorousness, hinted that if
+Captain Ahab was pleased to walk the planks, then, no one could say
+nay; but there might be some way of muffling the noise; hinting
+something indistinctly and hesitatingly about a globe of tow, and the
+insertion into it, of the ivory heel. Ah! Stubb, thou didst not know
+Ahab then.
+
+“Am I a cannon-ball, Stubb,” said Ahab, “that thou wouldst wad me that
+fashion? But go thy ways; I had forgot. Below to thy nightly grave;
+where such as ye sleep between shrouds, to use ye to the filling one at
+last.—Down, dog, and kennel!”
+
+Starting at the unforseen concluding exclamation of the so suddenly
+scornful old man, Stubb was speechless a moment; then said excitedly,
+“I am not used to be spoken to that way, sir; I do but less than half
+like it, sir.”
+
+“Avast! gritted Ahab between his set teeth, and violently moving away,
+as if to avoid some passionate temptation.
+
+“No, sir; not yet,” said Stubb, emboldened, “I will not tamely be
+called a dog, sir.”
+
+“Then be called ten times a donkey, and a mule, and an ass, and begone,
+or I’ll clear the world of thee!”
+
+As he said this, Ahab advanced upon him with such overbearing terrors
+in his aspect, that Stubb involuntarily retreated.
+
+“I was never served so before without giving a hard blow for it,”
+muttered Stubb, as he found himself descending the cabin-scuttle. “It’s
+very queer. Stop, Stubb; somehow, now, I don’t well know whether to go
+back and strike him, or—what’s that?—down here on my knees and pray for
+him? Yes, that was the thought coming up in me; but it would be the
+first time I ever _did_ pray. It’s queer; very queer; and he’s queer
+too; aye, take him fore and aft, he’s about the queerest old man Stubb
+ever sailed with. How he flashed at me!—his eyes like powder-pans! is
+he mad? Anyway there’s something on his mind, as sure as there must be
+something on a deck when it cracks. He aint in his bed now, either,
+more than three hours out of the twenty-four; and he don’t sleep then.
+Didn’t that Dough-Boy, the steward, tell me that of a morning he always
+finds the old man’s hammock clothes all rumpled and tumbled, and the
+sheets down at the foot, and the coverlid almost tied into knots, and
+the pillow a sort of frightful hot, as though a baked brick had been on
+it? A hot old man! I guess he’s got what some folks ashore call a
+conscience; it’s a kind of Tic-Dolly-row they say—worse nor a
+toothache. Well, well; I don’t know what it is, but the Lord keep me
+from catching it. He’s full of riddles; I wonder what he goes into the
+after hold for, every night, as Dough-Boy tells me he suspects; what’s
+that for, I should like to know? Who’s made appointments with him in
+the hold? Ain’t that queer, now? But there’s no telling, it’s the old
+game—Here goes for a snooze. Damn me, it’s worth a fellow’s while to be
+born into the world, if only to fall right asleep. And now that I think
+of it, that’s about the first thing babies do, and that’s a sort of
+queer, too. Damn me, but all things are queer, come to think of ’em.
+But that’s against my principles. Think not, is my eleventh
+commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth—So here goes again.
+But how’s that? didn’t he call me a dog? blazes! he called me ten times
+a donkey, and piled a lot of jackasses on top of _that!_ He might as
+well have kicked me, and done with it. Maybe he _did_ kick me, and I
+didn’t observe it, I was so taken all aback with his brow, somehow. It
+flashed like a bleached bone. What the devil’s the matter with me? I
+don’t stand right on my legs. Coming afoul of that old man has a sort
+of turned me wrong side out. By the Lord, I must have been dreaming,
+though—How? how? how?—but the only way’s to stash it; so here goes to
+hammock again; and in the morning, I’ll see how this plaguey juggling
+thinks over by daylight.”
+
+
+CHAPTER 30. The Pipe.
+
+When Stubb had departed, Ahab stood for a while leaning over the
+bulwarks; and then, as had been usual with him of late, calling a
+sailor of the watch, he sent him below for his ivory stool, and also
+his pipe. Lighting the pipe at the binnacle lamp and planting the stool
+on the weather side of the deck, he sat and smoked.
+
+In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were
+fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhale. How could
+one look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod of bones, without
+bethinking him of the royalty it symbolized? For a Khan of the plank,
+and a king of the sea, and a great lord of Leviathans was Ahab.
+
+Some moments passed, during which the thick vapor came from his mouth
+in quick and constant puffs, which blew back again into his face. “How
+now,” he soliloquized at last, withdrawing the tube, “this smoking no
+longer soothes. Oh, my pipe! hard must it go with me if thy charm be
+gone! Here have I been unconsciously toiling, not pleasuring—aye, and
+ignorantly smoking to windward all the while; to windward, and with
+such nervous whiffs, as if, like the dying whale, my final jets were
+the strongest and fullest of trouble. What business have I with this
+pipe? This thing that is meant for sereneness, to send up mild white
+vapors among mild white hairs, not among torn iron-grey locks like
+mine. I’ll smoke no more—”
+
+He tossed the still lighted pipe into the sea. The fire hissed in the
+waves; the same instant the ship shot by the bubble the sinking pipe
+made. With slouched hat, Ahab lurchingly paced the planks.
+
+
+CHAPTER 31. Queen Mab.
+
+Next morning Stubb accosted Flask.
+
+“Such a queer dream, King-Post, I never had. You know the old man’s
+ivory leg, well I dreamed he kicked me with it; and when I tried to
+kick back, upon my soul, my little man, I kicked my leg right off! And
+then, presto! Ahab seemed a pyramid, and I, like a blazing fool, kept
+kicking at it. But what was still more curious, Flask—you know how
+curious all dreams are—through all this rage that I was in, I somehow
+seemed to be thinking to myself, that after all, it was not much of an
+insult, that kick from Ahab. ‘Why,’ thinks I, ‘what’s the row? It’s not
+a real leg, only a false leg.’ And there’s a mighty difference between
+a living thump and a dead thump. That’s what makes a blow from the
+hand, Flask, fifty times more savage to bear than a blow from a cane.
+The living member—that makes the living insult, my little man. And
+thinks I to myself all the while, mind, while I was stubbing my silly
+toes against that cursed pyramid—so confoundedly contradictory was it
+all, all the while, I say, I was thinking to myself, ‘what’s his leg
+now, but a cane—a whalebone cane. Yes,’ thinks I, ‘it was only a
+playful cudgelling—in fact, only a whaleboning that he gave me—not a
+base kick. Besides,’ thinks I, ‘look at it once; why, the end of it—the
+foot part—what a small sort of end it is; whereas, if a broad footed
+farmer kicked me, _there’s_ a devilish broad insult. But this insult is
+whittled down to a point only.’ But now comes the greatest joke of the
+dream, Flask. While I was battering away at the pyramid, a sort of
+badger-haired old merman, with a hump on his back, takes me by the
+shoulders, and slews me round. ‘What are you ’bout?’ says he. Slid!
+man, but I was frightened. Such a phiz! But, somehow, next moment I was
+over the fright. ‘What am I about?’ says I at last. ‘And what business
+is that of yours, I should like to know, Mr. Humpback? Do _you_ want a
+kick?’ By the lord, Flask, I had no sooner said that, than he turned
+round his stern to me, bent over, and dragging up a lot of seaweed he
+had for a clout—what do you think, I saw?—why thunder alive, man, his
+stern was stuck full of marlinspikes, with the points out. Says I, on
+second thoughts, ‘I guess I won’t kick you, old fellow.’ ‘Wise Stubb,’
+said he, ‘wise Stubb;’ and kept muttering it all the time, a sort of
+eating of his own gums like a chimney hag. Seeing he wasn’t going to
+stop saying over his ‘wise Stubb, wise Stubb,’ I thought I might as
+well fall to kicking the pyramid again. But I had only just lifted my
+foot for it, when he roared out, ‘Stop that kicking!’ ‘Halloa,’ says I,
+‘what’s the matter now, old fellow?’ ‘Look ye here,’ says he; ‘let’s
+argue the insult. Captain Ahab kicked ye, didn’t he?’ ‘Yes, he did,’
+says I—‘right _here_ it was.’ ‘Very good,’ says he—‘he used his ivory
+leg, didn’t he?’ ‘Yes, he did,’ says I. ‘Well then,’ says he, ‘wise
+Stubb, what have you to complain of? Didn’t he kick with right good
+will? it wasn’t a common pitch pine leg he kicked with, was it? No, you
+were kicked by a great man, and with a beautiful ivory leg, Stubb. It’s
+an honor; I consider it an honor. Listen, wise Stubb. In old England
+the greatest lords think it great glory to be slapped by a queen, and
+made garter-knights of; but, be _your_ boast, Stubb, that ye were
+kicked by old Ahab, and made a wise man of. Remember what I say; _be_
+kicked by him; account his kicks honors; and on no account kick back;
+for you can’t help yourself, wise Stubb. Don’t you see that pyramid?’
+With that, he all of a sudden seemed somehow, in some queer fashion, to
+swim off into the air. I snored; rolled over; and there I was in my
+hammock! Now, what do you think of that dream, Flask?”
+
+“I don’t know; it seems a sort of foolish to me, tho.’”
+
+“May be; may be. But it’s made a wise man of me, Flask. D’ye see Ahab
+standing there, sideways looking over the stern? Well, the best thing
+you can do, Flask, is to let the old man alone; never speak to him,
+whatever he says. Halloa! What’s that he shouts? Hark!”
+
+“Mast-head, there! Look sharp, all of ye! There are whales hereabouts!
+
+“If ye see a white one, split your lungs for him!
+
+“What do you think of that now, Flask? ain’t there a small drop of
+something queer about that, eh? A white whale—did ye mark that, man?
+Look ye—there’s something special in the wind. Stand by for it, Flask.
+Ahab has that that’s bloody on his mind. But, mum; he comes this way.”
+
+
+CHAPTER 32. Cetology.
+
+Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost
+in its unshored, harbourless immensities. Ere that come to pass; ere
+the Pequod’s weedy hull rolls side by side with the barnacled hulls of
+the leviathan; at the outset it is but well to attend to a matter
+almost indispensable to a thorough appreciative understanding of the
+more special leviathanic revelations and allusions of all sorts which
+are to follow.
+
+It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera,
+that I would now fain put before you. Yet is it no easy task. The
+classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here
+essayed. Listen to what the best and latest authorities have laid down.
+
+“No branch of Zoology is so much involved as that which is entitled
+Cetology,” says Captain Scoresby, A.D. 1820.
+
+“It is not my intention, were it in my power, to enter into the inquiry
+as to the true method of dividing the cetacea into groups and families.
+* * * Utter confusion exists among the historians of this animal”
+(sperm whale), says Surgeon Beale, A.D. 1839.
+
+“Unfitness to pursue our research in the unfathomable waters.”
+“Impenetrable veil covering our knowledge of the cetacea.” “A field
+strewn with thorns.” “All these incomplete indications but serve to
+torture us naturalists.”
+
+Thus speak of the whale, the great Cuvier, and John Hunter, and Lesson,
+those lights of zoology and anatomy. Nevertheless, though of real
+knowledge there be little, yet of books there are a plenty; and so in
+some small degree, with cetology, or the science of whales. Many are
+the men, small and great, old and new, landsmen and seamen, who have at
+large or in little, written of the whale. Run over a few:—The Authors
+of the Bible; Aristotle; Pliny; Aldrovandi; Sir Thomas Browne; Gesner;
+Ray; Linnæus; Rondeletius; Willoughby; Green; Artedi; Sibbald; Brisson;
+Marten; Lacépède; Bonneterre; Desmarest; Baron Cuvier; Frederick
+Cuvier; John Hunter; Owen; Scoresby; Beale; Bennett; J. Ross Browne;
+the Author of Miriam Coffin; Olmstead; and the Rev. T. Cheever. But to
+what ultimate generalizing purpose all these have written, the above
+cited extracts will show.
+
+Of the names in this list of whale authors, only those following Owen
+ever saw living whales; and but one of them was a real professional
+harpooneer and whaleman. I mean Captain Scoresby. On the separate
+subject of the Greenland or right-whale, he is the best existing
+authority. But Scoresby knew nothing and says nothing of the great
+sperm whale, compared with which the Greenland whale is almost unworthy
+mentioning. And here be it said, that the Greenland whale is an usurper
+upon the throne of the seas. He is not even by any means the largest of
+the whales. Yet, owing to the long priority of his claims, and the
+profound ignorance which, till some seventy years back, invested the
+then fabulous or utterly unknown sperm-whale, and which ignorance to
+this present day still reigns in all but some few scientific retreats
+and whale-ports; this usurpation has been every way complete. Reference
+to nearly all the leviathanic allusions in the great poets of past
+days, will satisfy you that the Greenland whale, without one rival, was
+to them the monarch of the seas. But the time has at last come for a
+new proclamation. This is Charing Cross; hear ye! good people all,—the
+Greenland whale is deposed,—the great sperm whale now reigneth!
+
+There are only two books in being which at all pretend to put the
+living sperm whale before you, and at the same time, in the remotest
+degree succeed in the attempt. Those books are Beale’s and Bennett’s;
+both in their time surgeons to English South-Sea whale-ships, and both
+exact and reliable men. The original matter touching the sperm whale to
+be found in their volumes is necessarily small; but so far as it goes,
+it is of excellent quality, though mostly confined to scientific
+description. As yet, however, the sperm whale, scientific or poetic,
+lives not complete in any literature. Far above all other hunted
+whales, his is an unwritten life.
+
+Now the various species of whales need some sort of popular
+comprehensive classification, if only an easy outline one for the
+present, hereafter to be filled in all its departments by subsequent
+laborers. As no better man advances to take this matter in hand, I
+hereupon offer my own poor endeavors. I promise nothing complete;
+because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very
+reason infallibly be faulty. I shall not pretend to a minute anatomical
+description of the various species, or—in this place at least—to much
+of any description. My object here is simply to project the draught of
+a systematization of cetology. I am the architect, not the builder.
+
+But it is a ponderous task; no ordinary letter-sorter in the
+Post-Office is equal to it. To grope down into the bottom of the sea
+after them; to have one’s hands among the unspeakable foundations,
+ribs, and very pelvis of the world; this is a fearful thing. What am I
+that I should essay to hook the nose of this leviathan! The awful
+tauntings in Job might well appal me. Will he (the leviathan) make a
+covenant with thee? Behold the hope of him is vain! But I have swam
+through libraries and sailed through oceans; I have had to do with
+whales with these visible hands; I am in earnest; and I will try. There
+are some preliminaries to settle.
+
+First: The uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Cetology
+is in the very vestibule attested by the fact, that in some quarters it
+still remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish. In his System of
+Nature, A.D. 1776, Linnæus declares, “I hereby separate the whales from
+the fish.” But of my own knowledge, I know that down to the year 1850,
+sharks and shad, alewives and herring, against Linnæus’s express edict,
+were still found dividing the possession of the same seas with the
+Leviathan.
+
+The grounds upon which Linnæus would fain have banished the whales from
+the waters, he states as follows: “On account of their warm bilocular
+heart, their lungs, their movable eyelids, their hollow ears, penem
+intrantem feminam mammis lactantem,” and finally, “ex lege naturæ jure
+meritoque.” I submitted all this to my friends Simeon Macey and Charley
+Coffin, of Nantucket, both messmates of mine in a certain voyage, and
+they united in the opinion that the reasons set forth were altogether
+insufficient. Charley profanely hinted they were humbug.
+
+Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned
+ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me.
+This fundamental thing settled, the next point is, in what internal
+respect does the whale differ from other fish. Above, Linnæus has given
+you those items. But in brief, they are these: lungs and warm blood;
+whereas, all other fish are lungless and cold blooded.
+
+Next: how shall we define the whale, by his obvious externals, so as
+conspicuously to label him for all time to come? To be short, then, a
+whale is _a spouting fish with a horizontal tail_. There you have him.
+However contracted, that definition is the result of expanded
+meditation. A walrus spouts much like a whale, but the walrus is not a
+fish, because he is amphibious. But the last term of the definition is
+still more cogent, as coupled with the first. Almost any one must have
+noticed that all the fish familiar to landsmen have not a flat, but a
+vertical, or up-and-down tail. Whereas, among spouting fish the tail,
+though it may be similarly shaped, invariably assumes a horizontal
+position.
+
+By the above definition of what a whale is, I do by no means exclude
+from the leviathanic brotherhood any sea creature hitherto identified
+with the whale by the best informed Nantucketers; nor, on the other
+hand, link with it any fish hitherto authoritatively regarded as
+alien.* Hence, all the smaller, spouting, and horizontal tailed fish
+must be included in this ground-plan of Cetology. Now, then, come the
+grand divisions of the entire whale host.
+
+*I am aware that down to the present time, the fish styled Lamatins and
+Dugongs (Pig-fish and Sow-fish of the Coffins of Nantucket) are
+included by many naturalists among the whales. But as these pig-fish
+are a noisy, contemptible set, mostly lurking in the mouths of rivers,
+and feeding on wet hay, and especially as they do not spout, I deny
+their credentials as whales; and have presented them with their
+passports to quit the Kingdom of Cetology.
+
+First: According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary
+BOOKS (subdivisible into CHAPTERS), and these shall comprehend them
+all, both small and large.
+
+I. THE FOLIO WHALE; II. the OCTAVO WHALE; III. the DUODECIMO WHALE.
+
+As the type of the FOLIO I present the _Sperm Whale_; of the OCTAVO,
+the _Grampus_; of the DUODECIMO, the _Porpoise_.
+
+FOLIOS. Among these I here include the following chapters:—I. The
+_Sperm Whale_; II. the _Right Whale_; III. the _Fin-Back Whale_; IV.
+the _Hump-backed Whale_; V. the _Razor Back Whale_; VI. the _Sulphur
+Bottom Whale_.
+
+BOOK I. (_Folio_), CHAPTER I. (_Sperm Whale_).—This whale, among the
+English of old vaguely known as the Trumpa whale, and the Physeter
+whale, and the Anvil Headed whale, is the present Cachalot of the
+French, and the Pottsfich of the Germans, and the Macrocephalus of the
+Long Words. He is, without doubt, the largest inhabitant of the globe;
+the most formidable of all whales to encounter; the most majestic in
+aspect; and lastly, by far the most valuable in commerce; he being the
+only creature from which that valuable substance, spermaceti, is
+obtained. All his peculiarities will, in many other places, be enlarged
+upon. It is chiefly with his name that I now have to do. Philologically
+considered, it is absurd. Some centuries ago, when the Sperm whale was
+almost wholly unknown in his own proper individuality, and when his oil
+was only accidentally obtained from the stranded fish; in those days
+spermaceti, it would seem, was popularly supposed to be derived from a
+creature identical with the one then known in England as the Greenland
+or Right Whale. It was the idea also, that this same spermaceti was
+that quickening humor of the Greenland Whale which the first syllable
+of the word literally expresses. In those times, also, spermaceti was
+exceedingly scarce, not being used for light, but only as an ointment
+and medicament. It was only to be had from the druggists as you
+nowadays buy an ounce of rhubarb. When, as I opine, in the course of
+time, the true nature of spermaceti became known, its original name was
+still retained by the dealers; no doubt to enhance its value by a
+notion so strangely significant of its scarcity. And so the appellation
+must at last have come to be bestowed upon the whale from which this
+spermaceti was really derived.
+
+BOOK I. (_Folio_), CHAPTER II. (_Right Whale_).—In one respect this is
+the most venerable of the leviathans, being the one first regularly
+hunted by man. It yields the article commonly known as whalebone or
+baleen; and the oil specially known as “whale oil,” an inferior article
+in commerce. Among the fishermen, he is indiscriminately designated by
+all the following titles: The Whale; the Greenland Whale; the Black
+Whale; the Great Whale; the True Whale; the Right Whale. There is a
+deal of obscurity concerning the identity of the species thus
+multitudinously baptised. What then is the whale, which I include in
+the second species of my Folios? It is the Great Mysticetus of the
+English naturalists; the Greenland Whale of the English whalemen; the
+Baleine Ordinaire of the French whalemen; the Growlands Walfish of the
+Swedes. It is the whale which for more than two centuries past has been
+hunted by the Dutch and English in the Arctic seas; it is the whale
+which the American fishermen have long pursued in the Indian ocean, on
+the Brazil Banks, on the Nor’ West Coast, and various other parts of
+the world, designated by them Right Whale Cruising Grounds.
+
+Some pretend to see a difference between the Greenland whale of the
+English and the right whale of the Americans. But they precisely agree
+in all their grand features; nor has there yet been presented a single
+determinate fact upon which to ground a radical distinction. It is by
+endless subdivisions based upon the most inconclusive differences, that
+some departments of natural history become so repellingly intricate.
+The right whale will be elsewhere treated of at some length, with
+reference to elucidating the sperm whale.
+
+BOOK I. (_Folio_), CHAPTER III. (_Fin-Back_).—Under this head I reckon
+a monster which, by the various names of Fin-Back, Tall-Spout, and
+Long-John, has been seen almost in every sea and is commonly the whale
+whose distant jet is so often descried by passengers crossing the
+Atlantic, in the New York packet-tracks. In the length he attains, and
+in his baleen, the Fin-back resembles the right whale, but is of a less
+portly girth, and a lighter colour, approaching to olive. His great
+lips present a cable-like aspect, formed by the intertwisting, slanting
+folds of large wrinkles. His grand distinguishing feature, the fin,
+from which he derives his name, is often a conspicuous object. This fin
+is some three or four feet long, growing vertically from the hinder
+part of the back, of an angular shape, and with a very sharp pointed
+end. Even if not the slightest other part of the creature be visible,
+this isolated fin will, at times, be seen plainly projecting from the
+surface. When the sea is moderately calm, and slightly marked with
+spherical ripples, and this gnomon-like fin stands up and casts shadows
+upon the wrinkled surface, it may well be supposed that the watery
+circle surrounding it somewhat resembles a dial, with its style and
+wavy hour-lines graved on it. On that Ahaz-dial the shadow often goes
+back. The Fin-Back is not gregarious. He seems a whale-hater, as some
+men are man-haters. Very shy; always going solitary; unexpectedly
+rising to the surface in the remotest and most sullen waters; his
+straight and single lofty jet rising like a tall misanthropic spear
+upon a barren plain; gifted with such wondrous power and velocity in
+swimming, as to defy all present pursuit from man; this leviathan seems
+the banished and unconquerable Cain of his race, bearing for his mark
+that style upon his back. From having the baleen in his mouth, the
+Fin-Back is sometimes included with the right whale, among a theoretic
+species denominated _Whalebone whales_, that is, whales with baleen. Of
+these so called Whalebone whales, there would seem to be several
+varieties, most of which, however, are little known. Broad-nosed whales
+and beaked whales; pike-headed whales; bunched whales; under-jawed
+whales and rostrated whales, are the fishermen’s names for a few sorts.
+
+In connection with this appellative of “Whalebone whales,” it is of
+great importance to mention, that however such a nomenclature may be
+convenient in facilitating allusions to some kind of whales, yet it is
+in vain to attempt a clear classification of the Leviathan, founded
+upon either his baleen, or hump, or fin, or teeth; notwithstanding that
+those marked parts or features very obviously seem better adapted to
+afford the basis for a regular system of Cetology than any other
+detached bodily distinctions, which the whale, in his kinds, presents.
+How then? The baleen, hump, back-fin, and teeth; these are things whose
+peculiarities are indiscriminately dispersed among all sorts of whales,
+without any regard to what may be the nature of their structure in
+other and more essential particulars. Thus, the sperm whale and the
+humpbacked whale, each has a hump; but there the similitude ceases.
+Then, this same humpbacked whale and the Greenland whale, each of these
+has baleen; but there again the similitude ceases. And it is just the
+same with the other parts above mentioned. In various sorts of whales,
+they form such irregular combinations; or, in the case of any one of
+them detached, such an irregular isolation; as utterly to defy all
+general methodization formed upon such a basis. On this rock every one
+of the whale-naturalists has split.
+
+But it may possibly be conceived that, in the internal parts of the
+whale, in his anatomy—there, at least, we shall be able to hit the
+right classification. Nay; what thing, for example, is there in the
+Greenland whale’s anatomy more striking than his baleen? Yet we have
+seen that by his baleen it is impossible correctly to classify the
+Greenland whale. And if you descend into the bowels of the various
+leviathans, why there you will not find distinctions a fiftieth part as
+available to the systematizer as those external ones already
+enumerated. What then remains? nothing but to take hold of the whales
+bodily, in their entire liberal volume, and boldly sort them that way.
+And this is the Bibliographical system here adopted; and it is the only
+one that can possibly succeed, for it alone is practicable. To proceed.
+
+BOOK I. (_Folio_) CHAPTER IV. (_Hump Back_).—This whale is often seen
+on the northern American coast. He has been frequently captured there,
+and towed into harbor. He has a great pack on him like a peddler; or
+you might call him the Elephant and Castle whale. At any rate, the
+popular name for him does not sufficiently distinguish him, since the
+sperm whale also has a hump though a smaller one. His oil is not very
+valuable. He has baleen. He is the most gamesome and light-hearted of
+all the whales, making more gay foam and white water generally than any
+other of them.
+
+BOOK I. (_Folio_), CHAPTER V. (_Razor Back_).—Of this whale little is
+known but his name. I have seen him at a distance off Cape Horn. Of a
+retiring nature, he eludes both hunters and philosophers. Though no
+coward, he has never yet shown any part of him but his back, which
+rises in a long sharp ridge. Let him go. I know little more of him, nor
+does anybody else.
+
+BOOK I. (_Folio_), CHAPTER VI. (_Sulphur Bottom_).—Another retiring
+gentleman, with a brimstone belly, doubtless got by scraping along the
+Tartarian tiles in some of his profounder divings. He is seldom seen;
+at least I have never seen him except in the remoter southern seas, and
+then always at too great a distance to study his countenance. He is
+never chased; he would run away with rope-walks of line. Prodigies are
+told of him. Adieu, Sulphur Bottom! I can say nothing more that is true
+of ye, nor can the oldest Nantucketer.
+
+Thus ends BOOK I. (_Folio_), and now begins BOOK II. (_Octavo_).
+
+OCTAVOES.*—These embrace the whales of middling magnitude, among which
+present may be numbered:—I., the _Grampus_; II., the _Black Fish_;
+III., the _Narwhale_; IV., the _Thrasher_; V., the _Killer_.
+
+*Why this book of whales is not denominated the Quarto is very plain.
+Because, while the whales of this order, though smaller than those of
+the former order, nevertheless retain a proportionate likeness to them
+in figure, yet the bookbinder’s Quarto volume in its dimensioned form
+does not preserve the shape of the Folio volume, but the Octavo volume
+does.
+
+BOOK II. (_Octavo_), CHAPTER I. (_Grampus_).—Though this fish, whose
+loud sonorous breathing, or rather blowing, has furnished a proverb to
+landsmen, is so well known a denizen of the deep, yet is he not
+popularly classed among whales. But possessing all the grand
+distinctive features of the leviathan, most naturalists have recognised
+him for one. He is of moderate octavo size, varying from fifteen to
+twenty-five feet in length, and of corresponding dimensions round the
+waist. He swims in herds; he is never regularly hunted, though his oil
+is considerable in quantity, and pretty good for light. By some
+fishermen his approach is regarded as premonitory of the advance of the
+great sperm whale.
+
+BOOK II. (_Octavo_), CHAPTER II. (_Black Fish_).—I give the popular
+fishermen’s names for all these fish, for generally they are the best.
+Where any name happens to be vague or inexpressive, I shall say so, and
+suggest another. I do so now, touching the Black Fish, so-called,
+because blackness is the rule among almost all whales. So, call him the
+Hyena Whale, if you please. His voracity is well known, and from the
+circumstance that the inner angles of his lips are curved upwards, he
+carries an everlasting Mephistophelean grin on his face. This whale
+averages some sixteen or eighteen feet in length. He is found in almost
+all latitudes. He has a peculiar way of showing his dorsal hooked fin
+in swimming, which looks something like a Roman nose. When not more
+profitably employed, the sperm whale hunters sometimes capture the
+Hyena whale, to keep up the supply of cheap oil for domestic
+employment—as some frugal housekeepers, in the absence of company, and
+quite alone by themselves, burn unsavory tallow instead of odorous wax.
+Though their blubber is very thin, some of these whales will yield you
+upwards of thirty gallons of oil.
+
+BOOK II. (_Octavo_), CHAPTER III. (_Narwhale_), that is, _Nostril
+whale_.—Another instance of a curiously named whale, so named I suppose
+from his peculiar horn being originally mistaken for a peaked nose. The
+creature is some sixteen feet in length, while its horn averages five
+feet, though some exceed ten, and even attain to fifteen feet. Strictly
+speaking, this horn is but a lengthened tusk, growing out from the jaw
+in a line a little depressed from the horizontal. But it is only found
+on the sinister side, which has an ill effect, giving its owner
+something analogous to the aspect of a clumsy left-handed man. What
+precise purpose this ivory horn or lance answers, it would be hard to
+say. It does not seem to be used like the blade of the sword-fish and
+bill-fish; though some sailors tell me that the Narwhale employs it for
+a rake in turning over the bottom of the sea for food. Charley Coffin
+said it was used for an ice-piercer; for the Narwhale, rising to the
+surface of the Polar Sea, and finding it sheeted with ice, thrusts his
+horn up, and so breaks through. But you cannot prove either of these
+surmises to be correct. My own opinion is, that however this one-sided
+horn may really be used by the Narwhale—however that may be—it would
+certainly be very convenient to him for a folder in reading pamphlets.
+The Narwhale I have heard called the Tusked whale, the Horned whale,
+and the Unicorn whale. He is certainly a curious example of the
+Unicornism to be found in almost every kingdom of animated nature. From
+certain cloistered old authors I have gathered that this same
+sea-unicorn’s horn was in ancient days regarded as the great antidote
+against poison, and as such, preparations of it brought immense prices.
+It was also distilled to a volatile salts for fainting ladies, the same
+way that the horns of the male deer are manufactured into hartshorn.
+Originally it was in itself accounted an object of great curiosity.
+Black Letter tells me that Sir Martin Frobisher on his return from that
+voyage, when Queen Bess did gallantly wave her jewelled hand to him
+from a window of Greenwich Palace, as his bold ship sailed down the
+Thames; “when Sir Martin returned from that voyage,” saith Black
+Letter, “on bended knees he presented to her highness a prodigious long
+horn of the Narwhale, which for a long period after hung in the castle
+at Windsor.” An Irish author avers that the Earl of Leicester, on
+bended knees, did likewise present to her highness another horn,
+pertaining to a land beast of the unicorn nature.
+
+The Narwhale has a very picturesque, leopard-like look, being of a
+milk-white ground colour, dotted with round and oblong spots of black.
+His oil is very superior, clear and fine; but there is little of it,
+and he is seldom hunted. He is mostly found in the circumpolar seas.
+
+BOOK II. (_Octavo_), CHAPTER IV. (_Killer_).—Of this whale little is
+precisely known to the Nantucketer, and nothing at all to the professed
+naturalist. From what I have seen of him at a distance, I should say
+that he was about the bigness of a grampus. He is very savage—a sort of
+Feegee fish. He sometimes takes the great Folio whales by the lip, and
+hangs there like a leech, till the mighty brute is worried to death.
+The Killer is never hunted. I never heard what sort of oil he has.
+Exception might be taken to the name bestowed upon this whale, on the
+ground of its indistinctness. For we are all killers, on land and on
+sea; Bonapartes and Sharks included.
+
+BOOK II. (_Octavo_), CHAPTER V. (_Thrasher_).—This gentleman is famous
+for his tail, which he uses for a ferule in thrashing his foes. He
+mounts the Folio whale’s back, and as he swims, he works his passage by
+flogging him; as some schoolmasters get along in the world by a similar
+process. Still less is known of the Thrasher than of the Killer. Both
+are outlaws, even in the lawless seas.
+
+ Thus ends BOOK II. (_Octavo_), and begins BOOK III. (_Duodecimo_).
+
+DUODECIMOES.—These include the smaller whales. I. The Huzza Porpoise.
+II. The Algerine Porpoise. III. The Mealy-mouthed Porpoise.
+
+To those who have not chanced specially to study the subject, it may
+possibly seem strange, that fishes not commonly exceeding four or five
+feet should be marshalled among WHALES—a word, which, in the popular
+sense, always conveys an idea of hugeness. But the creatures set down
+above as Duodecimoes are infallibly whales, by the terms of my
+definition of what a whale is—_i.e._ a spouting fish, with a horizontal
+tail.
+
+BOOK III. (_Duodecimo_), CHAPTER 1. (_Huzza Porpoise_).—This is the
+common porpoise found almost all over the globe. The name is of my own
+bestowal; for there are more than one sort of porpoises, and something
+must be done to distinguish them. I call him thus, because he always
+swims in hilarious shoals, which upon the broad sea keep tossing
+themselves to heaven like caps in a Fourth-of-July crowd. Their
+appearance is generally hailed with delight by the mariner. Full of
+fine spirits, they invariably come from the breezy billows to windward.
+They are the lads that always live before the wind. They are accounted
+a lucky omen. If you yourself can withstand three cheers at beholding
+these vivacious fish, then heaven help ye; the spirit of godly
+gamesomeness is not in ye. A well-fed, plump Huzza Porpoise will yield
+you one good gallon of good oil. But the fine and delicate fluid
+extracted from his jaws is exceedingly valuable. It is in request among
+jewellers and watchmakers. Sailors put it on their hones. Porpoise meat
+is good eating, you know. It may never have occurred to you that a
+porpoise spouts. Indeed, his spout is so small that it is not very
+readily discernible. But the next time you have a chance, watch him;
+and you will then see the great Sperm whale himself in miniature.
+
+BOOK III. (_Duodecimo_), CHAPTER II. (_Algerine Porpoise_).—A pirate.
+Very savage. He is only found, I think, in the Pacific. He is somewhat
+larger than the Huzza Porpoise, but much of the same general make.
+Provoke him, and he will buckle to a shark. I have lowered for him many
+times, but never yet saw him captured.
+
+BOOK III. (_Duodecimo_), CHAPTER III. (_Mealy-mouthed Porpoise_).—The
+largest kind of Porpoise; and only found in the Pacific, so far as it
+is known. The only English name, by which he has hitherto been
+designated, is that of the fishers—Right-Whale Porpoise, from the
+circumstance that he is chiefly found in the vicinity of that Folio. In
+shape, he differs in some degree from the Huzza Porpoise, being of a
+less rotund and jolly girth; indeed, he is of quite a neat and
+gentleman-like figure. He has no fins on his back (most other porpoises
+have), he has a lovely tail, and sentimental Indian eyes of a hazel
+hue. But his mealy-mouth spoils all. Though his entire back down to his
+side fins is of a deep sable, yet a boundary line, distinct as the mark
+in a ship’s hull, called the “bright waist,” that line streaks him from
+stem to stern, with two separate colours, black above and white below.
+The white comprises part of his head, and the whole of his mouth, which
+makes him look as if he had just escaped from a felonious visit to a
+meal-bag. A most mean and mealy aspect! His oil is much like that of
+the common porpoise.
+
+  * * * * * *
+
+Beyond the DUODECIMO, this system does not proceed, inasmuch as the
+Porpoise is the smallest of the whales. Above, you have all the
+Leviathans of note. But there are a rabble of uncertain, fugitive,
+half-fabulous whales, which, as an American whaleman, I know by
+reputation, but not personally. I shall enumerate them by their
+fore-castle appellations; for possibly such a list may be valuable to
+future investigators, who may complete what I have here but begun. If
+any of the following whales, shall hereafter be caught and marked, then
+he can readily be incorporated into this System, according to his
+Folio, Octavo, or Duodecimo magnitude:—The Bottle-Nose Whale; the Junk
+Whale; the Pudding-Headed Whale; the Cape Whale; the Leading Whale; the
+Cannon Whale; the Scragg Whale; the Coppered Whale; the Elephant Whale;
+the Iceberg Whale; the Quog Whale; the Blue Whale; etc. From Icelandic,
+Dutch, and old English authorities, there might be quoted other lists
+of uncertain whales, blessed with all manner of uncouth names. But I
+omit them as altogether obsolete; and can hardly help suspecting them
+for mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, but signifying nothing.
+
+Finally: It was stated at the outset, that this system would not be
+here, and at once, perfected. You cannot but plainly see that I have
+kept my word. But I now leave my cetological System standing thus
+unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the
+crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small
+erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true
+ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever
+completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the
+draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!
+
+
+CHAPTER 33. The Specksnyder.
+
+Concerning the officers of the whale-craft, this seems as good a place
+as any to set down a little domestic peculiarity on ship-board, arising
+from the existence of the harpooneer class of officers, a class unknown
+of course in any other marine than the whale-fleet.
+
+The large importance attached to the harpooneer’s vocation is evinced
+by the fact, that originally in the old Dutch Fishery, two centuries
+and more ago, the command of a whale ship was not wholly lodged in the
+person now called the captain, but was divided between him and an
+officer called the Specksnyder. Literally this word means Fat-Cutter;
+usage, however, in time made it equivalent to Chief Harpooneer. In
+those days, the captain’s authority was restricted to the navigation
+and general management of the vessel; while over the whale-hunting
+department and all its concerns, the Specksnyder or Chief Harpooneer
+reigned supreme. In the British Greenland Fishery, under the corrupted
+title of Specksioneer, this old Dutch official is still retained, but
+his former dignity is sadly abridged. At present he ranks simply as
+senior Harpooneer; and as such, is but one of the captain’s more
+inferior subalterns. Nevertheless, as upon the good conduct of the
+harpooneers the success of a whaling voyage largely depends, and since
+in the American Fishery he is not only an important officer in the
+boat, but under certain circumstances (night watches on a whaling
+ground) the command of the ship’s deck is also his; therefore the grand
+political maxim of the sea demands, that he should nominally live apart
+from the men before the mast, and be in some way distinguished as their
+professional superior; though always, by them, familiarly regarded as
+their social equal.
+
+Now, the grand distinction drawn between officer and man at sea, is
+this—the first lives aft, the last forward. Hence, in whale-ships and
+merchantmen alike, the mates have their quarters with the captain; and
+so, too, in most of the American whalers the harpooneers are lodged in
+the after part of the ship. That is to say, they take their meals in
+the captain’s cabin, and sleep in a place indirectly communicating with
+it.
+
+Though the long period of a Southern whaling voyage (by far the longest
+of all voyages now or ever made by man), the peculiar perils of it, and
+the community of interest prevailing among a company, all of whom, high
+or low, depend for their profits, not upon fixed wages, but upon their
+common luck, together with their common vigilance, intrepidity, and
+hard work; though all these things do in some cases tend to beget a
+less rigorous discipline than in merchantmen generally; yet, never mind
+how much like an old Mesopotamian family these whalemen may, in some
+primitive instances, live together; for all that, the punctilious
+externals, at least, of the quarter-deck are seldom materially relaxed,
+and in no instance done away. Indeed, many are the Nantucket ships in
+which you will see the skipper parading his quarter-deck with an elated
+grandeur not surpassed in any military navy; nay, extorting almost as
+much outward homage as if he wore the imperial purple, and not the
+shabbiest of pilot-cloth.
+
+And though of all men the moody captain of the Pequod was the least
+given to that sort of shallowest assumption; and though the only homage
+he ever exacted, was implicit, instantaneous obedience; though he
+required no man to remove the shoes from his feet ere stepping upon the
+quarter-deck; and though there were times when, owing to peculiar
+circumstances connected with events hereafter to be detailed, he
+addressed them in unusual terms, whether of condescension or _in
+terrorem_, or otherwise; yet even Captain Ahab was by no means
+unobservant of the paramount forms and usages of the sea.
+
+Nor, perhaps, will it fail to be eventually perceived, that behind
+those forms and usages, as it were, he sometimes masked himself;
+incidentally making use of them for other and more private ends than
+they were legitimately intended to subserve. That certain sultanism of
+his brain, which had otherwise in a good degree remained unmanifested;
+through those forms that same sultanism became incarnate in an
+irresistible dictatorship. For be a man’s intellectual superiority what
+it will, it can never assume the practical, available supremacy over
+other men, without the aid of some sort of external arts and
+entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or less paltry and base.
+This it is, that for ever keeps God’s true princes of the Empire from
+the world’s hustings; and leaves the highest honors that this air can
+give, to those men who become famous more through their infinite
+inferiority to the choice hidden handful of the Divine Inert, than
+through their undoubted superiority over the dead level of the mass.
+Such large virtue lurks in these small things when extreme political
+superstitions invest them, that in some royal instances even to idiot
+imbecility they have imparted potency. But when, as in the case of
+Nicholas the Czar, the ringed crown of geographical empire encircles an
+imperial brain; then, the plebeian herds crouch abased before the
+tremendous centralization. Nor, will the tragic dramatist who would
+depict mortal indomitableness in its fullest sweep and direct swing,
+ever forget a hint, incidentally so important in his art, as the one
+now alluded to.
+
+But Ahab, my Captain, still moves before me in all his Nantucket
+grimness and shagginess; and in this episode touching Emperors and
+Kings, I must not conceal that I have only to do with a poor old
+whale-hunter like him; and, therefore, all outward majestical trappings
+and housings are denied me. Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it
+must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and
+featured in the unbodied air!
+
+
+CHAPTER 34. The Cabin-Table.
+
+It is noon; and Dough-Boy, the steward, thrusting his pale
+loaf-of-bread face from the cabin-scuttle, announces dinner to his lord
+and master; who, sitting in the lee quarter-boat, has just been taking
+an observation of the sun; and is now mutely reckoning the latitude on
+the smooth, medallion-shaped tablet, reserved for that daily purpose on
+the upper part of his ivory leg. From his complete inattention to the
+tidings, you would think that moody Ahab had not heard his menial. But
+presently, catching hold of the mizen shrouds, he swings himself to the
+deck, and in an even, unexhilarated voice, saying, “Dinner, Mr.
+Starbuck,” disappears into the cabin.
+
+When the last echo of his sultan’s step has died away, and Starbuck,
+the first Emir, has every reason to suppose that he is seated, then
+Starbuck rouses from his quietude, takes a few turns along the planks,
+and, after a grave peep into the binnacle, says, with some touch of
+pleasantness, “Dinner, Mr. Stubb,” and descends the scuttle. The second
+Emir lounges about the rigging awhile, and then slightly shaking the
+main brace, to see whether it will be all right with that important
+rope, he likewise takes up the old burden, and with a rapid “Dinner,
+Mr. Flask,” follows after his predecessors.
+
+But the third Emir, now seeing himself all alone on the quarter-deck,
+seems to feel relieved from some curious restraint; for, tipping all
+sorts of knowing winks in all sorts of directions, and kicking off his
+shoes, he strikes into a sharp but noiseless squall of a hornpipe right
+over the Grand Turk’s head; and then, by a dexterous sleight, pitching
+his cap up into the mizentop for a shelf, he goes down rollicking so
+far at least as he remains visible from the deck, reversing all other
+processions, by bringing up the rear with music. But ere stepping into
+the cabin doorway below, he pauses, ships a new face altogether, and,
+then, independent, hilarious little Flask enters King Ahab’s presence,
+in the character of Abjectus, or the Slave.
+
+It is not the least among the strange things bred by the intense
+artificialness of sea-usages, that while in the open air of the deck
+some officers will, upon provocation, bear themselves boldly and
+defyingly enough towards their commander; yet, ten to one, let those
+very officers the next moment go down to their customary dinner in that
+same commander’s cabin, and straightway their inoffensive, not to say
+deprecatory and humble air towards him, as he sits at the head of the
+table; this is marvellous, sometimes most comical. Wherefore this
+difference? A problem? Perhaps not. To have been Belshazzar, King of
+Babylon; and to have been Belshazzar, not haughtily but courteously,
+therein certainly must have been some touch of mundane grandeur. But he
+who in the rightly regal and intelligent spirit presides over his own
+private dinner-table of invited guests, that man’s unchallenged power
+and dominion of individual influence for the time; that man’s royalty
+of state transcends Belshazzar’s, for Belshazzar was not the greatest.
+Who has but once dined his friends, has tasted what it is to be Cæsar.
+It is a witchery of social czarship which there is no withstanding.
+Now, if to this consideration you superadd the official supremacy of a
+ship-master, then, by inference, you will derive the cause of that
+peculiarity of sea-life just mentioned.
+
+Over his ivory-inlaid table, Ahab presided like a mute, maned sea-lion
+on the white coral beach, surrounded by his warlike but still
+deferential cubs. In his own proper turn, each officer waited to be
+served. They were as little children before Ahab; and yet, in Ahab,
+there seemed not to lurk the smallest social arrogance. With one mind,
+their intent eyes all fastened upon the old man’s knife, as he carved
+the chief dish before him. I do not suppose that for the world they
+would have profaned that moment with the slightest observation, even
+upon so neutral a topic as the weather. No! And when reaching out his
+knife and fork, between which the slice of beef was locked, Ahab
+thereby motioned Starbuck’s plate towards him, the mate received his
+meat as though receiving alms; and cut it tenderly; and a little
+started if, perchance, the knife grazed against the plate; and chewed
+it noiselessly; and swallowed it, not without circumspection. For, like
+the Coronation banquet at Frankfort, where the German Emperor
+profoundly dines with the seven Imperial Electors, so these cabin meals
+were somehow solemn meals, eaten in awful silence; and yet at table old
+Ahab forbade not conversation; only he himself was dumb. What a relief
+it was to choking Stubb, when a rat made a sudden racket in the hold
+below. And poor little Flask, he was the youngest son, and little boy
+of this weary family party. His were the shinbones of the saline beef;
+his would have been the drumsticks. For Flask to have presumed to help
+himself, this must have seemed to him tantamount to larceny in the
+first degree. Had he helped himself at that table, doubtless, never
+more would he have been able to hold his head up in this honest world;
+nevertheless, strange to say, Ahab never forbade him. And had Flask
+helped himself, the chances were Ahab had never so much as noticed it.
+Least of all, did Flask presume to help himself to butter. Whether he
+thought the owners of the ship denied it to him, on account of its
+clotting his clear, sunny complexion; or whether he deemed that, on so
+long a voyage in such marketless waters, butter was at a premium, and
+therefore was not for him, a subaltern; however it was, Flask, alas!
+was a butterless man!
+
+Another thing. Flask was the last person down at the dinner, and Flask
+is the first man up. Consider! For hereby Flask’s dinner was badly
+jammed in point of time. Starbuck and Stubb both had the start of him;
+and yet they also have the privilege of lounging in the rear. If Stubb
+even, who is but a peg higher than Flask, happens to have but a small
+appetite, and soon shows symptoms of concluding his repast, then Flask
+must bestir himself, he will not get more than three mouthfuls that
+day; for it is against holy usage for Stubb to precede Flask to the
+deck. Therefore it was that Flask once admitted in private, that ever
+since he had arisen to the dignity of an officer, from that moment he
+had never known what it was to be otherwise than hungry, more or less.
+For what he ate did not so much relieve his hunger, as keep it immortal
+in him. Peace and satisfaction, thought Flask, have for ever departed
+from my stomach. I am an officer; but, how I wish I could fish a bit of
+old-fashioned beef in the forecastle, as I used to when I was before
+the mast. There’s the fruits of promotion now; there’s the vanity of
+glory: there’s the insanity of life! Besides, if it were so that any
+mere sailor of the Pequod had a grudge against Flask in Flask’s
+official capacity, all that sailor had to do, in order to obtain ample
+vengeance, was to go aft at dinner-time, and get a peep at Flask
+through the cabin sky-light, sitting silly and dumfoundered before
+awful Ahab.
+
+Now, Ahab and his three mates formed what may be called the first table
+in the Pequod’s cabin. After their departure, taking place in inverted
+order to their arrival, the canvas cloth was cleared, or rather was
+restored to some hurried order by the pallid steward. And then the
+three harpooneers were bidden to the feast, they being its residuary
+legatees. They made a sort of temporary servants’ hall of the high and
+mighty cabin.
+
+In strange contrast to the hardly tolerable constraint and nameless
+invisible domineerings of the captain’s table, was the entire care-free
+license and ease, the almost frantic democracy of those inferior
+fellows the harpooneers. While their masters, the mates, seemed afraid
+of the sound of the hinges of their own jaws, the harpooneers chewed
+their food with such a relish that there was a report to it. They dined
+like lords; they filled their bellies like Indian ships all day loading
+with spices. Such portentous appetites had Queequeg and Tashtego, that
+to fill out the vacancies made by the previous repast, often the pale
+Dough-Boy was fain to bring on a great baron of salt-junk, seemingly
+quarried out of the solid ox. And if he were not lively about it, if he
+did not go with a nimble hop-skip-and-jump, then Tashtego had an
+ungentlemanly way of accelerating him by darting a fork at his back,
+harpoon-wise. And once Daggoo, seized with a sudden humor, assisted
+Dough-Boy’s memory by snatching him up bodily, and thrusting his head
+into a great empty wooden trencher, while Tashtego, knife in hand,
+began laying out the circle preliminary to scalping him. He was
+naturally a very nervous, shuddering sort of little fellow, this
+bread-faced steward; the progeny of a bankrupt baker and a hospital
+nurse. And what with the standing spectacle of the black terrific Ahab,
+and the periodical tumultuous visitations of these three savages,
+Dough-Boy’s whole life was one continual lip-quiver. Commonly, after
+seeing the harpooneers furnished with all things they demanded, he
+would escape from their clutches into his little pantry adjoining, and
+fearfully peep out at them through the blinds of its door, till all was
+over.
+
+It was a sight to see Queequeg seated over against Tashtego, opposing
+his filed teeth to the Indian’s: crosswise to them, Daggoo seated on
+the floor, for a bench would have brought his hearse-plumed head to the
+low carlines; at every motion of his colossal limbs, making the low
+cabin framework to shake, as when an African elephant goes passenger in
+a ship. But for all this, the great negro was wonderfully abstemious,
+not to say dainty. It seemed hardly possible that by such comparatively
+small mouthfuls he could keep up the vitality diffused through so
+broad, baronial, and superb a person. But, doubtless, this noble savage
+fed strong and drank deep of the abounding element of air; and through
+his dilated nostrils snuffed in the sublime life of the worlds. Not by
+beef or by bread, are giants made or nourished. But Queequeg, he had a
+mortal, barbaric smack of the lip in eating—an ugly sound enough—so
+much so, that the trembling Dough-Boy almost looked to see whether any
+marks of teeth lurked in his own lean arms. And when he would hear
+Tashtego singing out for him to produce himself, that his bones might
+be picked, the simple-witted steward all but shattered the crockery
+hanging round him in the pantry, by his sudden fits of the palsy. Nor
+did the whetstone which the harpooneers carried in their pockets, for
+their lances and other weapons; and with which whetstones, at dinner,
+they would ostentatiously sharpen their knives; that grating sound did
+not at all tend to tranquillize poor Dough-Boy. How could he forget
+that in his Island days, Queequeg, for one, must certainly have been
+guilty of some murderous, convivial indiscretions. Alas! Dough-Boy!
+hard fares the white waiter who waits upon cannibals. Not a napkin
+should he carry on his arm, but a buckler. In good time, though, to his
+great delight, the three salt-sea warriors would rise and depart; to
+his credulous, fable-mongering ears, all their martial bones jingling
+in them at every step, like Moorish scimetars in scabbards.
+
+But, though these barbarians dined in the cabin, and nominally lived
+there; still, being anything but sedentary in their habits, they were
+scarcely ever in it except at mealtimes, and just before sleeping-time,
+when they passed through it to their own peculiar quarters.
+
+In this one matter, Ahab seemed no exception to most American whale
+captains, who, as a set, rather incline to the opinion that by rights
+the ship’s cabin belongs to them; and that it is by courtesy alone that
+anybody else is, at any time, permitted there. So that, in real truth,
+the mates and harpooneers of the Pequod might more properly be said to
+have lived out of the cabin than in it. For when they did enter it, it
+was something as a street-door enters a house; turning inwards for a
+moment, only to be turned out the next; and, as a permanent thing,
+residing in the open air. Nor did they lose much hereby; in the cabin
+was no companionship; socially, Ahab was inaccessible. Though nominally
+included in the census of Christendom, he was still an alien to it. He
+lived in the world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled
+Missouri. And as when Spring and Summer had departed, that wild Logan
+of the woods, burying himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the
+winter there, sucking his own paws; so, in his inclement, howling old
+age, Ahab’s soul, shut up in the caved trunk of his body, there fed
+upon the sullen paws of its gloom!
+
+
+CHAPTER 35. The Mast-Head.
+
+It was during the more pleasant weather, that in due rotation with the
+other seamen my first mast-head came round.
+
+In most American whalemen the mast-heads are manned almost
+simultaneously with the vessel’s leaving her port; even though she may
+have fifteen thousand miles, and more, to sail ere reaching her proper
+cruising ground. And if, after a three, four, or five years’ voyage she
+is drawing nigh home with anything empty in her—say, an empty vial
+even—then, her mast-heads are kept manned to the last; and not till her
+skysail-poles sail in among the spires of the port, does she altogether
+relinquish the hope of capturing one whale more.
+
+Now, as the business of standing mast-heads, ashore or afloat, is a
+very ancient and interesting one, let us in some measure expatiate
+here. I take it, that the earliest standers of mast-heads were the old
+Egyptians; because, in all my researches, I find none prior to them.
+For though their progenitors, the builders of Babel, must doubtless, by
+their tower, have intended to rear the loftiest mast-head in all Asia,
+or Africa either; yet (ere the final truck was put to it) as that great
+stone mast of theirs may be said to have gone by the board, in the
+dread gale of God’s wrath; therefore, we cannot give these Babel
+builders priority over the Egyptians. And that the Egyptians were a
+nation of mast-head standers, is an assertion based upon the general
+belief among archæologists, that the first pyramids were founded for
+astronomical purposes: a theory singularly supported by the peculiar
+stair-like formation of all four sides of those edifices; whereby, with
+prodigious long upliftings of their legs, those old astronomers were
+wont to mount to the apex, and sing out for new stars; even as the
+look-outs of a modern ship sing out for a sail, or a whale just bearing
+in sight. In Saint Stylites, the famous Christian hermit of old times,
+who built him a lofty stone pillar in the desert and spent the whole
+latter portion of his life on its summit, hoisting his food from the
+ground with a tackle; in him we have a remarkable instance of a
+dauntless stander-of-mast-heads; who was not to be driven from his
+place by fogs or frosts, rain, hail, or sleet; but valiantly facing
+everything out to the last, literally died at his post. Of modern
+standers-of-mast-heads we have but a lifeless set; mere stone, iron,
+and bronze men; who, though well capable of facing out a stiff gale,
+are still entirely incompetent to the business of singing out upon
+discovering any strange sight. There is Napoleon; who, upon the top of
+the column of Vendome, stands with arms folded, some one hundred and
+fifty feet in the air; careless, now, who rules the decks below;
+whether Louis Philippe, Louis Blanc, or Louis the Devil. Great
+Washington, too, stands high aloft on his towering main-mast in
+Baltimore, and like one of Hercules’ pillars, his column marks that
+point of human grandeur beyond which few mortals will go. Admiral
+Nelson, also, on a capstan of gun-metal, stands his mast-head in
+Trafalgar Square; and ever when most obscured by that London smoke,
+token is yet given that a hidden hero is there; for where there is
+smoke, must be fire. But neither great Washington, nor Napoleon, nor
+Nelson, will answer a single hail from below, however madly invoked to
+befriend by their counsels the distracted decks upon which they gaze;
+however it may be surmised, that their spirits penetrate through the
+thick haze of the future, and descry what shoals and what rocks must be
+shunned.
+
+It may seem unwarrantable to couple in any respect the mast-head
+standers of the land with those of the sea; but that in truth it is not
+so, is plainly evinced by an item for which Obed Macy, the sole
+historian of Nantucket, stands accountable. The worthy Obed tells us,
+that in the early times of the whale fishery, ere ships were regularly
+launched in pursuit of the game, the people of that island erected
+lofty spars along the sea-coast, to which the look-outs ascended by
+means of nailed cleats, something as fowls go upstairs in a hen-house.
+A few years ago this same plan was adopted by the Bay whalemen of New
+Zealand, who, upon descrying the game, gave notice to the ready-manned
+boats nigh the beach. But this custom has now become obsolete; turn we
+then to the one proper mast-head, that of a whale-ship at sea. The
+three mast-heads are kept manned from sun-rise to sun-set; the seamen
+taking their regular turns (as at the helm), and relieving each other
+every two hours. In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly
+pleasant the mast-head; nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is
+delightful. There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks,
+striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while
+beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters
+of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous
+Colossus at old Rhodes. There you stand, lost in the infinite series of
+the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship
+indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you
+into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime
+uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras
+with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into
+unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt
+securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what
+you shall have for dinner—for all your meals for three years and more
+are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable.
+
+In one of those southern whalesmen, on a long three or four years’
+voyage, as often happens, the sum of the various hours you spend at the
+mast-head would amount to several entire months. And it is much to be
+deplored that the place to which you devote so considerable a portion
+of the whole term of your natural life, should be so sadly destitute of
+anything approaching to a cosy inhabitiveness, or adapted to breed a
+comfortable localness of feeling, such as pertains to a bed, a hammock,
+a hearse, a sentry box, a pulpit, a coach, or any other of those small
+and snug contrivances in which men temporarily isolate themselves. Your
+most usual point of perch is the head of the t’ gallant-mast, where you
+stand upon two thin parallel sticks (almost peculiar to whalemen)
+called the t’ gallant cross-trees. Here, tossed about by the sea, the
+beginner feels about as cosy as he would standing on a bull’s horns. To
+be sure, in cold weather you may carry your house aloft with you, in
+the shape of a watch-coat; but properly speaking the thickest
+watch-coat is no more of a house than the unclad body; for as the soul
+is glued inside of its fleshy tabernacle, and cannot freely move about
+in it, nor even move out of it, without running great risk of perishing
+(like an ignorant pilgrim crossing the snowy Alps in winter); so a
+watch-coat is not so much of a house as it is a mere envelope, or
+additional skin encasing you. You cannot put a shelf or chest of
+drawers in your body, and no more can you make a convenient closet of
+your watch-coat.
+
+Concerning all this, it is much to be deplored that the mast-heads of a
+southern whale ship are unprovided with those enviable little tents or
+pulpits, called _crow’s-nests_, in which the look-outs of a Greenland
+whaler are protected from the inclement weather of the frozen seas. In
+the fireside narrative of Captain Sleet, entitled “A Voyage among the
+Icebergs, in quest of the Greenland Whale, and incidentally for the
+re-discovery of the Lost Icelandic Colonies of Old Greenland;” in this
+admirable volume, all standers of mast-heads are furnished with a
+charmingly circumstantial account of the then recently invented
+_crow’s-nest_ of the Glacier, which was the name of Captain Sleet’s
+good craft. He called it the _Sleet’s crow’s-nest_, in honor of
+himself; he being the original inventor and patentee, and free from all
+ridiculous false delicacy, and holding that if we call our own children
+after our own names (we fathers being the original inventors and
+patentees), so likewise should we denominate after ourselves any other
+apparatus we may beget. In shape, the Sleet’s crow’s-nest is something
+like a large tierce or pipe; it is open above, however, where it is
+furnished with a movable side-screen to keep to windward of your head
+in a hard gale. Being fixed on the summit of the mast, you ascend into
+it through a little trap-hatch in the bottom. On the after side, or
+side next the stern of the ship, is a comfortable seat, with a locker
+underneath for umbrellas, comforters, and coats. In front is a leather
+rack, in which to keep your speaking trumpet, pipe, telescope, and
+other nautical conveniences. When Captain Sleet in person stood his
+mast-head in this crow’s-nest of his, he tells us that he always had a
+rifle with him (also fixed in the rack), together with a powder flask
+and shot, for the purpose of popping off the stray narwhales, or
+vagrant sea unicorns infesting those waters; for you cannot
+successfully shoot at them from the deck owing to the resistance of the
+water, but to shoot down upon them is a very different thing. Now, it
+was plainly a labor of love for Captain Sleet to describe, as he does,
+all the little detailed conveniences of his crow’s-nest; but though he
+so enlarges upon many of these, and though he treats us to a very
+scientific account of his experiments in this crow’s-nest, with a small
+compass he kept there for the purpose of counteracting the errors
+resulting from what is called the “local attraction” of all binnacle
+magnets; an error ascribable to the horizontal vicinity of the iron in
+the ship’s planks, and in the Glacier’s case, perhaps, to there having
+been so many broken-down blacksmiths among her crew; I say, that though
+the Captain is very discreet and scientific here, yet, for all his
+learned “binnacle deviations,” “azimuth compass observations,” and
+“approximate errors,” he knows very well, Captain Sleet, that he was
+not so much immersed in those profound magnetic meditations, as to fail
+being attracted occasionally towards that well replenished little
+case-bottle, so nicely tucked in on one side of his crow’s nest, within
+easy reach of his hand. Though, upon the whole, I greatly admire and
+even love the brave, the honest, and learned Captain; yet I take it
+very ill of him that he should so utterly ignore that case-bottle,
+seeing what a faithful friend and comforter it must have been, while
+with mittened fingers and hooded head he was studying the mathematics
+aloft there in that bird’s nest within three or four perches of the
+pole.
+
+But if we Southern whale-fishers are not so snugly housed aloft as
+Captain Sleet and his Greenlandmen were; yet that disadvantage is
+greatly counter-balanced by the widely contrasting serenity of those
+seductive seas in which we South fishers mostly float. For one, I used
+to lounge up the rigging very leisurely, resting in the top to have a
+chat with Queequeg, or any one else off duty whom I might find there;
+then ascending a little way further, and throwing a lazy leg over the
+top-sail yard, take a preliminary view of the watery pastures, and so
+at last mount to my ultimate destination.
+
+Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept
+but sorry guard. With the problem of the universe revolving in me, how
+could I—being left completely to myself at such a thought-engendering
+altitude—how could I but lightly hold my obligations to observe all
+whale-ships’ standing orders, “Keep your weather eye open, and sing out
+every time.”
+
+And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of
+Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with
+lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who
+offers to ship with the Phædon instead of Bowditch in his head. Beware
+of such an one, I say; your whales must be seen before they can be
+killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes
+round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer. Nor
+are these monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the whale-fishery
+furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded
+young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking
+sentiment in tar and blubber. Childe Harold not unfrequently perches
+himself upon the mast-head of some luckless disappointed whale-ship,
+and in moody phrase ejaculates:—
+
+
+“Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand
+blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain.”
+
+
+
+Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded young
+philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient
+“interest” in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so hopelessly lost
+to all honorable ambition, as that in their secret souls they would
+rather not see whales than otherwise. But all in vain; those young
+Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are
+short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have
+left their opera-glasses at home.
+
+“Why, thou monkey,” said a harpooneer to one of these lads, “we’ve been
+cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale
+yet. Whales are scarce as hen’s teeth whenever thou art up here.”
+Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in
+the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of
+vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending
+cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity;
+takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep,
+blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange,
+half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every
+dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him
+the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by
+continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit
+ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space;
+like Cranmer’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of
+every shore the round globe over.
+
+There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a
+gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from
+the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on
+ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your
+identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And
+perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled
+shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no
+more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!
+
+
+CHAPTER 36. The Quarter-Deck.
+
+(_Enter Ahab: Then, all._)
+
+It was not a great while after the affair of the pipe, that one morning
+shortly after breakfast, Ahab, as was his wont, ascended the
+cabin-gangway to the deck. There most sea-captains usually walk at that
+hour, as country gentlemen, after the same meal, take a few turns in
+the garden.
+
+Soon his steady, ivory stride was heard, as to and fro he paced his old
+rounds, upon planks so familiar to his tread, that they were all over
+dented, like geological stones, with the peculiar mark of his walk. Did
+you fixedly gaze, too, upon that ribbed and dented brow; there also,
+you would see still stranger foot-prints—the foot-prints of his one
+unsleeping, ever-pacing thought.
+
+But on the occasion in question, those dents looked deeper, even as his
+nervous step that morning left a deeper mark. And, so full of his
+thought was Ahab, that at every uniform turn that he made, now at the
+main-mast and now at the binnacle, you could almost see that thought
+turn in him as he turned, and pace in him as he paced; so completely
+possessing him, indeed, that it all but seemed the inward mould of
+every outer movement.
+
+“D’ye mark him, Flask?” whispered Stubb; “the chick that’s in him pecks
+the shell. ’Twill soon be out.”
+
+The hours wore on;—Ahab now shut up within his cabin; anon, pacing the
+deck, with the same intense bigotry of purpose in his aspect.
+
+It drew near the close of day. Suddenly he came to a halt by the
+bulwarks, and inserting his bone leg into the auger-hole there, and
+with one hand grasping a shroud, he ordered Starbuck to send everybody
+aft.
+
+“Sir!” said the mate, astonished at an order seldom or never given on
+ship-board except in some extraordinary case.
+
+“Send everybody aft,” repeated Ahab. “Mast-heads, there! come down!”
+
+When the entire ship’s company were assembled, and with curious and not
+wholly unapprehensive faces, were eyeing him, for he looked not unlike
+the weather horizon when a storm is coming up, Ahab, after rapidly
+glancing over the bulwarks, and then darting his eyes among the crew,
+started from his standpoint; and as though not a soul were nigh him
+resumed his heavy turns upon the deck. With bent head and half-slouched
+hat he continued to pace, unmindful of the wondering whispering among
+the men; till Stubb cautiously whispered to Flask, that Ahab must have
+summoned them there for the purpose of witnessing a pedestrian feat.
+But this did not last long. Vehemently pausing, he cried:—
+
+“What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?”
+
+“Sing out for him!” was the impulsive rejoinder from a score of clubbed
+voices.
+
+“Good!” cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones; observing the
+hearty animation into which his unexpected question had so magnetically
+thrown them.
+
+“And what do ye next, men?”
+
+“Lower away, and after him!”
+
+“And what tune is it ye pull to, men?”
+
+“A dead whale or a stove boat!”
+
+More and more strangely and fiercely glad and approving, grew the
+countenance of the old man at every shout; while the mariners began to
+gaze curiously at each other, as if marvelling how it was that they
+themselves became so excited at such seemingly purposeless questions.
+
+But, they were all eagerness again, as Ahab, now half-revolving in his
+pivot-hole, with one hand reaching high up a shroud, and tightly,
+almost convulsively grasping it, addressed them thus:—
+
+“All ye mast-headers have before now heard me give orders about a white
+whale. Look ye! d’ye see this Spanish ounce of gold?”—holding up a
+broad bright coin to the sun—“it is a sixteen dollar piece, men. D’ye
+see it? Mr. Starbuck, hand me yon top-maul.”
+
+While the mate was getting the hammer, Ahab, without speaking, was
+slowly rubbing the gold piece against the skirts of his jacket, as if
+to heighten its lustre, and without using any words was meanwhile lowly
+humming to himself, producing a sound so strangely muffled and
+inarticulate that it seemed the mechanical humming of the wheels of his
+vitality in him.
+
+Receiving the top-maul from Starbuck, he advanced towards the main-mast
+with the hammer uplifted in one hand, exhibiting the gold with the
+other, and with a high raised voice exclaiming: “Whosoever of ye raises
+me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw;
+whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed whale, with three holes
+punctured in his starboard fluke—look ye, whosoever of ye raises me
+that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!”
+
+“Huzza! huzza!” cried the seamen, as with swinging tarpaulins they
+hailed the act of nailing the gold to the mast.
+
+“It’s a white whale, I say,” resumed Ahab, as he threw down the
+topmaul: “a white whale. Skin your eyes for him, men; look sharp for
+white water; if ye see but a bubble, sing out.”
+
+All this while Tashtego, Daggoo, and Queequeg had looked on with even
+more intense interest and surprise than the rest, and at the mention of
+the wrinkled brow and crooked jaw they had started as if each was
+separately touched by some specific recollection.
+
+“Captain Ahab,” said Tashtego, “that white whale must be the same that
+some call Moby Dick.”
+
+“Moby Dick?” shouted Ahab. “Do ye know the white whale then, Tash?”
+
+“Does he fan-tail a little curious, sir, before he goes down?” said the
+Gay-Header deliberately.
+
+“And has he a curious spout, too,” said Daggoo, “very bushy, even for a
+parmacetty, and mighty quick, Captain Ahab?”
+
+“And he have one, two, three—oh! good many iron in him hide, too,
+Captain,” cried Queequeg disjointedly, “all twiske-tee be-twisk, like
+him—him—” faltering hard for a word, and screwing his hand round and
+round as though uncorking a bottle—“like him—him—”
+
+“Corkscrew!” cried Ahab, “aye, Queequeg, the harpoons lie all twisted
+and wrenched in him; aye, Daggoo, his spout is a big one, like a whole
+shock of wheat, and white as a pile of our Nantucket wool after the
+great annual sheep-shearing; aye, Tashtego, and he fan-tails like a
+split jib in a squall. Death and devils! men, it is Moby Dick ye have
+seen—Moby Dick—Moby Dick!”
+
+“Captain Ahab,” said Starbuck, who, with Stubb and Flask, had thus far
+been eyeing his superior with increasing surprise, but at last seemed
+struck with a thought which somewhat explained all the wonder. “Captain
+Ahab, I have heard of Moby Dick—but it was not Moby Dick that took off
+thy leg?”
+
+“Who told thee that?” cried Ahab; then pausing, “Aye, Starbuck; aye, my
+hearties all round; it was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick that
+brought me to this dead stump I stand on now. Aye, aye,” he shouted
+with a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken moose;
+“Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale that razed me; made a poor
+pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!” Then tossing both arms, with
+measureless imprecations he shouted out: “Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him
+round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom,
+and round perdition’s flames before I give him up. And this is what ye
+have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land,
+and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin
+out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do
+look brave.”
+
+“Aye, aye!” shouted the harpooneers and seamen, running closer to the
+excited old man: “A sharp eye for the white whale; a sharp lance for
+Moby Dick!”
+
+“God bless ye,” he seemed to half sob and half shout. “God bless ye,
+men. Steward! go draw the great measure of grog. But what’s this long
+face about, Mr. Starbuck; wilt thou not chase the white whale? art not
+game for Moby Dick?”
+
+“I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too, Captain
+Ahab, if it fairly comes in the way of the business we follow; but I
+came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance. How many
+barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain
+Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market.”
+
+“Nantucket market! Hoot! But come closer, Starbuck; thou requirest a
+little lower layer. If money’s to be the measurer, man, and the
+accountants have computed their great counting-house the globe, by
+girdling it with guineas, one to every three parts of an inch; then,
+let me tell thee, that my vengeance will fetch a great premium _here!_”
+
+“He smites his chest,” whispered Stubb, “what’s that for? methinks it
+rings most vast, but hollow.”
+
+“Vengeance on a dumb brute!” cried Starbuck, “that simply smote thee
+from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing,
+Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.”
+
+“Hark ye yet again—the little lower layer. All visible objects, man,
+are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the
+undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth
+the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man
+will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach
+outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is
+that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond.
+But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous
+strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable
+thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the
+white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me
+of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the
+sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of
+fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my
+master, man, is even that fair play. Who’s over me? Truth hath no
+confines. Take off thine eye! more intolerable than fiends’ glarings is
+a doltish stare! So, so; thou reddenest and palest; my heat has melted
+thee to anger-glow. But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat, that
+thing unsays itself. There are men from whom warm words are small
+indignity. I meant not to incense thee. Let it go. Look! see yonder
+Turkish cheeks of spotted tawn—living, breathing pictures painted by
+the sun. The Pagan leopards—the unrecking and unworshipping things,
+that live; and seek, and give no reasons for the torrid life they feel!
+The crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab, in this
+matter of the whale? See Stubb! he laughs! See yonder Chilian! he
+snorts to think of it. Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one
+tost sapling cannot, Starbuck! And what is it? Reckon it. ’Tis but to
+help strike a fin; no wondrous feat for Starbuck. What is it more? From
+this one poor hunt, then, the best lance out of all Nantucket, surely
+he will not hang back, when every foremast-hand has clutched a
+whetstone? Ah! constrainings seize thee; I see! the billow lifts thee!
+Speak, but speak!—Aye, aye! thy silence, then, _that_ voices thee.
+(_Aside_) Something shot from my dilated nostrils, he has inhaled it in
+his lungs. Starbuck now is mine; cannot oppose me now, without
+rebellion.”
+
+“God keep me!—keep us all!” murmured Starbuck, lowly.
+
+But in his joy at the enchanted, tacit acquiescence of the mate, Ahab
+did not hear his foreboding invocation; nor yet the low laugh from the
+hold; nor yet the presaging vibrations of the winds in the cordage; nor
+yet the hollow flap of the sails against the masts, as for a moment
+their hearts sank in. For again Starbuck’s downcast eyes lighted up
+with the stubbornness of life; the subterranean laugh died away; the
+winds blew on; the sails filled out; the ship heaved and rolled as
+before. Ah, ye admonitions and warnings! why stay ye not when ye come?
+But rather are ye predictions than warnings, ye shadows! Yet not so
+much predictions from without, as verifications of the foregoing things
+within. For with little external to constrain us, the innermost
+necessities in our being, these still drive us on.
+
+“The measure! the measure!” cried Ahab.
+
+Receiving the brimming pewter, and turning to the harpooneers, he
+ordered them to produce their weapons. Then ranging them before him
+near the capstan, with their harpoons in their hands, while his three
+mates stood at his side with their lances, and the rest of the ship’s
+company formed a circle round the group; he stood for an instant
+searchingly eyeing every man of his crew. But those wild eyes met his,
+as the bloodshot eyes of the prairie wolves meet the eye of their
+leader, ere he rushes on at their head in the trail of the bison; but,
+alas! only to fall into the hidden snare of the Indian.
+
+“Drink and pass!” he cried, handing the heavy charged flagon to the
+nearest seaman. “The crew alone now drink. Round with it, round! Short
+draughts—long swallows, men; ’tis hot as Satan’s hoof. So, so; it goes
+round excellently. It spiralizes in ye; forks out at the
+serpent-snapping eye. Well done; almost drained. That way it went, this
+way it comes. Hand it me—here’s a hollow! Men, ye seem the years; so
+brimming life is gulped and gone. Steward, refill!
+
+“Attend now, my braves. I have mustered ye all round this capstan; and
+ye mates, flank me with your lances; and ye harpooneers, stand there
+with your irons; and ye, stout mariners, ring me in, that I may in some
+sort revive a noble custom of my fisherman fathers before me. O men,
+you will yet see that—Ha! boy, come back? bad pennies come not sooner.
+Hand it me. Why, now, this pewter had run brimming again, wer’t not
+thou St. Vitus’ imp—away, thou ague!
+
+“Advance, ye mates! Cross your lances full before me. Well done! Let me
+touch the axis.” So saying, with extended arm, he grasped the three
+level, radiating lances at their crossed centre; while so doing,
+suddenly and nervously twitched them; meanwhile, glancing intently from
+Starbuck to Stubb; from Stubb to Flask. It seemed as though, by some
+nameless, interior volition, he would fain have shocked into them the
+same fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own
+magnetic life. The three mates quailed before his strong, sustained,
+and mystic aspect. Stubb and Flask looked sideways from him; the honest
+eye of Starbuck fell downright.
+
+“In vain!” cried Ahab; “but, maybe, ’tis well. For did ye three but
+once take the full-forced shock, then mine own electric thing, _that_
+had perhaps expired from out me. Perchance, too, it would have dropped
+ye dead. Perchance ye need it not. Down lances! And now, ye mates, I do
+appoint ye three cupbearers to my three pagan kinsmen there—yon three
+most honorable gentlemen and noblemen, my valiant harpooneers. Disdain
+the task? What, when the great Pope washes the feet of beggars, using
+his tiara for ewer? Oh, my sweet cardinals! your own condescension,
+_that_ shall bend ye to it. I do not order ye; ye will it. Cut your
+seizings and draw the poles, ye harpooneers!”
+
+Silently obeying the order, the three harpooneers now stood with the
+detached iron part of their harpoons, some three feet long, held, barbs
+up, before him.
+
+“Stab me not with that keen steel! Cant them; cant them over! know ye
+not the goblet end? Turn up the socket! So, so; now, ye cup-bearers,
+advance. The irons! take them; hold them while I fill!” Forthwith,
+slowly going from one officer to the other, he brimmed the harpoon
+sockets with the fiery waters from the pewter.
+
+“Now, three to three, ye stand. Commend the murderous chalices! Bestow
+them, ye who are now made parties to this indissoluble league. Ha!
+Starbuck! but the deed is done! Yon ratifying sun now waits to sit upon
+it. Drink, ye harpooneers! drink and swear, ye men that man the
+deathful whaleboat’s bow—Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do
+not hunt Moby Dick to his death!” The long, barbed steel goblets were
+lifted; and to cries and maledictions against the white whale, the
+spirits were simultaneously quaffed down with a hiss. Starbuck paled,
+and turned, and shivered. Once more, and finally, the replenished
+pewter went the rounds among the frantic crew; when, waving his free
+hand to them, they all dispersed; and Ahab retired within his cabin.
+
+
+CHAPTER 37. Sunset.
+
+_The cabin; by the stern windows; Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out_.
+
+I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where’er I
+sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them;
+but first I pass.
+
+Yonder, by ever-brimming goblet’s rim, the warm waves blush like wine.
+The gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun—slow dived from noon—goes
+down; my soul mounts up! she wearies with her endless hill. Is, then,
+the crown too heavy that I wear? this Iron Crown of Lombardy. Yet is it
+bright with many a gem; I the wearer, see not its far flashings; but
+darkly feel that I wear that, that dazzlingly confounds. ’Tis iron—that
+I know—not gold. ’Tis split, too—that I feel; the jagged edge galls me
+so, my brain seems to beat against the solid metal; aye, steel skull,
+mine; the sort that needs no helmet in the most brain-battering fight!
+
+Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred
+me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not
+me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne’er enjoy. Gifted
+with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most
+subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise! Good
+night—good night! (_waving his hand, he moves from the window_.)
+
+’Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find one stubborn, at the least;
+but my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they
+revolve. Or, if you will, like so many ant-hills of powder, they all
+stand before me; and I their match. Oh, hard! that to fire others, the
+match itself must needs be wasting! What I’ve dared, I’ve willed; and
+what I’ve willed, I’ll do! They think me mad—Starbuck does; but I’m
+demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that’s only calm to
+comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered;
+and—Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my
+dismemberer. Now, then, be the prophet and the fulfiller one. That’s
+more than ye, ye great gods, ever were. I laugh and hoot at ye, ye
+cricket-players, ye pugilists, ye deaf Burkes and blinded Bendigoes! I
+will not say as schoolboys do to bullies—Take some one of your own
+size; don’t pommel _me!_ No, ye’ve knocked me down, and I am up again;
+but _ye_ have run and hidden. Come forth from behind your cotton bags!
+I have no long gun to reach ye. Come, Ahab’s compliments to ye; come
+and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye
+swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed
+purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run.
+Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under
+torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an
+angle to the iron way!
+
+
+CHAPTER 38. Dusk.
+
+_By the Mainmast; Starbuck leaning against it_.
+
+My soul is more than matched; she’s overmanned; and by a madman!
+Insufferable sting, that sanity should ground arms on such a field! But
+he drilled deep down, and blasted all my reason out of me! I think I
+see his impious end; but feel that I must help him to it. Will I, nill
+I, the ineffable thing has tied me to him; tows me with a cable I have
+no knife to cut. Horrible old man! Who’s over him, he cries;—aye, he
+would be a democrat to all above; look, how he lords it over all below!
+Oh! I plainly see my miserable office,—to obey, rebelling; and worse
+yet, to hate with touch of pity! For in his eyes I read some lurid woe
+would shrivel me up, had I it. Yet is there hope. Time and tide flow
+wide. The hated whale has the round watery world to swim in, as the
+small gold-fish has its glassy globe. His heaven-insulting purpose, God
+may wedge aside. I would up heart, were it not like lead. But my whole
+clock’s run down; my heart the all-controlling weight, I have no key to
+lift again.
+
+[_A burst of revelry from the forecastle_.]
+
+Oh, God! to sail with such a heathen crew that have small touch of
+human mothers in them! Whelped somewhere by the sharkish sea. The white
+whale is their demigorgon. Hark! the infernal orgies! that revelry is
+forward! mark the unfaltering silence aft! Methinks it pictures life.
+Foremost through the sparkling sea shoots on the gay, embattled,
+bantering bow, but only to drag dark Ahab after it, where he broods
+within his sternward cabin, builded over the dead water of the wake,
+and further on, hunted by its wolfish gurglings. The long howl thrills
+me through! Peace! ye revellers, and set the watch! Oh, life! ’tis in
+an hour like this, with soul beat down and held to knowledge,—as wild,
+untutored things are forced to feed—Oh, life! ’tis now that I do feel
+the latent horror in thee! but ’tis not me! that horror’s out of me!
+and with the soft feeling of the human in me, yet will I try to fight
+ye, ye grim, phantom futures! Stand by me, hold me, bind me, O ye
+blessed influences!
+
+
+CHAPTER 39. First Night-Watch.
+
+Fore-Top.
+
+(_Stubb solus, and mending a brace_.)
+
+Ha! ha! ha! ha! hem! clear my throat!—I’ve been thinking over it ever
+since, and that ha, ha’s the final consequence. Why so? Because a
+laugh’s the wisest, easiest answer to all that’s queer; and come what
+will, one comfort’s always left—that unfailing comfort is, it’s all
+predestinated. I heard not all his talk with Starbuck; but to my poor
+eye Starbuck then looked something as I the other evening felt. Be sure
+the old Mogul has fixed him, too. I twigged it, knew it; had had the
+gift, might readily have prophesied it—for when I clapped my eye upon
+his skull I saw it. Well, Stubb, _wise_ Stubb—that’s my title—well,
+Stubb, what of it, Stubb? Here’s a carcase. I know not all that may be
+coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing. Such a waggish
+leering as lurks in all your horribles! I feel funny. Fa, la! lirra,
+skirra! What’s my juicy little pear at home doing now? Crying its eyes
+out?—Giving a party to the last arrived harpooneers, I dare say, gay as
+a frigate’s pennant, and so am I—fa, la! lirra, skirra! Oh—
+
+
+We’ll drink to-night with hearts as light, To love, as gay and fleeting
+As bubbles that swim, on the beaker’s brim, And break on the lips while
+meeting.
+
+
+
+A brave stave that—who calls? Mr. Starbuck? Aye, aye, sir—(_Aside_)
+he’s my superior, he has his too, if I’m not mistaken.—Aye, aye, sir,
+just through with this job—coming.
+
+
+CHAPTER 40. Midnight, Forecastle.
+
+HARPOONEERS AND SAILORS.
+
+(_Foresail rises and discovers the watch standing, lounging, leaning,
+and lying in various attitudes, all singing in chorus_.)
+
+
+  Farewell and adieu to you, Spanish ladies! Farewell and adieu to you,
+  ladies of Spain! Our captain’s commanded.—
+
+
+
+1ST NANTUCKET SAILOR. Oh, boys, don’t be sentimental; it’s bad for the
+digestion! Take a tonic, follow me!
+
+(_Sings, and all follow._)
+
+
+ Our captain stood upon the deck, A spy-glass in his hand, A viewing of
+ those gallant whales That blew at every strand. Oh, your tubs in your
+ boats, my boys, And by your braces stand, And we’ll have one of those
+ fine whales, Hand, boys, over hand! So, be cheery, my lads! may your
+ hearts never fail! While the bold harpooner is striking the whale!
+
+
+
+MATE’S VOICE FROM THE QUARTER-DECK. Eight bells there, forward!
+
+2ND NANTUCKET SAILOR. Avast the chorus! Eight bells there! d’ye hear,
+bell-boy? Strike the bell eight, thou Pip! thou blackling! and let me
+call the watch. I’ve the sort of mouth for that—the hogshead mouth. So,
+so, (_thrusts his head down the scuttle_,) Star-bo-l-e-e-n-s, a-h-o-y!
+Eight bells there below! Tumble up!
+
+DUTCH SAILOR. Grand snoozing to-night, maty; fat night for that. I mark
+this in our old Mogul’s wine; it’s quite as deadening to some as
+filliping to others. We sing; they sleep—aye, lie down there, like
+ground-tier butts. At ’em again! There, take this copper-pump, and hail
+’em through it. Tell ’em to avast dreaming of their lasses. Tell ’em
+it’s the resurrection; they must kiss their last, and come to judgment.
+That’s the way—_that’s_ it; thy throat ain’t spoiled with eating
+Amsterdam butter.
+
+FRENCH SAILOR. Hist, boys! let’s have a jig or two before we ride to
+anchor in Blanket Bay. What say ye? There comes the other watch. Stand
+by all legs! Pip! little Pip! hurrah with your tambourine!
+
+PIP. (_Sulky and sleepy._) Don’t know where it is.
+
+FRENCH SAILOR. Beat thy belly, then, and wag thy ears. Jig it, men, I
+say; merry’s the word; hurrah! Damn me, won’t you dance? Form, now,
+Indian-file, and gallop into the double-shuffle? Throw yourselves!
+Legs! legs!
+
+ICELAND SAILOR. I don’t like your floor, maty; it’s too springy to my
+taste. I’m used to ice-floors. I’m sorry to throw cold water on the
+subject; but excuse me.
+
+MALTESE SAILOR. Me too; where’s your girls? Who but a fool would take
+his left hand by his right, and say to himself, how d’ye do? Partners!
+I must have partners!
+
+SICILIAN SAILOR. Aye; girls and a green!—then I’ll hop with ye; yea,
+turn grasshopper!
+
+LONG-ISLAND SAILOR. Well, well, ye sulkies, there’s plenty more of us.
+Hoe corn when you may, say I. All legs go to harvest soon. Ah! here
+comes the music; now for it!
+
+AZORE SAILOR. (_Ascending, and pitching the tambourine up the
+scuttle_.) Here you are, Pip; and there’s the windlass-bitts; up you
+mount! Now, boys! (_The half of them dance to the tambourine; some go
+below; some sleep or lie among the coils of rigging. Oaths a-plenty_.)
+
+AZORE SAILOR. (_Dancing_) Go it, Pip! Bang it, bell-boy! Rig it, dig
+it, stig it, quig it, bell-boy! Make fire-flies; break the jinglers!
+
+PIP. Jinglers, you say?—there goes another, dropped off; I pound it so.
+
+CHINA SAILOR. Rattle thy teeth, then, and pound away; make a pagoda of
+thyself.
+
+FRENCH SAILOR. Merry-mad! Hold up thy hoop, Pip, till I jump through
+it! Split jibs! tear yourselves!
+
+TASHTEGO. (_Quietly smoking._) That’s a white man; he calls that fun:
+humph! I save my sweat.
+
+OLD MANX SAILOR. I wonder whether those jolly lads bethink them of what
+they are dancing over. I’ll dance over your grave, I will—that’s the
+bitterest threat of your night-women, that beat head-winds round
+corners. O Christ! to think of the green navies and the green-skulled
+crews! Well, well; belike the whole world’s a ball, as you scholars
+have it; and so ’tis right to make one ballroom of it. Dance on, lads,
+you’re young; I was once.
+
+3D NANTUCKET SAILOR. Spell oh!—whew! this is worse than pulling after
+whales in a calm—give us a whiff, Tash.
+
+(_They cease dancing, and gather in clusters. Meantime the sky
+darkens—the wind rises_.)
+
+LASCAR SAILOR. By Brahma! boys, it’ll be douse sail soon. The sky-born,
+high-tide Ganges turned to wind! Thou showest thy black brow, Seeva!
+
+MALTESE SAILOR. (_Reclining and shaking his cap_.) It’s the waves—the
+snow’s caps turn to jig it now. They’ll shake their tassels soon. Now
+would all the waves were women, then I’d go drown, and chassee with
+them evermore! There’s naught so sweet on earth—heaven may not match
+it!—as those swift glances of warm, wild bosoms in the dance, when the
+over-arboring arms hide such ripe, bursting grapes.
+
+SICILIAN SAILOR. (_Reclining_.) Tell me not of it! Hark ye, lad—fleet
+interlacings of the limbs—lithe swayings—coyings—flutterings! lip!
+heart! hip! all graze: unceasing touch and go! not taste, observe ye,
+else come satiety. Eh, Pagan? (_Nudging_.)
+
+TAHITAN SAILOR. (_Reclining on a mat_.) Hail, holy nakedness of our
+dancing girls!—the Heeva-Heeva! Ah! low veiled, high palmed Tahiti! I
+still rest me on thy mat, but the soft soil has slid! I saw thee woven
+in the wood, my mat! green the first day I brought ye thence; now worn
+and wilted quite. Ah me!—not thou nor I can bear the change! How then,
+if so be transplanted to yon sky? Hear I the roaring streams from
+Pirohitee’s peak of spears, when they leap down the crags and drown the
+villages?—The blast! the blast! Up, spine, and meet it! (_Leaps to his
+feet_.)
+
+PORTUGUESE SAILOR. How the sea rolls swashing ’gainst the side! Stand
+by for reefing, hearties! the winds are just crossing swords, pell-mell
+they’ll go lunging presently.
+
+DANISH SAILOR. Crack, crack, old ship! so long as thou crackest, thou
+holdest! Well done! The mate there holds ye to it stiffly. He’s no more
+afraid than the isle fort at Cattegat, put there to fight the Baltic
+with storm-lashed guns, on which the sea-salt cakes!
+
+4TH NANTUCKET SAILOR. He has his orders, mind ye that. I heard old Ahab
+tell him he must always kill a squall, something as they burst a
+waterspout with a pistol—fire your ship right into it!
+
+ENGLISH SAILOR. Blood! but that old man’s a grand old cove! We are the
+lads to hunt him up his whale!
+
+ALL. Aye! aye!
+
+OLD MANX SAILOR. How the three pines shake! Pines are the hardest sort
+of tree to live when shifted to any other soil, and here there’s none
+but the crew’s cursed clay. Steady, helmsman! steady. This is the sort
+of weather when brave hearts snap ashore, and keeled hulls split at
+sea. Our captain has his birthmark; look yonder, boys, there’s another
+in the sky—lurid-like, ye see, all else pitch black.
+
+DAGGOO. What of that? Who’s afraid of black’s afraid of me! I’m
+quarried out of it!
+
+SPANISH SAILOR. (_Aside_.) He wants to bully, ah!—the old grudge makes
+me touchy (_Advancing_.) Aye, harpooneer, thy race is the undeniable
+dark side of mankind—devilish dark at that. No offence.
+
+DAGGOO (_grimly_). None.
+
+ST. JAGO’S SAILOR. That Spaniard’s mad or drunk. But that can’t be, or
+else in his one case our old Mogul’s fire-waters are somewhat long in
+working.
+
+5TH NANTUCKET SAILOR. What’s that I saw—lightning? Yes.
+
+SPANISH SAILOR. No; Daggoo showing his teeth.
+
+DAGGOO (_springing_). Swallow thine, mannikin! White skin, white liver!
+
+SPANISH SAILOR (_meeting him_). Knife thee heartily! big frame, small
+spirit!
+
+ALL. A row! a row! a row!
+
+TASHTEGO (_with a whiff_). A row a’low, and a row aloft—Gods and
+men—both brawlers! Humph!
+
+BELFAST SAILOR. A row! arrah a row! The Virgin be blessed, a row!
+Plunge in with ye!
+
+ENGLISH SAILOR. Fair play! Snatch the Spaniard’s knife! A ring, a ring!
+
+OLD MANX SAILOR. Ready formed. There! the ringed horizon. In that ring
+Cain struck Abel. Sweet work, right work! No? Why then, God, mad’st
+thou the ring?
+
+MATE’S VOICE FROM THE QUARTER-DECK. Hands by the halyards! in
+top-gallant sails! Stand by to reef topsails!
+
+ALL. The squall! the squall! jump, my jollies! (_They scatter_.)
+
+PIP (_shrinking under the windlass_). Jollies? Lord help such jollies!
+Crish, crash! there goes the jib-stay! Blang-whang! God! Duck lower,
+Pip, here comes the royal yard! It’s worse than being in the whirled
+woods, the last day of the year! Who’d go climbing after chestnuts now?
+But there they go, all cursing, and here I don’t. Fine prospects to
+’em; they’re on the road to heaven. Hold on hard! Jimmini, what a
+squall! But those chaps there are worse yet—they are your white
+squalls, they. White squalls? white whale, shirr! shirr! Here have I
+heard all their chat just now, and the white whale—shirr! shirr!—but
+spoken of once! and only this evening—it makes me jingle all over like
+my tambourine—that anaconda of an old man swore ’em in to hunt him! Oh,
+thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on
+this small black boy down here; preserve him from all men that have no
+bowels to feel fear!
+
+
+CHAPTER 41. Moby Dick.
+
+I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest;
+my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more
+did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A
+wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab’s quenchless feud
+seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that murderous
+monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of
+violence and revenge.
+
+For some time past, though at intervals only, the unaccompanied,
+secluded White Whale had haunted those uncivilized seas mostly
+frequented by the Sperm Whale fishermen. But not all of them knew of
+his existence; only a few of them, comparatively, had knowingly seen
+him; while the number who as yet had actually and knowingly given
+battle to him, was small indeed. For, owing to the large number of
+whale-cruisers; the disorderly way they were sprinkled over the entire
+watery circumference, many of them adventurously pushing their quest
+along solitary latitudes, so as seldom or never for a whole twelvemonth
+or more on a stretch, to encounter a single news-telling sail of any
+sort; the inordinate length of each separate voyage; the irregularity
+of the times of sailing from home; all these, with other circumstances,
+direct and indirect, long obstructed the spread through the whole
+world-wide whaling-fleet of the special individualizing tidings
+concerning Moby Dick. It was hardly to be doubted, that several vessels
+reported to have encountered, at such or such a time, or on such or
+such a meridian, a Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude and malignity,
+which whale, after doing great mischief to his assailants, had
+completely escaped them; to some minds it was not an unfair
+presumption, I say, that the whale in question must have been no other
+than Moby Dick. Yet as of late the Sperm Whale fishery had been marked
+by various and not unfrequent instances of great ferocity, cunning, and
+malice in the monster attacked; therefore it was, that those who by
+accident ignorantly gave battle to Moby Dick; such hunters, perhaps,
+for the most part, were content to ascribe the peculiar terror he bred,
+more, as it were, to the perils of the Sperm Whale fishery at large,
+than to the individual cause. In that way, mostly, the disastrous
+encounter between Ahab and the whale had hitherto been popularly
+regarded.
+
+And as for those who, previously hearing of the White Whale, by chance
+caught sight of him; in the beginning of the thing they had every one
+of them, almost, as boldly and fearlessly lowered for him, as for any
+other whale of that species. But at length, such calamities did ensue
+in these assaults—not restricted to sprained wrists and ankles, broken
+limbs, or devouring amputations—but fatal to the last degree of
+fatality; those repeated disastrous repulses, all accumulating and
+piling their terrors upon Moby Dick; those things had gone far to shake
+the fortitude of many brave hunters, to whom the story of the White
+Whale had eventually come.
+
+Nor did wild rumors of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and still the more
+horrify the true histories of these deadly encounters. For not only do
+fabulous rumors naturally grow out of the very body of all surprising
+terrible events,—as the smitten tree gives birth to its fungi; but, in
+maritime life, far more than in that of terra firma, wild rumors
+abound, wherever there is any adequate reality for them to cling to.
+And as the sea surpasses the land in this matter, so the whale fishery
+surpasses every other sort of maritime life, in the wonderfulness and
+fearfulness of the rumors which sometimes circulate there. For not only
+are whalemen as a body unexempt from that ignorance and
+superstitiousness hereditary to all sailors; but of all sailors, they
+are by all odds the most directly brought into contact with whatever is
+appallingly astonishing in the sea; face to face they not only eye its
+greatest marvels, but, hand to jaw, give battle to them. Alone, in such
+remotest waters, that though you sailed a thousand miles, and passed a
+thousand shores, you would not come to any chiseled hearth-stone, or
+aught hospitable beneath that part of the sun; in such latitudes and
+longitudes, pursuing too such a calling as he does, the whaleman is
+wrapped by influences all tending to make his fancy pregnant with many
+a mighty birth.
+
+No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit over
+the widest watery spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Whale did in
+the end incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints, and
+half-formed fœtal suggestions of supernatural agencies, which
+eventually invested Moby Dick with new terrors unborrowed from anything
+that visibly appears. So that in many cases such a panic did he finally
+strike, that few who by those rumors, at least, had heard of the White
+Whale, few of those hunters were willing to encounter the perils of his
+jaw.
+
+But there were still other and more vital practical influences at work.
+Not even at the present day has the original prestige of the Sperm
+Whale, as fearfully distinguished from all other species of the
+leviathan, died out of the minds of the whalemen as a body. There are
+those this day among them, who, though intelligent and courageous
+enough in offering battle to the Greenland or Right whale, would
+perhaps—either from professional inexperience, or incompetency, or
+timidity, decline a contest with the Sperm Whale; at any rate, there
+are plenty of whalemen, especially among those whaling nations not
+sailing under the American flag, who have never hostilely encountered
+the Sperm Whale, but whose sole knowledge of the leviathan is
+restricted to the ignoble monster primitively pursued in the North;
+seated on their hatches, these men will hearken with a childish
+fireside interest and awe, to the wild, strange tales of Southern
+whaling. Nor is the pre-eminent tremendousness of the great Sperm Whale
+anywhere more feelingly comprehended, than on board of those prows
+which stem him.
+
+And as if the now tested reality of his might had in former legendary
+times thrown its shadow before it; we find some book
+naturalists—Olassen and Povelson—declaring the Sperm Whale not only to
+be a consternation to every other creature in the sea, but also to be
+so incredibly ferocious as continually to be athirst for human blood.
+Nor even down to so late a time as Cuvier’s, were these or almost
+similar impressions effaced. For in his Natural History, the Baron
+himself affirms that at sight of the Sperm Whale, all fish (sharks
+included) are “struck with the most lively terrors,” and “often in the
+precipitancy of their flight dash themselves against the rocks with
+such violence as to cause instantaneous death.” And however the general
+experiences in the fishery may amend such reports as these; yet in
+their full terribleness, even to the bloodthirsty item of Povelson, the
+superstitious belief in them is, in some vicissitudes of their
+vocation, revived in the minds of the hunters.
+
+So that overawed by the rumors and portents concerning him, not a few
+of the fishermen recalled, in reference to Moby Dick, the earlier days
+of the Sperm Whale fishery, when it was oftentimes hard to induce long
+practised Right whalemen to embark in the perils of this new and daring
+warfare; such men protesting that although other leviathans might be
+hopefully pursued, yet to chase and point lance at such an apparition
+as the Sperm Whale was not for mortal man. That to attempt it, would be
+inevitably to be torn into a quick eternity. On this head, there are
+some remarkable documents that may be consulted.
+
+Nevertheless, some there were, who even in the face of these things
+were ready to give chase to Moby Dick; and a still greater number who,
+chancing only to hear of him distantly and vaguely, without the
+specific details of any certain calamity, and without superstitious
+accompaniments, were sufficiently hardy not to flee from the battle if
+offered.
+
+One of the wild suggestions referred to, as at last coming to be linked
+with the White Whale in the minds of the superstitiously inclined, was
+the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous; that he had
+actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same
+instant of time.
+
+Nor, credulous as such minds must have been, was this conceit
+altogether without some faint show of superstitious probability. For as
+the secrets of the currents in the seas have never yet been divulged,
+even to the most erudite research; so the hidden ways of the Sperm
+Whale when beneath the surface remain, in great part, unaccountable to
+his pursuers; and from time to time have originated the most curious
+and contradictory speculations regarding them, especially concerning
+the mystic modes whereby, after sounding to a great depth, he
+transports himself with such vast swiftness to the most widely distant
+points.
+
+It is a thing well known to both American and English whale-ships, and
+as well a thing placed upon authoritative record years ago by Scoresby,
+that some whales have been captured far north in the Pacific, in whose
+bodies have been found the barbs of harpoons darted in the Greenland
+seas. Nor is it to be gainsaid, that in some of these instances it has
+been declared that the interval of time between the two assaults could
+not have exceeded very many days. Hence, by inference, it has been
+believed by some whalemen, that the Nor’ West Passage, so long a
+problem to man, was never a problem to the whale. So that here, in the
+real living experience of living men, the prodigies related in old
+times of the inland Strello mountain in Portugal (near whose top there
+was said to be a lake in which the wrecks of ships floated up to the
+surface); and that still more wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain
+near Syracuse (whose waters were believed to have come from the Holy
+Land by an underground passage); these fabulous narrations are almost
+fully equalled by the realities of the whalemen.
+
+Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these; and
+knowing that after repeated, intrepid assaults, the White Whale had
+escaped alive; it cannot be much matter of surprise that some whalemen
+should go still further in their superstitions; declaring Moby Dick not
+only ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in
+time); that though groves of spears should be planted in his flanks, he
+would still swim away unharmed; or if indeed he should ever be made to
+spout thick blood, such a sight would be but a ghastly deception; for
+again in unensanguined billows hundreds of leagues away, his unsullied
+jet would once more be seen.
+
+But even stripped of these supernatural surmisings, there was enough in
+the earthly make and incontestable character of the monster to strike
+the imagination with unwonted power. For, it was not so much his
+uncommon bulk that so much distinguished him from other sperm whales,
+but, as was elsewhere thrown out—a peculiar snow-white wrinkled
+forehead, and a high, pyramidical white hump. These were his prominent
+features; the tokens whereby, even in the limitless, uncharted seas, he
+revealed his identity, at a long distance, to those who knew him.
+
+The rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled with the
+same shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had gained his distinctive
+appellation of the White Whale; a name, indeed, literally justified by
+his vivid aspect, when seen gliding at high noon through a dark blue
+sea, leaving a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all spangled with golden
+gleamings.
+
+Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable hue, nor yet his
+deformed lower jaw, that so much invested the whale with natural
+terror, as that unexampled, intelligent malignity which, according to
+specific accounts, he had over and over again evinced in his assaults.
+More than all, his treacherous retreats struck more of dismay than
+perhaps aught else. For, when swimming before his exulting pursuers,
+with every apparent symptom of alarm, he had several times been known
+to turn round suddenly, and, bearing down upon them, either stave their
+boats to splinters, or drive them back in consternation to their ship.
+
+Already several fatalities had attended his chase. But though similar
+disasters, however little bruited ashore, were by no means unusual in
+the fishery; yet, in most instances, such seemed the White Whale’s
+infernal aforethought of ferocity, that every dismembering or death
+that he caused, was not wholly regarded as having been inflicted by an
+unintelligent agent.
+
+Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of
+his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of chewed
+boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the
+white curds of the whale’s direful wrath into the serene, exasperating
+sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal.
+
+His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the
+eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had
+dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly
+seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the
+whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping
+his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away
+Ahab’s leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned Turk,
+no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming
+malice. Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that
+almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness
+against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness
+he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but
+all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam
+before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious
+agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left
+living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity
+which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern
+Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of
+the east reverenced in their statue devil;—Ahab did not fall down and
+worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the
+abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All
+that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things;
+all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the
+brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy
+Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby
+Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general
+rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if
+his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.
+
+It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise at
+the precise time of his bodily dismemberment. Then, in darting at the
+monster, knife in hand, he had but given loose to a sudden, passionate,
+corporal animosity; and when he received the stroke that tore him, he
+probably but felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but nothing more.
+Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards home, and for long
+months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in
+one hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling Patagonian
+Cape; then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one
+another; and so interfusing, made him mad. That it was only then, on
+the homeward voyage, after the encounter, that the final monomania
+seized him, seems all but certain from the fact that, at intervals
+during the passage, he was a raving lunatic; and, though unlimbed of a
+leg, yet such vital strength yet lurked in his Egyptian chest, and was
+moreover intensified by his delirium, that his mates were forced to
+lace him fast, even there, as he sailed, raving in his hammock. In a
+strait-jacket, he swung to the mad rockings of the gales. And, when
+running into more sufferable latitudes, the ship, with mild stun’sails
+spread, floated across the tranquil tropics, and, to all appearances,
+the old man’s delirium seemed left behind him with the Cape Horn
+swells, and he came forth from his dark den into the blessed light and
+air; even then, when he bore that firm, collected front, however pale,
+and issued his calm orders once again; and his mates thanked God the
+direful madness was now gone; even then, Ahab, in his hidden self,
+raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing.
+When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some
+still subtler form. Ahab’s full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly
+contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows
+narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But, as in his
+narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab’s broad madness had been
+left behind; so in that broad madness, not one jot of his great natural
+intellect had perished. That before living agent, now became the living
+instrument. If such a furious trope may stand, his special lunacy
+stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its
+concentred cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from having lost
+his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a thousand fold
+more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one
+reasonable object.
+
+This is much; yet Ahab’s larger, darker, deeper part remains unhinted.
+But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound. Winding
+far down from within the very heart of this spiked Hotel de Cluny where
+we here stand—however grand and wonderful, now quit it;—and take your
+way, ye nobler, sadder souls, to those vast Roman halls of Thermes;
+where far beneath the fantastic towers of man’s upper earth, his root
+of grandeur, his whole awful essence sits in bearded state; an antique
+buried beneath antiquities, and throned on torsoes! So with a broken
+throne, the great gods mock that captive king; so like a Caryatid, he
+patient sits, upholding on his frozen brow the piled entablatures of
+ages. Wind ye down there, ye prouder, sadder souls! question that
+proud, sad king! A family likeness! aye, he did beget ye, ye young
+exiled royalties; and from your grim sire only will the old
+State-secret come.
+
+Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely: all my means
+are sane, my motive and my object mad. Yet without power to kill, or
+change, or shun the fact; he likewise knew that to mankind he did long
+dissemble; in some sort, did still. But that thing of his dissembling
+was only subject to his perceptibility, not to his will determinate.
+Nevertheless, so well did he succeed in that dissembling, that when
+with ivory leg he stepped ashore at last, no Nantucketer thought him
+otherwise than but naturally grieved, and that to the quick, with the
+terrible casualty which had overtaken him.
+
+The report of his undeniable delirium at sea was likewise popularly
+ascribed to a kindred cause. And so too, all the added moodiness which
+always afterwards, to the very day of sailing in the Pequod on the
+present voyage, sat brooding on his brow. Nor is it so very unlikely,
+that far from distrusting his fitness for another whaling voyage, on
+account of such dark symptoms, the calculating people of that prudent
+isle were inclined to harbor the conceit, that for those very reasons
+he was all the better qualified and set on edge, for a pursuit so full
+of rage and wildness as the bloody hunt of whales. Gnawed within and
+scorched without, with the infixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable
+idea; such an one, could he be found, would seem the very man to dart
+his iron and lift his lance against the most appalling of all brutes.
+Or, if for any reason thought to be corporeally incapacitated for that,
+yet such an one would seem superlatively competent to cheer and howl on
+his underlings to the attack. But be all this as it may, certain it is,
+that with the mad secret of his unabated rage bolted up and keyed in
+him, Ahab had purposely sailed upon the present voyage with the one
+only and all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any one
+of his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking
+in him then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls have
+wrenched the ship from such a fiendish man! They were bent on
+profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from the
+mint. He was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural
+revenge.
+
+Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses
+a Job’s whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made
+up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals—morally enfeebled
+also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in
+Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in
+Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a crew, so
+officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality
+to help him to his monomaniac revenge. How it was that they so
+aboundingly responded to the old man’s ire—by what evil magic their
+souls were possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the
+White Whale as much their insufferable foe as his; how all this came to
+be—what the White Whale was to them, or how to their unconscious
+understandings, also, in some dim, unsuspected way, he might have
+seemed the gliding great demon of the seas of life,—all this to
+explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go. The subterranean
+miner that works in us all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft by
+the ever shifting, muffled sound of his pick? Who does not feel the
+irresistible arm drag? What skiff in tow of a seventy-four can stand
+still? For one, I gave myself up to the abandonment of the time and the
+place; but while yet all a-rush to encounter the whale, could see
+naught in that brute but the deadliest ill.
+
+
+CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of the Whale.
+
+What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he
+was to me, as yet remains unsaid.
+
+Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which
+could not but occasionally awaken in any man’s soul some alarm, there
+was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him,
+which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest;
+and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost
+despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of
+the whale that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to
+explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I
+must, else all these chapters might be naught.
+
+Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty,
+as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles,
+japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way
+recognised a certain royal preeminence in this hue; even the barbaric,
+grand old kings of Pegu placing the title “Lord of the White Elephants”
+above all their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the
+modern kings of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the
+royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a
+snow-white charger; and the great Austrian Empire, Cæsarian, heir to
+overlording Rome, having for the imperial colour the same imperial hue;
+and though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself,
+giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; and
+though, besides, all this, whiteness has been even made significant of
+gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and
+though in other mortal sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is
+made the emblem of many touching, noble things—the innocence of brides,
+the benignity of age; though among the Red Men of America the giving of
+the white belt of wampum was the deepest pledge of honor; though in
+many climes, whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of
+the Judge, and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn
+by milk-white steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of the most
+august religions it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness
+and power; by the Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame
+being held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies,
+Great Jove himself being made incarnate in a snow-white bull; and
+though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred
+White Dog was by far the holiest festival of their theology, that
+spotless, faithful creature being held the purest envoy they could send
+to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of their own fidelity; and
+though directly from the Latin word for white, all Christian priests
+derive the name of one part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic,
+worn beneath the cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish
+faith, white is specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of
+our Lord; though in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to
+the redeemed, and the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white
+before the great white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there
+white like wool; yet for all these accumulated associations, with
+whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an
+elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more
+of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.
+
+This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when
+divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object
+terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds.
+Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the
+tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the
+transcendent horrors they are? That ghastly whiteness it is which
+imparts such an abhorrent mildness, even more loathsome than terrific,
+to the dumb gloating of their aspect. So that not the fierce-fanged
+tiger in his heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded
+bear or shark.*
+
+*With reference to the Polar bear, it may possibly be urged by him who
+would fain go still deeper into this matter, that it is not the
+whiteness, separately regarded, which heightens the intolerable
+hideousness of that brute; for, analysed, that heightened hideousness,
+it might be said, only rises from the circumstance, that the
+irresponsible ferociousness of the creature stands invested in the
+fleece of celestial innocence and love; and hence, by bringing together
+two such opposite emotions in our minds, the Polar bear frightens us
+with so unnatural a contrast. But even assuming all this to be true;
+yet, were it not for the whiteness, you would not have that intensified
+terror.
+
+As for the white shark, the white gliding ghostliness of repose in that
+creature, when beheld in his ordinary moods, strangely tallies with the
+same quality in the Polar quadruped. This peculiarity is most vividly
+hit by the French in the name they bestow upon that fish. The Romish
+mass for the dead begins with “Requiem eternam” (eternal rest), whence
+_Requiem_ denominating the mass itself, and any other funeral music.
+Now, in allusion to the white, silent stillness of death in this shark,
+and the mild deadliness of his habits, the French call him _Requin_.
+
+Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those clouds of spiritual
+wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all
+imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw that spell; but God’s great,
+unflattering laureate, Nature.*
+
+*I remember the first albatross I ever saw. It was during a prolonged
+gale, in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas. From my forenoon watch
+below, I ascended to the overclouded deck; and there, dashed upon the
+main hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and
+with a hooked, Roman bill sublime. At intervals, it arched forth its
+vast archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark. Wondrous
+flutterings and throbbings shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered
+cries, as some king’s ghost in supernatural distress. Through its
+inexpressible, strange eyes, methought I peeped to secrets which took
+hold of God. As Abraham before the angels, I bowed myself; the white
+thing was so white, its wings so wide, and in those for ever exiled
+waters, I had lost the miserable warping memories of traditions and of
+towns. Long I gazed at that prodigy of plumage. I cannot tell, can only
+hint, the things that darted through me then. But at last I awoke; and
+turning, asked a sailor what bird was this. A goney, he replied. Goney!
+never had heard that name before; is it conceivable that this glorious
+thing is utterly unknown to men ashore! never! But some time after, I
+learned that goney was some seaman’s name for albatross. So that by no
+possibility could Coleridge’s wild Rhyme have had aught to do with
+those mystical impressions which were mine, when I saw that bird upon
+our deck. For neither had I then read the Rhyme, nor knew the bird to
+be an albatross. Yet, in saying this, I do but indirectly burnish a
+little brighter the noble merit of the poem and the poet.
+
+I assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird
+chiefly lurks the secret of the spell; a truth the more evinced in
+this, that by a solecism of terms there are birds called grey
+albatrosses; and these I have frequently seen, but never with such
+emotions as when I beheld the Antarctic fowl.
+
+But how had the mystic thing been caught? Whisper it not, and I will
+tell; with a treacherous hook and line, as the fowl floated on the sea.
+At last the Captain made a postman of it; tying a lettered, leathern
+tally round its neck, with the ship’s time and place; and then letting
+it escape. But I doubt not, that leathern tally, meant for man, was
+taken off in Heaven, when the white fowl flew to join the wing-folding,
+the invoking, and adoring cherubim!
+
+Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that of the
+White Steed of the Prairies; a magnificent milk-white charger,
+large-eyed, small-headed, bluff-chested, and with the dignity of a
+thousand monarchs in his lofty, overscorning carriage. He was the
+elected Xerxes of vast herds of wild horses, whose pastures in those
+days were only fenced by the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghanies. At
+their flaming head he westward trooped it like that chosen star which
+every evening leads on the hosts of light. The flashing cascade of his
+mane, the curving comet of his tail, invested him with housings more
+resplendent than gold and silver-beaters could have furnished him. A
+most imperial and archangelical apparition of that unfallen, western
+world, which to the eyes of the old trappers and hunters revived the
+glories of those primeval times when Adam walked majestic as a god,
+bluff-browed and fearless as this mighty steed. Whether marching amid
+his aides and marshals in the van of countless cohorts that endlessly
+streamed it over the plains, like an Ohio; or whether with his
+circumambient subjects browsing all around at the horizon, the White
+Steed gallopingly reviewed them with warm nostrils reddening through
+his cool milkiness; in whatever aspect he presented himself, always to
+the bravest Indians he was the object of trembling reverence and awe.
+Nor can it be questioned from what stands on legendary record of this
+noble horse, that it was his spiritual whiteness chiefly, which so
+clothed him with divineness; and that this divineness had that in it
+which, though commanding worship, at the same time enforced a certain
+nameless terror.
+
+But there are other instances where this whiteness loses all that
+accessory and strange glory which invests it in the White Steed and
+Albatross.
+
+What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks
+the eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin! It is
+that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed by the name he
+bears. The Albino is as well made as other men—has no substantive
+deformity—and yet this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes him
+more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion. Why should this be
+so?
+
+Nor, in quite other aspects, does Nature in her least palpable but not
+the less malicious agencies, fail to enlist among her forces this
+crowning attribute of the terrible. From its snowy aspect, the
+gauntleted ghost of the Southern Seas has been denominated the White
+Squall. Nor, in some historic instances, has the art of human malice
+omitted so potent an auxiliary. How wildly it heightens the effect of
+that passage in Froissart, when, masked in the snowy symbol of their
+faction, the desperate White Hoods of Ghent murder their bailiff in the
+market-place!
+
+Nor, in some things, does the common, hereditary experience of all
+mankind fail to bear witness to the supernaturalism of this hue. It
+cannot well be doubted, that the one visible quality in the aspect of
+the dead which most appals the gazer, is the marble pallor lingering
+there; as if indeed that pallor were as much like the badge of
+consternation in the other world, as of mortal trepidation here. And
+from that pallor of the dead, we borrow the expressive hue of the
+shroud in which we wrap them. Nor even in our superstitions do we fail
+to throw the same snowy mantle round our phantoms; all ghosts rising in
+a milk-white fog—Yea, while these terrors seize us, let us add, that
+even the king of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on
+his pallid horse.
+
+Therefore, in his other moods, symbolize whatever grand or gracious
+thing he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest
+idealized significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul.
+
+But though without dissent this point be fixed, how is mortal man to
+account for it? To analyse it, would seem impossible. Can we, then, by
+the citation of some of those instances wherein this thing of
+whiteness—though for the time either wholly or in great part stripped
+of all direct associations calculated to impart to it aught fearful,
+but nevertheless, is found to exert over us the same sorcery, however
+modified;—can we thus hope to light upon some chance clue to conduct us
+to the hidden cause we seek?
+
+Let us try. But in a matter like this, subtlety appeals to subtlety,
+and without imagination no man can follow another into these halls. And
+though, doubtless, some at least of the imaginative impressions about
+to be presented may have been shared by most men, yet few perhaps were
+entirely conscious of them at the time, and therefore may not be able
+to recall them now.
+
+Why to the man of untutored ideality, who happens to be but loosely
+acquainted with the peculiar character of the day, does the bare
+mention of Whitsuntide marshal in the fancy such long, dreary,
+speechless processions of slow-pacing pilgrims, down-cast and hooded
+with new-fallen snow? Or, to the unread, unsophisticated Protestant of
+the Middle American States, why does the passing mention of a White
+Friar or a White Nun, evoke such an eyeless statue in the soul?
+
+Or what is there apart from the traditions of dungeoned warriors and
+kings (which will not wholly account for it) that makes the White Tower
+of London tell so much more strongly on the imagination of an
+untravelled American, than those other storied structures, its
+neighbors—the Byward Tower, or even the Bloody? And those sublimer
+towers, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, whence, in peculiar
+moods, comes that gigantic ghostliness over the soul at the bare
+mention of that name, while the thought of Virginia’s Blue Ridge is
+full of a soft, dewy, distant dreaminess? Or why, irrespective of all
+latitudes and longitudes, does the name of the White Sea exert such a
+spectralness over the fancy, while that of the Yellow Sea lulls us with
+mortal thoughts of long lacquered mild afternoons on the waves,
+followed by the gaudiest and yet sleepiest of sunsets? Or, to choose a
+wholly unsubstantial instance, purely addressed to the fancy, why, in
+reading the old fairy tales of Central Europe, does “the tall pale man”
+of the Hartz forests, whose changeless pallor unrustlingly glides
+through the green of the groves—why is this phantom more terrible than
+all the whooping imps of the Blocksburg?
+
+Nor is it, altogether, the remembrance of her cathedral-toppling
+earthquakes; nor the stampedoes of her frantic seas; nor the
+tearlessness of arid skies that never rain; nor the sight of her wide
+field of leaning spires, wrenched cope-stones, and crosses all adroop
+(like canted yards of anchored fleets); and her suburban avenues of
+house-walls lying over upon each other, as a tossed pack of cards;—it
+is not these things alone which make tearless Lima, the strangest,
+saddest city thou can’st see. For Lima has taken the white veil; and
+there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro,
+this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever new; admits not the cheerful
+greenness of complete decay; spreads over her broken ramparts the rigid
+pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its own distortions.
+
+I know that, to the common apprehension, this phenomenon of whiteness
+is not confessed to be the prime agent in exaggerating the terror of
+objects otherwise terrible; nor to the unimaginative mind is there
+aught of terror in those appearances whose awfulness to another mind
+almost solely consists in this one phenomenon, especially when
+exhibited under any form at all approaching to muteness or
+universality. What I mean by these two statements may perhaps be
+respectively elucidated by the following examples.
+
+First: The mariner, when drawing nigh the coasts of foreign lands, if
+by night he hear the roar of breakers, starts to vigilance, and feels
+just enough of trepidation to sharpen all his faculties; but under
+precisely similar circumstances, let him be called from his hammock to
+view his ship sailing through a midnight sea of milky whiteness—as if
+from encircling headlands shoals of combed white bears were swimming
+round him, then he feels a silent, superstitious dread; the shrouded
+phantom of the whitened waters is horrible to him as a real ghost; in
+vain the lead assures him he is still off soundings; heart and helm
+they both go down; he never rests till blue water is under him again.
+Yet where is the mariner who will tell thee, “Sir, it was not so much
+the fear of striking hidden rocks, as the fear of that hideous
+whiteness that so stirred me?”
+
+Second: To the native Indian of Peru, the continual sight of the
+snow-howdahed Andes conveys naught of dread, except, perhaps, in the
+mere fancying of the eternal frosted desolateness reigning at such vast
+altitudes, and the natural conceit of what a fearfulness it would be to
+lose oneself in such inhuman solitudes. Much the same is it with the
+backwoodsman of the West, who with comparative indifference views an
+unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow, no shadow of tree or twig
+to break the fixed trance of whiteness. Not so the sailor, beholding
+the scenery of the Antarctic seas; where at times, by some infernal
+trick of legerdemain in the powers of frost and air, he, shivering and
+half shipwrecked, instead of rainbows speaking hope and solace to his
+misery, views what seems a boundless churchyard grinning upon him with
+its lean ice monuments and splintered crosses.
+
+But thou sayest, methinks that white-lead chapter about whiteness is
+but a white flag hung out from a craven soul; thou surrenderest to a
+hypo, Ishmael.
+
+Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled in some peaceful valley of
+Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey—why is it that upon the
+sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo robe behind him, so that
+he cannot even see it, but only smells its wild animal muskiness—why
+will he start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the ground in
+phrensies of affright? There is no remembrance in him of any gorings of
+wild creatures in his green northern home, so that the strange
+muskiness he smells cannot recall to him anything associated with the
+experience of former perils; for what knows he, this New England colt,
+of the black bisons of distant Oregon?
+
+No: but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the instinct of the
+knowledge of the demonism in the world. Though thousands of miles from
+Oregon, still when he smells that savage musk, the rending, goring
+bison herds are as present as to the deserted wild foal of the
+prairies, which this instant they may be trampling into dust.
+
+Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak rustlings of
+the festooned frosts of mountains; the desolate shiftings of the
+windrowed snows of prairies; all these, to Ishmael, are as the shaking
+of that buffalo robe to the frightened colt!
+
+Though neither knows where lie the nameless things of which the mystic
+sign gives forth such hints; yet with me, as with the colt, somewhere
+those things must exist. Though in many of its aspects this visible
+world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in
+fright.
+
+But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and
+learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange
+and far more portentous—why, as we have seen, it is at once the most
+meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the
+Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent
+in things the most appalling to mankind.
+
+Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids
+and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the
+thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky
+way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as
+the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all
+colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness,
+full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colourless, all-colour
+of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory
+of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately
+or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea,
+and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of
+young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent
+in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified
+Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover
+nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and
+consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her
+hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless
+in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all
+objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all
+this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful
+travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring
+glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at
+the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And
+of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at
+the fiery hunt?
+
+
+CHAPTER 43. Hark!
+
+“HIST! Did you hear that noise, Cabaco?”
+
+It was the middle-watch: a fair moonlight; the seamen were standing in
+a cordon, extending from one of the fresh-water butts in the waist, to
+the scuttle-butt near the taffrail. In this manner, they passed the
+buckets to fill the scuttle-butt. Standing, for the most part, on the
+hallowed precincts of the quarter-deck, they were careful not to speak
+or rustle their feet. From hand to hand, the buckets went in the
+deepest silence, only broken by the occasional flap of a sail, and the
+steady hum of the unceasingly advancing keel.
+
+It was in the midst of this repose, that Archy, one of the cordon,
+whose post was near the after-hatches, whispered to his neighbor, a
+Cholo, the words above.
+
+“Hist! did you hear that noise, Cabaco?”
+
+“Take the bucket, will ye, Archy? what noise d’ye mean?”
+
+“There it is again—under the hatches—don’t you hear it—a cough—it
+sounded like a cough.”
+
+“Cough be damned! Pass along that return bucket.”
+
+“There again—there it is!—it sounds like two or three sleepers turning
+over, now!”
+
+“Caramba! have done, shipmate, will ye? It’s the three soaked biscuits
+ye eat for supper turning over inside of ye—nothing else. Look to the
+bucket!”
+
+“Say what ye will, shipmate; I’ve sharp ears.”
+
+“Aye, you are the chap, ain’t ye, that heard the hum of the old
+Quakeress’s knitting-needles fifty miles at sea from Nantucket; you’re
+the chap.”
+
+“Grin away; we’ll see what turns up. Hark ye, Cabaco, there is somebody
+down in the after-hold that has not yet been seen on deck; and I
+suspect our old Mogul knows something of it too. I heard Stubb tell
+Flask, one morning watch, that there was something of that sort in the
+wind.”
+
+“Tish! the bucket!”
+
+
+CHAPTER 44. The Chart.
+
+Had you followed Captain Ahab down into his cabin after the squall that
+took place on the night succeeding that wild ratification of his
+purpose with his crew, you would have seen him go to a locker in the
+transom, and bringing out a large wrinkled roll of yellowish sea
+charts, spread them before him on his screwed-down table. Then seating
+himself before it, you would have seen him intently study the various
+lines and shadings which there met his eye; and with slow but steady
+pencil trace additional courses over spaces that before were blank. At
+intervals, he would refer to piles of old log-books beside him, wherein
+were set down the seasons and places in which, on various former
+voyages of various ships, sperm whales had been captured or seen.
+
+While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in chains over his
+head, continually rocked with the motion of the ship, and for ever
+threw shifting gleams and shadows of lines upon his wrinkled brow, till
+it almost seemed that while he himself was marking out lines and
+courses on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also tracing
+lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead.
+
+But it was not this night in particular that, in the solitude of his
+cabin, Ahab thus pondered over his charts. Almost every night they were
+brought out; almost every night some pencil marks were effaced, and
+others were substituted. For with the charts of all four oceans before
+him, Ahab was threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a view to
+the more certain accomplishment of that monomaniac thought of his soul.
+
+Now, to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans,
+it might seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek out one solitary
+creature in the unhooped oceans of this planet. But not so did it seem
+to Ahab, who knew the sets of all tides and currents; and thereby
+calculating the driftings of the sperm whale’s food; and, also, calling
+to mind the regular, ascertained seasons for hunting him in particular
+latitudes; could arrive at reasonable surmises, almost approaching to
+certainties, concerning the timeliest day to be upon this or that
+ground in search of his prey.
+
+So assured, indeed, is the fact concerning the periodicalness of the
+sperm whale’s resorting to given waters, that many hunters believe
+that, could he be closely observed and studied throughout the world;
+were the logs for one voyage of the entire whale fleet carefully
+collated, then the migrations of the sperm whale would be found to
+correspond in invariability to those of the herring-shoals or the
+flights of swallows. On this hint, attempts have been made to construct
+elaborate migratory charts of the sperm whale.*
+
+
+  *Since the above was written, the statement is happily borne out by
+  an official circular, issued by Lieutenant Maury, of the National
+  Observatory, Washington, April 16th, 1851. By that circular, it
+  appears that precisely such a chart is in course of completion; and
+  portions of it are presented in the circular. “This chart divides the
+  ocean into districts of five degrees of latitude by five degrees of
+  longitude; perpendicularly through each of which districts are twelve
+  columns for the twelve months; and horizontally through each of which
+  districts are three lines; one to show the number of days that have
+  been spent in each month in every district, and the two others to
+  show the number of days in which whales, sperm or right, have been
+  seen.”
+
+
+
+
+Besides, when making a passage from one feeding-ground to another, the
+sperm whales, guided by some infallible instinct—say, rather, secret
+intelligence from the Deity—mostly swim in _veins_, as they are called;
+continuing their way along a given ocean-line with such undeviating
+exactitude, that no ship ever sailed her course, by any chart, with one
+tithe of such marvellous precision. Though, in these cases, the
+direction taken by any one whale be straight as a surveyor’s parallel,
+and though the line of advance be strictly confined to its own
+unavoidable, straight wake, yet the arbitrary _vein_ in which at these
+times he is said to swim, generally embraces some few miles in width
+(more or less, as the vein is presumed to expand or contract); but
+never exceeds the visual sweep from the whale-ship’s mast-heads, when
+circumspectly gliding along this magic zone. The sum is, that at
+particular seasons within that breadth and along that path, migrating
+whales may with great confidence be looked for.
+
+And hence not only at substantiated times, upon well known separate
+feeding-grounds, could Ahab hope to encounter his prey; but in crossing
+the widest expanses of water between those grounds he could, by his
+art, so place and time himself on his way, as even then not to be
+wholly without prospect of a meeting.
+
+There was a circumstance which at first sight seemed to entangle his
+delirious but still methodical scheme. But not so in the reality,
+perhaps. Though the gregarious sperm whales have their regular seasons
+for particular grounds, yet in general you cannot conclude that the
+herds which haunted such and such a latitude or longitude this year,
+say, will turn out to be identically the same with those that were
+found there the preceding season; though there are peculiar and
+unquestionable instances where the contrary of this has proved true. In
+general, the same remark, only within a less wide limit, applies to the
+solitaries and hermits among the matured, aged sperm whales. So that
+though Moby Dick had in a former year been seen, for example, on what
+is called the Seychelle ground in the Indian ocean, or Volcano Bay on
+the Japanese Coast; yet it did not follow, that were the Pequod to
+visit either of those spots at any subsequent corresponding season, she
+would infallibly encounter him there. So, too, with some other feeding
+grounds, where he had at times revealed himself. But all these seemed
+only his casual stopping-places and ocean-inns, so to speak, not his
+places of prolonged abode. And where Ahab’s chances of accomplishing
+his object have hitherto been spoken of, allusion has only been made to
+whatever way-side, antecedent, extra prospects were his, ere a
+particular set time or place were attained, when all possibilities
+would become probabilities, and, as Ahab fondly thought, every
+possibility the next thing to a certainty. That particular set time and
+place were conjoined in the one technical phrase—the
+Season-on-the-Line. For there and then, for several consecutive years,
+Moby Dick had been periodically descried, lingering in those waters for
+awhile, as the sun, in its annual round, loiters for a predicted
+interval in any one sign of the Zodiac. There it was, too, that most of
+the deadly encounters with the white whale had taken place; there the
+waves were storied with his deeds; there also was that tragic spot
+where the monomaniac old man had found the awful motive to his
+vengeance. But in the cautious comprehensiveness and unloitering
+vigilance with which Ahab threw his brooding soul into this unfaltering
+hunt, he would not permit himself to rest all his hopes upon the one
+crowning fact above mentioned, however flattering it might be to those
+hopes; nor in the sleeplessness of his vow could he so tranquillize his
+unquiet heart as to postpone all intervening quest.
+
+Now, the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginning of the
+Season-on-the-Line. No possible endeavor then could enable her
+commander to make the great passage southwards, double Cape Horn, and
+then running down sixty degrees of latitude arrive in the equatorial
+Pacific in time to cruise there. Therefore, he must wait for the next
+ensuing season. Yet the premature hour of the Pequod’s sailing had,
+perhaps, been correctly selected by Ahab, with a view to this very
+complexion of things. Because, an interval of three hundred and
+sixty-five days and nights was before him; an interval which, instead
+of impatiently enduring ashore, he would spend in a miscellaneous hunt;
+if by chance the White Whale, spending his vacation in seas far remote
+from his periodical feeding-grounds, should turn up his wrinkled brow
+off the Persian Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay, or China Seas, or in any
+other waters haunted by his race. So that Monsoons, Pampas,
+Nor’-Westers, Harmattans, Trades; any wind but the Levanter and Simoon,
+might blow Moby Dick into the devious zig-zag world-circle of the
+Pequod’s circumnavigating wake.
+
+But granting all this; yet, regarded discreetly and coolly, seems it
+not but a mad idea, this; that in the broad boundless ocean, one
+solitary whale, even if encountered, should be thought capable of
+individual recognition from his hunter, even as a white-bearded Mufti
+in the thronged thoroughfares of Constantinople? Yes. For the peculiar
+snow-white brow of Moby Dick, and his snow-white hump, could not but be
+unmistakable. And have I not tallied the whale, Ahab would mutter to
+himself, as after poring over his charts till long after midnight he
+would throw himself back in reveries—tallied him, and shall he escape?
+His broad fins are bored, and scalloped out like a lost sheep’s ear!
+And here, his mad mind would run on in a breathless race; till a
+weariness and faintness of pondering came over him; and in the open air
+of the deck he would seek to recover his strength. Ah, God! what
+trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one
+unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes
+with his own bloody nails in his palms.
+
+Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably vivid
+dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts through
+the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies, and whirled them
+round and round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing
+of his life-spot became insufferable anguish; and when, as was
+sometimes the case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up
+from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked
+flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap
+down among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild
+cry would be heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would
+burst from his state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on
+fire. Yet these, perhaps, instead of being the unsuppressable symptoms
+of some latent weakness, or fright at his own resolve, were but the
+plainest tokens of its intensity. For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the
+scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the white whale; this Ahab
+that had gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused him to
+burst from it in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living
+principle or soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time dissociated
+from the characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its
+outer vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the
+scorching contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it
+was no longer an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless
+leagued with the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab’s
+case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme
+purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced
+itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent
+being of its own. Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the common
+vitality to which it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the
+unbidden and unfathered birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit that
+glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room,
+was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being,
+a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to colour, and
+therefore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts
+have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus
+makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that
+vulture the very creature he creates.
+
+
+CHAPTER 45. The Affidavit.
+
+So far as what there may be of a narrative in this book; and, indeed,
+as indirectly touching one or two very interesting and curious
+particulars in the habits of sperm whales, the foregoing chapter, in
+its earlier part, is as important a one as will be found in this
+volume; but the leading matter of it requires to be still further and
+more familiarly enlarged upon, in order to be adequately understood,
+and moreover to take away any incredulity which a profound ignorance of
+the entire subject may induce in some minds, as to the natural verity
+of the main points of this affair.
+
+I care not to perform this part of my task methodically; but shall be
+content to produce the desired impression by separate citations of
+items, practically or reliably known to me as a whaleman; and from
+these citations, I take it—the conclusion aimed at will naturally
+follow of itself.
+
+First: I have personally known three instances where a whale, after
+receiving a harpoon, has effected a complete escape; and, after an
+interval (in one instance of three years), has been again struck by the
+same hand, and slain; when the two irons, both marked by the same
+private cypher, have been taken from the body. In the instance where
+three years intervened between the flinging of the two harpoons; and I
+think it may have been something more than that; the man who darted
+them happening, in the interval, to go in a trading ship on a voyage to
+Africa, went ashore there, joined a discovery party, and penetrated far
+into the interior, where he travelled for a period of nearly two years,
+often endangered by serpents, savages, tigers, poisonous miasmas, with
+all the other common perils incident to wandering in the heart of
+unknown regions. Meanwhile, the whale he had struck must also have been
+on its travels; no doubt it had thrice circumnavigated the globe,
+brushing with its flanks all the coasts of Africa; but to no purpose.
+This man and this whale again came together, and the one vanquished the
+other. I say I, myself, have known three instances similar to this;
+that is in two of them I saw the whales struck; and, upon the second
+attack, saw the two irons with the respective marks cut in them,
+afterwards taken from the dead fish. In the three-year instance, it so
+fell out that I was in the boat both times, first and last, and the
+last time distinctly recognised a peculiar sort of huge mole under the
+whale’s eye, which I had observed there three years previous. I say
+three years, but I am pretty sure it was more than that. Here are three
+instances, then, which I personally know the truth of; but I have heard
+of many other instances from persons whose veracity in the matter there
+is no good ground to impeach.
+
+Secondly: It is well known in the Sperm Whale Fishery, however ignorant
+the world ashore may be of it, that there have been several memorable
+historical instances where a particular whale in the ocean has been at
+distant times and places popularly cognisable. Why such a whale became
+thus marked was not altogether and originally owing to his bodily
+peculiarities as distinguished from other whales; for however peculiar
+in that respect any chance whale may be, they soon put an end to his
+peculiarities by killing him, and boiling him down into a peculiarly
+valuable oil. No: the reason was this: that from the fatal experiences
+of the fishery there hung a terrible prestige of perilousness about
+such a whale as there did about Rinaldo Rinaldini, insomuch that most
+fishermen were content to recognise him by merely touching their
+tarpaulins when he would be discovered lounging by them on the sea,
+without seeking to cultivate a more intimate acquaintance. Like some
+poor devils ashore that happen to know an irascible great man, they
+make distant unobtrusive salutations to him in the street, lest if they
+pursued the acquaintance further, they might receive a summary thump
+for their presumption.
+
+But not only did each of these famous whales enjoy great individual
+celebrity—Nay, you may call it an ocean-wide renown; not only was he
+famous in life and now is immortal in forecastle stories after death,
+but he was admitted into all the rights, privileges, and distinctions
+of a name; had as much a name indeed as Cambyses or Cæsar. Was it not
+so, O Timor Tom! thou famed leviathan, scarred like an iceberg, who so
+long did’st lurk in the Oriental straits of that name, whose spout was
+oft seen from the palmy beach of Ombay? Was it not so, O New Zealand
+Jack! thou terror of all cruisers that crossed their wakes in the
+vicinity of the Tattoo Land? Was it not so, O Morquan! King of Japan,
+whose lofty jet they say at times assumed the semblance of a snow-white
+cross against the sky? Was it not so, O Don Miguel! thou Chilian whale,
+marked like an old tortoise with mystic hieroglyphics upon the back! In
+plain prose, here are four whales as well known to the students of
+Cetacean History as Marius or Sylla to the classic scholar.
+
+But this is not all. New Zealand Tom and Don Miguel, after at various
+times creating great havoc among the boats of different vessels, were
+finally gone in quest of, systematically hunted out, chased and killed
+by valiant whaling captains, who heaved up their anchors with that
+express object as much in view, as in setting out through the
+Narragansett Woods, Captain Butler of old had it in his mind to capture
+that notorious murderous savage Annawon, the headmost warrior of the
+Indian King Philip.
+
+I do not know where I can find a better place than just here, to make
+mention of one or two other things, which to me seem important, as in
+printed form establishing in all respects the reasonableness of the
+whole story of the White Whale, more especially the catastrophe. For
+this is one of those disheartening instances where truth requires full
+as much bolstering as error. So ignorant are most landsmen of some of
+the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some
+hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the
+fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still
+worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.
+
+First: Though most men have some vague flitting ideas of the general
+perils of the grand fishery, yet they have nothing like a fixed, vivid
+conception of those perils, and the frequency with which they recur.
+One reason perhaps is, that not one in fifty of the actual disasters
+and deaths by casualties in the fishery, ever finds a public record at
+home, however transient and immediately forgotten that record. Do you
+suppose that that poor fellow there, who this moment perhaps caught by
+the whale-line off the coast of New Guinea, is being carried down to
+the bottom of the sea by the sounding leviathan—do you suppose that
+that poor fellow’s name will appear in the newspaper obituary you will
+read to-morrow at your breakfast? No: because the mails are very
+irregular between here and New Guinea. In fact, did you ever hear what
+might be called regular news direct or indirect from New Guinea? Yet I
+tell you that upon one particular voyage which I made to the Pacific,
+among many others we spoke thirty different ships, every one of which
+had had a death by a whale, some of them more than one, and three that
+had each lost a boat’s crew. For God’s sake, be economical with your
+lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of
+man’s blood was spilled for it.
+
+Secondly: People ashore have indeed some indefinite idea that a whale
+is an enormous creature of enormous power; but I have ever found that
+when narrating to them some specific example of this two-fold
+enormousness, they have significantly complimented me upon my
+facetiousness; when, I declare upon my soul, I had no more idea of
+being facetious than Moses, when he wrote the history of the plagues of
+Egypt.
+
+But fortunately the special point I here seek can be established upon
+testimony entirely independent of my own. That point is this: The Sperm
+Whale is in some cases sufficiently powerful, knowing, and judiciously
+malicious, as with direct aforethought to stave in, utterly destroy,
+and sink a large ship; and what is more, the Sperm Whale _has_ done it.
+
+First: In the year 1820 the ship Essex, Captain Pollard, of Nantucket,
+was cruising in the Pacific Ocean. One day she saw spouts, lowered her
+boats, and gave chase to a shoal of sperm whales. Ere long, several of
+the whales were wounded; when, suddenly, a very large whale escaping
+from the boats, issued from the shoal, and bore directly down upon the
+ship. Dashing his forehead against her hull, he so stove her in, that
+in less than “ten minutes” she settled down and fell over. Not a
+surviving plank of her has been seen since. After the severest
+exposure, part of the crew reached the land in their boats. Being
+returned home at last, Captain Pollard once more sailed for the Pacific
+in command of another ship, but the gods shipwrecked him again upon
+unknown rocks and breakers; for the second time his ship was utterly
+lost, and forthwith forswearing the sea, he has never tempted it since.
+At this day Captain Pollard is a resident of Nantucket. I have seen
+Owen Chace, who was chief mate of the Essex at the time of the tragedy;
+I have read his plain and faithful narrative; I have conversed with his
+son; and all this within a few miles of the scene of the catastrophe.*
+
+*The following are extracts from Chace’s narrative: “Every fact seemed
+to warrant me in concluding that it was anything but chance which
+directed his operations; he made two several attacks upon the ship, at
+a short interval between them, both of which, according to their
+direction, were calculated to do us the most injury, by being made
+ahead, and thereby combining the speed of the two objects for the
+shock; to effect which, the exact manœuvres which he made were
+necessary. His aspect was most horrible, and such as indicated
+resentment and fury. He came directly from the shoal which we had just
+before entered, and in which we had struck three of his companions, as
+if fired with revenge for their sufferings.” Again: “At all events, the
+whole circumstances taken together, all happening before my own eyes,
+and producing, at the time, impressions in my mind of decided,
+calculating mischief, on the part of the whale (many of which
+impressions I cannot now recall), induce me to be satisfied that I am
+correct in my opinion.”
+
+Here are his reflections some time after quitting the ship, during a
+black night in an open boat, when almost despairing of reaching any
+hospitable shore. “The dark ocean and swelling waters were nothing; the
+fears of being swallowed up by some dreadful tempest, or dashed upon
+hidden rocks, with all the other ordinary subjects of fearful
+contemplation, seemed scarcely entitled to a moment’s thought; the
+dismal looking wreck, and _the horrid aspect and revenge of the whale_,
+wholly engrossed my reflections, until day again made its appearance.”
+
+In another place—p. 45,—he speaks of “_the mysterious and mortal attack
+of the animal_.”
+
+Secondly: The ship Union, also of Nantucket, was in the year 1807
+totally lost off the Azores by a similar onset, but the authentic
+particulars of this catastrophe I have never chanced to encounter,
+though from the whale hunters I have now and then heard casual
+allusions to it.
+
+Thirdly: Some eighteen or twenty years ago Commodore J——, then
+commanding an American sloop-of-war of the first class, happened to be
+dining with a party of whaling captains, on board a Nantucket ship in
+the harbor of Oahu, Sandwich Islands. Conversation turning upon whales,
+the Commodore was pleased to be sceptical touching the amazing strength
+ascribed to them by the professional gentlemen present. He peremptorily
+denied for example, that any whale could so smite his stout
+sloop-of-war as to cause her to leak so much as a thimbleful. Very
+good; but there is more coming. Some weeks after, the Commodore set
+sail in this impregnable craft for Valparaiso. But he was stopped on
+the way by a portly sperm whale, that begged a few moments’
+confidential business with him. That business consisted in fetching the
+Commodore’s craft such a thwack, that with all his pumps going he made
+straight for the nearest port to heave down and repair. I am not
+superstitious, but I consider the Commodore’s interview with that whale
+as providential. Was not Saul of Tarsus converted from unbelief by a
+similar fright? I tell you, the sperm whale will stand no nonsense.
+
+I will now refer you to Langsdorff’s Voyages for a little circumstance
+in point, peculiarly interesting to the writer hereof. Langsdorff, you
+must know by the way, was attached to the Russian Admiral Krusenstern’s
+famous Discovery Expedition in the beginning of the present century.
+Captain Langsdorff thus begins his seventeenth chapter:
+
+“By the thirteenth of May our ship was ready to sail, and the next day
+we were out in the open sea, on our way to Ochotsh. The weather was
+very clear and fine, but so intolerably cold that we were obliged to
+keep on our fur clothing. For some days we had very little wind; it was
+not till the nineteenth that a brisk gale from the northwest sprang up.
+An uncommon large whale, the body of which was larger than the ship
+itself, lay almost at the surface of the water, but was not perceived
+by any one on board till the moment when the ship, which was in full
+sail, was almost upon him, so that it was impossible to prevent its
+striking against him. We were thus placed in the most imminent danger,
+as this gigantic creature, setting up its back, raised the ship three
+feet at least out of the water. The masts reeled, and the sails fell
+altogether, while we who were below all sprang instantly upon the deck,
+concluding that we had struck upon some rock; instead of this we saw
+the monster sailing off with the utmost gravity and solemnity. Captain
+D’Wolf applied immediately to the pumps to examine whether or not the
+vessel had received any damage from the shock, but we found that very
+happily it had escaped entirely uninjured.”
+
+Now, the Captain D’Wolf here alluded to as commanding the ship in
+question, is a New Englander, who, after a long life of unusual
+adventures as a sea-captain, this day resides in the village of
+Dorchester near Boston. I have the honor of being a nephew of his. I
+have particularly questioned him concerning this passage in Langsdorff.
+He substantiates every word. The ship, however, was by no means a large
+one: a Russian craft built on the Siberian coast, and purchased by my
+uncle after bartering away the vessel in which he sailed from home.
+
+In that up and down manly book of old-fashioned adventure, so full,
+too, of honest wonders—the voyage of Lionel Wafer, one of ancient
+Dampier’s old chums—I found a little matter set down so like that just
+quoted from Langsdorff, that I cannot forbear inserting it here for a
+corroborative example, if such be needed.
+
+Lionel, it seems, was on his way to “John Ferdinando,” as he calls the
+modern Juan Fernandes. “In our way thither,” he says, “about four
+o’clock in the morning, when we were about one hundred and fifty
+leagues from the Main of America, our ship felt a terrible shock, which
+put our men in such consternation that they could hardly tell where
+they were or what to think; but every one began to prepare for death.
+And, indeed, the shock was so sudden and violent, that we took it for
+granted the ship had struck against a rock; but when the amazement was
+a little over, we cast the lead, and sounded, but found no ground. * *
+* * * The suddenness of the shock made the guns leap in their
+carriages, and several of the men were shaken out of their hammocks.
+Captain Davis, who lay with his head on a gun, was thrown out of his
+cabin!” Lionel then goes on to impute the shock to an earthquake, and
+seems to substantiate the imputation by stating that a great
+earthquake, somewhere about that time, did actually do great mischief
+along the Spanish land. But I should not much wonder if, in the
+darkness of that early hour of the morning, the shock was after all
+caused by an unseen whale vertically bumping the hull from beneath.
+
+I might proceed with several more examples, one way or another known to
+me, of the great power and malice at times of the sperm whale. In more
+than one instance, he has been known, not only to chase the assailing
+boats back to their ships, but to pursue the ship itself, and long
+withstand all the lances hurled at him from its decks. The English ship
+Pusie Hall can tell a story on that head; and, as for his strength, let
+me say, that there have been examples where the lines attached to a
+running sperm whale have, in a calm, been transferred to the ship, and
+secured there; the whale towing her great hull through the water, as a
+horse walks off with a cart. Again, it is very often observed that, if
+the sperm whale, once struck, is allowed time to rally, he then acts,
+not so often with blind rage, as with wilful, deliberate designs of
+destruction to his pursuers; nor is it without conveying some eloquent
+indication of his character, that upon being attacked he will
+frequently open his mouth, and retain it in that dread expansion for
+several consecutive minutes. But I must be content with only one more
+and a concluding illustration; a remarkable and most significant one,
+by which you will not fail to see, that not only is the most marvellous
+event in this book corroborated by plain facts of the present day, but
+that these marvels (like all marvels) are mere repetitions of the ages;
+so that for the millionth time we say amen with Solomon—Verily there is
+nothing new under the sun.
+
+In the sixth Christian century lived Procopius, a Christian magistrate
+of Constantinople, in the days when Justinian was Emperor and
+Belisarius general. As many know, he wrote the history of his own
+times, a work every way of uncommon value. By the best authorities, he
+has always been considered a most trustworthy and unexaggerating
+historian, except in some one or two particulars, not at all affecting
+the matter presently to be mentioned.
+
+Now, in this history of his, Procopius mentions that, during the term
+of his prefecture at Constantinople, a great sea-monster was captured
+in the neighboring Propontis, or Sea of Marmora, after having destroyed
+vessels at intervals in those waters for a period of more than fifty
+years. A fact thus set down in substantial history cannot easily be
+gainsaid. Nor is there any reason it should be. Of what precise species
+this sea-monster was, is not mentioned. But as he destroyed ships, as
+well as for other reasons, he must have been a whale; and I am strongly
+inclined to think a sperm whale. And I will tell you why. For a long
+time I fancied that the sperm whale had been always unknown in the
+Mediterranean and the deep waters connecting with it. Even now I am
+certain that those seas are not, and perhaps never can be, in the
+present constitution of things, a place for his habitual gregarious
+resort. But further investigations have recently proved to me, that in
+modern times there have been isolated instances of the presence of the
+sperm whale in the Mediterranean. I am told, on good authority, that on
+the Barbary coast, a Commodore Davis of the British navy found the
+skeleton of a sperm whale. Now, as a vessel of war readily passes
+through the Dardanelles, hence a sperm whale could, by the same route,
+pass out of the Mediterranean into the Propontis.
+
+In the Propontis, as far as I can learn, none of that peculiar
+substance called _brit_ is to be found, the aliment of the right whale.
+But I have every reason to believe that the food of the sperm
+whale—squid or cuttle-fish—lurks at the bottom of that sea, because
+large creatures, but by no means the largest of that sort, have been
+found at its surface. If, then, you properly put these statements
+together, and reason upon them a bit, you will clearly perceive that,
+according to all human reasoning, Procopius’s sea-monster, that for
+half a century stove the ships of a Roman Emperor, must in all
+probability have been a sperm whale.
+
+
+CHAPTER 46. Surmises.
+
+Though, consumed with the hot fire of his purpose, Ahab in all his
+thoughts and actions ever had in view the ultimate capture of Moby
+Dick; though he seemed ready to sacrifice all mortal interests to that
+one passion; nevertheless it may have been that he was by nature and
+long habituation far too wedded to a fiery whaleman’s ways, altogether
+to abandon the collateral prosecution of the voyage. Or at least if
+this were otherwise, there were not wanting other motives much more
+influential with him. It would be refining too much, perhaps, even
+considering his monomania, to hint that his vindictiveness towards the
+White Whale might have possibly extended itself in some degree to all
+sperm whales, and that the more monsters he slew by so much the more he
+multiplied the chances that each subsequently encountered whale would
+prove to be the hated one he hunted. But if such an hypothesis be
+indeed exceptionable, there were still additional considerations which,
+though not so strictly according with the wildness of his ruling
+passion, yet were by no means incapable of swaying him.
+
+To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used in
+the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order. He knew,
+for example, that however magnetic his ascendency in some respects was
+over Starbuck, yet that ascendency did not cover the complete spiritual
+man any more than mere corporeal superiority involves intellectual
+mastership; for to the purely spiritual, the intellectual but stand in
+a sort of corporeal relation. Starbuck’s body and Starbuck’s coerced
+will were Ahab’s, so long as Ahab kept his magnet at Starbuck’s brain;
+still he knew that for all this the chief mate, in his soul, abhorred
+his captain’s quest, and could he, would joyfully disintegrate himself
+from it, or even frustrate it. It might be that a long interval would
+elapse ere the White Whale was seen. During that long interval Starbuck
+would ever be apt to fall into open relapses of rebellion against his
+captain’s leadership, unless some ordinary, prudential, circumstantial
+influences were brought to bear upon him. Not only that, but the subtle
+insanity of Ahab respecting Moby Dick was noways more significantly
+manifested than in his superlative sense and shrewdness in foreseeing
+that, for the present, the hunt should in some way be stripped of that
+strange imaginative impiousness which naturally invested it; that the
+full terror of the voyage must be kept withdrawn into the obscure
+background (for few men’s courage is proof against protracted
+meditation unrelieved by action); that when they stood their long night
+watches, his officers and men must have some nearer things to think of
+than Moby Dick. For however eagerly and impetuously the savage crew had
+hailed the announcement of his quest; yet all sailors of all sorts are
+more or less capricious and unreliable—they live in the varying outer
+weather, and they inhale its fickleness—and when retained for any
+object remote and blank in the pursuit, however promissory of life and
+passion in the end, it is above all things requisite that temporary
+interests and employments should intervene and hold them healthily
+suspended for the final dash.
+
+Nor was Ahab unmindful of another thing. In times of strong emotion
+mankind disdain all base considerations; but such times are evanescent.
+The permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man, thought
+Ahab, is sordidness. Granting that the White Whale fully incites the
+hearts of this my savage crew, and playing round their savageness even
+breeds a certain generous knight-errantism in them, still, while for
+the love of it they give chase to Moby Dick, they must also have food
+for their more common, daily appetites. For even the high lifted and
+chivalric Crusaders of old times were not content to traverse two
+thousand miles of land to fight for their holy sepulchre, without
+committing burglaries, picking pockets, and gaining other pious
+perquisites by the way. Had they been strictly held to their one final
+and romantic object—that final and romantic object, too many would have
+turned from in disgust. I will not strip these men, thought Ahab, of
+all hopes of cash—aye, cash. They may scorn cash now; but let some
+months go by, and no perspective promise of it to them, and then this
+same quiescent cash all at once mutinying in them, this same cash would
+soon cashier Ahab.
+
+Nor was there wanting still another precautionary motive more related
+to Ahab personally. Having impulsively, it is probable, and perhaps
+somewhat prematurely revealed the prime but private purpose of the
+Pequod’s voyage, Ahab was now entirely conscious that, in so doing, he
+had indirectly laid himself open to the unanswerable charge of
+usurpation; and with perfect impunity, both moral and legal, his crew
+if so disposed, and to that end competent, could refuse all further
+obedience to him, and even violently wrest from him the command. From
+even the barely hinted imputation of usurpation, and the possible
+consequences of such a suppressed impression gaining ground, Ahab must
+of course have been most anxious to protect himself. That protection
+could only consist in his own predominating brain and heart and hand,
+backed by a heedful, closely calculating attention to every minute
+atmospheric influence which it was possible for his crew to be
+subjected to.
+
+For all these reasons then, and others perhaps too analytic to be
+verbally developed here, Ahab plainly saw that he must still in a good
+degree continue true to the natural, nominal purpose of the Pequod’s
+voyage; observe all customary usages; and not only that, but force
+himself to evince all his well known passionate interest in the general
+pursuit of his profession.
+
+Be all this as it may, his voice was now often heard hailing the three
+mast-heads and admonishing them to keep a bright look-out, and not omit
+reporting even a porpoise. This vigilance was not long without reward.
+
+
+CHAPTER 47. The Mat-Maker.
+
+It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon; the seamen were lazily lounging
+about the decks, or vacantly gazing over into the lead-coloured waters.
+Queequeg and I were mildly employed weaving what is called a sword-mat,
+for an additional lashing to our boat. So still and subdued and yet
+somehow preluding was all the scene, and such an incantation of reverie
+lurked in the air, that each silent sailor seemed resolved into his own
+invisible self.
+
+I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat. As I
+kept passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline between the
+long yarns of the warp, using my own hand for the shuttle, and as
+Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid his heavy oaken sword
+between the threads, and idly looking off upon the water, carelessly
+and unthinkingly drove home every yarn: I say so strange a dreaminess
+did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only
+broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as
+if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically
+weaving and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of
+the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging
+vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise
+interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed
+necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle
+and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads. Meantime,
+Queequeg’s impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof
+slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be;
+and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding
+contrast in the final aspect of the completed fabric; this savage’s
+sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and
+woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chance—aye, chance, free
+will, and necessity—nowise incompatible—all interweavingly working
+together. The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its
+ultimate course—its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending
+to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads;
+and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of
+necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though
+thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the
+last featuring blow at events.
+
+Thus we were weaving and weaving away when I started at a sound so
+strange, long drawn, and musically wild and unearthly, that the ball of
+free will dropped from my hand, and I stood gazing up at the clouds
+whence that voice dropped like a wing. High aloft in the cross-trees
+was that mad Gay-Header, Tashtego. His body was reaching eagerly
+forward, his hand stretched out like a wand, and at brief sudden
+intervals he continued his cries. To be sure the same sound was that
+very moment perhaps being heard all over the seas, from hundreds of
+whalemen’s look-outs perched as high in the air; but from few of those
+lungs could that accustomed old cry have derived such a marvellous
+cadence as from Tashtego the Indian’s.
+
+As he stood hovering over you half suspended in air, so wildly and
+eagerly peering towards the horizon, you would have thought him some
+prophet or seer beholding the shadows of Fate, and by those wild cries
+announcing their coming.
+
+“There she blows! there! there! there! she blows! she blows!”
+
+“Where-away?”
+
+“On the lee-beam, about two miles off! a school of them!”
+
+Instantly all was commotion.
+
+The Sperm Whale blows as a clock ticks, with the same undeviating and
+reliable uniformity. And thereby whalemen distinguish this fish from
+other tribes of his genus.
+
+“There go flukes!” was now the cry from Tashtego; and the whales
+disappeared.
+
+“Quick, steward!” cried Ahab. “Time! time!”
+
+Dough-Boy hurried below, glanced at the watch, and reported the exact
+minute to Ahab.
+
+The ship was now kept away from the wind, and she went gently rolling
+before it. Tashtego reporting that the whales had gone down heading to
+leeward, we confidently looked to see them again directly in advance of
+our bows. For that singular craft at times evinced by the Sperm Whale
+when, sounding with his head in one direction, he nevertheless, while
+concealed beneath the surface, mills round, and swiftly swims off in
+the opposite quarter—this deceitfulness of his could not now be in
+action; for there was no reason to suppose that the fish seen by
+Tashtego had been in any way alarmed, or indeed knew at all of our
+vicinity. One of the men selected for shipkeepers—that is, those not
+appointed to the boats, by this time relieved the Indian at the
+main-mast head. The sailors at the fore and mizzen had come down; the
+line tubs were fixed in their places; the cranes were thrust out; the
+mainyard was backed, and the three boats swung over the sea like three
+samphire baskets over high cliffs. Outside of the bulwarks their eager
+crews with one hand clung to the rail, while one foot was expectantly
+poised on the gunwale. So look the long line of man-of-war’s men about
+to throw themselves on board an enemy’s ship.
+
+But at this critical instant a sudden exclamation was heard that took
+every eye from the whale. With a start all glared at dark Ahab, who was
+surrounded by five dusky phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air.
+
+
+CHAPTER 48. The First Lowering.
+
+The phantoms, for so they then seemed, were flitting on the other side
+of the deck, and, with a noiseless celerity, were casting loose the
+tackles and bands of the boat which swung there. This boat had always
+been deemed one of the spare boats, though technically called the
+captain’s, on account of its hanging from the starboard quarter. The
+figure that now stood by its bows was tall and swart, with one white
+tooth evilly protruding from its steel-like lips. A rumpled Chinese
+jacket of black cotton funereally invested him, with wide black
+trowsers of the same dark stuff. But strangely crowning this ebonness
+was a glistening white plaited turban, the living hair braided and
+coiled round and round upon his head. Less swart in aspect, the
+companions of this figure were of that vivid, tiger-yellow complexion
+peculiar to some of the aboriginal natives of the Manillas;—a race
+notorious for a certain diabolism of subtilty, and by some honest white
+mariners supposed to be the paid spies and secret confidential agents
+on the water of the devil, their lord, whose counting-room they suppose
+to be elsewhere.
+
+While yet the wondering ship’s company were gazing upon these
+strangers, Ahab cried out to the white-turbaned old man at their head,
+“All ready there, Fedallah?”
+
+“Ready,” was the half-hissed reply.
+
+“Lower away then; d’ye hear?” shouting across the deck. “Lower away
+there, I say.”
+
+Such was the thunder of his voice, that spite of their amazement the
+men sprang over the rail; the sheaves whirled round in the blocks; with
+a wallow, the three boats dropped into the sea; while, with a
+dexterous, off-handed daring, unknown in any other vocation, the
+sailors, goat-like, leaped down the rolling ship’s side into the tossed
+boats below.
+
+Hardly had they pulled out from under the ship’s lee, when a fourth
+keel, coming from the windward side, pulled round under the stern, and
+showed the five strangers rowing Ahab, who, standing erect in the
+stern, loudly hailed Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, to spread themselves
+widely, so as to cover a large expanse of water. But with all their
+eyes again riveted upon the swart Fedallah and his crew, the inmates of
+the other boats obeyed not the command.
+
+“Captain Ahab?—” said Starbuck.
+
+“Spread yourselves,” cried Ahab; “give way, all four boats. Thou,
+Flask, pull out more to leeward!”
+
+“Aye, aye, sir,” cheerily cried little King-Post, sweeping round his
+great steering oar. “Lay back!” addressing his crew.
+“There!—there!—there again! There she blows right ahead, boys!—lay
+back!”
+
+“Never heed yonder yellow boys, Archy.”
+
+“Oh, I don’t mind ’em, sir,” said Archy; “I knew it all before now.
+Didn’t I hear ’em in the hold? And didn’t I tell Cabaco here of it?
+What say ye, Cabaco? They are stowaways, Mr. Flask.”
+
+“Pull, pull, my fine hearts-alive; pull, my children; pull, my little
+ones,” drawlingly and soothingly sighed Stubb to his crew, some of whom
+still showed signs of uneasiness. “Why don’t you break your backbones,
+my boys? What is it you stare at? Those chaps in yonder boat? Tut! They
+are only five more hands come to help us—never mind from where—the more
+the merrier. Pull, then, do pull; never mind the brimstone—devils are
+good fellows enough. So, so; there you are now; that’s the stroke for a
+thousand pounds; that’s the stroke to sweep the stakes! Hurrah for the
+gold cup of sperm oil, my heroes! Three cheers, men—all hearts alive!
+Easy, easy; don’t be in a hurry—don’t be in a hurry. Why don’t you snap
+your oars, you rascals? Bite something, you dogs! So, so, so,
+then:—softly, softly! That’s it—that’s it! long and strong. Give way
+there, give way! The devil fetch ye, ye ragamuffin rapscallions; ye are
+all asleep. Stop snoring, ye sleepers, and pull. Pull, will ye? pull,
+can’t ye? pull, won’t ye? Why in the name of gudgeons and ginger-cakes
+don’t ye pull?—pull and break something! pull, and start your eyes out!
+Here!” whipping out the sharp knife from his girdle; “every mother’s
+son of ye draw his knife, and pull with the blade between his teeth.
+That’s it—that’s it. Now ye do something; that looks like it, my
+steel-bits. Start her—start her, my silver-spoons! Start her,
+marling-spikes!”
+
+Stubb’s exordium to his crew is given here at large, because he had
+rather a peculiar way of talking to them in general, and especially in
+inculcating the religion of rowing. But you must not suppose from this
+specimen of his sermonizings that he ever flew into downright passions
+with his congregation. Not at all; and therein consisted his chief
+peculiarity. He would say the most terrific things to his crew, in a
+tone so strangely compounded of fun and fury, and the fury seemed so
+calculated merely as a spice to the fun, that no oarsman could hear
+such queer invocations without pulling for dear life, and yet pulling
+for the mere joke of the thing. Besides he all the time looked so easy
+and indolent himself, so loungingly managed his steering-oar, and so
+broadly gaped—open-mouthed at times—that the mere sight of such a
+yawning commander, by sheer force of contrast, acted like a charm upon
+the crew. Then again, Stubb was one of those odd sort of humorists,
+whose jollity is sometimes so curiously ambiguous, as to put all
+inferiors on their guard in the matter of obeying them.
+
+In obedience to a sign from Ahab, Starbuck was now pulling obliquely
+across Stubb’s bow; and when for a minute or so the two boats were
+pretty near to each other, Stubb hailed the mate.
+
+“Mr. Starbuck! larboard boat there, ahoy! a word with ye, sir, if ye
+please!”
+
+“Halloa!” returned Starbuck, turning round not a single inch as he
+spoke; still earnestly but whisperingly urging his crew; his face set
+like a flint from Stubb’s.
+
+“What think ye of those yellow boys, sir!”
+
+“Smuggled on board, somehow, before the ship sailed. (Strong, strong,
+boys!)” in a whisper to his crew, then speaking out loud again: “A sad
+business, Mr. Stubb! (seethe her, seethe her, my lads!) but never mind,
+Mr. Stubb, all for the best. Let all your crew pull strong, come what
+will. (Spring, my men, spring!) There’s hogsheads of sperm ahead, Mr.
+Stubb, and that’s what ye came for. (Pull, my boys!) Sperm, sperm’s the
+play! This at least is duty; duty and profit hand in hand.”
+
+“Aye, aye, I thought as much,” soliloquized Stubb, when the boats
+diverged, “as soon as I clapt eye on ’em, I thought so. Aye, and that’s
+what he went into the after hold for, so often, as Dough-Boy long
+suspected. They were hidden down there. The White Whale’s at the bottom
+of it. Well, well, so be it! Can’t be helped! All right! Give way, men!
+It ain’t the White Whale to-day! Give way!”
+
+Now the advent of these outlandish strangers at such a critical instant
+as the lowering of the boats from the deck, this had not unreasonably
+awakened a sort of superstitious amazement in some of the ship’s
+company; but Archy’s fancied discovery having some time previous got
+abroad among them, though indeed not credited then, this had in some
+small measure prepared them for the event. It took off the extreme edge
+of their wonder; and so what with all this and Stubb’s confident way of
+accounting for their appearance, they were for the time freed from
+superstitious surmisings; though the affair still left abundant room
+for all manner of wild conjectures as to dark Ahab’s precise agency in
+the matter from the beginning. For me, I silently recalled the
+mysterious shadows I had seen creeping on board the Pequod during the
+dim Nantucket dawn, as well as the enigmatical hintings of the
+unaccountable Elijah.
+
+Meantime, Ahab, out of hearing of his officers, having sided the
+furthest to windward, was still ranging ahead of the other boats; a
+circumstance bespeaking how potent a crew was pulling him. Those tiger
+yellow creatures of his seemed all steel and whalebone; like five
+trip-hammers they rose and fell with regular strokes of strength, which
+periodically started the boat along the water like a horizontal burst
+boiler out of a Mississippi steamer. As for Fedallah, who was seen
+pulling the harpooneer oar, he had thrown aside his black jacket, and
+displayed his naked chest with the whole part of his body above the
+gunwale, clearly cut against the alternating depressions of the watery
+horizon; while at the other end of the boat Ahab, with one arm, like a
+fencer’s, thrown half backward into the air, as if to counterbalance
+any tendency to trip; Ahab was seen steadily managing his steering oar
+as in a thousand boat lowerings ere the White Whale had torn him. All
+at once the outstretched arm gave a peculiar motion and then remained
+fixed, while the boat’s five oars were seen simultaneously peaked. Boat
+and crew sat motionless on the sea. Instantly the three spread boats in
+the rear paused on their way. The whales had irregularly settled bodily
+down into the blue, thus giving no distantly discernible token of the
+movement, though from his closer vicinity Ahab had observed it.
+
+“Every man look out along his oars!” cried Starbuck. “Thou, Queequeg,
+stand up!”
+
+Nimbly springing up on the triangular raised box in the bow, the savage
+stood erect there, and with intensely eager eyes gazed off towards the
+spot where the chase had last been descried. Likewise upon the extreme
+stern of the boat where it was also triangularly platformed level with
+the gunwale, Starbuck himself was seen coolly and adroitly balancing
+himself to the jerking tossings of his chip of a craft, and silently
+eyeing the vast blue eye of the sea.
+
+Not very far distant Flask’s boat was also lying breathlessly still;
+its commander recklessly standing upon the top of the loggerhead, a
+stout sort of post rooted in the keel, and rising some two feet above
+the level of the stern platform. It is used for catching turns with the
+whale line. Its top is not more spacious than the palm of a man’s hand,
+and standing upon such a base as that, Flask seemed perched at the
+mast-head of some ship which had sunk to all but her trucks. But little
+King-Post was small and short, and at the same time little King-Post
+was full of a large and tall ambition, so that this loggerhead
+stand-point of his did by no means satisfy King-Post.
+
+“I can’t see three seas off; tip us up an oar there, and let me on to
+that.”
+
+Upon this, Daggoo, with either hand upon the gunwale to steady his way,
+swiftly slid aft, and then erecting himself volunteered his lofty
+shoulders for a pedestal.
+
+“Good a mast-head as any, sir. Will you mount?”
+
+“That I will, and thank ye very much, my fine fellow; only I wish you
+fifty feet taller.”
+
+Whereupon planting his feet firmly against two opposite planks of the
+boat, the gigantic negro, stooping a little, presented his flat palm to
+Flask’s foot, and then putting Flask’s hand on his hearse-plumed head
+and bidding him spring as he himself should toss, with one dexterous
+fling landed the little man high and dry on his shoulders. And here was
+Flask now standing, Daggoo with one lifted arm furnishing him with a
+breastband to lean against and steady himself by.
+
+At any time it is a strange sight to the tyro to see with what wondrous
+habitude of unconscious skill the whaleman will maintain an erect
+posture in his boat, even when pitched about by the most riotously
+perverse and cross-running seas. Still more strange to see him giddily
+perched upon the loggerhead itself, under such circumstances. But the
+sight of little Flask mounted upon gigantic Daggoo was yet more
+curious; for sustaining himself with a cool, indifferent, easy,
+unthought of, barbaric majesty, the noble negro to every roll of the
+sea harmoniously rolled his fine form. On his broad back, flaxen-haired
+Flask seemed a snow-flake. The bearer looked nobler than the rider.
+Though truly vivacious, tumultuous, ostentatious little Flask would now
+and then stamp with impatience; but not one added heave did he thereby
+give to the negro’s lordly chest. So have I seen Passion and Vanity
+stamping the living magnanimous earth, but the earth did not alter her
+tides and her seasons for that.
+
+Meanwhile Stubb, the third mate, betrayed no such far-gazing
+solicitudes. The whales might have made one of their regular soundings,
+not a temporary dive from mere fright; and if that were the case,
+Stubb, as his wont in such cases, it seems, was resolved to solace the
+languishing interval with his pipe. He withdrew it from his hatband,
+where he always wore it aslant like a feather. He loaded it, and rammed
+home the loading with his thumb-end; but hardly had he ignited his
+match across the rough sandpaper of his hand, when Tashtego, his
+harpooneer, whose eyes had been setting to windward like two fixed
+stars, suddenly dropped like light from his erect attitude to his seat,
+crying out in a quick phrensy of hurry, “Down, down all, and give
+way!—there they are!”
+
+To a landsman, no whale, nor any sign of a herring, would have been
+visible at that moment; nothing but a troubled bit of greenish white
+water, and thin scattered puffs of vapor hovering over it, and
+suffusingly blowing off to leeward, like the confused scud from white
+rolling billows. The air around suddenly vibrated and tingled, as it
+were, like the air over intensely heated plates of iron. Beneath this
+atmospheric waving and curling, and partially beneath a thin layer of
+water, also, the whales were swimming. Seen in advance of all the other
+indications, the puffs of vapor they spouted, seemed their forerunning
+couriers and detached flying outriders.
+
+All four boats were now in keen pursuit of that one spot of troubled
+water and air. But it bade fair to outstrip them; it flew on and on, as
+a mass of interblending bubbles borne down a rapid stream from the
+hills.
+
+“Pull, pull, my good boys,” said Starbuck, in the lowest possible but
+intensest concentrated whisper to his men; while the sharp fixed glance
+from his eyes darted straight ahead of the bow, almost seemed as two
+visible needles in two unerring binnacle compasses. He did not say much
+to his crew, though, nor did his crew say anything to him. Only the
+silence of the boat was at intervals startlingly pierced by one of his
+peculiar whispers, now harsh with command, now soft with entreaty.
+
+How different the loud little King-Post. “Sing out and say something,
+my hearties. Roar and pull, my thunderbolts! Beach me, beach me on
+their black backs, boys; only do that for me, and I’ll sign over to you
+my Martha’s Vineyard plantation, boys; including wife and children,
+boys. Lay me on—lay me on! O Lord, Lord! but I shall go stark, staring
+mad! See! see that white water!” And so shouting, he pulled his hat
+from his head, and stamped up and down on it; then picking it up,
+flirted it far off upon the sea; and finally fell to rearing and
+plunging in the boat’s stern like a crazed colt from the prairie.
+
+“Look at that chap now,” philosophically drawled Stubb, who, with his
+unlighted short pipe, mechanically retained between his teeth, at a
+short distance, followed after—“He’s got fits, that Flask has. Fits?
+yes, give him fits—that’s the very word—pitch fits into ’em. Merrily,
+merrily, hearts-alive. Pudding for supper, you know;—merry’s the word.
+Pull, babes—pull, sucklings—pull, all. But what the devil are you
+hurrying about? Softly, softly, and steadily, my men. Only pull, and
+keep pulling; nothing more. Crack all your backbones, and bite your
+knives in two—that’s all. Take it easy—why don’t ye take it easy, I
+say, and burst all your livers and lungs!”
+
+But what it was that inscrutable Ahab said to that tiger-yellow crew of
+his—these were words best omitted here; for you live under the blessed
+light of the evangelical land. Only the infidel sharks in the audacious
+seas may give ear to such words, when, with tornado brow, and eyes of
+red murder, and foam-glued lips, Ahab leaped after his prey.
+
+Meanwhile, all the boats tore on. The repeated specific allusions of
+Flask to “that whale,” as he called the fictitious monster which he
+declared to be incessantly tantalizing his boat’s bow with its
+tail—these allusions of his were at times so vivid and life-like, that
+they would cause some one or two of his men to snatch a fearful look
+over the shoulder. But this was against all rule; for the oarsmen must
+put out their eyes, and ram a skewer through their necks; usage
+pronouncing that they must have no organs but ears, and no limbs but
+arms, in these critical moments.
+
+It was a sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast swells of the
+omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled
+along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless
+bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip
+for an instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost
+seemed threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the
+watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the
+top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other
+side;—all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooneers, and
+the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the
+ivory Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like
+a wild hen after her screaming brood;—all this was thrilling.
+
+Not the raw recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever
+heat of his first battle; not the dead man’s ghost encountering the
+first unknown phantom in the other world;—neither of these can feel
+stranger and stronger emotions than that man does, who for the first
+time finds himself pulling into the charmed, churned circle of the
+hunted sperm whale.
+
+The dancing white water made by the chase was now becoming more and
+more visible, owing to the increasing darkness of the dun cloud-shadows
+flung upon the sea. The jets of vapor no longer blended, but tilted
+everywhere to right and left; the whales seemed separating their wakes.
+The boats were pulled more apart; Starbuck giving chase to three whales
+running dead to leeward. Our sail was now set, and, with the still
+rising wind, we rushed along; the boat going with such madness through
+the water, that the lee oars could scarcely be worked rapidly enough to
+escape being torn from the row-locks.
+
+Soon we were running through a suffusing wide veil of mist; neither
+ship nor boat to be seen.
+
+“Give way, men,” whispered Starbuck, drawing still further aft the
+sheet of his sail; “there is time to kill a fish yet before the squall
+comes. There’s white water again!—close to! Spring!”
+
+Soon after, two cries in quick succession on each side of us denoted
+that the other boats had got fast; but hardly were they overheard, when
+with a lightning-like hurtling whisper Starbuck said: “Stand up!” and
+Queequeg, harpoon in hand, sprang to his feet.
+
+Though not one of the oarsmen was then facing the life and death peril
+so close to them ahead, yet with their eyes on the intense countenance
+of the mate in the stern of the boat, they knew that the imminent
+instant had come; they heard, too, an enormous wallowing sound as of
+fifty elephants stirring in their litter. Meanwhile the boat was still
+booming through the mist, the waves curling and hissing around us like
+the erected crests of enraged serpents.
+
+“That’s his hump. _There_, _there_, give it to him!” whispered
+Starbuck.
+
+A short rushing sound leaped out of the boat; it was the darted iron of
+Queequeg. Then all in one welded commotion came an invisible push from
+astern, while forward the boat seemed striking on a ledge; the sail
+collapsed and exploded; a gush of scalding vapor shot up near by;
+something rolled and tumbled like an earthquake beneath us. The whole
+crew were half suffocated as they were tossed helter-skelter into the
+white curdling cream of the squall. Squall, whale, and harpoon had all
+blended together; and the whale, merely grazed by the iron, escaped.
+
+Though completely swamped, the boat was nearly unharmed. Swimming round
+it we picked up the floating oars, and lashing them across the gunwale,
+tumbled back to our places. There we sat up to our knees in the sea,
+the water covering every rib and plank, so that to our downward gazing
+eyes the suspended craft seemed a coral boat grown up to us from the
+bottom of the ocean.
+
+The wind increased to a howl; the waves dashed their bucklers together;
+the whole squall roared, forked, and crackled around us like a white
+fire upon the prairie, in which, unconsumed, we were burning; immortal
+in these jaws of death! In vain we hailed the other boats; as well roar
+to the live coals down the chimney of a flaming furnace as hail those
+boats in that storm. Meanwhile the driving scud, rack, and mist, grew
+darker with the shadows of night; no sign of the ship could be seen.
+The rising sea forbade all attempts to bale out the boat. The oars were
+useless as propellers, performing now the office of life-preservers.
+So, cutting the lashing of the waterproof match keg, after many
+failures Starbuck contrived to ignite the lamp in the lantern; then
+stretching it on a waif pole, handed it to Queequeg as the
+standard-bearer of this forlorn hope. There, then, he sat, holding up
+that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness. There,
+then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly
+holding up hope in the midst of despair.
+
+Wet, drenched through, and shivering cold, despairing of ship or boat,
+we lifted up our eyes as the dawn came on. The mist still spread over
+the sea, the empty lantern lay crushed in the bottom of the boat.
+Suddenly Queequeg started to his feet, hollowing his hand to his ear.
+We all heard a faint creaking, as of ropes and yards hitherto muffled
+by the storm. The sound came nearer and nearer; the thick mists were
+dimly parted by a huge, vague form. Affrighted, we all sprang into the
+sea as the ship at last loomed into view, bearing right down upon us
+within a distance of not much more than its length.
+
+Floating on the waves we saw the abandoned boat, as for one instant it
+tossed and gaped beneath the ship’s bows like a chip at the base of a
+cataract; and then the vast hull rolled over it, and it was seen no
+more till it came up weltering astern. Again we swam for it, were
+dashed against it by the seas, and were at last taken up and safely
+landed on board. Ere the squall came close to, the other boats had cut
+loose from their fish and returned to the ship in good time. The ship
+had given us up, but was still cruising, if haply it might light upon
+some token of our perishing,—an oar or a lance pole.
+
+
+CHAPTER 49. The Hyena.
+
+There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed
+affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast
+practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more
+than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own.
+However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He
+bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all
+hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich
+of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for
+small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril
+of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly,
+good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen
+and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am
+speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation;
+it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before
+might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part
+of the general joke. There is nothing like the perils of whaling to
+breed this free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with
+it I now regarded this whole voyage of the Pequod, and the great White
+Whale its object.
+
+“Queequeg,” said I, when they had dragged me, the last man, to the
+deck, and I was still shaking myself in my jacket to fling off the
+water; “Queequeg, my fine friend, does this sort of thing often
+happen?” Without much emotion, though soaked through just like me, he
+gave me to understand that such things did often happen.
+
+“Mr. Stubb,” said I, turning to that worthy, who, buttoned up in his
+oil-jacket, was now calmly smoking his pipe in the rain; “Mr. Stubb, I
+think I have heard you say that of all whalemen you ever met, our chief
+mate, Mr. Starbuck, is by far the most careful and prudent. I suppose
+then, that going plump on a flying whale with your sail set in a foggy
+squall is the height of a whaleman’s discretion?”
+
+“Certain. I’ve lowered for whales from a leaking ship in a gale off
+Cape Horn.”
+
+“Mr. Flask,” said I, turning to little King-Post, who was standing
+close by; “you are experienced in these things, and I am not. Will you
+tell me whether it is an unalterable law in this fishery, Mr. Flask,
+for an oarsman to break his own back pulling himself back-foremost into
+death’s jaws?”
+
+“Can’t you twist that smaller?” said Flask. “Yes, that’s the law. I
+should like to see a boat’s crew backing water up to a whale face
+foremost. Ha, ha! the whale would give them squint for squint, mind
+that!”
+
+Here then, from three impartial witnesses, I had a deliberate statement
+of the entire case. Considering, therefore, that squalls and capsizings
+in the water and consequent bivouacks on the deep, were matters of
+common occurrence in this kind of life; considering that at the
+superlatively critical instant of going on to the whale I must resign
+my life into the hands of him who steered the boat—oftentimes a fellow
+who at that very moment is in his impetuousness upon the point of
+scuttling the craft with his own frantic stampings; considering that
+the particular disaster to our own particular boat was chiefly to be
+imputed to Starbuck’s driving on to his whale almost in the teeth of a
+squall, and considering that Starbuck, notwithstanding, was famous for
+his great heedfulness in the fishery; considering that I belonged to
+this uncommonly prudent Starbuck’s boat; and finally considering in
+what a devil’s chase I was implicated, touching the White Whale: taking
+all things together, I say, I thought I might as well go below and make
+a rough draft of my will. “Queequeg,” said I, “come along, you shall be
+my lawyer, executor, and legatee.”
+
+It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at
+their last wills and testaments, but there are no people in the world
+more fond of that diversion. This was the fourth time in my nautical
+life that I had done the same thing. After the ceremony was concluded
+upon the present occasion, I felt all the easier; a stone was rolled
+away from my heart. Besides, all the days I should now live would be as
+good as the days that Lazarus lived after his resurrection; a
+supplementary clean gain of so many months or weeks as the case might
+be. I survived myself; my death and burial were locked up in my chest.
+I looked round me tranquilly and contentedly, like a quiet ghost with a
+clean conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug family vault.
+
+Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock,
+here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the
+devil fetch the hindmost.
+
+
+CHAPTER 50. Ahab’s Boat and Crew. Fedallah.
+
+“Who would have thought it, Flask!” cried Stubb; “if I had but one leg
+you would not catch me in a boat, unless maybe to stop the plug-hole
+with my timber toe. Oh! he’s a wonderful old man!”
+
+“I don’t think it so strange, after all, on that account,” said Flask.
+“If his leg were off at the hip, now, it would be a different thing.
+That would disable him; but he has one knee, and good part of the other
+left, you know.”
+
+“I don’t know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel.”
+
+Among whale-wise people it has often been argued whether, considering
+the paramount importance of his life to the success of the voyage, it
+is right for a whaling captain to jeopardize that life in the active
+perils of the chase. So Tamerlane’s soldiers often argued with tears in
+their eyes, whether that invaluable life of his ought to be carried
+into the thickest of the fight.
+
+But with Ahab the question assumed a modified aspect. Considering that
+with two legs man is but a hobbling wight in all times of danger;
+considering that the pursuit of whales is always under great and
+extraordinary difficulties; that every individual moment, indeed, then
+comprises a peril; under these circumstances is it wise for any maimed
+man to enter a whale-boat in the hunt? As a general thing, the
+joint-owners of the Pequod must have plainly thought not.
+
+Ahab well knew that although his friends at home would think little of
+his entering a boat in certain comparatively harmless vicissitudes of
+the chase, for the sake of being near the scene of action and giving
+his orders in person, yet for Captain Ahab to have a boat actually
+apportioned to him as a regular headsman in the hunt—above all for
+Captain Ahab to be supplied with five extra men, as that same boat’s
+crew, he well knew that such generous conceits never entered the heads
+of the owners of the Pequod. Therefore he had not solicited a boat’s
+crew from them, nor had he in any way hinted his desires on that head.
+Nevertheless he had taken private measures of his own touching all that
+matter. Until Cabaco’s published discovery, the sailors had little
+foreseen it, though to be sure when, after being a little while out of
+port, all hands had concluded the customary business of fitting the
+whaleboats for service; when some time after this Ahab was now and then
+found bestirring himself in the matter of making thole-pins with his
+own hands for what was thought to be one of the spare boats, and even
+solicitously cutting the small wooden skewers, which when the line is
+running out are pinned over the groove in the bow: when all this was
+observed in him, and particularly his solicitude in having an extra
+coat of sheathing in the bottom of the boat, as if to make it better
+withstand the pointed pressure of his ivory limb; and also the anxiety
+he evinced in exactly shaping the thigh board, or clumsy cleat, as it
+is sometimes called, the horizontal piece in the boat’s bow for bracing
+the knee against in darting or stabbing at the whale; when it was
+observed how often he stood up in that boat with his solitary knee
+fixed in the semi-circular depression in the cleat, and with the
+carpenter’s chisel gouged out a little here and straightened it a
+little there; all these things, I say, had awakened much interest and
+curiosity at the time. But almost everybody supposed that this
+particular preparative heedfulness in Ahab must only be with a view to
+the ultimate chase of Moby Dick; for he had already revealed his
+intention to hunt that mortal monster in person. But such a supposition
+did by no means involve the remotest suspicion as to any boat’s crew
+being assigned to that boat.
+
+Now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soon waned
+away; for in a whaler wonders soon wane. Besides, now and then such
+unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations come up from the unknown
+nooks and ash-holes of the earth to man these floating outlaws of
+whalers; and the ships themselves often pick up such queer castaway
+creatures found tossing about the open sea on planks, bits of wreck,
+oars, whaleboats, canoes, blown-off Japanese junks, and what not; that
+Beelzebub himself might climb up the side and step down into the cabin
+to chat with the captain, and it would not create any unsubduable
+excitement in the forecastle.
+
+But be all this as it may, certain it is that while the subordinate
+phantoms soon found their place among the crew, though still as it were
+somehow distinct from them, yet that hair-turbaned Fedallah remained a
+muffled mystery to the last. Whence he came in a mannerly world like
+this, by what sort of unaccountable tie he soon evinced himself to be
+linked with Ahab’s peculiar fortunes; nay, so far as to have some sort
+of a half-hinted influence; Heaven knows, but it might have been even
+authority over him; all this none knew. But one cannot sustain an
+indifferent air concerning Fedallah. He was such a creature as
+civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their
+dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide
+among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles
+to the east of the continent—those insulated, immemorial, unalterable
+countries, which even in these modern days still preserve much of the
+ghostly aboriginalness of earth’s primal generations, when the memory
+of the first man was a distinct recollection, and all men his
+descendants, unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as real
+phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moon why they were created and
+to what end; when though, according to Genesis, the angels indeed
+consorted with the daughters of men, the devils also, add the
+uncanonical Rabbins, indulged in mundane amours.
+
+
+CHAPTER 51. The Spirit-Spout.
+
+Days, weeks passed, and under easy sail, the ivory Pequod had slowly
+swept across four several cruising-grounds; that off the Azores; off
+the Cape de Verdes; on the Plate (so called), being off the mouth of
+the Rio de la Plata; and the Carrol Ground, an unstaked, watery
+locality, southerly from St. Helena.
+
+It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and
+moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver;
+and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery
+silence, not a solitude; on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen
+far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it
+looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from
+the sea. Fedallah first descried this jet. For of these moonlight
+nights, it was his wont to mount to the main-mast head, and stand a
+look-out there, with the same precision as if it had been day. And yet,
+though herds of whales were seen by night, not one whaleman in a
+hundred would venture a lowering for them. You may think with what
+emotions, then, the seamen beheld this old Oriental perched aloft at
+such unusual hours; his turban and the moon, companions in one sky. But
+when, after spending his uniform interval there for several successive
+nights without uttering a single sound; when, after all this silence,
+his unearthly voice was heard announcing that silvery, moon-lit jet,
+every reclining mariner started to his feet as if some winged spirit
+had lighted in the rigging, and hailed the mortal crew. “There she
+blows!” Had the trump of judgment blown, they could not have quivered
+more; yet still they felt no terror; rather pleasure. For though it was
+a most unwonted hour, yet so impressive was the cry, and so deliriously
+exciting, that almost every soul on board instinctively desired a
+lowering.
+
+Walking the deck with quick, side-lunging strides, Ahab commanded the
+t’gallant sails and royals to be set, and every stunsail spread. The
+best man in the ship must take the helm. Then, with every mast-head
+manned, the piled-up craft rolled down before the wind. The strange,
+upheaving, lifting tendency of the taffrail breeze filling the hollows
+of so many sails, made the buoyant, hovering deck to feel like air
+beneath the feet; while still she rushed along, as if two antagonistic
+influences were struggling in her—one to mount direct to heaven, the
+other to drive yawingly to some horizontal goal. And had you watched
+Ahab’s face that night, you would have thought that in him also two
+different things were warring. While his one live leg made lively
+echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a
+coffin-tap. On life and death this old man walked. But though the ship
+so swiftly sped, and though from every eye, like arrows, the eager
+glances shot, yet the silvery jet was no more seen that night. Every
+sailor swore he saw it once, but not a second time.
+
+This midnight-spout had almost grown a forgotten thing, when, some days
+after, lo! at the same silent hour, it was again announced: again it
+was descried by all; but upon making sail to overtake it, once more it
+disappeared as if it had never been. And so it served us night after
+night, till no one heeded it but to wonder at it. Mysteriously jetted
+into the clear moonlight, or starlight, as the case might be;
+disappearing again for one whole day, or two days, or three; and
+somehow seeming at every distinct repetition to be advancing still
+further and further in our van, this solitary jet seemed for ever
+alluring us on.
+
+Nor with the immemorial superstition of their race, and in accordance
+with the preternaturalness, as it seemed, which in many things invested
+the Pequod, were there wanting some of the seamen who swore that
+whenever and wherever descried; at however remote times, or in however
+far apart latitudes and longitudes, that unnearable spout was cast by
+one self-same whale; and that whale, Moby Dick. For a time, there
+reigned, too, a sense of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition, as
+if it were treacherously beckoning us on and on, in order that the
+monster might turn round upon us, and rend us at last in the remotest
+and most savage seas.
+
+These temporary apprehensions, so vague but so awful, derived a
+wondrous potency from the contrasting serenity of the weather, in
+which, beneath all its blue blandness, some thought there lurked a
+devilish charm, as for days and days we voyaged along, through seas so
+wearily, lonesomely mild, that all space, in repugnance to our vengeful
+errand, seemed vacating itself of life before our urn-like prow.
+
+But, at last, when turning to the eastward, the Cape winds began
+howling around us, and we rose and fell upon the long, troubled seas
+that are there; when the ivory-tusked Pequod sharply bowed to the
+blast, and gored the dark waves in her madness, till, like showers of
+silver chips, the foam-flakes flew over her bulwarks; then all this
+desolate vacuity of life went away, but gave place to sights more
+dismal than before.
+
+Close to our bows, strange forms in the water darted hither and thither
+before us; while thick in our rear flew the inscrutable sea-ravens. And
+every morning, perched on our stays, rows of these birds were seen; and
+spite of our hootings, for a long time obstinately clung to the hemp,
+as though they deemed our ship some drifting, uninhabited craft; a
+thing appointed to desolation, and therefore fit roosting-place for
+their homeless selves. And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved
+the black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great
+mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering
+it had bred.
+
+Cape of Good Hope, do they call ye? Rather Cape Tormentoso, as called
+of yore; for long allured by the perfidious silences that before had
+attended us, we found ourselves launched into this tormented sea, where
+guilty beings transformed into those fowls and these fish, seemed
+condemned to swim on everlastingly without any haven in store, or beat
+that black air without any horizon. But calm, snow-white, and
+unvarying; still directing its fountain of feathers to the sky; still
+beckoning us on from before, the solitary jet would at times be
+descried.
+
+During all this blackness of the elements, Ahab, though assuming for
+the time the almost continual command of the drenched and dangerous
+deck, manifested the gloomiest reserve; and more seldom than ever
+addressed his mates. In tempestuous times like these, after everything
+above and aloft has been secured, nothing more can be done but
+passively to await the issue of the gale. Then Captain and crew become
+practical fatalists. So, with his ivory leg inserted into its
+accustomed hole, and with one hand firmly grasping a shroud, Ahab for
+hours and hours would stand gazing dead to windward, while an
+occasional squall of sleet or snow would all but congeal his very
+eyelashes together. Meantime, the crew driven from the forward part of
+the ship by the perilous seas that burstingly broke over its bows,
+stood in a line along the bulwarks in the waist; and the better to
+guard against the leaping waves, each man had slipped himself into a
+sort of bowline secured to the rail, in which he swung as in a loosened
+belt. Few or no words were spoken; and the silent ship, as if manned by
+painted sailors in wax, day after day tore on through all the swift
+madness and gladness of the demoniac waves. By night the same muteness
+of humanity before the shrieks of the ocean prevailed; still in silence
+the men swung in the bowlines; still wordless Ahab stood up to the
+blast. Even when wearied nature seemed demanding repose he would not
+seek that repose in his hammock. Never could Starbuck forget the old
+man’s aspect, when one night going down into the cabin to mark how the
+barometer stood, he saw him with closed eyes sitting straight in his
+floor-screwed chair; the rain and half-melted sleet of the storm from
+which he had some time before emerged, still slowly dripping from the
+unremoved hat and coat. On the table beside him lay unrolled one of
+those charts of tides and currents which have previously been spoken
+of. His lantern swung from his tightly clenched hand. Though the body
+was erect, the head was thrown back so that the closed eyes were
+pointed towards the needle of the tell-tale that swung from a beam in
+the ceiling.*
+
+*The cabin-compass is called the tell-tale, because without going to
+the compass at the helm, the Captain, while below, can inform himself
+of the course of the ship.
+
+Terrible old man! thought Starbuck with a shudder, sleeping in this
+gale, still thou steadfastly eyest thy purpose.
+
+
+CHAPTER 52. The Albatross.
+
+South-eastward from the Cape, off the distant Crozetts, a good cruising
+ground for Right Whalemen, a sail loomed ahead, the Goney (Albatross)
+by name. As she slowly drew nigh, from my lofty perch at the
+fore-mast-head, I had a good view of that sight so remarkable to a tyro
+in the far ocean fisheries—a whaler at sea, and long absent from home.
+
+As if the waves had been fullers, this craft was bleached like the
+skeleton of a stranded walrus. All down her sides, this spectral
+appearance was traced with long channels of reddened rust, while all
+her spars and her rigging were like the thick branches of trees furred
+over with hoar-frost. Only her lower sails were set. A wild sight it
+was to see her long-bearded look-outs at those three mast-heads. They
+seemed clad in the skins of beasts, so torn and bepatched the raiment
+that had survived nearly four years of cruising. Standing in iron hoops
+nailed to the mast, they swayed and swung over a fathomless sea; and
+though, when the ship slowly glided close under our stern, we six men
+in the air came so nigh to each other that we might almost have leaped
+from the mast-heads of one ship to those of the other; yet, those
+forlorn-looking fishermen, mildly eyeing us as they passed, said not
+one word to our own look-outs, while the quarter-deck hail was being
+heard from below.
+
+“Ship ahoy! Have ye seen the White Whale?”
+
+But as the strange captain, leaning over the pallid bulwarks, was in
+the act of putting his trumpet to his mouth, it somehow fell from his
+hand into the sea; and the wind now rising amain, he in vain strove to
+make himself heard without it. Meantime his ship was still increasing
+the distance between. While in various silent ways the seamen of the
+Pequod were evincing their observance of this ominous incident at the
+first mere mention of the White Whale’s name to another ship, Ahab for
+a moment paused; it almost seemed as though he would have lowered a
+boat to board the stranger, had not the threatening wind forbade. But
+taking advantage of his windward position, he again seized his trumpet,
+and knowing by her aspect that the stranger vessel was a Nantucketer
+and shortly bound home, he loudly hailed—“Ahoy there! This is the
+Pequod, bound round the world! Tell them to address all future letters
+to the Pacific ocean! and this time three years, if I am not at home,
+tell them to address them to ——”
+
+At that moment the two wakes were fairly crossed, and instantly, then,
+in accordance with their singular ways, shoals of small harmless fish,
+that for some days before had been placidly swimming by our side,
+darted away with what seemed shuddering fins, and ranged themselves
+fore and aft with the stranger’s flanks. Though in the course of his
+continual voyagings Ahab must often before have noticed a similar
+sight, yet, to any monomaniac man, the veriest trifles capriciously
+carry meanings.
+
+“Swim away from me, do ye?” murmured Ahab, gazing over into the water.
+There seemed but little in the words, but the tone conveyed more of
+deep helpless sadness than the insane old man had ever before evinced.
+But turning to the steersman, who thus far had been holding the ship in
+the wind to diminish her headway, he cried out in his old lion
+voice,—“Up helm! Keep her off round the world!”
+
+Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings;
+but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through
+numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those that
+we left behind secure, were all the time before us.
+
+Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for
+ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange
+than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise
+in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in
+tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims
+before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they
+either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.
+
+
+CHAPTER 53. The Gam.
+
+The ostensible reason why Ahab did not go on board of the whaler we had
+spoken was this: the wind and sea betokened storms. But even had this
+not been the case, he would not after all, perhaps, have boarded
+her—judging by his subsequent conduct on similar occasions—if so it had
+been that, by the process of hailing, he had obtained a negative answer
+to the question he put. For, as it eventually turned out, he cared not
+to consort, even for five minutes, with any stranger captain, except he
+could contribute some of that information he so absorbingly sought. But
+all this might remain inadequately estimated, were not something said
+here of the peculiar usages of whaling-vessels when meeting each other
+in foreign seas, and especially on a common cruising-ground.
+
+If two strangers crossing the Pine Barrens in New York State, or the
+equally desolate Salisbury Plain in England; if casually encountering
+each other in such inhospitable wilds, these twain, for the life of
+them, cannot well avoid a mutual salutation; and stopping for a moment
+to interchange the news; and, perhaps, sitting down for a while and
+resting in concert: then, how much more natural that upon the
+illimitable Pine Barrens and Salisbury Plains of the sea, two whaling
+vessels descrying each other at the ends of the earth—off lone
+Fanning’s Island, or the far away King’s Mills; how much more natural,
+I say, that under such circumstances these ships should not only
+interchange hails, but come into still closer, more friendly and
+sociable contact. And especially would this seem to be a matter of
+course, in the case of vessels owned in one seaport, and whose
+captains, officers, and not a few of the men are personally known to
+each other; and consequently, have all sorts of dear domestic things to
+talk about.
+
+For the long absent ship, the outward-bounder, perhaps, has letters on
+board; at any rate, she will be sure to let her have some papers of a
+date a year or two later than the last one on her blurred and
+thumb-worn files. And in return for that courtesy, the outward-bound
+ship would receive the latest whaling intelligence from the
+cruising-ground to which she may be destined, a thing of the utmost
+importance to her. And in degree, all this will hold true concerning
+whaling vessels crossing each other’s track on the cruising-ground
+itself, even though they are equally long absent from home. For one of
+them may have received a transfer of letters from some third, and now
+far remote vessel; and some of those letters may be for the people of
+the ship she now meets. Besides, they would exchange the whaling news,
+and have an agreeable chat. For not only would they meet with all the
+sympathies of sailors, but likewise with all the peculiar
+congenialities arising from a common pursuit and mutually shared
+privations and perils.
+
+Nor would difference of country make any very essential difference;
+that is, so long as both parties speak one language, as is the case
+with Americans and English. Though, to be sure, from the small number
+of English whalers, such meetings do not very often occur, and when
+they do occur there is too apt to be a sort of shyness between them;
+for your Englishman is rather reserved, and your Yankee, he does not
+fancy that sort of thing in anybody but himself. Besides, the English
+whalers sometimes affect a kind of metropolitan superiority over the
+American whalers; regarding the long, lean Nantucketer, with his
+nondescript provincialisms, as a sort of sea-peasant. But where this
+superiority in the English whalemen does really consist, it would be
+hard to say, seeing that the Yankees in one day, collectively, kill
+more whales than all the English, collectively, in ten years. But this
+is a harmless little foible in the English whale-hunters, which the
+Nantucketer does not take much to heart; probably, because he knows
+that he has a few foibles himself.
+
+So, then, we see that of all ships separately sailing the sea, the
+whalers have most reason to be sociable—and they are so. Whereas, some
+merchant ships crossing each other’s wake in the mid-Atlantic, will
+oftentimes pass on without so much as a single word of recognition,
+mutually cutting each other on the high seas, like a brace of dandies
+in Broadway; and all the time indulging, perhaps, in finical criticism
+upon each other’s rig. As for Men-of-War, when they chance to meet at
+sea, they first go through such a string of silly bowings and
+scrapings, such a ducking of ensigns, that there does not seem to be
+much right-down hearty good-will and brotherly love about it at all. As
+touching Slave-ships meeting, why, they are in such a prodigious hurry,
+they run away from each other as soon as possible. And as for Pirates,
+when they chance to cross each other’s cross-bones, the first hail
+is—“How many skulls?”—the same way that whalers hail—“How many
+barrels?” And that question once answered, pirates straightway steer
+apart, for they are infernal villains on both sides, and don’t like to
+see overmuch of each other’s villanous likenesses.
+
+But look at the godly, honest, unostentatious, hospitable, sociable,
+free-and-easy whaler! What does the whaler do when she meets another
+whaler in any sort of decent weather? She has a “_Gam_,” a thing so
+utterly unknown to all other ships that they never heard of the name
+even; and if by chance they should hear of it, they only grin at it,
+and repeat gamesome stuff about “spouters” and “blubber-boilers,” and
+such like pretty exclamations. Why it is that all Merchant-seamen, and
+also all Pirates and Man-of-War’s men, and Slave-ship sailors, cherish
+such a scornful feeling towards Whale-ships; this is a question it
+would be hard to answer. Because, in the case of pirates, say, I should
+like to know whether that profession of theirs has any peculiar glory
+about it. It sometimes ends in uncommon elevation, indeed; but only at
+the gallows. And besides, when a man is elevated in that odd fashion,
+he has no proper foundation for his superior altitude. Hence, I
+conclude, that in boasting himself to be high lifted above a whaleman,
+in that assertion the pirate has no solid basis to stand on.
+
+But what is a _Gam?_ You might wear out your index-finger running up
+and down the columns of dictionaries, and never find the word. Dr.
+Johnson never attained to that erudition; Noah Webster’s ark does not
+hold it. Nevertheless, this same expressive word has now for many years
+been in constant use among some fifteen thousand true born Yankees.
+Certainly, it needs a definition, and should be incorporated into the
+Lexicon. With that view, let me learnedly define it.
+
+GAM. NOUN—_A social meeting of two_ (_or more_) _Whaleships, generally
+on a cruising-ground; when, after exchanging hails, they exchange
+visits by boats’ crews: the two captains remaining, for the time, on
+board of one ship, and the two chief mates on the other._
+
+There is another little item about Gamming which must not be forgotten
+here. All professions have their own little peculiarities of detail; so
+has the whale fishery. In a pirate, man-of-war, or slave ship, when the
+captain is rowed anywhere in his boat, he always sits in the stern
+sheets on a comfortable, sometimes cushioned seat there, and often
+steers himself with a pretty little milliner’s tiller decorated with
+gay cords and ribbons. But the whale-boat has no seat astern, no sofa
+of that sort whatever, and no tiller at all. High times indeed, if
+whaling captains were wheeled about the water on castors like gouty old
+aldermen in patent chairs. And as for a tiller, the whale-boat never
+admits of any such effeminacy; and therefore as in gamming a complete
+boat’s crew must leave the ship, and hence as the boat steerer or
+harpooneer is of the number, that subordinate is the steersman upon the
+occasion, and the captain, having no place to sit in, is pulled off to
+his visit all standing like a pine tree. And often you will notice that
+being conscious of the eyes of the whole visible world resting on him
+from the sides of the two ships, this standing captain is all alive to
+the importance of sustaining his dignity by maintaining his legs. Nor
+is this any very easy matter; for in his rear is the immense projecting
+steering oar hitting him now and then in the small of his back, the
+after-oar reciprocating by rapping his knees in front. He is thus
+completely wedged before and behind, and can only expand himself
+sideways by settling down on his stretched legs; but a sudden, violent
+pitch of the boat will often go far to topple him, because length of
+foundation is nothing without corresponding breadth. Merely make a
+spread angle of two poles, and you cannot stand them up. Then, again,
+it would never do in plain sight of the world’s riveted eyes, it would
+never do, I say, for this straddling captain to be seen steadying
+himself the slightest particle by catching hold of anything with his
+hands; indeed, as token of his entire, buoyant self-command, he
+generally carries his hands in his trowsers’ pockets; but perhaps being
+generally very large, heavy hands, he carries them there for ballast.
+Nevertheless there have occurred instances, well authenticated ones
+too, where the captain has been known for an uncommonly critical moment
+or two, in a sudden squall say—to seize hold of the nearest oarsman’s
+hair, and hold on there like grim death.
+
+
+CHAPTER 54. The Town-Ho’s Story.
+
+(_As told at the Golden Inn._)
+
+The Cape of Good Hope, and all the watery region round about there, is
+much like some noted four corners of a great highway, where you meet
+more travellers than in any other part.
+
+It was not very long after speaking the Goney that another
+homeward-bound whaleman, the Town-Ho,* was encountered. She was manned
+almost wholly by Polynesians. In the short gam that ensued she gave us
+strong news of Moby Dick. To some the general interest in the White
+Whale was now wildly heightened by a circumstance of the Town-Ho’s
+story, which seemed obscurely to involve with the whale a certain
+wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called judgments of
+God which at times are said to overtake some men. This latter
+circumstance, with its own particular accompaniments, forming what may
+be called the secret part of the tragedy about to be narrated, never
+reached the ears of Captain Ahab or his mates. For that secret part of
+the story was unknown to the captain of the Town-Ho himself. It was the
+private property of three confederate white seamen of that ship, one of
+whom, it seems, communicated it to Tashtego with Romish injunctions of
+secrecy, but the following night Tashtego rambled in his sleep, and
+revealed so much of it in that way, that when he was wakened he could
+not well withhold the rest. Nevertheless, so potent an influence did
+this thing have on those seamen in the Pequod who came to the full
+knowledge of it, and by such a strange delicacy, to call it so, were
+they governed in this matter, that they kept the secret among
+themselves so that it never transpired abaft the Pequod’s main-mast.
+Interweaving in its proper place this darker thread with the story as
+publicly narrated on the ship, the whole of this strange affair I now
+proceed to put on lasting record.
+
+*The ancient whale-cry upon first sighting a whale from the mast-head,
+still used by whalemen in hunting the famous Gallipagos terrapin.
+
+For my humor’s sake, I shall preserve the style in which I once
+narrated it at Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish friends, one
+saint’s eve, smoking upon the thick-gilt tiled piazza of the Golden
+Inn. Of those fine cavaliers, the young Dons, Pedro and Sebastian, were
+on the closer terms with me; and hence the interluding questions they
+occasionally put, and which are duly answered at the time.
+
+“Some two years prior to my first learning the events which I am about
+rehearsing to you, gentlemen, the Town-Ho, Sperm Whaler of Nantucket,
+was cruising in your Pacific here, not very many days’ sail eastward
+from the eaves of this good Golden Inn. She was somewhere to the
+northward of the Line. One morning upon handling the pumps, according
+to daily usage, it was observed that she made more water in her hold
+than common. They supposed a sword-fish had stabbed her, gentlemen. But
+the captain, having some unusual reason for believing that rare good
+luck awaited him in those latitudes; and therefore being very averse to
+quit them, and the leak not being then considered at all dangerous,
+though, indeed, they could not find it after searching the hold as low
+down as was possible in rather heavy weather, the ship still continued
+her cruisings, the mariners working at the pumps at wide and easy
+intervals; but no good luck came; more days went by, and not only was
+the leak yet undiscovered, but it sensibly increased. So much so, that
+now taking some alarm, the captain, making all sail, stood away for the
+nearest harbor among the islands, there to have his hull hove out and
+repaired.
+
+“Though no small passage was before her, yet, if the commonest chance
+favoured, he did not at all fear that his ship would founder by the
+way, because his pumps were of the best, and being periodically
+relieved at them, those six-and-thirty men of his could easily keep the
+ship free; never mind if the leak should double on her. In truth, well
+nigh the whole of this passage being attended by very prosperous
+breezes, the Town-Ho had all but certainly arrived in perfect safety at
+her port without the occurrence of the least fatality, had it not been
+for the brutal overbearing of Radney, the mate, a Vineyarder, and the
+bitterly provoked vengeance of Steelkilt, a Lakeman and desperado from
+Buffalo.
+
+“‘Lakeman!—Buffalo! Pray, what is a Lakeman, and where is Buffalo?’
+said Don Sebastian, rising in his swinging mat of grass.
+
+“On the eastern shore of our Lake Erie, Don; but—I crave your
+courtesy—may be, you shall soon hear further of all that. Now,
+gentlemen, in square-sail brigs and three-masted ships, well-nigh as
+large and stout as any that ever sailed out of your old Callao to far
+Manilla; this Lakeman, in the land-locked heart of our America, had yet
+been nurtured by all those agrarian freebooting impressions popularly
+connected with the open ocean. For in their interflowing aggregate,
+those grand fresh-water seas of ours,—Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and
+Superior, and Michigan,—possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many
+of the ocean’s noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of
+races and of climes. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic
+isles, even as the Polynesian waters do; in large part, are shored by
+two great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long
+maritime approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East,
+dotted all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by
+batteries, and by the goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they
+have heard the fleet thunderings of naval victories; at intervals, they
+yield their beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash
+from out their peltry wigwams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by
+ancient and unentered forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried
+lines of kings in Gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring wild
+Afric beasts of prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs give
+robes to Tartar Emperors; they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and
+Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float alike the
+full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer,
+and the beech canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as
+direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks
+are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full
+many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew. Thus, gentlemen,
+though an inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean born, and wild-ocean
+nurtured; as much of an audacious mariner as any. And for Radney,
+though in his infancy he may have laid him down on the lone Nantucket
+beach, to nurse at his maternal sea; though in after life he had long
+followed our austere Atlantic and your contemplative Pacific; yet was
+he quite as vengeful and full of social quarrel as the backwoods
+seaman, fresh from the latitudes of buck-horn handled Bowie-knives. Yet
+was this Nantucketer a man with some good-hearted traits; and this
+Lakeman, a mariner, who though a sort of devil indeed, might yet by
+inflexible firmness, only tempered by that common decency of human
+recognition which is the meanest slave’s right; thus treated, this
+Steelkilt had long been retained harmless and docile. At all events, he
+had proved so thus far; but Radney was doomed and made mad, and
+Steelkilt—but, gentlemen, you shall hear.
+
+“It was not more than a day or two at the furthest after pointing her
+prow for her island haven, that the Town-Ho’s leak seemed again
+increasing, but only so as to require an hour or more at the pumps
+every day. You must know that in a settled and civilized ocean like our
+Atlantic, for example, some skippers think little of pumping their
+whole way across it; though of a still, sleepy night, should the
+officer of the deck happen to forget his duty in that respect, the
+probability would be that he and his shipmates would never again
+remember it, on account of all hands gently subsiding to the bottom.
+Nor in the solitary and savage seas far from you to the westward,
+gentlemen, is it altogether unusual for ships to keep clanging at their
+pump-handles in full chorus even for a voyage of considerable length;
+that is, if it lie along a tolerably accessible coast, or if any other
+reasonable retreat is afforded them. It is only when a leaky vessel is
+in some very out of the way part of those waters, some really landless
+latitude, that her captain begins to feel a little anxious.
+
+“Much this way had it been with the Town-Ho; so when her leak was found
+gaining once more, there was in truth some small concern manifested by
+several of her company; especially by Radney the mate. He commanded the
+upper sails to be well hoisted, sheeted home anew, and every way
+expanded to the breeze. Now this Radney, I suppose, was as little of a
+coward, and as little inclined to any sort of nervous apprehensiveness
+touching his own person as any fearless, unthinking creature on land or
+on sea that you can conveniently imagine, gentlemen. Therefore when he
+betrayed this solicitude about the safety of the ship, some of the
+seamen declared that it was only on account of his being a part owner
+in her. So when they were working that evening at the pumps, there was
+on this head no small gamesomeness slily going on among them, as they
+stood with their feet continually overflowed by the rippling clear
+water; clear as any mountain spring, gentlemen—that bubbling from the
+pumps ran across the deck, and poured itself out in steady spouts at
+the lee scupper-holes.
+
+“Now, as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this conventional
+world of ours—watery or otherwise; that when a person placed in command
+over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very significantly his
+superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man he
+conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness; and if he have a
+chance he will pull down and pulverize that subaltern’s tower, and make
+a little heap of dust of it. Be this conceit of mine as it may,
+gentlemen, at all events Steelkilt was a tall and noble animal with a
+head like a Roman, and a flowing golden beard like the tasseled
+housings of your last viceroy’s snorting charger; and a brain, and a
+heart, and a soul in him, gentlemen, which had made Steelkilt
+Charlemagne, had he been born son to Charlemagne’s father. But Radney,
+the mate, was ugly as a mule; yet as hardy, as stubborn, as malicious.
+He did not love Steelkilt, and Steelkilt knew it.
+
+“Espying the mate drawing near as he was toiling at the pump with the
+rest, the Lakeman affected not to notice him, but unawed, went on with
+his gay banterings.
+
+“‘Aye, aye, my merry lads, it’s a lively leak this; hold a cannikin,
+one of ye, and let’s have a taste. By the Lord, it’s worth bottling! I
+tell ye what, men, old Rad’s investment must go for it! he had best cut
+away his part of the hull and tow it home. The fact is, boys, that
+sword-fish only began the job; he’s come back again with a gang of
+ship-carpenters, saw-fish, and file-fish, and what not; and the whole
+posse of ’em are now hard at work cutting and slashing at the bottom;
+making improvements, I suppose. If old Rad were here now, I’d tell him
+to jump overboard and scatter ’em. They’re playing the devil with his
+estate, I can tell him. But he’s a simple old soul,—Rad, and a beauty
+too. Boys, they say the rest of his property is invested in
+looking-glasses. I wonder if he’d give a poor devil like me the model
+of his nose.’
+
+“‘Damn your eyes! what’s that pump stopping for?’ roared Radney,
+pretending not to have heard the sailors’ talk. ‘Thunder away at it!’
+
+“‘Aye, aye, sir,’ said Steelkilt, merry as a cricket. ‘Lively, boys,
+lively, now!’ And with that the pump clanged like fifty fire-engines;
+the men tossed their hats off to it, and ere long that peculiar gasping
+of the lungs was heard which denotes the fullest tension of life’s
+utmost energies.
+
+“Quitting the pump at last, with the rest of his band, the Lakeman went
+forward all panting, and sat himself down on the windlass; his face
+fiery red, his eyes bloodshot, and wiping the profuse sweat from his
+brow. Now what cozening fiend it was, gentlemen, that possessed Radney
+to meddle with such a man in that corporeally exasperated state, I know
+not; but so it happened. Intolerably striding along the deck, the mate
+commanded him to get a broom and sweep down the planks, and also a
+shovel, and remove some offensive matters consequent upon allowing a
+pig to run at large.
+
+“Now, gentlemen, sweeping a ship’s deck at sea is a piece of household
+work which in all times but raging gales is regularly attended to every
+evening; it has been known to be done in the case of ships actually
+foundering at the time. Such, gentlemen, is the inflexibility of
+sea-usages and the instinctive love of neatness in seamen; some of whom
+would not willingly drown without first washing their faces. But in all
+vessels this broom business is the prescriptive province of the boys,
+if boys there be aboard. Besides, it was the stronger men in the
+Town-Ho that had been divided into gangs, taking turns at the pumps;
+and being the most athletic seaman of them all, Steelkilt had been
+regularly assigned captain of one of the gangs; consequently he should
+have been freed from any trivial business not connected with truly
+nautical duties, such being the case with his comrades. I mention all
+these particulars so that you may understand exactly how this affair
+stood between the two men.
+
+“But there was more than this: the order about the shovel was almost as
+plainly meant to sting and insult Steelkilt, as though Radney had spat
+in his face. Any man who has gone sailor in a whale-ship will
+understand this; and all this and doubtless much more, the Lakeman
+fully comprehended when the mate uttered his command. But as he sat
+still for a moment, and as he steadfastly looked into the mate’s
+malignant eye and perceived the stacks of powder-casks heaped up in him
+and the slow-match silently burning along towards them; as he
+instinctively saw all this, that strange forbearance and unwillingness
+to stir up the deeper passionateness in any already ireful being—a
+repugnance most felt, when felt at all, by really valiant men even when
+aggrieved—this nameless phantom feeling, gentlemen, stole over
+Steelkilt.
+
+“Therefore, in his ordinary tone, only a little broken by the bodily
+exhaustion he was temporarily in, he answered him saying that sweeping
+the deck was not his business, and he would not do it. And then,
+without at all alluding to the shovel, he pointed to three lads as the
+customary sweepers; who, not being billeted at the pumps, had done
+little or nothing all day. To this, Radney replied with an oath, in a
+most domineering and outrageous manner unconditionally reiterating his
+command; meanwhile advancing upon the still seated Lakeman, with an
+uplifted cooper’s club hammer which he had snatched from a cask near
+by.
+
+“Heated and irritated as he was by his spasmodic toil at the pumps, for
+all his first nameless feeling of forbearance the sweating Steelkilt
+could but ill brook this bearing in the mate; but somehow still
+smothering the conflagration within him, without speaking he remained
+doggedly rooted to his seat, till at last the incensed Radney shook the
+hammer within a few inches of his face, furiously commanding him to do
+his bidding.
+
+“Steelkilt rose, and slowly retreating round the windlass, steadily
+followed by the mate with his menacing hammer, deliberately repeated
+his intention not to obey. Seeing, however, that his forbearance had
+not the slightest effect, by an awful and unspeakable intimation with
+his twisted hand he warned off the foolish and infatuated man; but it
+was to no purpose. And in this way the two went once slowly round the
+windlass; when, resolved at last no longer to retreat, bethinking him
+that he had now forborne as much as comported with his humor, the
+Lakeman paused on the hatches and thus spoke to the officer:
+
+“‘Mr. Radney, I will not obey you. Take that hammer away, or look to
+yourself.’ But the predestinated mate coming still closer to him, where
+the Lakeman stood fixed, now shook the heavy hammer within an inch of
+his teeth; meanwhile repeating a string of insufferable maledictions.
+Retreating not the thousandth part of an inch; stabbing him in the eye
+with the unflinching poniard of his glance, Steelkilt, clenching his
+right hand behind him and creepingly drawing it back, told his
+persecutor that if the hammer but grazed his cheek he (Steelkilt) would
+murder him. But, gentlemen, the fool had been branded for the slaughter
+by the gods. Immediately the hammer touched the cheek; the next instant
+the lower jaw of the mate was stove in his head; he fell on the hatch
+spouting blood like a whale.
+
+“Ere the cry could go aft Steelkilt was shaking one of the backstays
+leading far aloft to where two of his comrades were standing their
+mastheads. They were both Canallers.
+
+“‘Canallers!’ cried Don Pedro. ‘We have seen many whale-ships in our
+harbours, but never heard of your Canallers. Pardon: who and what are
+they?’
+
+“‘Canallers, Don, are the boatmen belonging to our grand Erie Canal.
+You must have heard of it.’
+
+“‘Nay, Senor; hereabouts in this dull, warm, most lazy, and hereditary
+land, we know but little of your vigorous North.’
+
+“‘Aye? Well then, Don, refill my cup. Your chicha’s very fine; and ere
+proceeding further I will tell ye what our Canallers are; for such
+information may throw side-light upon my story.’
+
+“For three hundred and sixty miles, gentlemen, through the entire
+breadth of the state of New York; through numerous populous cities and
+most thriving villages; through long, dismal, uninhabited swamps, and
+affluent, cultivated fields, unrivalled for fertility; by billiard-room
+and bar-room; through the holy-of-holies of great forests; on Roman
+arches over Indian rivers; through sun and shade; by happy hearts or
+broken; through all the wide contrasting scenery of those noble Mohawk
+counties; and especially, by rows of snow-white chapels, whose spires
+stand almost like milestones, flows one continual stream of Venetianly
+corrupt and often lawless life. There’s your true Ashantee, gentlemen;
+there howl your pagans; where you ever find them, next door to you;
+under the long-flung shadow, and the snug patronising lee of churches.
+For by some curious fatality, as it is often noted of your metropolitan
+freebooters that they ever encamp around the halls of justice, so
+sinners, gentlemen, most abound in holiest vicinities.
+
+“‘Is that a friar passing?’ said Don Pedro, looking downwards into the
+crowded plazza, with humorous concern.
+
+“‘Well for our northern friend, Dame Isabella’s Inquisition wanes in
+Lima,’ laughed Don Sebastian. ‘Proceed, Senor.’
+
+“‘A moment! Pardon!’ cried another of the company. ‘In the name of all
+us Limeese, I but desire to express to you, sir sailor, that we have by
+no means overlooked your delicacy in not substituting present Lima for
+distant Venice in your corrupt comparison. Oh! do not bow and look
+surprised; you know the proverb all along this coast—“Corrupt as Lima.”
+It but bears out your saying, too; churches more plentiful than
+billiard-tables, and for ever open—and “Corrupt as Lima.” So, too,
+Venice; I have been there; the holy city of the blessed evangelist, St.
+Mark!—St. Dominic, purge it! Your cup! Thanks: here I refill; now, you
+pour out again.’
+
+“Freely depicted in his own vocation, gentlemen, the Canaller would
+make a fine dramatic hero, so abundantly and picturesquely wicked is
+he. Like Mark Antony, for days and days along his green-turfed, flowery
+Nile, he indolently floats, openly toying with his red-cheeked
+Cleopatra, ripening his apricot thigh upon the sunny deck. But ashore,
+all this effeminacy is dashed. The brigandish guise which the Canaller
+so proudly sports; his slouched and gaily-ribboned hat betoken his
+grand features. A terror to the smiling innocence of the villages
+through which he floats; his swart visage and bold swagger are not
+unshunned in cities. Once a vagabond on his own canal, I have received
+good turns from one of these Canallers; I thank him heartily; would
+fain be not ungrateful; but it is often one of the prime redeeming
+qualities of your man of violence, that at times he has as stiff an arm
+to back a poor stranger in a strait, as to plunder a wealthy one. In
+sum, gentlemen, what the wildness of this canal life is, is
+emphatically evinced by this; that our wild whale-fishery contains so
+many of its most finished graduates, and that scarce any race of
+mankind, except Sydney men, are so much distrusted by our whaling
+captains. Nor does it at all diminish the curiousness of this matter,
+that to many thousands of our rural boys and young men born along its
+line, the probationary life of the Grand Canal furnishes the sole
+transition between quietly reaping in a Christian corn-field, and
+recklessly ploughing the waters of the most barbaric seas.
+
+“‘I see! I see!’ impetuously exclaimed Don Pedro, spilling his chicha
+upon his silvery ruffles. ‘No need to travel! The world’s one Lima. I
+had thought, now, that at your temperate North the generations were
+cold and holy as the hills.—But the story.’
+
+“I left off, gentlemen, where the Lakeman shook the backstay. Hardly
+had he done so, when he was surrounded by the three junior mates and
+the four harpooneers, who all crowded him to the deck. But sliding down
+the ropes like baleful comets, the two Canallers rushed into the
+uproar, and sought to drag their man out of it towards the forecastle.
+Others of the sailors joined with them in this attempt, and a twisted
+turmoil ensued; while standing out of harm’s way, the valiant captain
+danced up and down with a whale-pike, calling upon his officers to
+manhandle that atrocious scoundrel, and smoke him along to the
+quarter-deck. At intervals, he ran close up to the revolving border of
+the confusion, and prying into the heart of it with his pike, sought to
+prick out the object of his resentment. But Steelkilt and his
+desperadoes were too much for them all; they succeeded in gaining the
+forecastle deck, where, hastily slewing about three or four large casks
+in a line with the windlass, these sea-Parisians entrenched themselves
+behind the barricade.
+
+“‘Come out of that, ye pirates!’ roared the captain, now menacing them
+with a pistol in each hand, just brought to him by the steward. ‘Come
+out of that, ye cut-throats!’
+
+“Steelkilt leaped on the barricade, and striding up and down there,
+defied the worst the pistols could do; but gave the captain to
+understand distinctly, that his (Steelkilt’s) death would be the signal
+for a murderous mutiny on the part of all hands. Fearing in his heart
+lest this might prove but too true, the captain a little desisted, but
+still commanded the insurgents instantly to return to their duty.
+
+“‘Will you promise not to touch us, if we do?’ demanded their
+ringleader.
+
+“‘Turn to! turn to!—I make no promise;—to your duty! Do you want to
+sink the ship, by knocking off at a time like this? Turn to!’ and he
+once more raised a pistol.
+
+“‘Sink the ship?’ cried Steelkilt. ‘Aye, let her sink. Not a man of us
+turns to, unless you swear not to raise a rope-yarn against us. What
+say ye, men?’ turning to his comrades. A fierce cheer was their
+response.
+
+“The Lakeman now patrolled the barricade, all the while keeping his eye
+on the Captain, and jerking out such sentences as these:—‘It’s not our
+fault; we didn’t want it; I told him to take his hammer away; it was
+boy’s business; he might have known me before this; I told him not to
+prick the buffalo; I believe I have broken a finger here against his
+cursed jaw; ain’t those mincing knives down in the forecastle there,
+men? look to those handspikes, my hearties. Captain, by God, look to
+yourself; say the word; don’t be a fool; forget it all; we are ready to
+turn to; treat us decently, and we’re your men; but we won’t be
+flogged.’
+
+“‘Turn to! I make no promises, turn to, I say!’
+
+“‘Look ye, now,’ cried the Lakeman, flinging out his arm towards him,
+‘there are a few of us here (and I am one of them) who have shipped for
+the cruise, d’ye see; now as you well know, sir, we can claim our
+discharge as soon as the anchor is down; so we don’t want a row; it’s
+not our interest; we want to be peaceable; we are ready to work, but we
+won’t be flogged.’
+
+“‘Turn to!’ roared the Captain.
+
+“Steelkilt glanced round him a moment, and then said:—‘I tell you what
+it is now, Captain, rather than kill ye, and be hung for such a shabby
+rascal, we won’t lift a hand against ye unless ye attack us; but till
+you say the word about not flogging us, we don’t do a hand’s turn.’
+
+“‘Down into the forecastle then, down with ye, I’ll keep ye there till
+ye’re sick of it. Down ye go.’
+
+“‘Shall we?’ cried the ringleader to his men. Most of them were against
+it; but at length, in obedience to Steelkilt, they preceded him down
+into their dark den, growlingly disappearing, like bears into a cave.
+
+“As the Lakeman’s bare head was just level with the planks, the Captain
+and his posse leaped the barricade, and rapidly drawing over the slide
+of the scuttle, planted their group of hands upon it, and loudly called
+for the steward to bring the heavy brass padlock belonging to the
+companionway. Then opening the slide a little, the Captain whispered
+something down the crack, closed it, and turned the key upon them—ten
+in number—leaving on deck some twenty or more, who thus far had
+remained neutral.
+
+“All night a wide-awake watch was kept by all the officers, forward and
+aft, especially about the forecastle scuttle and fore hatchway; at
+which last place it was feared the insurgents might emerge, after
+breaking through the bulkhead below. But the hours of darkness passed
+in peace; the men who still remained at their duty toiling hard at the
+pumps, whose clinking and clanking at intervals through the dreary
+night dismally resounded through the ship.
+
+“At sunrise the Captain went forward, and knocking on the deck,
+summoned the prisoners to work; but with a yell they refused. Water was
+then lowered down to them, and a couple of handfuls of biscuit were
+tossed after it; when again turning the key upon them and pocketing it,
+the Captain returned to the quarter-deck. Twice every day for three
+days this was repeated; but on the fourth morning a confused wrangling,
+and then a scuffling was heard, as the customary summons was delivered;
+and suddenly four men burst up from the forecastle, saying they were
+ready to turn to. The fetid closeness of the air, and a famishing diet,
+united perhaps to some fears of ultimate retribution, had constrained
+them to surrender at discretion. Emboldened by this, the Captain
+reiterated his demand to the rest, but Steelkilt shouted up to him a
+terrific hint to stop his babbling and betake himself where he
+belonged. On the fifth morning three others of the mutineers bolted up
+into the air from the desperate arms below that sought to restrain
+them. Only three were left.
+
+“‘Better turn to, now?’ said the Captain with a heartless jeer.
+
+“‘Shut us up again, will ye!’ cried Steelkilt.
+
+“‘Oh certainly,’ said the Captain, and the key clicked.
+
+“It was at this point, gentlemen, that enraged by the defection of
+seven of his former associates, and stung by the mocking voice that had
+last hailed him, and maddened by his long entombment in a place as
+black as the bowels of despair; it was then that Steelkilt proposed to
+the two Canallers, thus far apparently of one mind with him, to burst
+out of their hole at the next summoning of the garrison; and armed with
+their keen mincing knives (long, crescentic, heavy implements with a
+handle at each end) run amuck from the bowsprit to the taffrail; and if
+by any devilishness of desperation possible, seize the ship. For
+himself, he would do this, he said, whether they joined him or not.
+That was the last night he should spend in that den. But the scheme met
+with no opposition on the part of the other two; they swore they were
+ready for that, or for any other mad thing, for anything in short but a
+surrender. And what was more, they each insisted upon being the first
+man on deck, when the time to make the rush should come. But to this
+their leader as fiercely objected, reserving that priority for himself;
+particularly as his two comrades would not yield, the one to the other,
+in the matter; and both of them could not be first, for the ladder
+would but admit one man at a time. And here, gentlemen, the foul play
+of these miscreants must come out.
+
+“Upon hearing the frantic project of their leader, each in his own
+separate soul had suddenly lighted, it would seem, upon the same piece
+of treachery, namely: to be foremost in breaking out, in order to be
+the first of the three, though the last of the ten, to surrender; and
+thereby secure whatever small chance of pardon such conduct might
+merit. But when Steelkilt made known his determination still to lead
+them to the last, they in some way, by some subtle chemistry of
+villany, mixed their before secret treacheries together; and when their
+leader fell into a doze, verbally opened their souls to each other in
+three sentences; and bound the sleeper with cords, and gagged him with
+cords; and shrieked out for the Captain at midnight.
+
+“Thinking murder at hand, and smelling in the dark for the blood, he
+and all his armed mates and harpooneers rushed for the forecastle. In a
+few minutes the scuttle was opened, and, bound hand and foot, the still
+struggling ringleader was shoved up into the air by his perfidious
+allies, who at once claimed the honor of securing a man who had been
+fully ripe for murder. But all these were collared, and dragged along
+the deck like dead cattle; and, side by side, were seized up into the
+mizzen rigging, like three quarters of meat, and there they hung till
+morning. ‘Damn ye,’ cried the Captain, pacing to and fro before them,
+‘the vultures would not touch ye, ye villains!’
+
+“At sunrise he summoned all hands; and separating those who had
+rebelled from those who had taken no part in the mutiny, he told the
+former that he had a good mind to flog them all round—thought, upon the
+whole, he would do so—he ought to—justice demanded it; but for the
+present, considering their timely surrender, he would let them go with
+a reprimand, which he accordingly administered in the vernacular.
+
+“‘But as for you, ye carrion rogues,’ turning to the three men in the
+rigging—‘for you, I mean to mince ye up for the try-pots;’ and, seizing
+a rope, he applied it with all his might to the backs of the two
+traitors, till they yelled no more, but lifelessly hung their heads
+sideways, as the two crucified thieves are drawn.
+
+“‘My wrist is sprained with ye!’ he cried, at last; ‘but there is still
+rope enough left for you, my fine bantam, that wouldn’t give up. Take
+that gag from his mouth, and let us hear what he can say for himself.’
+
+“For a moment the exhausted mutineer made a tremulous motion of his
+cramped jaws, and then painfully twisting round his head, said in a
+sort of hiss, ‘What I say is this—and mind it well—if you flog me, I
+murder you!’
+
+“‘Say ye so? then see how ye frighten me’—and the Captain drew off with
+the rope to strike.
+
+“‘Best not,’ hissed the Lakeman.
+
+“‘But I must,’—and the rope was once more drawn back for the stroke.
+
+“Steelkilt here hissed out something, inaudible to all but the Captain;
+who, to the amazement of all hands, started back, paced the deck
+rapidly two or three times, and then suddenly throwing down his rope,
+said, ‘I won’t do it—let him go—cut him down: d’ye hear?’
+
+“But as the junior mates were hurrying to execute the order, a pale
+man, with a bandaged head, arrested them—Radney the chief mate. Ever
+since the blow, he had lain in his berth; but that morning, hearing the
+tumult on the deck, he had crept out, and thus far had watched the
+whole scene. Such was the state of his mouth, that he could hardly
+speak; but mumbling something about _his_ being willing and able to do
+what the captain dared not attempt, he snatched the rope and advanced
+to his pinioned foe.
+
+“‘You are a coward!’ hissed the Lakeman.
+
+“‘So I am, but take that.’ The mate was in the very act of striking,
+when another hiss stayed his uplifted arm. He paused: and then pausing
+no more, made good his word, spite of Steelkilt’s threat, whatever that
+might have been. The three men were then cut down, all hands were
+turned to, and, sullenly worked by the moody seamen, the iron pumps
+clanged as before.
+
+“Just after dark that day, when one watch had retired below, a clamor
+was heard in the forecastle; and the two trembling traitors running up,
+besieged the cabin door, saying they durst not consort with the crew.
+Entreaties, cuffs, and kicks could not drive them back, so at their own
+instance they were put down in the ship’s run for salvation. Still, no
+sign of mutiny reappeared among the rest. On the contrary, it seemed,
+that mainly at Steelkilt’s instigation, they had resolved to maintain
+the strictest peacefulness, obey all orders to the last, and, when the
+ship reached port, desert her in a body. But in order to insure the
+speediest end to the voyage, they all agreed to another thing—namely,
+not to sing out for whales, in case any should be discovered. For,
+spite of her leak, and spite of all her other perils, the Town-Ho still
+maintained her mast-heads, and her captain was just as willing to lower
+for a fish that moment, as on the day his craft first struck the
+cruising ground; and Radney the mate was quite as ready to change his
+berth for a boat, and with his bandaged mouth seek to gag in death the
+vital jaw of the whale.
+
+“But though the Lakeman had induced the seamen to adopt this sort of
+passiveness in their conduct, he kept his own counsel (at least till
+all was over) concerning his own proper and private revenge upon the
+man who had stung him in the ventricles of his heart. He was in Radney
+the chief mate’s watch; and as if the infatuated man sought to run more
+than half way to meet his doom, after the scene at the rigging, he
+insisted, against the express counsel of the captain, upon resuming the
+head of his watch at night. Upon this, and one or two other
+circumstances, Steelkilt systematically built the plan of his revenge.
+
+“During the night, Radney had an unseamanlike way of sitting on the
+bulwarks of the quarter-deck, and leaning his arm upon the gunwale of
+the boat which was hoisted up there, a little above the ship’s side. In
+this attitude, it was well known, he sometimes dozed. There was a
+considerable vacancy between the boat and the ship, and down between
+this was the sea. Steelkilt calculated his time, and found that his
+next trick at the helm would come round at two o’clock, in the morning
+of the third day from that in which he had been betrayed. At his
+leisure, he employed the interval in braiding something very carefully
+in his watches below.
+
+“‘What are you making there?’ said a shipmate.
+
+“‘What do you think? what does it look like?’
+
+“‘Like a lanyard for your bag; but it’s an odd one, seems to me.’
+
+“‘Yes, rather oddish,’ said the Lakeman, holding it at arm’s length
+before him; ‘but I think it will answer. Shipmate, I haven’t enough
+twine,—have you any?’
+
+“But there was none in the forecastle.
+
+“‘Then I must get some from old Rad;’ and he rose to go aft.
+
+“‘You don’t mean to go a begging to _him!_’ said a sailor.
+
+“‘Why not? Do you think he won’t do me a turn, when it’s to help
+himself in the end, shipmate?’ and going to the mate, he looked at him
+quietly, and asked him for some twine to mend his hammock. It was given
+him—neither twine nor lanyard were seen again; but the next night an
+iron ball, closely netted, partly rolled from the pocket of the
+Lakeman’s monkey jacket, as he was tucking the coat into his hammock
+for a pillow. Twenty-four hours after, his trick at the silent
+helm—nigh to the man who was apt to doze over the grave always ready
+dug to the seaman’s hand—that fatal hour was then to come; and in the
+fore-ordaining soul of Steelkilt, the mate was already stark and
+stretched as a corpse, with his forehead crushed in.
+
+“But, gentlemen, a fool saved the would-be murderer from the bloody
+deed he had planned. Yet complete revenge he had, and without being the
+avenger. For by a mysterious fatality, Heaven itself seemed to step in
+to take out of his hands into its own the damning thing he would have
+done.
+
+“It was just between daybreak and sunrise of the morning of the second
+day, when they were washing down the decks, that a stupid Teneriffe
+man, drawing water in the main-chains, all at once shouted out, ‘There
+she rolls! there she rolls!’ Jesu, what a whale! It was Moby Dick.
+
+“‘Moby Dick!’ cried Don Sebastian; ‘St. Dominic! Sir sailor, but do
+whales have christenings? Whom call you Moby Dick?’
+
+“‘A very white, and famous, and most deadly immortal monster, Don;—but
+that would be too long a story.’
+
+“‘How? how?’ cried all the young Spaniards, crowding.
+
+“‘Nay, Dons, Dons—nay, nay! I cannot rehearse that now. Let me get more
+into the air, Sirs.’
+
+“‘The chicha! the chicha!’ cried Don Pedro; ‘our vigorous friend looks
+faint;—fill up his empty glass!’
+
+“No need, gentlemen; one moment, and I proceed.—Now, gentlemen, so
+suddenly perceiving the snowy whale within fifty yards of the
+ship—forgetful of the compact among the crew—in the excitement of the
+moment, the Teneriffe man had instinctively and involuntarily lifted
+his voice for the monster, though for some little time past it had been
+plainly beheld from the three sullen mast-heads. All was now a phrensy.
+‘The White Whale—the White Whale!’ was the cry from captain, mates, and
+harpooneers, who, undeterred by fearful rumours, were all anxious to
+capture so famous and precious a fish; while the dogged crew eyed
+askance, and with curses, the appalling beauty of the vast milky mass,
+that lit up by a horizontal spangling sun, shifted and glistened like a
+living opal in the blue morning sea. Gentlemen, a strange fatality
+pervades the whole career of these events, as if verily mapped out
+before the world itself was charted. The mutineer was the bowsman of
+the mate, and when fast to a fish, it was his duty to sit next him,
+while Radney stood up with his lance in the prow, and haul in or
+slacken the line, at the word of command. Moreover, when the four boats
+were lowered, the mate’s got the start; and none howled more fiercely
+with delight than did Steelkilt, as he strained at his oar. After a
+stiff pull, their harpooneer got fast, and, spear in hand, Radney
+sprang to the bow. He was always a furious man, it seems, in a boat.
+And now his bandaged cry was, to beach him on the whale’s topmost back.
+Nothing loath, his bowsman hauled him up and up, through a blinding
+foam that blent two whitenesses together; till of a sudden the boat
+struck as against a sunken ledge, and keeling over, spilled out the
+standing mate. That instant, as he fell on the whale’s slippery back,
+the boat righted, and was dashed aside by the swell, while Radney was
+tossed over into the sea, on the other flank of the whale. He struck
+out through the spray, and, for an instant, was dimly seen through that
+veil, wildly seeking to remove himself from the eye of Moby Dick. But
+the whale rushed round in a sudden maelstrom; seized the swimmer
+between his jaws; and rearing high up with him, plunged headlong again,
+and went down.
+
+“Meantime, at the first tap of the boat’s bottom, the Lakeman had
+slackened the line, so as to drop astern from the whirlpool; calmly
+looking on, he thought his own thoughts. But a sudden, terrific,
+downward jerking of the boat, quickly brought his knife to the line. He
+cut it; and the whale was free. But, at some distance, Moby Dick rose
+again, with some tatters of Radney’s red woollen shirt, caught in the
+teeth that had destroyed him. All four boats gave chase again; but the
+whale eluded them, and finally wholly disappeared.
+
+“In good time, the Town-Ho reached her port—a savage, solitary
+place—where no civilized creature resided. There, headed by the
+Lakeman, all but five or six of the foremastmen deliberately deserted
+among the palms; eventually, as it turned out, seizing a large double
+war-canoe of the savages, and setting sail for some other harbor.
+
+“The ship’s company being reduced to but a handful, the captain called
+upon the Islanders to assist him in the laborious business of heaving
+down the ship to stop the leak. But to such unresting vigilance over
+their dangerous allies was this small band of whites necessitated, both
+by night and by day, and so extreme was the hard work they underwent,
+that upon the vessel being ready again for sea, they were in such a
+weakened condition that the captain durst not put off with them in so
+heavy a vessel. After taking counsel with his officers, he anchored the
+ship as far off shore as possible; loaded and ran out his two cannon
+from the bows; stacked his muskets on the poop; and warning the
+Islanders not to approach the ship at their peril, took one man with
+him, and setting the sail of his best whale-boat, steered straight
+before the wind for Tahiti, five hundred miles distant, to procure a
+reinforcement to his crew.
+
+“On the fourth day of the sail, a large canoe was descried, which
+seemed to have touched at a low isle of corals. He steered away from
+it; but the savage craft bore down on him; and soon the voice of
+Steelkilt hailed him to heave to, or he would run him under water. The
+captain presented a pistol. With one foot on each prow of the yoked
+war-canoes, the Lakeman laughed him to scorn; assuring him that if the
+pistol so much as clicked in the lock, he would bury him in bubbles and
+foam.
+
+“‘What do you want of me?’ cried the captain.
+
+“‘Where are you bound? and for what are you bound?’ demanded Steelkilt;
+‘no lies.’
+
+“‘I am bound to Tahiti for more men.’
+
+“‘Very good. Let me board you a moment—I come in peace.’ With that he
+leaped from the canoe, swam to the boat; and climbing the gunwale,
+stood face to face with the captain.
+
+“‘Cross your arms, sir; throw back your head. Now, repeat after me. As
+soon as Steelkilt leaves me, I swear to beach this boat on yonder
+island, and remain there six days. If I do not, may lightnings strike
+me!’
+
+“‘A pretty scholar,’ laughed the Lakeman. ‘Adios, Senor!’ and leaping
+into the sea, he swam back to his comrades.
+
+“Watching the boat till it was fairly beached, and drawn up to the
+roots of the cocoa-nut trees, Steelkilt made sail again, and in due
+time arrived at Tahiti, his own place of destination. There, luck
+befriended him; two ships were about to sail for France, and were
+providentially in want of precisely that number of men which the sailor
+headed. They embarked; and so for ever got the start of their former
+captain, had he been at all minded to work them legal retribution.
+
+“Some ten days after the French ships sailed, the whale-boat arrived,
+and the captain was forced to enlist some of the more civilized
+Tahitians, who had been somewhat used to the sea. Chartering a small
+native schooner, he returned with them to his vessel; and finding all
+right there, again resumed his cruisings.
+
+“Where Steelkilt now is, gentlemen, none know; but upon the island of
+Nantucket, the widow of Radney still turns to the sea which refuses to
+give up its dead; still in dreams sees the awful white whale that
+destroyed him.  * * * *
+
+“‘Are you through?’ said Don Sebastian, quietly.
+
+“‘I am, Don.’
+
+“‘Then I entreat you, tell me if to the best of your own convictions,
+this your story is in substance really true? It is so passing
+wonderful! Did you get it from an unquestionable source? Bear with me
+if I seem to press.’
+
+“‘Also bear with all of us, sir sailor; for we all join in Don
+Sebastian’s suit,’ cried the company, with exceeding interest.
+
+“‘Is there a copy of the Holy Evangelists in the Golden Inn,
+gentlemen?’
+
+“‘Nay,’ said Don Sebastian; ‘but I know a worthy priest near by, who
+will quickly procure one for me. I go for it; but are you well advised?
+this may grow too serious.’
+
+“‘Will you be so good as to bring the priest also, Don?’
+
+“‘Though there are no Auto-da-Fés in Lima now,’ said one of the company
+to another; ‘I fear our sailor friend runs risk of the archiepiscopacy.
+Let us withdraw more out of the moonlight. I see no need of this.’
+
+“‘Excuse me for running after you, Don Sebastian; but may I also beg
+that you will be particular in procuring the largest sized Evangelists
+you can.’
+
+* * * * * *
+
+“‘This is the priest, he brings you the Evangelists,’ said Don
+Sebastian, gravely, returning with a tall and solemn figure.
+
+“‘Let me remove my hat. Now, venerable priest, further into the light,
+and hold the Holy Book before me that I may touch it.
+
+“‘So help me Heaven, and on my honor the story I have told ye,
+gentlemen, is in substance and its great items, true. I know it to be
+true; it happened on this ball; I trod the ship; I knew the crew; I
+have seen and talked with Steelkilt since the death of Radney.’”
+
+
+CHAPTER 55. Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales.
+
+I shall ere long paint to you as well as one can without canvas,
+something like the true form of the whale as he actually appears to the
+eye of the whaleman when in his own absolute body the whale is moored
+alongside the whale-ship so that he can be fairly stepped upon there.
+It may be worth while, therefore, previously to advert to those curious
+imaginary portraits of him which even down to the present day
+confidently challenge the faith of the landsman. It is time to set the
+world right in this matter, by proving such pictures of the whale all
+wrong.
+
+It may be that the primal source of all those pictorial delusions will
+be found among the oldest Hindoo, Egyptian, and Grecian sculptures. For
+ever since those inventive but unscrupulous times when on the marble
+panellings of temples, the pedestals of statues, and on shields,
+medallions, cups, and coins, the dolphin was drawn in scales of
+chain-armor like Saladin’s, and a helmeted head like St. George’s; ever
+since then has something of the same sort of license prevailed, not
+only in most popular pictures of the whale, but in many scientific
+presentations of him.
+
+Now, by all odds, the most ancient extant portrait anyways purporting
+to be the whale’s, is to be found in the famous cavern-pagoda of
+Elephanta, in India. The Brahmins maintain that in the almost endless
+sculptures of that immemorial pagoda, all the trades and pursuits,
+every conceivable avocation of man, were prefigured ages before any of
+them actually came into being. No wonder then, that in some sort our
+noble profession of whaling should have been there shadowed forth. The
+Hindoo whale referred to, occurs in a separate department of the wall,
+depicting the incarnation of Vishnu in the form of leviathan, learnedly
+known as the Matse Avatar. But though this sculpture is half man and
+half whale, so as only to give the tail of the latter, yet that small
+section of him is all wrong. It looks more like the tapering tail of an
+anaconda, than the broad palms of the true whale’s majestic flukes.
+
+But go to the old Galleries, and look now at a great Christian
+painter’s portrait of this fish; for he succeeds no better than the
+antediluvian Hindoo. It is Guido’s picture of Perseus rescuing
+Andromeda from the sea-monster or whale. Where did Guido get the model
+of such a strange creature as that? Nor does Hogarth, in painting the
+same scene in his own “Perseus Descending,” make out one whit better.
+The huge corpulence of that Hogarthian monster undulates on the
+surface, scarcely drawing one inch of water. It has a sort of howdah on
+its back, and its distended tusked mouth into which the billows are
+rolling, might be taken for the Traitors’ Gate leading from the Thames
+by water into the Tower. Then, there are the Prodromus whales of old
+Scotch Sibbald, and Jonah’s whale, as depicted in the prints of old
+Bibles and the cuts of old primers. What shall be said of these? As for
+the book-binder’s whale winding like a vine-stalk round the stock of a
+descending anchor—as stamped and gilded on the backs and title-pages of
+many books both old and new—that is a very picturesque but purely
+fabulous creature, imitated, I take it, from the like figures on
+antique vases. Though universally denominated a dolphin, I nevertheless
+call this book-binder’s fish an attempt at a whale; because it was so
+intended when the device was first introduced. It was introduced by an
+old Italian publisher somewhere about the 15th century, during the
+Revival of Learning; and in those days, and even down to a
+comparatively late period, dolphins were popularly supposed to be a
+species of the Leviathan.
+
+In the vignettes and other embellishments of some ancient books you
+will at times meet with very curious touches at the whale, where all
+manner of spouts, jets d’eau, hot springs and cold, Saratoga and
+Baden-Baden, come bubbling up from his unexhausted brain. In the
+title-page of the original edition of the “Advancement of Learning” you
+will find some curious whales.
+
+But quitting all these unprofessional attempts, let us glance at those
+pictures of leviathan purporting to be sober, scientific delineations,
+by those who know. In old Harris’s collection of voyages there are some
+plates of whales extracted from a Dutch book of voyages, A.D. 1671,
+entitled “A Whaling Voyage to Spitzbergen in the ship Jonas in the
+Whale, Peter Peterson of Friesland, master.” In one of those plates the
+whales, like great rafts of logs, are represented lying among
+ice-isles, with white bears running over their living backs. In another
+plate, the prodigious blunder is made of representing the whale with
+perpendicular flukes.
+
+Then again, there is an imposing quarto, written by one Captain
+Colnett, a Post Captain in the English navy, entitled “A Voyage round
+Cape Horn into the South Seas, for the purpose of extending the
+Spermaceti Whale Fisheries.” In this book is an outline purporting to
+be a “Picture of a Physeter or Spermaceti whale, drawn by scale from
+one killed on the coast of Mexico, August, 1793, and hoisted on deck.”
+I doubt not the captain had this veracious picture taken for the
+benefit of his marines. To mention but one thing about it, let me say
+that it has an eye which applied, according to the accompanying scale,
+to a full grown sperm whale, would make the eye of that whale a
+bow-window some five feet long. Ah, my gallant captain, why did ye not
+give us Jonah looking out of that eye!
+
+Nor are the most conscientious compilations of Natural History for the
+benefit of the young and tender, free from the same heinousness of
+mistake. Look at that popular work “Goldsmith’s Animated Nature.” In
+the abridged London edition of 1807, there are plates of an alleged
+“whale” and a “narwhale.” I do not wish to seem inelegant, but this
+unsightly whale looks much like an amputated sow; and, as for the
+narwhale, one glimpse at it is enough to amaze one, that in this
+nineteenth century such a hippogriff could be palmed for genuine upon
+any intelligent public of schoolboys.
+
+Then, again, in 1825, Bernard Germain, Count de Lacépède, a great
+naturalist, published a scientific systemized whale book, wherein are
+several pictures of the different species of the Leviathan. All these
+are not only incorrect, but the picture of the Mysticetus or Greenland
+whale (that is to say, the Right whale), even Scoresby, a long
+experienced man as touching that species, declares not to have its
+counterpart in nature.
+
+But the placing of the cap-sheaf to all this blundering business was
+reserved for the scientific Frederick Cuvier, brother to the famous
+Baron. In 1836, he published a Natural History of Whales, in which he
+gives what he calls a picture of the Sperm Whale. Before showing that
+picture to any Nantucketer, you had best provide for your summary
+retreat from Nantucket. In a word, Frederick Cuvier’s Sperm Whale is
+not a Sperm Whale, but a squash. Of course, he never had the benefit of
+a whaling voyage (such men seldom have), but whence he derived that
+picture, who can tell? Perhaps he got it as his scientific predecessor
+in the same field, Desmarest, got one of his authentic abortions; that
+is, from a Chinese drawing. And what sort of lively lads with the
+pencil those Chinese are, many queer cups and saucers inform us.
+
+As for the sign-painters’ whales seen in the streets hanging over the
+shops of oil-dealers, what shall be said of them? They are generally
+Richard III. whales, with dromedary humps, and very savage;
+breakfasting on three or four sailor tarts, that is whaleboats full of
+mariners: their deformities floundering in seas of blood and blue
+paint.
+
+But these manifold mistakes in depicting the whale are not so very
+surprising after all. Consider! Most of the scientific drawings have
+been taken from the stranded fish; and these are about as correct as a
+drawing of a wrecked ship, with broken back, would correctly represent
+the noble animal itself in all its undashed pride of hull and spars.
+Though elephants have stood for their full-lengths, the living
+Leviathan has never yet fairly floated himself for his portrait. The
+living whale, in his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen
+at sea in unfathomable waters; and afloat the vast bulk of him is out
+of sight, like a launched line-of-battle ship; and out of that element
+it is a thing eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist him bodily
+into the air, so as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations.
+And, not to speak of the highly presumable difference of contour
+between a young sucking whale and a full-grown Platonian Leviathan;
+yet, even in the case of one of those young sucking whales hoisted to a
+ship’s deck, such is then the outlandish, eel-like, limbered, varying
+shape of him, that his precise expression the devil himself could not
+catch.
+
+But it may be fancied, that from the naked skeleton of the stranded
+whale, accurate hints may be derived touching his true form. Not at
+all. For it is one of the more curious things about this Leviathan,
+that his skeleton gives very little idea of his general shape. Though
+Jeremy Bentham’s skeleton, which hangs for candelabra in the library of
+one of his executors, correctly conveys the idea of a burly-browed
+utilitarian old gentleman, with all Jeremy’s other leading personal
+characteristics; yet nothing of this kind could be inferred from any
+leviathan’s articulated bones. In fact, as the great Hunter says, the
+mere skeleton of the whale bears the same relation to the fully
+invested and padded animal as the insect does to the chrysalis that so
+roundingly envelopes it. This peculiarity is strikingly evinced in the
+head, as in some part of this book will be incidentally shown. It is
+also very curiously displayed in the side fin, the bones of which
+almost exactly answer to the bones of the human hand, minus only the
+thumb. This fin has four regular bone-fingers, the index, middle, ring,
+and little finger. But all these are permanently lodged in their fleshy
+covering, as the human fingers in an artificial covering. “However
+recklessly the whale may sometimes serve us,” said humorous Stubb one
+day, “he can never be truly said to handle us without mittens.”
+
+For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs
+conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world
+which must remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit the
+mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very
+considerable degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding
+out precisely what the whale really looks like. And the only mode in
+which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by
+going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of
+being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you
+had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this
+Leviathan.
+
+
+CHAPTER 56. Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True
+Pictures of Whaling Scenes.
+
+In connexion with the monstrous pictures of whales, I am strongly
+tempted here to enter upon those still more monstrous stories of them
+which are to be found in certain books, both ancient and modern,
+especially in Pliny, Purchas, Hackluyt, Harris, Cuvier, etc. But I pass
+that matter by.
+
+I know of only four published outlines of the great Sperm Whale;
+Colnett’s, Huggins’s, Frederick Cuvier’s, and Beale’s. In the previous
+chapter Colnett and Cuvier have been referred to. Huggins’s is far
+better than theirs; but, by great odds, Beale’s is the best. All
+Beale’s drawings of this whale are good, excepting the middle figure in
+the picture of three whales in various attitudes, capping his second
+chapter. His frontispiece, boats attacking Sperm Whales, though no
+doubt calculated to excite the civil scepticism of some parlor men, is
+admirably correct and life-like in its general effect. Some of the
+Sperm Whale drawings in J. Ross Browne are pretty correct in contour;
+but they are wretchedly engraved. That is not his fault though.
+
+Of the Right Whale, the best outline pictures are in Scoresby; but they
+are drawn on too small a scale to convey a desirable impression. He has
+but one picture of whaling scenes, and this is a sad deficiency,
+because it is by such pictures only, when at all well done, that you
+can derive anything like a truthful idea of the living whale as seen by
+his living hunters.
+
+But, taken for all in all, by far the finest, though in some details
+not the most correct, presentations of whales and whaling scenes to be
+anywhere found, are two large French engravings, well executed, and
+taken from paintings by one Garnery. Respectively, they represent
+attacks on the Sperm and Right Whale. In the first engraving a noble
+Sperm Whale is depicted in full majesty of might, just risen beneath
+the boat from the profundities of the ocean, and bearing high in the
+air upon his back the terrific wreck of the stoven planks. The prow of
+the boat is partially unbroken, and is drawn just balancing upon the
+monster’s spine; and standing in that prow, for that one single
+incomputable flash of time, you behold an oarsman, half shrouded by the
+incensed boiling spout of the whale, and in the act of leaping, as if
+from a precipice. The action of the whole thing is wonderfully good and
+true. The half-emptied line-tub floats on the whitened sea; the wooden
+poles of the spilled harpoons obliquely bob in it; the heads of the
+swimming crew are scattered about the whale in contrasting expressions
+of affright; while in the black stormy distance the ship is bearing
+down upon the scene. Serious fault might be found with the anatomical
+details of this whale, but let that pass; since, for the life of me, I
+could not draw so good a one.
+
+In the second engraving, the boat is in the act of drawing alongside
+the barnacled flank of a large running Right Whale, that rolls his
+black weedy bulk in the sea like some mossy rock-slide from the
+Patagonian cliffs. His jets are erect, full, and black like soot; so
+that from so abounding a smoke in the chimney, you would think there
+must be a brave supper cooking in the great bowels below. Sea fowls are
+pecking at the small crabs, shell-fish, and other sea candies and
+maccaroni, which the Right Whale sometimes carries on his pestilent
+back. And all the while the thick-lipped leviathan is rushing through
+the deep, leaving tons of tumultuous white curds in his wake, and
+causing the slight boat to rock in the swells like a skiff caught nigh
+the paddle-wheels of an ocean steamer. Thus, the foreground is all
+raging commotion; but behind, in admirable artistic contrast, is the
+glassy level of a sea becalmed, the drooping unstarched sails of the
+powerless ship, and the inert mass of a dead whale, a conquered
+fortress, with the flag of capture lazily hanging from the whale-pole
+inserted into his spout-hole.
+
+Who Garnery the painter is, or was, I know not. But my life for it he
+was either practically conversant with his subject, or else
+marvellously tutored by some experienced whaleman. The French are the
+lads for painting action. Go and gaze upon all the paintings of Europe,
+and where will you find such a gallery of living and breathing
+commotion on canvas, as in that triumphal hall at Versailles; where the
+beholder fights his way, pell-mell, through the consecutive great
+battles of France; where every sword seems a flash of the Northern
+Lights, and the successive armed kings and Emperors dash by, like a
+charge of crowned centaurs? Not wholly unworthy of a place in that
+gallery, are these sea battle-pieces of Garnery.
+
+The natural aptitude of the French for seizing the picturesqueness of
+things seems to be peculiarly evinced in what paintings and engravings
+they have of their whaling scenes. With not one tenth of England’s
+experience in the fishery, and not the thousandth part of that of the
+Americans, they have nevertheless furnished both nations with the only
+finished sketches at all capable of conveying the real spirit of the
+whale hunt. For the most part, the English and American whale
+draughtsmen seem entirely content with presenting the mechanical
+outline of things, such as the vacant profile of the whale; which, so
+far as picturesqueness of effect is concerned, is about tantamount to
+sketching the profile of a pyramid. Even Scoresby, the justly renowned
+Right whaleman, after giving us a stiff full length of the Greenland
+whale, and three or four delicate miniatures of narwhales and
+porpoises, treats us to a series of classical engravings of boat hooks,
+chopping knives, and grapnels; and with the microscopic diligence of a
+Leuwenhoeck submits to the inspection of a shivering world ninety-six
+fac-similes of magnified Arctic snow crystals. I mean no disparagement
+to the excellent voyager (I honor him for a veteran), but in so
+important a matter it was certainly an oversight not to have procured
+for every crystal a sworn affidavit taken before a Greenland Justice of
+the Peace.
+
+In addition to those fine engravings from Garnery, there are two other
+French engravings worthy of note, by some one who subscribes himself
+“H. Durand.” One of them, though not precisely adapted to our present
+purpose, nevertheless deserves mention on other accounts. It is a quiet
+noon-scene among the isles of the Pacific; a French whaler anchored,
+inshore, in a calm, and lazily taking water on board; the loosened
+sails of the ship, and the long leaves of the palms in the background,
+both drooping together in the breezeless air. The effect is very fine,
+when considered with reference to its presenting the hardy fishermen
+under one of their few aspects of oriental repose. The other engraving
+is quite a different affair: the ship hove-to upon the open sea, and in
+the very heart of the Leviathanic life, with a Right Whale alongside;
+the vessel (in the act of cutting-in) hove over to the monster as if to
+a quay; and a boat, hurriedly pushing off from this scene of activity,
+is about giving chase to whales in the distance. The harpoons and
+lances lie levelled for use; three oarsmen are just setting the mast in
+its hole; while from a sudden roll of the sea, the little craft stands
+half-erect out of the water, like a rearing horse. From the ship, the
+smoke of the torments of the boiling whale is going up like the smoke
+over a village of smithies; and to windward, a black cloud, rising up
+with earnest of squalls and rains, seems to quicken the activity of the
+excited seamen.
+
+
+CHAPTER 57. Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in
+Stone; in Mountains; in Stars.
+
+On Tower-hill, as you go down to the London docks, you may have seen a
+crippled beggar (or _kedger_, as the sailors say) holding a painted
+board before him, representing the tragic scene in which he lost his
+leg. There are three whales and three boats; and one of the boats
+(presumed to contain the missing leg in all its original integrity) is
+being crunched by the jaws of the foremost whale. Any time these ten
+years, they tell me, has that man held up that picture, and exhibited
+that stump to an incredulous world. But the time of his justification
+has now come. His three whales are as good whales as were ever
+published in Wapping, at any rate; and his stump as unquestionable a
+stump as any you will find in the western clearings. But, though for
+ever mounted on that stump, never a stump-speech does the poor whaleman
+make; but, with downcast eyes, stands ruefully contemplating his own
+amputation.
+
+Throughout the Pacific, and also in Nantucket, and New Bedford, and Sag
+Harbor, you will come across lively sketches of whales and
+whaling-scenes, graven by the fishermen themselves on Sperm
+Whale-teeth, or ladies’ busks wrought out of the Right Whale-bone, and
+other like skrimshander articles, as the whalemen call the numerous
+little ingenious contrivances they elaborately carve out of the rough
+material, in their hours of ocean leisure. Some of them have little
+boxes of dentistical-looking implements, specially intended for the
+skrimshandering business. But, in general, they toil with their
+jack-knives alone; and, with that almost omnipotent tool of the sailor,
+they will turn you out anything you please, in the way of a mariner’s
+fancy.
+
+Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man
+to that condition in which God placed him, _i.e._ what is called
+savagery. Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. I
+myself am a savage, owning no allegiance but to the King of the
+Cannibals; and ready at any moment to rebel against him.
+
+Now, one of the peculiar characteristics of the savage in his domestic
+hours, is his wonderful patience of industry. An ancient Hawaiian
+war-club or spear-paddle, in its full multiplicity and elaboration of
+carving, is as great a trophy of human perseverance as a Latin lexicon.
+For, with but a bit of broken sea-shell or a shark’s tooth, that
+miraculous intricacy of wooden net-work has been achieved; and it has
+cost steady years of steady application.
+
+As with the Hawaiian savage, so with the white sailor-savage. With the
+same marvellous patience, and with the same single shark’s tooth, of
+his one poor jack-knife, he will carve you a bit of bone sculpture, not
+quite as workmanlike, but as close packed in its maziness of design, as
+the Greek savage, Achilles’s shield; and full of barbaric spirit and
+suggestiveness, as the prints of that fine old Dutch savage, Albert
+Durer.
+
+Wooden whales, or whales cut in profile out of the small dark slabs of
+the noble South Sea war-wood, are frequently met with in the
+forecastles of American whalers. Some of them are done with much
+accuracy.
+
+At some old gable-roofed country houses you will see brass whales hung
+by the tail for knockers to the road-side door. When the porter is
+sleepy, the anvil-headed whale would be best. But these knocking whales
+are seldom remarkable as faithful essays. On the spires of some
+old-fashioned churches you will see sheet-iron whales placed there for
+weather-cocks; but they are so elevated, and besides that are to all
+intents and purposes so labelled with “_Hands off!_” you cannot examine
+them closely enough to decide upon their merit.
+
+In bony, ribby regions of the earth, where at the base of high broken
+cliffs masses of rock lie strewn in fantastic groupings upon the plain,
+you will often discover images as of the petrified forms of the
+Leviathan partly merged in grass, which of a windy day breaks against
+them in a surf of green surges.
+
+Then, again, in mountainous countries where the traveller is
+continually girdled by amphitheatrical heights; here and there from
+some lucky point of view you will catch passing glimpses of the
+profiles of whales defined along the undulating ridges. But you must be
+a thorough whaleman, to see these sights; and not only that, but if you
+wish to return to such a sight again, you must be sure and take the
+exact intersecting latitude and longitude of your first stand-point,
+else so chance-like are such observations of the hills, that your
+precise, previous stand-point would require a laborious re-discovery;
+like the Soloma Islands, which still remain incognita, though once
+high-ruffed Mendanna trod them and old Figuera chronicled them.
+
+Nor when expandingly lifted by your subject, can you fail to trace out
+great whales in the starry heavens, and boats in pursuit of them; as
+when long filled with thoughts of war the Eastern nations saw armies
+locked in battle among the clouds. Thus at the North have I chased
+Leviathan round and round the Pole with the revolutions of the bright
+points that first defined him to me. And beneath the effulgent
+Antarctic skies I have boarded the Argo-Navis, and joined the chase
+against the starry Cetus far beyond the utmost stretch of Hydrus and
+the Flying Fish.
+
+With a frigate’s anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons for
+spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies, to
+see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents really
+lie encamped beyond my mortal sight!
+
+
+CHAPTER 58. Brit.
+
+Steering north-eastward from the Crozetts, we fell in with vast meadows
+of brit, the minute, yellow substance, upon which the Right Whale
+largely feeds. For leagues and leagues it undulated round us, so that
+we seemed to be sailing through boundless fields of ripe and golden
+wheat.
+
+On the second day, numbers of Right Whales were seen, who, secure from
+the attack of a Sperm Whaler like the Pequod, with open jaws sluggishly
+swam through the brit, which, adhering to the fringing fibres of that
+wondrous Venetian blind in their mouths, was in that manner separated
+from the water that escaped at the lip.
+
+As morning mowers, who side by side slowly and seethingly advance their
+scythes through the long wet grass of marshy meads; even so these
+monsters swam, making a strange, grassy, cutting sound; and leaving
+behind them endless swaths of blue upon the yellow sea.*
+
+*That part of the sea known among whalemen as the “Brazil Banks” does
+not bear that name as the Banks of Newfoundland do, because of there
+being shallows and soundings there, but because of this remarkable
+meadow-like appearance, caused by the vast drifts of brit continually
+floating in those latitudes, where the Right Whale is often chased.
+
+But it was only the sound they made as they parted the brit which at
+all reminded one of mowers. Seen from the mast-heads, especially when
+they paused and were stationary for a while, their vast black forms
+looked more like lifeless masses of rock than anything else. And as in
+the great hunting countries of India, the stranger at a distance will
+sometimes pass on the plains recumbent elephants without knowing them
+to be such, taking them for bare, blackened elevations of the soil;
+even so, often, with him, who for the first time beholds this species
+of the leviathans of the sea. And even when recognised at last, their
+immense magnitude renders it very hard really to believe that such
+bulky masses of overgrowth can possibly be instinct, in all parts, with
+the same sort of life that lives in a dog or a horse.
+
+Indeed, in other respects, you can hardly regard any creatures of the
+deep with the same feelings that you do those of the shore. For though
+some old naturalists have maintained that all creatures of the land are
+of their kind in the sea; and though taking a broad general view of the
+thing, this may very well be; yet coming to specialties, where, for
+example, does the ocean furnish any fish that in disposition answers to
+the sagacious kindness of the dog? The accursed shark alone can in any
+generic respect be said to bear comparative analogy to him.
+
+But though, to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the seas
+have ever been regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and
+repelling; though we know the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita,
+so that Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his
+one superficial western one; though, by vast odds, the most terrific of
+all mortal disasters have immemorially and indiscriminately befallen
+tens and hundreds of thousands of those who have gone upon the waters;
+though but a moment’s consideration will teach, that however baby man
+may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering
+future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever,
+to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize
+the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the
+continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense
+of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.
+
+The first boat we read of, floated on an ocean, that with Portuguese
+vengeance had whelmed a whole world without leaving so much as a widow.
+That same ocean rolls now; that same ocean destroyed the wrecked ships
+of last year. Yea, foolish mortals, Noah’s flood is not yet subsided;
+two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.
+
+Wherein differ the sea and the land, that a miracle upon one is not a
+miracle upon the other? Preternatural terrors rested upon the Hebrews,
+when under the feet of Korah and his company the live ground opened and
+swallowed them up for ever; yet not a modern sun ever sets, but in
+precisely the same manner the live sea swallows up ships and crews.
+
+But not only is the sea such a foe to man who is an alien to it, but it
+is also a fiend to its own off-spring; worse than the Persian host who
+murdered his own guests; sparing not the creatures which itself hath
+spawned. Like a savage tigress that tossing in the jungle overlays her
+own cubs, so the sea dashes even the mightiest whales against the
+rocks, and leaves them there side by side with the split wrecks of
+ships. No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting
+like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean
+overruns the globe.
+
+Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures
+glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously
+hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish
+brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the
+dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once
+more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey
+upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.
+
+Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile
+earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a
+strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean
+surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one
+insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the
+horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that
+isle, thou canst never return!
+
+
+CHAPTER 59. Squid.
+
+Slowly wading through the meadows of brit, the Pequod still held on her
+way north-eastward towards the island of Java; a gentle air impelling
+her keel, so that in the surrounding serenity her three tall tapering
+masts mildly waved to that languid breeze, as three mild palms on a
+plain. And still, at wide intervals in the silvery night, the lonely,
+alluring jet would be seen.
+
+But one transparent blue morning, when a stillness almost preternatural
+spread over the sea, however unattended with any stagnant calm; when
+the long burnished sun-glade on the waters seemed a golden finger laid
+across them, enjoining some secrecy; when the slippered waves whispered
+together as they softly ran on; in this profound hush of the visible
+sphere a strange spectre was seen by Daggoo from the main-mast-head.
+
+In the distance, a great white mass lazily rose, and rising higher and
+higher, and disentangling itself from the azure, at last gleamed before
+our prow like a snow-slide, new slid from the hills. Thus glistening
+for a moment, as slowly it subsided, and sank. Then once more arose,
+and silently gleamed. It seemed not a whale; and yet is this Moby Dick?
+thought Daggoo. Again the phantom went down, but on re-appearing once
+more, with a stiletto-like cry that startled every man from his nod,
+the negro yelled out—“There! there again! there she breaches! right
+ahead! The White Whale, the White Whale!”
+
+Upon this, the seamen rushed to the yard-arms, as in swarming-time the
+bees rush to the boughs. Bare-headed in the sultry sun, Ahab stood on
+the bowsprit, and with one hand pushed far behind in readiness to wave
+his orders to the helmsman, cast his eager glance in the direction
+indicated aloft by the outstretched motionless arm of Daggoo.
+
+Whether the flitting attendance of the one still and solitary jet had
+gradually worked upon Ahab, so that he was now prepared to connect the
+ideas of mildness and repose with the first sight of the particular
+whale he pursued; however this was, or whether his eagerness betrayed
+him; whichever way it might have been, no sooner did he distinctly
+perceive the white mass, than with a quick intensity he instantly gave
+orders for lowering.
+
+The four boats were soon on the water; Ahab’s in advance, and all
+swiftly pulling towards their prey. Soon it went down, and while, with
+oars suspended, we were awaiting its reappearance, lo! in the same spot
+where it sank, once more it slowly rose. Almost forgetting for the
+moment all thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at the most wondrous
+phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind. A
+vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing
+cream-colour, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms
+radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of
+anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach.
+No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of
+either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an
+unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life.
+
+As with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck still
+gazing at the agitated waters where it had sunk, with a wild voice
+exclaimed—“Almost rather had I seen Moby Dick and fought him, than to
+have seen thee, thou white ghost!”
+
+“What was it, Sir?” said Flask.
+
+“The great live squid, which, they say, few whale-ships ever beheld,
+and returned to their ports to tell of it.”
+
+But Ahab said nothing; turning his boat, he sailed back to the vessel;
+the rest as silently following.
+
+Whatever superstitions the sperm whalemen in general have connected
+with the sight of this object, certain it is, that a glimpse of it
+being so very unusual, that circumstance has gone far to invest it with
+portentousness. So rarely is it beheld, that though one and all of them
+declare it to be the largest animated thing in the ocean, yet very few
+of them have any but the most vague ideas concerning its true nature
+and form; notwithstanding, they believe it to furnish to the sperm
+whale his only food. For though other species of whales find their food
+above water, and may be seen by man in the act of feeding, the
+spermaceti whale obtains his whole food in unknown zones below the
+surface; and only by inference is it that any one can tell of what,
+precisely, that food consists. At times, when closely pursued, he will
+disgorge what are supposed to be the detached arms of the squid; some
+of them thus exhibited exceeding twenty and thirty feet in length. They
+fancy that the monster to which these arms belonged ordinarily clings
+by them to the bed of the ocean; and that the sperm whale, unlike other
+species, is supplied with teeth in order to attack and tear it.
+
+There seems some ground to imagine that the great Kraken of Bishop
+Pontoppodan may ultimately resolve itself into Squid. The manner in
+which the Bishop describes it, as alternately rising and sinking, with
+some other particulars he narrates, in all this the two correspond. But
+much abatement is necessary with respect to the incredible bulk he
+assigns it.
+
+By some naturalists who have vaguely heard rumors of the mysterious
+creature, here spoken of, it is included among the class of
+cuttle-fish, to which, indeed, in certain external respects it would
+seem to belong, but only as the Anak of the tribe.
+
+
+CHAPTER 60. The Line.
+
+With reference to the whaling scene shortly to be described, as well as
+for the better understanding of all similar scenes elsewhere presented,
+I have here to speak of the magical, sometimes horrible whale-line.
+
+The line originally used in the fishery was of the best hemp, slightly
+vapored with tar, not impregnated with it, as in the case of ordinary
+ropes; for while tar, as ordinarily used, makes the hemp more pliable
+to the rope-maker, and also renders the rope itself more convenient to
+the sailor for common ship use; yet, not only would the ordinary
+quantity too much stiffen the whale-line for the close coiling to which
+it must be subjected; but as most seamen are beginning to learn, tar in
+general by no means adds to the rope’s durability or strength, however
+much it may give it compactness and gloss.
+
+Of late years the Manilla rope has in the American fishery almost
+entirely superseded hemp as a material for whale-lines; for, though not
+so durable as hemp, it is stronger, and far more soft and elastic; and
+I will add (since there is an æsthetics in all things), is much more
+handsome and becoming to the boat, than hemp. Hemp is a dusky, dark
+fellow, a sort of Indian; but Manilla is as a golden-haired Circassian
+to behold.
+
+The whale-line is only two-thirds of an inch in thickness. At first
+sight, you would not think it so strong as it really is. By experiment
+its one and fifty yarns will each suspend a weight of one hundred and
+twenty pounds; so that the whole rope will bear a strain nearly equal
+to three tons. In length, the common sperm whale-line measures
+something over two hundred fathoms. Towards the stern of the boat it is
+spirally coiled away in the tub, not like the worm-pipe of a still
+though, but so as to form one round, cheese-shaped mass of densely
+bedded “sheaves,” or layers of concentric spiralizations, without any
+hollow but the “heart,” or minute vertical tube formed at the axis of
+the cheese. As the least tangle or kink in the coiling would, in
+running out, infallibly take somebody’s arm, leg, or entire body off,
+the utmost precaution is used in stowing the line in its tub. Some
+harpooneers will consume almost an entire morning in this business,
+carrying the line high aloft and then reeving it downwards through a
+block towards the tub, so as in the act of coiling to free it from all
+possible wrinkles and twists.
+
+In the English boats two tubs are used instead of one; the same line
+being continuously coiled in both tubs. There is some advantage in
+this; because these twin-tubs being so small they fit more readily into
+the boat, and do not strain it so much; whereas, the American tub,
+nearly three feet in diameter and of proportionate depth, makes a
+rather bulky freight for a craft whose planks are but one half-inch in
+thickness; for the bottom of the whale-boat is like critical ice, which
+will bear up a considerable distributed weight, but not very much of a
+concentrated one. When the painted canvas cover is clapped on the
+American line-tub, the boat looks as if it were pulling off with a
+prodigious great wedding-cake to present to the whales.
+
+Both ends of the line are exposed; the lower end terminating in an
+eye-splice or loop coming up from the bottom against the side of the
+tub, and hanging over its edge completely disengaged from everything.
+This arrangement of the lower end is necessary on two accounts. First:
+In order to facilitate the fastening to it of an additional line from a
+neighboring boat, in case the stricken whale should sound so deep as to
+threaten to carry off the entire line originally attached to the
+harpoon. In these instances, the whale of course is shifted like a mug
+of ale, as it were, from the one boat to the other; though the first
+boat always hovers at hand to assist its consort. Second: This
+arrangement is indispensable for common safety’s sake; for were the
+lower end of the line in any way attached to the boat, and were the
+whale then to run the line out to the end almost in a single, smoking
+minute as he sometimes does, he would not stop there, for the doomed
+boat would infallibly be dragged down after him into the profundity of
+the sea; and in that case no town-crier would ever find her again.
+
+Before lowering the boat for the chase, the upper end of the line is
+taken aft from the tub, and passing round the loggerhead there, is
+again carried forward the entire length of the boat, resting crosswise
+upon the loom or handle of every man’s oar, so that it jogs against his
+wrist in rowing; and also passing between the men, as they alternately
+sit at the opposite gunwales, to the leaded chocks or grooves in the
+extreme pointed prow of the boat, where a wooden pin or skewer the size
+of a common quill, prevents it from slipping out. From the chocks it
+hangs in a slight festoon over the bows, and is then passed inside the
+boat again; and some ten or twenty fathoms (called box-line) being
+coiled upon the box in the bows, it continues its way to the gunwale
+still a little further aft, and is then attached to the short-warp—the
+rope which is immediately connected with the harpoon; but previous to
+that connexion, the short-warp goes through sundry mystifications too
+tedious to detail.
+
+Thus the whale-line folds the whole boat in its complicated coils,
+twisting and writhing around it in almost every direction. All the
+oarsmen are involved in its perilous contortions; so that to the timid
+eye of the landsman, they seem as Indian jugglers, with the deadliest
+snakes sportively festooning their limbs. Nor can any son of mortal
+woman, for the first time, seat himself amid those hempen intricacies,
+and while straining his utmost at the oar, bethink him that at any
+unknown instant the harpoon may be darted, and all these horrible
+contortions be put in play like ringed lightnings; he cannot be thus
+circumstanced without a shudder that makes the very marrow in his bones
+to quiver in him like a shaken jelly. Yet habit—strange thing! what
+cannot habit accomplish?—Gayer sallies, more merry mirth, better jokes,
+and brighter repartees, you never heard over your mahogany, than you
+will hear over the half-inch white cedar of the whale-boat, when thus
+hung in hangman’s nooses; and, like the six burghers of Calais before
+King Edward, the six men composing the crew pull into the jaws of
+death, with a halter around every neck, as you may say.
+
+Perhaps a very little thought will now enable you to account for those
+repeated whaling disasters—some few of which are casually chronicled—of
+this man or that man being taken out of the boat by the line, and lost.
+For, when the line is darting out, to be seated then in the boat, is
+like being seated in the midst of the manifold whizzings of a
+steam-engine in full play, when every flying beam, and shaft, and
+wheel, is grazing you. It is worse; for you cannot sit motionless in
+the heart of these perils, because the boat is rocking like a cradle,
+and you are pitched one way and the other, without the slightest
+warning; and only by a certain self-adjusting buoyancy and
+simultaneousness of volition and action, can you escape being made a
+Mazeppa of, and run away with where the all-seeing sun himself could
+never pierce you out.
+
+Again: as the profound calm which only apparently precedes and
+prophesies of the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself;
+for, indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelope of the storm; and
+contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal
+powder, and the ball, and the explosion; so the graceful repose of the
+line, as it silently serpentines about the oarsmen before being brought
+into actual play—this is a thing which carries more of true terror than
+any other aspect of this dangerous affair. But why say more? All men
+live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their
+necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death,
+that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.
+And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would
+not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before
+your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.
+
+
+CHAPTER 61. Stubb Kills a Whale.
+
+If to Starbuck the apparition of the Squid was a thing of portents, to
+Queequeg it was quite a different object.
+
+“When you see him ’quid,” said the savage, honing his harpoon in the
+bow of his hoisted boat, “then you quick see him ’parm whale.”
+
+The next day was exceedingly still and sultry, and with nothing special
+to engage them, the Pequod’s crew could hardly resist the spell of
+sleep induced by such a vacant sea. For this part of the Indian Ocean
+through which we then were voyaging is not what whalemen call a lively
+ground; that is, it affords fewer glimpses of porpoises, dolphins,
+flying-fish, and other vivacious denizens of more stirring waters, than
+those off the Rio de la Plata, or the in-shore ground off Peru.
+
+It was my turn to stand at the foremast-head; and with my shoulders
+leaning against the slackened royal shrouds, to and fro I idly swayed
+in what seemed an enchanted air. No resolution could withstand it; in
+that dreamy mood losing all consciousness, at last my soul went out of
+my body; though my body still continued to sway as a pendulum will,
+long after the power which first moved it is withdrawn.
+
+Ere forgetfulness altogether came over me, I had noticed that the
+seamen at the main and mizzen-mast-heads were already drowsy. So that
+at last all three of us lifelessly swung from the spars, and for every
+swing that we made there was a nod from below from the slumbering
+helmsman. The waves, too, nodded their indolent crests; and across the
+wide trance of the sea, east nodded to west, and the sun over all.
+
+Suddenly bubbles seemed bursting beneath my closed eyes; like vices my
+hands grasped the shrouds; some invisible, gracious agency preserved
+me; with a shock I came back to life. And lo! close under our lee, not
+forty fathoms off, a gigantic Sperm Whale lay rolling in the water like
+the capsized hull of a frigate, his broad, glossy back, of an Ethiopian
+hue, glistening in the sun’s rays like a mirror. But lazily undulating
+in the trough of the sea, and ever and anon tranquilly spouting his
+vapory jet, the whale looked like a portly burgher smoking his pipe of
+a warm afternoon. But that pipe, poor whale, was thy last. As if struck
+by some enchanter’s wand, the sleepy ship and every sleeper in it all
+at once started into wakefulness; and more than a score of voices from
+all parts of the vessel, simultaneously with the three notes from
+aloft, shouted forth the accustomed cry, as the great fish slowly and
+regularly spouted the sparkling brine into the air.
+
+“Clear away the boats! Luff!” cried Ahab. And obeying his own order, he
+dashed the helm down before the helmsman could handle the spokes.
+
+The sudden exclamations of the crew must have alarmed the whale; and
+ere the boats were down, majestically turning, he swam away to the
+leeward, but with such a steady tranquillity, and making so few ripples
+as he swam, that thinking after all he might not as yet be alarmed,
+Ahab gave orders that not an oar should be used, and no man must speak
+but in whispers. So seated like Ontario Indians on the gunwales of the
+boats, we swiftly but silently paddled along; the calm not admitting of
+the noiseless sails being set. Presently, as we thus glided in chase,
+the monster perpendicularly flitted his tail forty feet into the air,
+and then sank out of sight like a tower swallowed up.
+
+“There go flukes!” was the cry, an announcement immediately followed by
+Stubb’s producing his match and igniting his pipe, for now a respite
+was granted. After the full interval of his sounding had elapsed, the
+whale rose again, and being now in advance of the smoker’s boat, and
+much nearer to it than to any of the others, Stubb counted upon the
+honor of the capture. It was obvious, now, that the whale had at length
+become aware of his pursuers. All silence of cautiousness was therefore
+no longer of use. Paddles were dropped, and oars came loudly into play.
+And still puffing at his pipe, Stubb cheered on his crew to the
+assault.
+
+Yes, a mighty change had come over the fish. All alive to his jeopardy,
+he was going “head out”; that part obliquely projecting from the mad
+yeast which he brewed.*
+
+*It will be seen in some other place of what a very light substance the
+entire interior of the sperm whale’s enormous head consists. Though
+apparently the most massive, it is by far the most buoyant part about
+him. So that with ease he elevates it in the air, and invariably does
+so when going at his utmost speed. Besides, such is the breadth of the
+upper part of the front of his head, and such the tapering cut-water
+formation of the lower part, that by obliquely elevating his head, he
+thereby may be said to transform himself from a bluff-bowed sluggish
+galliot into a sharppointed New York pilot-boat.
+
+“Start her, start her, my men! Don’t hurry yourselves; take plenty of
+time—but start her; start her like thunder-claps, that’s all,” cried
+Stubb, spluttering out the smoke as he spoke. “Start her, now; give ’em
+the long and strong stroke, Tashtego. Start her, Tash, my boy—start
+her, all; but keep cool, keep cool—cucumbers is the word—easy,
+easy—only start her like grim death and grinning devils, and raise the
+buried dead perpendicular out of their graves, boys—that’s all. Start
+her!”
+
+“Woo-hoo! Wa-hee!” screamed the Gay-Header in reply, raising some old
+war-whoop to the skies; as every oarsman in the strained boat
+involuntarily bounced forward with the one tremendous leading stroke
+which the eager Indian gave.
+
+But his wild screams were answered by others quite as wild. “Kee-hee!
+Kee-hee!” yelled Daggoo, straining forwards and backwards on his seat,
+like a pacing tiger in his cage.
+
+“Ka-la! Koo-loo!” howled Queequeg, as if smacking his lips over a
+mouthful of Grenadier’s steak. And thus with oars and yells the keels
+cut the sea. Meanwhile, Stubb retaining his place in the van, still
+encouraged his men to the onset, all the while puffing the smoke from
+his mouth. Like desperadoes they tugged and they strained, till the
+welcome cry was heard—“Stand up, Tashtego!—give it to him!” The harpoon
+was hurled. “Stern all!” The oarsmen backed water; the same moment
+something went hot and hissing along every one of their wrists. It was
+the magical line. An instant before, Stubb had swiftly caught two
+additional turns with it round the loggerhead, whence, by reason of its
+increased rapid circlings, a hempen blue smoke now jetted up and
+mingled with the steady fumes from his pipe. As the line passed round
+and round the loggerhead; so also, just before reaching that point, it
+blisteringly passed through and through both of Stubb’s hands, from
+which the hand-cloths, or squares of quilted canvas sometimes worn at
+these times, had accidentally dropped. It was like holding an enemy’s
+sharp two-edged sword by the blade, and that enemy all the time
+striving to wrest it out of your clutch.
+
+“Wet the line! wet the line!” cried Stubb to the tub oarsman (him
+seated by the tub) who, snatching off his hat, dashed sea-water into
+it.* More turns were taken, so that the line began holding its place.
+The boat now flew through the boiling water like a shark all fins.
+Stubb and Tashtego here changed places—stem for stern—a staggering
+business truly in that rocking commotion.
+
+*Partly to show the indispensableness of this act, it may here be
+stated, that, in the old Dutch fishery, a mop was used to dash the
+running line with water; in many other ships, a wooden piggin, or
+bailer, is set apart for that purpose. Your hat, however, is the most
+convenient.
+
+From the vibrating line extending the entire length of the upper part
+of the boat, and from its now being more tight than a harpstring, you
+would have thought the craft had two keels—one cleaving the water, the
+other the air—as the boat churned on through both opposing elements at
+once. A continual cascade played at the bows; a ceaseless whirling eddy
+in her wake; and, at the slightest motion from within, even but of a
+little finger, the vibrating, cracking craft canted over her spasmodic
+gunwale into the sea. Thus they rushed; each man with might and main
+clinging to his seat, to prevent being tossed to the foam; and the tall
+form of Tashtego at the steering oar crouching almost double, in order
+to bring down his centre of gravity. Whole Atlantics and Pacifics
+seemed passed as they shot on their way, till at length the whale
+somewhat slackened his flight.
+
+“Haul in—haul in!” cried Stubb to the bowsman! and, facing round
+towards the whale, all hands began pulling the boat up to him, while
+yet the boat was being towed on. Soon ranging up by his flank, Stubb,
+firmly planting his knee in the clumsy cleat, darted dart after dart
+into the flying fish; at the word of command, the boat alternately
+sterning out of the way of the whale’s horrible wallow, and then
+ranging up for another fling.
+
+The red tide now poured from all sides of the monster like brooks down
+a hill. His tormented body rolled not in brine but in blood, which
+bubbled and seethed for furlongs behind in their wake. The slanting sun
+playing upon this crimson pond in the sea, sent back its reflection
+into every face, so that they all glowed to each other like red men.
+And all the while, jet after jet of white smoke was agonizingly shot
+from the spiracle of the whale, and vehement puff after puff from the
+mouth of the excited headsman; as at every dart, hauling in upon his
+crooked lance (by the line attached to it), Stubb straightened it again
+and again, by a few rapid blows against the gunwale, then again and
+again sent it into the whale.
+
+“Pull up—pull up!” he now cried to the bowsman, as the waning whale
+relaxed in his wrath. “Pull up!—close to!” and the boat ranged along
+the fish’s flank. When reaching far over the bow, Stubb slowly churned
+his long sharp lance into the fish, and kept it there, carefully
+churning and churning, as if cautiously seeking to feel after some gold
+watch that the whale might have swallowed, and which he was fearful of
+breaking ere he could hook it out. But that gold watch he sought was
+the innermost life of the fish. And now it is struck; for, starting
+from his trance into that unspeakable thing called his “flurry,” the
+monster horribly wallowed in his blood, overwrapped himself in
+impenetrable, mad, boiling spray, so that the imperilled craft,
+instantly dropping astern, had much ado blindly to struggle out from
+that phrensied twilight into the clear air of the day.
+
+And now abating in his flurry, the whale once more rolled out into
+view; surging from side to side; spasmodically dilating and contracting
+his spout-hole, with sharp, cracking, agonized respirations. At last,
+gush after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been the purple lees
+of red wine, shot into the frighted air; and falling back again, ran
+dripping down his motionless flanks into the sea. His heart had burst!
+
+“He’s dead, Mr. Stubb,” said Daggoo.
+
+“Yes; both pipes smoked out!” and withdrawing his own from his mouth,
+Stubb scattered the dead ashes over the water; and, for a moment, stood
+thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had made.
+
+
+CHAPTER 62. The Dart.
+
+A word concerning an incident in the last chapter.
+
+According to the invariable usage of the fishery, the whale-boat pushes
+off from the ship, with the headsman or whale-killer as temporary
+steersman, and the harpooneer or whale-fastener pulling the foremost
+oar, the one known as the harpooneer-oar. Now it needs a strong,
+nervous arm to strike the first iron into the fish; for often, in what
+is called a long dart, the heavy implement has to be flung to the
+distance of twenty or thirty feet. But however prolonged and exhausting
+the chase, the harpooneer is expected to pull his oar meanwhile to the
+uttermost; indeed, he is expected to set an example of superhuman
+activity to the rest, not only by incredible rowing, but by repeated
+loud and intrepid exclamations; and what it is to keep shouting at the
+top of one’s compass, while all the other muscles are strained and half
+started—what that is none know but those who have tried it. For one, I
+cannot bawl very heartily and work very recklessly at one and the same
+time. In this straining, bawling state, then, with his back to the
+fish, all at once the exhausted harpooneer hears the exciting
+cry—“Stand up, and give it to him!” He now has to drop and secure his
+oar, turn round on his centre half way, seize his harpoon from the
+crotch, and with what little strength may remain, he essays to pitch it
+somehow into the whale. No wonder, taking the whole fleet of whalemen
+in a body, that out of fifty fair chances for a dart, not five are
+successful; no wonder that so many hapless harpooneers are madly cursed
+and disrated; no wonder that some of them actually burst their
+blood-vessels in the boat; no wonder that some sperm whalemen are
+absent four years with four barrels; no wonder that to many ship
+owners, whaling is but a losing concern; for it is the harpooneer that
+makes the voyage, and if you take the breath out of his body how can
+you expect to find it there when most wanted!
+
+Again, if the dart be successful, then at the second critical instant,
+that is, when the whale starts to run, the boatheader and harpooneer
+likewise start to running fore and aft, to the imminent jeopardy of
+themselves and every one else. It is then they change places; and the
+headsman, the chief officer of the little craft, takes his proper
+station in the bows of the boat.
+
+Now, I care not who maintains the contrary, but all this is both
+foolish and unnecessary. The headsman should stay in the bows from
+first to last; he should both dart the harpoon and the lance, and no
+rowing whatever should be expected of him, except under circumstances
+obvious to any fisherman. I know that this would sometimes involve a
+slight loss of speed in the chase; but long experience in various
+whalemen of more than one nation has convinced me that in the vast
+majority of failures in the fishery, it has not by any means been so
+much the speed of the whale as the before described exhaustion of the
+harpooneer that has caused them.
+
+To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooneers of this
+world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from out
+of toil.
+
+
+CHAPTER 63. The Crotch.
+
+Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in
+productive subjects, grow the chapters.
+
+The crotch alluded to on a previous page deserves independent mention.
+It is a notched stick of a peculiar form, some two feet in length,
+which is perpendicularly inserted into the starboard gunwale near the
+bow, for the purpose of furnishing a rest for the wooden extremity of
+the harpoon, whose other naked, barbed end slopingly projects from the
+prow. Thereby the weapon is instantly at hand to its hurler, who
+snatches it up as readily from its rest as a backwoodsman swings his
+rifle from the wall. It is customary to have two harpoons reposing in
+the crotch, respectively called the first and second irons.
+
+But these two harpoons, each by its own cord, are both connected with
+the line; the object being this: to dart them both, if possible, one
+instantly after the other into the same whale; so that if, in the
+coming drag, one should draw out, the other may still retain a hold. It
+is a doubling of the chances. But it very often happens that owing to
+the instantaneous, violent, convulsive running of the whale upon
+receiving the first iron, it becomes impossible for the harpooneer,
+however lightning-like in his movements, to pitch the second iron into
+him. Nevertheless, as the second iron is already connected with the
+line, and the line is running, hence that weapon must, at all events,
+be anticipatingly tossed out of the boat, somehow and somewhere; else
+the most terrible jeopardy would involve all hands. Tumbled into the
+water, it accordingly is in such cases; the spare coils of box line
+(mentioned in a preceding chapter) making this feat, in most instances,
+prudently practicable. But this critical act is not always unattended
+with the saddest and most fatal casualties.
+
+Furthermore: you must know that when the second iron is thrown
+overboard, it thenceforth becomes a dangling, sharp-edged terror,
+skittishly curvetting about both boat and whale, entangling the lines,
+or cutting them, and making a prodigious sensation in all directions.
+Nor, in general, is it possible to secure it again until the whale is
+fairly captured and a corpse.
+
+Consider, now, how it must be in the case of four boats all engaging
+one unusually strong, active, and knowing whale; when owing to these
+qualities in him, as well as to the thousand concurring accidents of
+such an audacious enterprise, eight or ten loose second irons may be
+simultaneously dangling about him. For, of course, each boat is
+supplied with several harpoons to bend on to the line should the first
+one be ineffectually darted without recovery. All these particulars are
+faithfully narrated here, as they will not fail to elucidate several
+most important, however intricate passages, in scenes hereafter to be
+painted.
+
+
+CHAPTER 64. Stubb’s Supper.
+
+Stubb’s whale had been killed some distance from the ship. It was a
+calm; so, forming a tandem of three boats, we commenced the slow
+business of towing the trophy to the Pequod. And now, as we eighteen
+men with our thirty-six arms, and one hundred and eighty thumbs and
+fingers, slowly toiled hour after hour upon that inert, sluggish corpse
+in the sea; and it seemed hardly to budge at all, except at long
+intervals; good evidence was hereby furnished of the enormousness of
+the mass we moved. For, upon the great canal of Hang-Ho, or whatever
+they call it, in China, four or five laborers on the foot-path will
+draw a bulky freighted junk at the rate of a mile an hour; but this
+grand argosy we towed heavily forged along, as if laden with pig-lead
+in bulk.
+
+Darkness came on; but three lights up and down in the Pequod’s
+main-rigging dimly guided our way; till drawing nearer we saw Ahab
+dropping one of several more lanterns over the bulwarks. Vacantly
+eyeing the heaving whale for a moment, he issued the usual orders for
+securing it for the night, and then handing his lantern to a seaman,
+went his way into the cabin, and did not come forward again until
+morning.
+
+Though, in overseeing the pursuit of this whale, Captain Ahab had
+evinced his customary activity, to call it so; yet now that the
+creature was dead, some vague dissatisfaction, or impatience, or
+despair, seemed working in him; as if the sight of that dead body
+reminded him that Moby Dick was yet to be slain; and though a thousand
+other whales were brought to his ship, all that would not one jot
+advance his grand, monomaniac object. Very soon you would have thought
+from the sound on the Pequod’s decks, that all hands were preparing to
+cast anchor in the deep; for heavy chains are being dragged along the
+deck, and thrust rattling out of the port-holes. But by those clanking
+links, the vast corpse itself, not the ship, is to be moored. Tied by
+the head to the stern, and by the tail to the bows, the whale now lies
+with its black hull close to the vessel’s and seen through the darkness
+of the night, which obscured the spars and rigging aloft, the two—ship
+and whale, seemed yoked together like colossal bullocks, whereof one
+reclines while the other remains standing.*
+
+*A little item may as well be related here. The strongest and most
+reliable hold which the ship has upon the whale when moored alongside,
+is by the flukes or tail; and as from its greater density that part is
+relatively heavier than any other (excepting the side-fins), its
+flexibility even in death, causes it to sink low beneath the surface;
+so that with the hand you cannot get at it from the boat, in order to
+put the chain round it. But this difficulty is ingeniously overcome: a
+small, strong line is prepared with a wooden float at its outer end,
+and a weight in its middle, while the other end is secured to the ship.
+By adroit management the wooden float is made to rise on the other side
+of the mass, so that now having girdled the whale, the chain is readily
+made to follow suit; and being slipped along the body, is at last
+locked fast round the smallest part of the tail, at the point of
+junction with its broad flukes or lobes.
+
+If moody Ahab was now all quiescence, at least so far as could be known
+on deck, Stubb, his second mate, flushed with conquest, betrayed an
+unusual but still good-natured excitement. Such an unwonted bustle was
+he in that the staid Starbuck, his official superior, quietly resigned
+to him for the time the sole management of affairs. One small, helping
+cause of all this liveliness in Stubb, was soon made strangely
+manifest. Stubb was a high liver; he was somewhat intemperately fond of
+the whale as a flavorish thing to his palate.
+
+“A steak, a steak, ere I sleep! You, Daggoo! overboard you go, and cut
+me one from his small!”
+
+Here be it known, that though these wild fishermen do not, as a general
+thing, and according to the great military maxim, make the enemy defray
+the current expenses of the war (at least before realizing the proceeds
+of the voyage), yet now and then you find some of these Nantucketers
+who have a genuine relish for that particular part of the Sperm Whale
+designated by Stubb; comprising the tapering extremity of the body.
+
+About midnight that steak was cut and cooked; and lighted by two
+lanterns of sperm oil, Stubb stoutly stood up to his spermaceti supper
+at the capstan-head, as if that capstan were a sideboard. Nor was Stubb
+the only banqueter on whale’s flesh that night. Mingling their
+mumblings with his own mastications, thousands on thousands of sharks,
+swarming round the dead leviathan, smackingly feasted on its fatness.
+The few sleepers below in their bunks were often startled by the sharp
+slapping of their tails against the hull, within a few inches of the
+sleepers’ hearts. Peering over the side you could just see them (as
+before you heard them) wallowing in the sullen, black waters, and
+turning over on their backs as they scooped out huge globular pieces of
+the whale of the bigness of a human head. This particular feat of the
+shark seems all but miraculous. How at such an apparently unassailable
+surface, they contrive to gouge out such symmetrical mouthfuls, remains
+a part of the universal problem of all things. The mark they thus leave
+on the whale, may best be likened to the hollow made by a carpenter in
+countersinking for a screw.
+
+Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks
+will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship’s decks, like hungry dogs
+round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down every
+killed man that is tossed to them; and though, while the valiant
+butchers over the deck-table are thus cannibally carving each other’s
+live meat with carving-knives all gilded and tasselled, the sharks,
+also, with their jewel-hilted mouths, are quarrelsomely carving away
+under the table at the dead meat; and though, were you to turn the
+whole affair upside down, it would still be pretty much the same thing,
+that is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough for all parties;
+and though sharks also are the invariable outriders of all slave ships
+crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be handy
+in case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be
+decently buried; and though one or two other like instances might be
+set down, touching the set terms, places, and occasions, when sharks do
+most socially congregate, and most hilariously feast; yet is there no
+conceivable time or occasion when you will find them in such countless
+numbers, and in gayer or more jovial spirits, than around a dead sperm
+whale, moored by night to a whaleship at sea. If you have never seen
+that sight, then suspend your decision about the propriety of
+devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil.
+
+But, as yet, Stubb heeded not the mumblings of the banquet that was
+going on so nigh him, no more than the sharks heeded the smacking of
+his own epicurean lips.
+
+“Cook, cook!—where’s that old Fleece?” he cried at length, widening his
+legs still further, as if to form a more secure base for his supper;
+and, at the same time darting his fork into the dish, as if stabbing
+with his lance; “cook, you cook!—sail this way, cook!”
+
+The old black, not in any very high glee at having been previously
+roused from his warm hammock at a most unseasonable hour, came
+shambling along from his galley, for, like many old blacks, there was
+something the matter with his knee-pans, which he did not keep well
+scoured like his other pans; this old Fleece, as they called him, came
+shuffling and limping along, assisting his step with his tongs, which,
+after a clumsy fashion, were made of straightened iron hoops; this old
+Ebony floundered along, and in obedience to the word of command, came
+to a dead stop on the opposite side of Stubb’s sideboard; when, with
+both hands folded before him, and resting on his two-legged cane, he
+bowed his arched back still further over, at the same time sideways
+inclining his head, so as to bring his best ear into play.
+
+“Cook,” said Stubb, rapidly lifting a rather reddish morsel to his
+mouth, “don’t you think this steak is rather overdone? You’ve been
+beating this steak too much, cook; it’s too tender. Don’t I always say
+that to be good, a whale-steak must be tough? There are those sharks
+now over the side, don’t you see they prefer it tough and rare? What a
+shindy they are kicking up! Cook, go and talk to ’em; tell ’em they are
+welcome to help themselves civilly, and in moderation, but they must
+keep quiet. Blast me, if I can hear my own voice. Away, cook, and
+deliver my message. Here, take this lantern,” snatching one from his
+sideboard; “now then, go and preach to ’em!”
+
+Sullenly taking the offered lantern, old Fleece limped across the deck
+to the bulwarks; and then, with one hand dropping his light low over
+the sea, so as to get a good view of his congregation, with the other
+hand he solemnly flourished his tongs, and leaning far over the side in
+a mumbling voice began addressing the sharks, while Stubb, softly
+crawling behind, overheard all that was said.
+
+“Fellow-critters: I’se ordered here to say dat you must stop dat dam
+noise dare. You hear? Stop dat dam smackin’ ob de lip! Massa Stubb say
+dat you can fill your dam bellies up to de hatchings, but by Gor! you
+must stop dat dam racket!”
+
+“Cook,” here interposed Stubb, accompanying the word with a sudden slap
+on the shoulder,—“Cook! why, damn your eyes, you mustn’t swear that way
+when you’re preaching. That’s no way to convert sinners, cook!”
+
+“Who dat? Den preach to him yourself,” sullenly turning to go.
+
+“No, cook; go on, go on.”
+
+“Well, den, Belubed fellow-critters:”—
+
+“Right!” exclaimed Stubb, approvingly, “coax ’em to it; try that,” and
+Fleece continued.
+
+“Do you is all sharks, and by natur wery woracious, yet I zay to you,
+fellow-critters, dat dat woraciousness—’top dat dam slappin’ ob de
+tail! How you tink to hear, spose you keep up such a dam slappin’ and
+bitin’ dare?”
+
+“Cook,” cried Stubb, collaring him, “I won’t have that swearing. Talk
+to ’em gentlemanly.”
+
+Once more the sermon proceeded.
+
+“Your woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don’t blame ye so much for; dat
+is natur, and can’t be helped; but to gobern dat wicked natur, dat is
+de pint. You is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you, why
+den you be angel; for all angel is not’ing more dan de shark well
+goberned. Now, look here, bred’ren, just try wonst to be cibil, a
+helping yourselbs from dat whale. Don’t be tearin’ de blubber out your
+neighbour’s mout, I say. Is not one shark dood right as toder to dat
+whale? And, by Gor, none on you has de right to dat whale; dat whale
+belong to some one else. I know some o’ you has berry brig mout,
+brigger dan oders; but den de brig mouts sometimes has de small
+bellies; so dat de brigness of de mout is not to swaller wid, but to
+bit off de blubber for de small fry ob sharks, dat can’t get into de
+scrouge to help demselves.”
+
+“Well done, old Fleece!” cried Stubb, “that’s Christianity; go on.”
+
+“No use goin’ on; de dam willains will keep a scougin’ and slappin’
+each oder, Massa Stubb; dey don’t hear one word; no use a-preachin’ to
+such dam g’uttons as you call ’em, till dare bellies is full, and dare
+bellies is bottomless; and when dey do get ’em full, dey wont hear you
+den; for den dey sink in de sea, go fast to sleep on de coral, and
+can’t hear not’ing at all, no more, for eber and eber.”
+
+“Upon my soul, I am about of the same opinion; so give the benediction,
+Fleece, and I’ll away to my supper.”
+
+Upon this, Fleece, holding both hands over the fishy mob, raised his
+shrill voice, and cried—
+
+“Cussed fellow-critters! Kick up de damndest row as ever you can; fill
+your dam’ bellies ’till dey bust—and den die.”
+
+“Now, cook,” said Stubb, resuming his supper at the capstan; “stand
+just where you stood before, there, over against me, and pay particular
+attention.”
+
+“All dention,” said Fleece, again stooping over upon his tongs in the
+desired position.
+
+“Well,” said Stubb, helping himself freely meanwhile; “I shall now go
+back to the subject of this steak. In the first place, how old are you,
+cook?”
+
+“What dat do wid de ’teak,” said the old black, testily.
+
+“Silence! How old are you, cook?”
+
+“’Bout ninety, dey say,” he gloomily muttered.
+
+“And you have lived in this world hard upon one hundred years, cook,
+and don’t know yet how to cook a whale-steak?” rapidly bolting another
+mouthful at the last word, so that morsel seemed a continuation of the
+question. “Where were you born, cook?”
+
+“’Hind de hatchway, in ferry-boat, goin’ ober de Roanoke.”
+
+“Born in a ferry-boat! That’s queer, too. But I want to know what
+country you were born in, cook!”
+
+“Didn’t I say de Roanoke country?” he cried sharply.
+
+“No, you didn’t, cook; but I’ll tell you what I’m coming to, cook. You
+must go home and be born over again; you don’t know how to cook a
+whale-steak yet.”
+
+“Bress my soul, if I cook noder one,” he growled, angrily, turning
+round to depart.
+
+“Come back, cook;—here, hand me those tongs;—now take that bit of steak
+there, and tell me if you think that steak cooked as it should be? Take
+it, I say”—holding the tongs towards him—“take it, and taste it.”
+
+Faintly smacking his withered lips over it for a moment, the old negro
+muttered, “Best cooked ’teak I eber taste; joosy, berry joosy.”
+
+“Cook,” said Stubb, squaring himself once more; “do you belong to the
+church?”
+
+“Passed one once in Cape-Down,” said the old man sullenly.
+
+“And you have once in your life passed a holy church in Cape-Town,
+where you doubtless overheard a holy parson addressing his hearers as
+his beloved fellow-creatures, have you, cook! And yet you come here,
+and tell me such a dreadful lie as you did just now, eh?” said Stubb.
+“Where do you expect to go to, cook?”
+
+“Go to bed berry soon,” he mumbled, half-turning as he spoke.
+
+“Avast! heave to! I mean when you die, cook. It’s an awful question.
+Now what’s your answer?”
+
+“When dis old brack man dies,” said the negro slowly, changing his
+whole air and demeanor, “he hisself won’t go nowhere; but some bressed
+angel will come and fetch him.”
+
+“Fetch him? How? In a coach and four, as they fetched Elijah? And fetch
+him where?”
+
+“Up dere,” said Fleece, holding his tongs straight over his head, and
+keeping it there very solemnly.
+
+“So, then, you expect to go up into our main-top, do you, cook, when
+you are dead? But don’t you know the higher you climb, the colder it
+gets? Main-top, eh?”
+
+“Didn’t say dat t’all,” said Fleece, again in the sulks.
+
+“You said up there, didn’t you? and now look yourself, and see where
+your tongs are pointing. But, perhaps you expect to get into heaven by
+crawling through the lubber’s hole, cook; but, no, no, cook, you don’t
+get there, except you go the regular way, round by the rigging. It’s a
+ticklish business, but must be done, or else it’s no go. But none of us
+are in heaven yet. Drop your tongs, cook, and hear my orders. Do ye
+hear? Hold your hat in one hand, and clap t’other a’top of your heart,
+when I’m giving my orders, cook. What! that your heart, there?—that’s
+your gizzard! Aloft! aloft!—that’s it—now you have it. Hold it there
+now, and pay attention.”
+
+“All ’dention,” said the old black, with both hands placed as desired,
+vainly wriggling his grizzled head, as if to get both ears in front at
+one and the same time.
+
+“Well then, cook, you see this whale-steak of yours was so very bad,
+that I have put it out of sight as soon as possible; you see that,
+don’t you? Well, for the future, when you cook another whale-steak for
+my private table here, the capstan, I’ll tell you what to do so as not
+to spoil it by overdoing. Hold the steak in one hand, and show a live
+coal to it with the other; that done, dish it; d’ye hear? And now
+to-morrow, cook, when we are cutting in the fish, be sure you stand by
+to get the tips of his fins; have them put in pickle. As for the ends
+of the flukes, have them soused, cook. There, now ye may go.”
+
+But Fleece had hardly got three paces off, when he was recalled.
+
+“Cook, give me cutlets for supper to-morrow night in the mid-watch.
+D’ye hear? away you sail, then.—Halloa! stop! make a bow before you
+go.—Avast heaving again! Whale-balls for breakfast—don’t forget.”
+
+“Wish, by gor! whale eat him, ’stead of him eat whale. I’m bressed if
+he ain’t more of shark dan Massa Shark hisself,” muttered the old man,
+limping away; with which sage ejaculation he went to his hammock.
+
+
+CHAPTER 65. The Whale as a Dish.
+
+That mortal man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp, and,
+like Stubb, eat him by his own light, as you may say; this seems so
+outlandish a thing that one must needs go a little into the history and
+philosophy of it.
+
+It is upon record, that three centuries ago the tongue of the Right
+Whale was esteemed a great delicacy in France, and commanded large
+prices there. Also, that in Henry VIIIth’s time, a certain cook of the
+court obtained a handsome reward for inventing an admirable sauce to be
+eaten with barbacued porpoises, which, you remember, are a species of
+whale. Porpoises, indeed, are to this day considered fine eating. The
+meat is made into balls about the size of billiard balls, and being
+well seasoned and spiced might be taken for turtle-balls or veal balls.
+The old monks of Dunfermline were very fond of them. They had a great
+porpoise grant from the crown.
+
+The fact is, that among his hunters at least, the whale would by all
+hands be considered a noble dish, were there not so much of him; but
+when you come to sit down before a meat-pie nearly one hundred feet
+long, it takes away your appetite. Only the most unprejudiced of men
+like Stubb, nowadays partake of cooked whales; but the Esquimaux are
+not so fastidious. We all know how they live upon whales, and have rare
+old vintages of prime old train oil. Zogranda, one of their most famous
+doctors, recommends strips of blubber for infants, as being exceedingly
+juicy and nourishing. And this reminds me that certain Englishmen, who
+long ago were accidentally left in Greenland by a whaling vessel—that
+these men actually lived for several months on the mouldy scraps of
+whales which had been left ashore after trying out the blubber. Among
+the Dutch whalemen these scraps are called “fritters”; which, indeed,
+they greatly resemble, being brown and crisp, and smelling something
+like old Amsterdam housewives’ dough-nuts or oly-cooks, when fresh.
+They have such an eatable look that the most self-denying stranger can
+hardly keep his hands off.
+
+But what further depreciates the whale as a civilized dish, is his
+exceeding richness. He is the great prize ox of the sea, too fat to be
+delicately good. Look at his hump, which would be as fine eating as the
+buffalo’s (which is esteemed a rare dish), were it not such a solid
+pyramid of fat. But the spermaceti itself, how bland and creamy that
+is; like the transparent, half-jellied, white meat of a cocoanut in the
+third month of its growth, yet far too rich to supply a substitute for
+butter. Nevertheless, many whalemen have a method of absorbing it into
+some other substance, and then partaking of it. In the long try watches
+of the night it is a common thing for the seamen to dip their
+ship-biscuit into the huge oil-pots and let them fry there awhile. Many
+a good supper have I thus made.
+
+In the case of a small Sperm Whale the brains are accounted a fine
+dish. The casket of the skull is broken into with an axe, and the two
+plump, whitish lobes being withdrawn (precisely resembling two large
+puddings), they are then mixed with flour, and cooked into a most
+delectable mess, in flavor somewhat resembling calves’ head, which is
+quite a dish among some epicures; and every one knows that some young
+bucks among the epicures, by continually dining upon calves’ brains, by
+and by get to have a little brains of their own, so as to be able to
+tell a calf’s head from their own heads; which, indeed, requires
+uncommon discrimination. And that is the reason why a young buck with
+an intelligent looking calf’s head before him, is somehow one of the
+saddest sights you can see. The head looks a sort of reproachfully at
+him, with an “Et tu Brute!” expression.
+
+It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively
+unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with
+abhorrence; that appears to result, in some way, from the consideration
+before mentioned: _i.e._ that a man should eat a newly murdered thing
+of the sea, and eat it too by its own light. But no doubt the first man
+that ever murdered an ox was regarded as a murderer; perhaps he was
+hung; and if he had been put on his trial by oxen, he certainly would
+have been; and he certainly deserved it if any murderer does. Go to the
+meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds
+staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight
+take a tooth out of the cannibal’s jaw? Cannibals? who is not a
+cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that
+salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it
+will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of
+judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who
+nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy
+paté-de-foie-gras.
+
+But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he? and that is
+adding insult to injury, is it? Look at your knife-handle, there, my
+civilized and enlightened gourmand dining off that roast beef, what is
+that handle made of?—what but the bones of the brother of the very ox
+you are eating? And what do you pick your teeth with, after devouring
+that fat goose? With a feather of the same fowl. And with what quill
+did the Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty to
+Ganders formally indite his circulars? It is only within the last month
+or two that that society passed a resolution to patronize nothing but
+steel pens.
+
+
+CHAPTER 66. The Shark Massacre.
+
+When in the Southern Fishery, a captured Sperm Whale, after long and
+weary toil, is brought alongside late at night, it is not, as a general
+thing at least, customary to proceed at once to the business of cutting
+him in. For that business is an exceedingly laborious one; is not very
+soon completed; and requires all hands to set about it. Therefore, the
+common usage is to take in all sail; lash the helm a’lee; and then send
+every one below to his hammock till daylight, with the reservation
+that, until that time, anchor-watches shall be kept; that is, two and
+two for an hour, each couple, the crew in rotation shall mount the deck
+to see that all goes well.
+
+But sometimes, especially upon the Line in the Pacific, this plan will
+not answer at all; because such incalculable hosts of sharks gather
+round the moored carcase, that were he left so for six hours, say, on a
+stretch, little more than the skeleton would be visible by morning. In
+most other parts of the ocean, however, where these fish do not so
+largely abound, their wondrous voracity can be at times considerably
+diminished, by vigorously stirring them up with sharp whaling-spades, a
+procedure notwithstanding, which, in some instances, only seems to
+tickle them into still greater activity. But it was not thus in the
+present case with the Pequod’s sharks; though, to be sure, any man
+unaccustomed to such sights, to have looked over her side that night,
+would have almost thought the whole round sea was one huge cheese, and
+those sharks the maggots in it.
+
+Nevertheless, upon Stubb setting the anchor-watch after his supper was
+concluded; and when, accordingly, Queequeg and a forecastle seaman came
+on deck, no small excitement was created among the sharks; for
+immediately suspending the cutting stages over the side, and lowering
+three lanterns, so that they cast long gleams of light over the turbid
+sea, these two mariners, darting their long whaling-spades, kept up an
+incessant murdering of the sharks,* by striking the keen steel deep
+into their skulls, seemingly their only vital part. But in the foamy
+confusion of their mixed and struggling hosts, the marksmen could not
+always hit their mark; and this brought about new revelations of the
+incredible ferocity of the foe. They viciously snapped, not only at
+each other’s disembowelments, but like flexible bows, bent round, and
+bit their own; till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again
+by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound. Nor was
+this all. It was unsafe to meddle with the corpses and ghosts of these
+creatures. A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality seemed to lurk in
+their very joints and bones, after what might be called the individual
+life had departed. Killed and hoisted on deck for the sake of his skin,
+one of these sharks almost took poor Queequeg’s hand off, when he tried
+to shut down the dead lid of his murderous jaw.
+
+*The whaling-spade used for cutting-in is made of the very best steel;
+is about the bigness of a man’s spread hand; and in general shape,
+corresponds to the garden implement after which it is named; only its
+sides are perfectly flat, and its upper end considerably narrower than
+the lower. This weapon is always kept as sharp as possible; and when
+being used is occasionally honed, just like a razor. In its socket, a
+stiff pole, from twenty to thirty feet long, is inserted for a handle.
+
+“Queequeg no care what god made him shark,” said the savage,
+agonizingly lifting his hand up and down; “wedder Fejee god or
+Nantucket god; but de god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin.”
+
+
+CHAPTER 67. Cutting In.
+
+It was a Saturday night, and such a Sabbath as followed! Ex officio
+professors of Sabbath breaking are all whalemen. The ivory Pequod was
+turned into what seemed a shamble; every sailor a butcher. You would
+have thought we were offering up ten thousand red oxen to the sea gods.
+
+In the first place, the enormous cutting tackles, among other ponderous
+things comprising a cluster of blocks generally painted green, and
+which no single man can possibly lift—this vast bunch of grapes was
+swayed up to the main-top and firmly lashed to the lower mast-head, the
+strongest point anywhere above a ship’s deck. The end of the
+hawser-like rope winding through these intricacies, was then conducted
+to the windlass, and the huge lower block of the tackles was swung over
+the whale; to this block the great blubber hook, weighing some one
+hundred pounds, was attached. And now suspended in stages over the
+side, Starbuck and Stubb, the mates, armed with their long spades,
+began cutting a hole in the body for the insertion of the hook just
+above the nearest of the two side-fins. This done, a broad,
+semicircular line is cut round the hole, the hook is inserted, and the
+main body of the crew striking up a wild chorus, now commence heaving
+in one dense crowd at the windlass. When instantly, the entire ship
+careens over on her side; every bolt in her starts like the nail-heads
+of an old house in frosty weather; she trembles, quivers, and nods her
+frighted mast-heads to the sky. More and more she leans over to the
+whale, while every gasping heave of the windlass is answered by a
+helping heave from the billows; till at last, a swift, startling snap
+is heard; with a great swash the ship rolls upwards and backwards from
+the whale, and the triumphant tackle rises into sight dragging after it
+the disengaged semicircular end of the first strip of blubber. Now as
+the blubber envelopes the whale precisely as the rind does an orange,
+so is it stripped off from the body precisely as an orange is sometimes
+stripped by spiralizing it. For the strain constantly kept up by the
+windlass continually keeps the whale rolling over and over in the
+water, and as the blubber in one strip uniformly peels off along the
+line called the “scarf,” simultaneously cut by the spades of Starbuck
+and Stubb, the mates; and just as fast as it is thus peeled off, and
+indeed by that very act itself, it is all the time being hoisted higher
+and higher aloft till its upper end grazes the main-top; the men at the
+windlass then cease heaving, and for a moment or two the prodigious
+blood-dripping mass sways to and fro as if let down from the sky, and
+every one present must take good heed to dodge it when it swings, else
+it may box his ears and pitch him headlong overboard.
+
+One of the attending harpooneers now advances with a long, keen weapon
+called a boarding-sword, and watching his chance he dexterously slices
+out a considerable hole in the lower part of the swaying mass. Into
+this hole, the end of the second alternating great tackle is then
+hooked so as to retain a hold upon the blubber, in order to prepare for
+what follows. Whereupon, this accomplished swordsman, warning all hands
+to stand off, once more makes a scientific dash at the mass, and with a
+few sidelong, desperate, lunging slicings, severs it completely in
+twain; so that while the short lower part is still fast, the long upper
+strip, called a blanket-piece, swings clear, and is all ready for
+lowering. The heavers forward now resume their song, and while the one
+tackle is peeling and hoisting a second strip from the whale, the other
+is slowly slackened away, and down goes the first strip through the
+main hatchway right beneath, into an unfurnished parlor called the
+blubber-room. Into this twilight apartment sundry nimble hands keep
+coiling away the long blanket-piece as if it were a great live mass of
+plaited serpents. And thus the work proceeds; the two tackles hoisting
+and lowering simultaneously; both whale and windlass heaving, the
+heavers singing, the blubber-room gentlemen coiling, the mates
+scarfing, the ship straining, and all hands swearing occasionally, by
+way of assuaging the general friction.
+
+
+CHAPTER 68. The Blanket.
+
+I have given no small attention to that not unvexed subject, the skin
+of the whale. I have had controversies about it with experienced
+whalemen afloat, and learned naturalists ashore. My original opinion
+remains unchanged; but it is only an opinion.
+
+The question is, what and where is the skin of the whale? Already you
+know what his blubber is. That blubber is something of the consistence
+of firm, close-grained beef, but tougher, more elastic and compact, and
+ranges from eight or ten to twelve and fifteen inches in thickness.
+
+Now, however preposterous it may at first seem to talk of any
+creature’s skin as being of that sort of consistence and thickness, yet
+in point of fact these are no arguments against such a presumption;
+because you cannot raise any other dense enveloping layer from the
+whale’s body but that same blubber; and the outermost enveloping layer
+of any animal, if reasonably dense, what can that be but the skin?
+True, from the unmarred dead body of the whale, you may scrape off with
+your hand an infinitely thin, transparent substance, somewhat
+resembling the thinnest shreds of isinglass, only it is almost as
+flexible and soft as satin; that is, previous to being dried, when it
+not only contracts and thickens, but becomes rather hard and brittle. I
+have several such dried bits, which I use for marks in my whale-books.
+It is transparent, as I said before; and being laid upon the printed
+page, I have sometimes pleased myself with fancying it exerted a
+magnifying influence. At any rate, it is pleasant to read about whales
+through their own spectacles, as you may say. But what I am driving at
+here is this. That same infinitely thin, isinglass substance, which, I
+admit, invests the entire body of the whale, is not so much to be
+regarded as the skin of the creature, as the skin of the skin, so to
+speak; for it were simply ridiculous to say, that the proper skin of
+the tremendous whale is thinner and more tender than the skin of a
+new-born child. But no more of this.
+
+Assuming the blubber to be the skin of the whale; then, when this skin,
+as in the case of a very large Sperm Whale, will yield the bulk of one
+hundred barrels of oil; and, when it is considered that, in quantity,
+or rather weight, that oil, in its expressed state, is only three
+fourths, and not the entire substance of the coat; some idea may hence
+be had of the enormousness of that animated mass, a mere part of whose
+mere integument yields such a lake of liquid as that. Reckoning ten
+barrels to the ton, you have ten tons for the net weight of only three
+quarters of the stuff of the whale’s skin.
+
+In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among
+the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over
+obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in
+thick array, something like those in the finest Italian line
+engravings. But these marks do not seem to be impressed upon the
+isinglass substance above mentioned, but seem to be seen through it, as
+if they were engraved upon the body itself. Nor is this all. In some
+instances, to the quick, observant eye, those linear marks, as in a
+veritable engraving, but afford the ground for far other delineations.
+These are hieroglyphical; that is, if you call those mysterious cyphers
+on the walls of pyramids hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to
+use in the present connexion. By my retentive memory of the
+hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale in particular, I was much struck
+with a plate representing the old Indian characters chiselled on the
+famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi.
+Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains
+undecipherable. This allusion to the Indian rocks reminds me of another
+thing. Besides all the other phenomena which the exterior of the Sperm
+Whale presents, he not seldom displays the back, and more especially
+his flanks, effaced in great part of the regular linear appearance, by
+reason of numerous rude scratches, altogether of an irregular, random
+aspect. I should say that those New England rocks on the sea-coast,
+which Agassiz imagines to bear the marks of violent scraping contact
+with vast floating icebergs—I should say, that those rocks must not a
+little resemble the Sperm Whale in this particular. It also seems to me
+that such scratches in the whale are probably made by hostile contact
+with other whales; for I have most remarked them in the large,
+full-grown bulls of the species.
+
+A word or two more concerning this matter of the skin or blubber of the
+whale. It has already been said, that it is stript from him in long
+pieces, called blanket-pieces. Like most sea-terms, this one is very
+happy and significant. For the whale is indeed wrapt up in his blubber
+as in a real blanket or counterpane; or, still better, an Indian poncho
+slipt over his head, and skirting his extremity. It is by reason of
+this cosy blanketing of his body, that the whale is enabled to keep
+himself comfortable in all weathers, in all seas, times, and tides.
+What would become of a Greenland whale, say, in those shuddering, icy
+seas of the North, if unsupplied with his cosy surtout? True, other
+fish are found exceedingly brisk in those Hyperborean waters; but
+these, be it observed, are your cold-blooded, lungless fish, whose very
+bellies are refrigerators; creatures, that warm themselves under the
+lee of an iceberg, as a traveller in winter would bask before an inn
+fire; whereas, like man, the whale has lungs and warm blood. Freeze his
+blood, and he dies. How wonderful is it then—except after
+explanation—that this great monster, to whom corporeal warmth is as
+indispensable as it is to man; how wonderful that he should be found at
+home, immersed to his lips for life in those Arctic waters! where, when
+seamen fall overboard, they are sometimes found, months afterwards,
+perpendicularly frozen into the hearts of fields of ice, as a fly is
+found glued in amber. But more surprising is it to know, as has been
+proved by experiment, that the blood of a Polar whale is warmer than
+that of a Borneo negro in summer.
+
+It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong
+individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare
+virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself
+after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too,
+live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep
+thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter’s, and
+like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of
+thine own.
+
+But how easy and how hopeless to teach these fine things! Of erections,
+how few are domed like St. Peter’s! of creatures, how few vast as the
+whale!
+
+
+CHAPTER 69. The Funeral.
+
+“Haul in the chains! Let the carcase go astern!”
+
+The vast tackles have now done their duty. The peeled white body of the
+beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre; though changed in hue,
+it has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk. It is still colossal.
+Slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it torn and
+splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with
+rapacious flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many
+insulting poniards in the whale. The vast white headless phantom floats
+further and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats,
+what seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls, augment the
+murderous din. For hours and hours from the almost stationary ship that
+hideous sight is seen. Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon
+the fair face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that
+great mass of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite
+perspectives.
+
+There’s a most doleful and most mocking funeral! The sea-vultures all
+in pious mourning, the air-sharks all punctiliously in black or
+speckled. In life but few of them would have helped the whale, I ween,
+if peradventure he had needed it; but upon the banquet of his funeral
+they most piously do pounce. Oh, horrible vultureism of earth! from
+which not the mightiest whale is free.
+
+Nor is this the end. Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful ghost
+survives and hovers over it to scare. Espied by some timid man-of-war
+or blundering discovery-vessel from afar, when the distance obscuring
+the swarming fowls, nevertheless still shows the white mass floating in
+the sun, and the white spray heaving high against it; straightway the
+whale’s unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in the
+log—_shoals, rocks, and breakers hereabouts: beware!_ And for years
+afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it as silly
+sheep leap over a vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there
+when a stick was held. There’s your law of precedents; there’s your
+utility of traditions; there’s the story of your obstinate survival of
+old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in
+the air! There’s orthodoxy!
+
+Thus, while in life the great whale’s body may have been a real terror
+to his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a
+world.
+
+Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend? There are other ghosts than
+the Cock-Lane one, and far deeper men than Doctor Johnson who believe
+in them.
+
+
+CHAPTER 70. The Sphynx.
+
+It should not have been omitted that previous to completely stripping
+the body of the leviathan, he was beheaded. Now, the beheading of the
+Sperm Whale is a scientific anatomical feat, upon which experienced
+whale surgeons very much pride themselves: and not without reason.
+
+Consider that the whale has nothing that can properly be called a neck;
+on the contrary, where his head and body seem to join, there, in that
+very place, is the thickest part of him. Remember, also, that the
+surgeon must operate from above, some eight or ten feet intervening
+between him and his subject, and that subject almost hidden in a
+discoloured, rolling, and oftentimes tumultuous and bursting sea. Bear
+in mind, too, that under these untoward circumstances he has to cut
+many feet deep in the flesh; and in that subterraneous manner, without
+so much as getting one single peep into the ever-contracting gash thus
+made, he must skilfully steer clear of all adjacent, interdicted parts,
+and exactly divide the spine at a critical point hard by its insertion
+into the skull. Do you not marvel, then, at Stubb’s boast, that he
+demanded but ten minutes to behead a sperm whale?
+
+When first severed, the head is dropped astern and held there by a
+cable till the body is stripped. That done, if it belong to a small
+whale it is hoisted on deck to be deliberately disposed of. But, with a
+full grown leviathan this is impossible; for the sperm whale’s head
+embraces nearly one third of his entire bulk, and completely to suspend
+such a burden as that, even by the immense tackles of a whaler, this
+were as vain a thing as to attempt weighing a Dutch barn in jewellers’
+scales.
+
+The Pequod’s whale being decapitated and the body stripped, the head
+was hoisted against the ship’s side—about half way out of the sea, so
+that it might yet in great part be buoyed up by its native element. And
+there with the strained craft steeply leaning over to it, by reason of
+the enormous downward drag from the lower mast-head, and every yard-arm
+on that side projecting like a crane over the waves; there, that
+blood-dripping head hung to the Pequod’s waist like the giant
+Holofernes’s from the girdle of Judith.
+
+When this last task was accomplished it was noon, and the seamen went
+below to their dinner. Silence reigned over the before tumultuous but
+now deserted deck. An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow
+lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves
+upon the sea.
+
+A short space elapsed, and up into this noiselessness came Ahab alone
+from his cabin. Taking a few turns on the quarter-deck, he paused to
+gaze over the side, then slowly getting into the main-chains he took
+Stubb’s long spade—still remaining there after the whale’s
+decapitation—and striking it into the lower part of the half-suspended
+mass, placed its other end crutch-wise under one arm, and so stood
+leaning over with eyes attentively fixed on this head.
+
+It was a black and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so
+intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx’s in the desert. “Speak, thou vast
+and venerable head,” muttered Ahab, “which, though ungarnished with a
+beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty
+head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou
+hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams,
+has moved amid this world’s foundations. Where unrecorded names and
+navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous
+hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the
+drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar
+home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many
+a sailor’s side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay
+them down. Thou saw’st the locked lovers when leaping from their
+flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true
+to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw’st the
+murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours
+he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his
+murderers still sailed on unharmed—while swift lightnings shivered the
+neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to
+outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast seen enough to split the
+planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!”
+
+“Sail ho!” cried a triumphant voice from the main-mast-head.
+
+“Aye? Well, now, that’s cheering,” cried Ahab, suddenly erecting
+himself, while whole thunder-clouds swept aside from his brow. “That
+lively cry upon this deadly calm might almost convert a better
+man.—Where away?”
+
+“Three points on the starboard bow, sir, and bringing down her breeze
+to us!
+
+“Better and better, man. Would now St. Paul would come along that way,
+and to my breezelessness bring his breeze! O Nature, and O soul of man!
+how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the
+smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate
+in mind.”
+
+
+CHAPTER 71. The Jeroboam’s Story.
+
+Hand in hand, ship and breeze blew on; but the breeze came faster than
+the ship, and soon the Pequod began to rock.
+
+By and by, through the glass the stranger’s boats and manned mast-heads
+proved her a whale-ship. But as she was so far to windward, and
+shooting by, apparently making a passage to some other ground, the
+Pequod could not hope to reach her. So the signal was set to see what
+response would be made.
+
+Here be it said, that like the vessels of military marines, the ships
+of the American Whale Fleet have each a private signal; all which
+signals being collected in a book with the names of the respective
+vessels attached, every captain is provided with it. Thereby, the whale
+commanders are enabled to recognise each other upon the ocean, even at
+considerable distances and with no small facility.
+
+The Pequod’s signal was at last responded to by the stranger’s setting
+her own; which proved the ship to be the Jeroboam of Nantucket.
+Squaring her yards, she bore down, ranged abeam under the Pequod’s lee,
+and lowered a boat; it soon drew nigh; but, as the side-ladder was
+being rigged by Starbuck’s order to accommodate the visiting captain,
+the stranger in question waved his hand from his boat’s stern in token
+of that proceeding being entirely unnecessary. It turned out that the
+Jeroboam had a malignant epidemic on board, and that Mayhew, her
+captain, was fearful of infecting the Pequod’s company. For, though
+himself and boat’s crew remained untainted, and though his ship was
+half a rifle-shot off, and an incorruptible sea and air rolling and
+flowing between; yet conscientiously adhering to the timid quarantine
+of the land, he peremptorily refused to come into direct contact with
+the Pequod.
+
+But this did by no means prevent all communications. Preserving an
+interval of some few yards between itself and the ship, the Jeroboam’s
+boat by the occasional use of its oars contrived to keep parallel to
+the Pequod, as she heavily forged through the sea (for by this time it
+blew very fresh), with her main-topsail aback; though, indeed, at times
+by the sudden onset of a large rolling wave, the boat would be pushed
+some way ahead; but would be soon skilfully brought to her proper
+bearings again. Subject to this, and other the like interruptions now
+and then, a conversation was sustained between the two parties; but at
+intervals not without still another interruption of a very different
+sort.
+
+Pulling an oar in the Jeroboam’s boat, was a man of a singular
+appearance, even in that wild whaling life where individual
+notabilities make up all totalities. He was a small, short, youngish
+man, sprinkled all over his face with freckles, and wearing redundant
+yellow hair. A long-skirted, cabalistically-cut coat of a faded walnut
+tinge enveloped him; the overlapping sleeves of which were rolled up on
+his wrists. A deep, settled, fanatic delirium was in his eyes.
+
+So soon as this figure had been first descried, Stubb had
+exclaimed—“That’s he! that’s he!—the long-togged scaramouch the
+Town-Ho’s company told us of!” Stubb here alluded to a strange story
+told of the Jeroboam, and a certain man among her crew, some time
+previous when the Pequod spoke the Town-Ho. According to this account
+and what was subsequently learned, it seemed that the scaramouch in
+question had gained a wonderful ascendency over almost everybody in the
+Jeroboam. His story was this:
+
+He had been originally nurtured among the crazy society of Neskyeuna
+Shakers, where he had been a great prophet; in their cracked, secret
+meetings having several times descended from heaven by the way of a
+trap-door, announcing the speedy opening of the seventh vial, which he
+carried in his vest-pocket; but, which, instead of containing
+gunpowder, was supposed to be charged with laudanum. A strange,
+apostolic whim having seized him, he had left Neskyeuna for Nantucket,
+where, with that cunning peculiar to craziness, he assumed a steady,
+common-sense exterior, and offered himself as a green-hand candidate
+for the Jeroboam’s whaling voyage. They engaged him; but straightway
+upon the ship’s getting out of sight of land, his insanity broke out in
+a freshet. He announced himself as the archangel Gabriel, and commanded
+the captain to jump overboard. He published his manifesto, whereby he
+set himself forth as the deliverer of the isles of the sea and
+vicar-general of all Oceanica. The unflinching earnestness with which
+he declared these things;—the dark, daring play of his sleepless,
+excited imagination, and all the preternatural terrors of real
+delirium, united to invest this Gabriel in the minds of the majority of
+the ignorant crew, with an atmosphere of sacredness. Moreover, they
+were afraid of him. As such a man, however, was not of much practical
+use in the ship, especially as he refused to work except when he
+pleased, the incredulous captain would fain have been rid of him; but
+apprised that that individual’s intention was to land him in the first
+convenient port, the archangel forthwith opened all his seals and
+vials—devoting the ship and all hands to unconditional perdition, in
+case this intention was carried out. So strongly did he work upon his
+disciples among the crew, that at last in a body they went to the
+captain and told him if Gabriel was sent from the ship, not a man of
+them would remain. He was therefore forced to relinquish his plan. Nor
+would they permit Gabriel to be any way maltreated, say or do what he
+would; so that it came to pass that Gabriel had the complete freedom of
+the ship. The consequence of all this was, that the archangel cared
+little or nothing for the captain and mates; and since the epidemic had
+broken out, he carried a higher hand than ever; declaring that the
+plague, as he called it, was at his sole command; nor should it be
+stayed but according to his good pleasure. The sailors, mostly poor
+devils, cringed, and some of them fawned before him; in obedience to
+his instructions, sometimes rendering him personal homage, as to a god.
+Such things may seem incredible; but, however wondrous, they are true.
+Nor is the history of fanatics half so striking in respect to the
+measureless self-deception of the fanatic himself, as his measureless
+power of deceiving and bedevilling so many others. But it is time to
+return to the Pequod.
+
+“I fear not thy epidemic, man,” said Ahab from the bulwarks, to Captain
+Mayhew, who stood in the boat’s stern; “come on board.”
+
+But now Gabriel started to his feet.
+
+“Think, think of the fevers, yellow and bilious! Beware of the horrible
+plague!”
+
+“Gabriel! Gabriel!” cried Captain Mayhew; “thou must either—” But that
+instant a headlong wave shot the boat far ahead, and its seethings
+drowned all speech.
+
+“Hast thou seen the White Whale?” demanded Ahab, when the boat drifted
+back.
+
+“Think, think of thy whale-boat, stoven and sunk! Beware of the
+horrible tail!”
+
+“I tell thee again, Gabriel, that—” But again the boat tore ahead as if
+dragged by fiends. Nothing was said for some moments, while a
+succession of riotous waves rolled by, which by one of those occasional
+caprices of the seas were tumbling, not heaving it. Meantime, the
+hoisted sperm whale’s head jogged about very violently, and Gabriel was
+seen eyeing it with rather more apprehensiveness than his archangel
+nature seemed to warrant.
+
+When this interlude was over, Captain Mayhew began a dark story
+concerning Moby Dick; not, however, without frequent interruptions from
+Gabriel, whenever his name was mentioned, and the crazy sea that seemed
+leagued with him.
+
+It seemed that the Jeroboam had not long left home, when upon speaking
+a whale-ship, her people were reliably apprised of the existence of
+Moby Dick, and the havoc he had made. Greedily sucking in this
+intelligence, Gabriel solemnly warned the captain against attacking the
+White Whale, in case the monster should be seen; in his gibbering
+insanity, pronouncing the White Whale to be no less a being than the
+Shaker God incarnated; the Shakers receiving the Bible. But when, some
+year or two afterwards, Moby Dick was fairly sighted from the
+mast-heads, Macey, the chief mate, burned with ardour to encounter him;
+and the captain himself being not unwilling to let him have the
+opportunity, despite all the archangel’s denunciations and
+forewarnings, Macey succeeded in persuading five men to man his boat.
+With them he pushed off; and, after much weary pulling, and many
+perilous, unsuccessful onsets, he at last succeeded in getting one iron
+fast. Meantime, Gabriel, ascending to the main-royal mast-head, was
+tossing one arm in frantic gestures, and hurling forth prophecies of
+speedy doom to the sacrilegious assailants of his divinity. Now, while
+Macey, the mate, was standing up in his boat’s bow, and with all the
+reckless energy of his tribe was venting his wild exclamations upon the
+whale, and essaying to get a fair chance for his poised lance, lo! a
+broad white shadow rose from the sea; by its quick, fanning motion,
+temporarily taking the breath out of the bodies of the oarsmen. Next
+instant, the luckless mate, so full of furious life, was smitten bodily
+into the air, and making a long arc in his descent, fell into the sea
+at the distance of about fifty yards. Not a chip of the boat was
+harmed, nor a hair of any oarsman’s head; but the mate for ever sank.
+
+It is well to parenthesize here, that of the fatal accidents in the
+Sperm-Whale Fishery, this kind is perhaps almost as frequent as any.
+Sometimes, nothing is injured but the man who is thus annihilated;
+oftener the boat’s bow is knocked off, or the thigh-board, in which the
+headsman stands, is torn from its place and accompanies the body. But
+strangest of all is the circumstance, that in more instances than one,
+when the body has been recovered, not a single mark of violence is
+discernible; the man being stark dead.
+
+The whole calamity, with the falling form of Macey, was plainly
+descried from the ship. Raising a piercing shriek—“The vial! the vial!”
+Gabriel called off the terror-stricken crew from the further hunting of
+the whale. This terrible event clothed the archangel with added
+influence; because his credulous disciples believed that he had
+specifically fore-announced it, instead of only making a general
+prophecy, which any one might have done, and so have chanced to hit one
+of many marks in the wide margin allowed. He became a nameless terror
+to the ship.
+
+Mayhew having concluded his narration, Ahab put such questions to him,
+that the stranger captain could not forbear inquiring whether he
+intended to hunt the White Whale, if opportunity should offer. To which
+Ahab answered—“Aye.” Straightway, then, Gabriel once more started to
+his feet, glaring upon the old man, and vehemently exclaimed, with
+downward pointed finger—“Think, think of the blasphemer—dead, and down
+there!—beware of the blasphemer’s end!”
+
+Ahab stolidly turned aside; then said to Mayhew, “Captain, I have just
+bethought me of my letter-bag; there is a letter for one of thy
+officers, if I mistake not. Starbuck, look over the bag.”
+
+Every whale-ship takes out a goodly number of letters for various
+ships, whose delivery to the persons to whom they may be addressed,
+depends upon the mere chance of encountering them in the four oceans.
+Thus, most letters never reach their mark; and many are only received
+after attaining an age of two or three years or more.
+
+Soon Starbuck returned with a letter in his hand. It was sorely
+tumbled, damp, and covered with a dull, spotted, green mould, in
+consequence of being kept in a dark locker of the cabin. Of such a
+letter, Death himself might well have been the post-boy.
+
+“Can’st not read it?” cried Ahab. “Give it me, man. Aye, aye, it’s but
+a dim scrawl;—what’s this?” As he was studying it out, Starbuck took a
+long cutting-spade pole, and with his knife slightly split the end, to
+insert the letter there, and in that way, hand it to the boat, without
+its coming any closer to the ship.
+
+Meantime, Ahab holding the letter, muttered, “Mr. Har—yes, Mr. Harry—(a
+woman’s pinny hand,—the man’s wife, I’ll wager)—Aye—Mr. Harry Macey,
+Ship Jeroboam;—why it’s Macey, and he’s dead!”
+
+“Poor fellow! poor fellow! and from his wife,” sighed Mayhew; “but let
+me have it.”
+
+“Nay, keep it thyself,” cried Gabriel to Ahab; “thou art soon going
+that way.”
+
+“Curses throttle thee!” yelled Ahab. “Captain Mayhew, stand by now to
+receive it”; and taking the fatal missive from Starbuck’s hands, he
+caught it in the slit of the pole, and reached it over towards the
+boat. But as he did so, the oarsmen expectantly desisted from rowing;
+the boat drifted a little towards the ship’s stern; so that, as if by
+magic, the letter suddenly ranged along with Gabriel’s eager hand. He
+clutched it in an instant, seized the boat-knife, and impaling the
+letter on it, sent it thus loaded back into the ship. It fell at Ahab’s
+feet. Then Gabriel shrieked out to his comrades to give way with their
+oars, and in that manner the mutinous boat rapidly shot away from the
+Pequod.
+
+As, after this interlude, the seamen resumed their work upon the jacket
+of the whale, many strange things were hinted in reference to this wild
+affair.
+
+
+CHAPTER 72. The Monkey-Rope.
+
+In the tumultuous business of cutting-in and attending to a whale,
+there is much running backwards and forwards among the crew. Now hands
+are wanted here, and then again hands are wanted there. There is no
+staying in any one place; for at one and the same time everything has
+to be done everywhere. It is much the same with him who endeavors the
+description of the scene. We must now retrace our way a little. It was
+mentioned that upon first breaking ground in the whale’s back, the
+blubber-hook was inserted into the original hole there cut by the
+spades of the mates. But how did so clumsy and weighty a mass as that
+same hook get fixed in that hole? It was inserted there by my
+particular friend Queequeg, whose duty it was, as harpooneer, to
+descend upon the monster’s back for the special purpose referred to.
+But in very many cases, circumstances require that the harpooneer shall
+remain on the whale till the whole flensing or stripping operation is
+concluded. The whale, be it observed, lies almost entirely submerged,
+excepting the immediate parts operated upon. So down there, some ten
+feet below the level of the deck, the poor harpooneer flounders about,
+half on the whale and half in the water, as the vast mass revolves like
+a tread-mill beneath him. On the occasion in question, Queequeg figured
+in the Highland costume—a shirt and socks—in which to my eyes, at
+least, he appeared to uncommon advantage; and no one had a better
+chance to observe him, as will presently be seen.
+
+Being the savage’s bowsman, that is, the person who pulled the bow-oar
+in his boat (the second one from forward), it was my cheerful duty to
+attend upon him while taking that hard-scrabble scramble upon the dead
+whale’s back. You have seen Italian organ-boys holding a dancing-ape by
+a long cord. Just so, from the ship’s steep side, did I hold Queequeg
+down there in the sea, by what is technically called in the fishery a
+monkey-rope, attached to a strong strip of canvas belted round his
+waist.
+
+It was a humorously perilous business for both of us. For, before we
+proceed further, it must be said that the monkey-rope was fast at both
+ends; fast to Queequeg’s broad canvas belt, and fast to my narrow
+leather one. So that for better or for worse, we two, for the time,
+were wedded; and should poor Queequeg sink to rise no more, then both
+usage and honor demanded, that instead of cutting the cord, it should
+drag me down in his wake. So, then, an elongated Siamese ligature
+united us. Queequeg was my own inseparable twin brother; nor could I
+any way get rid of the dangerous liabilities which the hempen bond
+entailed.
+
+So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then,
+that while earnestly watching his motions, I seemed distinctly to
+perceive that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock
+company of two; that my free will had received a mortal wound; and that
+another’s mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited
+disaster and death. Therefore, I saw that here was a sort of
+interregnum in Providence; for its even-handed equity never could have
+so gross an injustice. And yet still further pondering—while I jerked
+him now and then from between the whale and ship, which would threaten
+to jam him—still further pondering, I say, I saw that this situation of
+mine was the precise situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in
+most cases, he, one way or other, has this Siamese connexion with a
+plurality of other mortals. If your banker breaks, you snap; if your
+apothecary by mistake sends you poison in your pills, you die. True,
+you may say that, by exceeding caution, you may possibly escape these
+and the multitudinous other evil chances of life. But handle Queequeg’s
+monkey-rope heedfully as I would, sometimes he jerked it so, that I
+came very near sliding overboard. Nor could I possibly forget that, do
+what I would, I only had the management of one end of it.*
+
+*The monkey-rope is found in all whalers; but it was only in the Pequod
+that the monkey and his holder were ever tied together. This
+improvement upon the original usage was introduced by no less a man
+than Stubb, in order to afford the imperilled harpooneer the strongest
+possible guarantee for the faithfulness and vigilance of his
+monkey-rope holder.
+
+I have hinted that I would often jerk poor Queequeg from between the
+whale and the ship—where he would occasionally fall, from the incessant
+rolling and swaying of both. But this was not the only jamming jeopardy
+he was exposed to. Unappalled by the massacre made upon them during the
+night, the sharks now freshly and more keenly allured by the before
+pent blood which began to flow from the carcass—the rabid creatures
+swarmed round it like bees in a beehive.
+
+And right in among those sharks was Queequeg; who often pushed them
+aside with his floundering feet. A thing altogether incredible were it
+not that attracted by such prey as a dead whale, the otherwise
+miscellaneously carnivorous shark will seldom touch a man.
+
+Nevertheless, it may well be believed that since they have such a
+ravenous finger in the pie, it is deemed but wise to look sharp to
+them. Accordingly, besides the monkey-rope, with which I now and then
+jerked the poor fellow from too close a vicinity to the maw of what
+seemed a peculiarly ferocious shark—he was provided with still another
+protection. Suspended over the side in one of the stages, Tashtego and
+Daggoo continually flourished over his head a couple of keen
+whale-spades, wherewith they slaughtered as many sharks as they could
+reach. This procedure of theirs, to be sure, was very disinterested and
+benevolent of them. They meant Queequeg’s best happiness, I admit; but
+in their hasty zeal to befriend him, and from the circumstance that
+both he and the sharks were at times half hidden by the blood-muddled
+water, those indiscreet spades of theirs would come nearer amputating a
+leg than a tail. But poor Queequeg, I suppose, straining and gasping
+there with that great iron hook—poor Queequeg, I suppose, only prayed
+to his Yojo, and gave up his life into the hands of his gods.
+
+Well, well, my dear comrade and twin-brother, thought I, as I drew in
+and then slacked off the rope to every swell of the sea—what matters
+it, after all? Are you not the precious image of each and all of us men
+in this whaling world? That unsounded ocean you gasp in, is Life; those
+sharks, your foes; those spades, your friends; and what between sharks
+and spades you are in a sad pickle and peril, poor lad.
+
+But courage! there is good cheer in store for you, Queequeg. For now,
+as with blue lips and blood-shot eyes the exhausted savage at last
+climbs up the chains and stands all dripping and involuntarily
+trembling over the side; the steward advances, and with a benevolent,
+consolatory glance hands him—what? Some hot Cognac? No! hands him, ye
+gods! hands him a cup of tepid ginger and water!
+
+“Ginger? Do I smell ginger?” suspiciously asked Stubb, coming near.
+“Yes, this must be ginger,” peering into the as yet untasted cup. Then
+standing as if incredulous for a while, he calmly walked towards the
+astonished steward slowly saying, “Ginger? ginger? and will you have
+the goodness to tell me, Mr. Dough-Boy, where lies the virtue of
+ginger? Ginger! is ginger the sort of fuel you use, Dough-boy, to
+kindle a fire in this shivering cannibal? Ginger!—what the devil is
+ginger? Sea-coal? firewood?—lucifer matches?—tinder?—gunpowder?—what
+the devil is ginger, I say, that you offer this cup to our poor
+Queequeg here.”
+
+“There is some sneaking Temperance Society movement about this
+business,” he suddenly added, now approaching Starbuck, who had just
+come from forward. “Will you look at that kannakin, sir: smell of it,
+if you please.” Then watching the mate’s countenance, he added, “The
+steward, Mr. Starbuck, had the face to offer that calomel and jalap to
+Queequeg, there, this instant off the whale. Is the steward an
+apothecary, sir? and may I ask whether this is the sort of bitters by
+which he blows back the life into a half-drowned man?”
+
+“I trust not,” said Starbuck, “it is poor stuff enough.”
+
+“Aye, aye, steward,” cried Stubb, “we’ll teach you to drug a
+harpooneer; none of your apothecary’s medicine here; you want to poison
+us, do ye? You have got out insurances on our lives and want to murder
+us all, and pocket the proceeds, do ye?”
+
+“It was not me,” cried Dough-Boy, “it was Aunt Charity that brought the
+ginger on board; and bade me never give the harpooneers any spirits,
+but only this ginger-jub—so she called it.”
+
+“Ginger-jub! you gingerly rascal! take that! and run along with ye to
+the lockers, and get something better. I hope I do no wrong, Mr.
+Starbuck. It is the captain’s orders—grog for the harpooneer on a
+whale.”
+
+“Enough,” replied Starbuck, “only don’t hit him again, but—”
+
+“Oh, I never hurt when I hit, except when I hit a whale or something of
+that sort; and this fellow’s a weazel. What were you about saying,
+sir?”
+
+“Only this: go down with him, and get what thou wantest thyself.”
+
+When Stubb reappeared, he came with a dark flask in one hand, and a
+sort of tea-caddy in the other. The first contained strong spirits, and
+was handed to Queequeg; the second was Aunt Charity’s gift, and that
+was freely given to the waves.
+
+
+CHAPTER 73. Stubb and Flask kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk
+over Him.
+
+It must be borne in mind that all this time we have a Sperm Whale’s
+prodigious head hanging to the Pequod’s side. But we must let it
+continue hanging there a while till we can get a chance to attend to
+it. For the present other matters press, and the best we can do now for
+the head, is to pray heaven the tackles may hold.
+
+Now, during the past night and forenoon, the Pequod had gradually
+drifted into a sea, which, by its occasional patches of yellow brit,
+gave unusual tokens of the vicinity of Right Whales, a species of the
+Leviathan that but few supposed to be at this particular time lurking
+anywhere near. And though all hands commonly disdained the capture of
+those inferior creatures; and though the Pequod was not commissioned to
+cruise for them at all, and though she had passed numbers of them near
+the Crozetts without lowering a boat; yet now that a Sperm Whale had
+been brought alongside and beheaded, to the surprise of all, the
+announcement was made that a Right Whale should be captured that day,
+if opportunity offered.
+
+Nor was this long wanting. Tall spouts were seen to leeward; and two
+boats, Stubb’s and Flask’s, were detached in pursuit. Pulling further
+and further away, they at last became almost invisible to the men at
+the mast-head. But suddenly in the distance, they saw a great heap of
+tumultuous white water, and soon after news came from aloft that one or
+both the boats must be fast. An interval passed and the boats were in
+plain sight, in the act of being dragged right towards the ship by the
+towing whale. So close did the monster come to the hull, that at first
+it seemed as if he meant it malice; but suddenly going down in a
+maelstrom, within three rods of the planks, he wholly disappeared from
+view, as if diving under the keel. “Cut, cut!” was the cry from the
+ship to the boats, which, for one instant, seemed on the point of being
+brought with a deadly dash against the vessel’s side. But having plenty
+of line yet in the tubs, and the whale not sounding very rapidly, they
+paid out abundance of rope, and at the same time pulled with all their
+might so as to get ahead of the ship. For a few minutes the struggle
+was intensely critical; for while they still slacked out the tightened
+line in one direction, and still plied their oars in another, the
+contending strain threatened to take them under. But it was only a few
+feet advance they sought to gain. And they stuck to it till they did
+gain it; when instantly, a swift tremor was felt running like lightning
+along the keel, as the strained line, scraping beneath the ship,
+suddenly rose to view under her bows, snapping and quivering; and so
+flinging off its drippings, that the drops fell like bits of broken
+glass on the water, while the whale beyond also rose to sight, and once
+more the boats were free to fly. But the fagged whale abated his speed,
+and blindly altering his course, went round the stern of the ship
+towing the two boats after him, so that they performed a complete
+circuit.
+
+Meantime, they hauled more and more upon their lines, till close
+flanking him on both sides, Stubb answered Flask with lance for lance;
+and thus round and round the Pequod the battle went, while the
+multitudes of sharks that had before swum round the Sperm Whale’s body,
+rushed to the fresh blood that was spilled, thirstily drinking at every
+new gash, as the eager Israelites did at the new bursting fountains
+that poured from the smitten rock.
+
+At last his spout grew thick, and with a frightful roll and vomit, he
+turned upon his back a corpse.
+
+While the two headsmen were engaged in making fast cords to his flukes,
+and in other ways getting the mass in readiness for towing, some
+conversation ensued between them.
+
+“I wonder what the old man wants with this lump of foul lard,” said
+Stubb, not without some disgust at the thought of having to do with so
+ignoble a leviathan.
+
+“Wants with it?” said Flask, coiling some spare line in the boat’s bow,
+“did you never hear that the ship which but once has a Sperm Whale’s
+head hoisted on her starboard side, and at the same time a Right
+Whale’s on the larboard; did you never hear, Stubb, that that ship can
+never afterwards capsize?”
+
+“Why not?
+
+“I don’t know, but I heard that gamboge ghost of a Fedallah saying so,
+and he seems to know all about ships’ charms. But I sometimes think
+he’ll charm the ship to no good at last. I don’t half like that chap,
+Stubb. Did you ever notice how that tusk of his is a sort of carved
+into a snake’s head, Stubb?”
+
+“Sink him! I never look at him at all; but if ever I get a chance of a
+dark night, and he standing hard by the bulwarks, and no one by; look
+down there, Flask”—pointing into the sea with a peculiar motion of both
+hands—“Aye, will I! Flask, I take that Fedallah to be the devil in
+disguise. Do you believe that cock and bull story about his having been
+stowed away on board ship? He’s the devil, I say. The reason why you
+don’t see his tail, is because he tucks it up out of sight; he carries
+it coiled away in his pocket, I guess. Blast him! now that I think of
+it, he’s always wanting oakum to stuff into the toes of his boots.”
+
+“He sleeps in his boots, don’t he? He hasn’t got any hammock; but I’ve
+seen him lay of nights in a coil of rigging.”
+
+“No doubt, and it’s because of his cursed tail; he coils it down, do ye
+see, in the eye of the rigging.”
+
+“What’s the old man have so much to do with him for?”
+
+“Striking up a swap or a bargain, I suppose.”
+
+“Bargain?—about what?”
+
+“Why, do ye see, the old man is hard bent after that White Whale, and
+the devil there is trying to come round him, and get him to swap away
+his silver watch, or his soul, or something of that sort, and then
+he’ll surrender Moby Dick.”
+
+“Pooh! Stubb, you are skylarking; how can Fedallah do that?”
+
+“I don’t know, Flask, but the devil is a curious chap, and a wicked
+one, I tell ye. Why, they say as how he went a sauntering into the old
+flag-ship once, switching his tail about devilish easy and
+gentlemanlike, and inquiring if the old governor was at home. Well, he
+was at home, and asked the devil what he wanted. The devil, switching
+his hoofs, up and says, ‘I want John.’ ‘What for?’ says the old
+governor. ‘What business is that of yours,’ says the devil, getting
+mad,—‘I want to use him.’ ‘Take him,’ says the governor—and by the
+Lord, Flask, if the devil didn’t give John the Asiatic cholera before
+he got through with him, I’ll eat this whale in one mouthful. But look
+sharp—ain’t you all ready there? Well, then, pull ahead, and let’s get
+the whale alongside.”
+
+“I think I remember some such story as you were telling,” said Flask,
+when at last the two boats were slowly advancing with their burden
+towards the ship, “but I can’t remember where.”
+
+“Three Spaniards? Adventures of those three bloody-minded soldadoes?
+Did ye read it there, Flask? I guess ye did?”
+
+“No: never saw such a book; heard of it, though. But now, tell me,
+Stubb, do you suppose that that devil you was speaking of just now, was
+the same you say is now on board the Pequod?”
+
+“Am I the same man that helped kill this whale? Doesn’t the devil live
+for ever; who ever heard that the devil was dead? Did you ever see any
+parson a wearing mourning for the devil? And if the devil has a
+latch-key to get into the admiral’s cabin, don’t you suppose he can
+crawl into a porthole? Tell me that, Mr. Flask?”
+
+“How old do you suppose Fedallah is, Stubb?”
+
+“Do you see that mainmast there?” pointing to the ship; “well, that’s
+the figure one; now take all the hoops in the Pequod’s hold, and string
+along in a row with that mast, for oughts, do you see; well, that
+wouldn’t begin to be Fedallah’s age. Nor all the coopers in creation
+couldn’t show hoops enough to make oughts enough.”
+
+“But see here, Stubb, I thought you a little boasted just now, that you
+meant to give Fedallah a sea-toss, if you got a good chance. Now, if
+he’s so old as all those hoops of yours come to, and if he is going to
+live for ever, what good will it do to pitch him overboard—tell me
+that?
+
+“Give him a good ducking, anyhow.”
+
+“But he’d crawl back.”
+
+“Duck him again; and keep ducking him.”
+
+“Suppose he should take it into his head to duck you, though—yes, and
+drown you—what then?”
+
+“I should like to see him try it; I’d give him such a pair of black
+eyes that he wouldn’t dare to show his face in the admiral’s cabin
+again for a long while, let alone down in the orlop there, where he
+lives, and hereabouts on the upper decks where he sneaks so much. Damn
+the devil, Flask; so you suppose I’m afraid of the devil? Who’s afraid
+of him, except the old governor who daresn’t catch him and put him in
+double-darbies, as he deserves, but lets him go about kidnapping
+people; aye, and signed a bond with him, that all the people the devil
+kidnapped, he’d roast for him? There’s a governor!”
+
+“Do you suppose Fedallah wants to kidnap Captain Ahab?”
+
+“Do I suppose it? You’ll know it before long, Flask. But I am going now
+to keep a sharp look-out on him; and if I see anything very suspicious
+going on, I’ll just take him by the nape of his neck, and say—Look
+here, Beelzebub, you don’t do it; and if he makes any fuss, by the Lord
+I’ll make a grab into his pocket for his tail, take it to the capstan,
+and give him such a wrenching and heaving, that his tail will come
+short off at the stump—do you see; and then, I rather guess when he
+finds himself docked in that queer fashion, he’ll sneak off without the
+poor satisfaction of feeling his tail between his legs.”
+
+“And what will you do with the tail, Stubb?”
+
+“Do with it? Sell it for an ox whip when we get home;—what else?”
+
+“Now, do you mean what you say, and have been saying all along, Stubb?”
+
+“Mean or not mean, here we are at the ship.”
+
+The boats were here hailed, to tow the whale on the larboard side,
+where fluke chains and other necessaries were already prepared for
+securing him.
+
+“Didn’t I tell you so?” said Flask; “yes, you’ll soon see this right
+whale’s head hoisted up opposite that parmacetti’s.”
+
+In good time, Flask’s saying proved true. As before, the Pequod steeply
+leaned over towards the sperm whale’s head, now, by the counterpoise of
+both heads, she regained her even keel; though sorely strained, you may
+well believe. So, when on one side you hoist in Locke’s head, you go
+over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant’s and you come
+back again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep
+trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! throw all these thunder-heads overboard,
+and then you will float light and right.
+
+In disposing of the body of a right whale, when brought alongside the
+ship, the same preliminary proceedings commonly take place as in the
+case of a sperm whale; only, in the latter instance, the head is cut
+off whole, but in the former the lips and tongue are separately removed
+and hoisted on deck, with all the well known black bone attached to
+what is called the crown-piece. But nothing like this, in the present
+case, had been done. The carcases of both whales had dropped astern;
+and the head-laden ship not a little resembled a mule carrying a pair
+of overburdening panniers.
+
+Meantime, Fedallah was calmly eyeing the right whale’s head, and ever
+and anon glancing from the deep wrinkles there to the lines in his own
+hand. And Ahab chanced so to stand, that the Parsee occupied his
+shadow; while, if the Parsee’s shadow was there at all it seemed only
+to blend with, and lengthen Ahab’s. As the crew toiled on, Laplandish
+speculations were bandied among them, concerning all these passing
+things.
+
+
+CHAPTER 74. The Sperm Whale’s Head—Contrasted View.
+
+Here, now, are two great whales, laying their heads together; let us
+join them, and lay together our own.
+
+Of the grand order of folio leviathans, the Sperm Whale and the Right
+Whale are by far the most noteworthy. They are the only whales
+regularly hunted by man. To the Nantucketer, they present the two
+extremes of all the known varieties of the whale. As the external
+difference between them is mainly observable in their heads; and as a
+head of each is this moment hanging from the Pequod’s side; and as we
+may freely go from one to the other, by merely stepping across the
+deck:—where, I should like to know, will you obtain a better chance to
+study practical cetology than here?
+
+In the first place, you are struck by the general contrast between
+these heads. Both are massive enough in all conscience; but there is a
+certain mathematical symmetry in the Sperm Whale’s which the Right
+Whale’s sadly lacks. There is more character in the Sperm Whale’s head.
+As you behold it, you involuntarily yield the immense superiority to
+him, in point of pervading dignity. In the present instance, too, this
+dignity is heightened by the pepper and salt colour of his head at the
+summit, giving token of advanced age and large experience. In short, he
+is what the fishermen technically call a “grey-headed whale.”
+
+Let us now note what is least dissimilar in these heads—namely, the two
+most important organs, the eye and the ear. Far back on the side of the
+head, and low down, near the angle of either whale’s jaw, if you
+narrowly search, you will at last see a lashless eye, which you would
+fancy to be a young colt’s eye; so out of all proportion is it to the
+magnitude of the head.
+
+Now, from this peculiar sideway position of the whale’s eyes, it is
+plain that he can never see an object which is exactly ahead, no more
+than he can one exactly astern. In a word, the position of the whale’s
+eyes corresponds to that of a man’s ears; and you may fancy, for
+yourself, how it would fare with you, did you sideways survey objects
+through your ears. You would find that you could only command some
+thirty degrees of vision in advance of the straight side-line of sight;
+and about thirty more behind it. If your bitterest foe were walking
+straight towards you, with dagger uplifted in broad day, you would not
+be able to see him, any more than if he were stealing upon you from
+behind. In a word, you would have two backs, so to speak; but, at the
+same time, also, two fronts (side fronts): for what is it that makes
+the front of a man—what, indeed, but his eyes?
+
+Moreover, while in most other animals that I can now think of, the eyes
+are so planted as imperceptibly to blend their visual power, so as to
+produce one picture and not two to the brain; the peculiar position of
+the whale’s eyes, effectually divided as they are by many cubic feet of
+solid head, which towers between them like a great mountain separating
+two lakes in valleys; this, of course, must wholly separate the
+impressions which each independent organ imparts. The whale, therefore,
+must see one distinct picture on this side, and another distinct
+picture on that side; while all between must be profound darkness and
+nothingness to him. Man may, in effect, be said to look out on the
+world from a sentry-box with two joined sashes for his window. But with
+the whale, these two sashes are separately inserted, making two
+distinct windows, but sadly impairing the view. This peculiarity of the
+whale’s eyes is a thing always to be borne in mind in the fishery; and
+to be remembered by the reader in some subsequent scenes.
+
+A curious and most puzzling question might be started concerning this
+visual matter as touching the Leviathan. But I must be content with a
+hint. So long as a man’s eyes are open in the light, the act of seeing
+is involuntary; that is, he cannot then help mechanically seeing
+whatever objects are before him. Nevertheless, any one’s experience
+will teach him, that though he can take in an undiscriminating sweep of
+things at one glance, it is quite impossible for him, attentively, and
+completely, to examine any two things—however large or however small—at
+one and the same instant of time; never mind if they lie side by side
+and touch each other. But if you now come to separate these two
+objects, and surround each by a circle of profound darkness; then, in
+order to see one of them, in such a manner as to bring your mind to
+bear on it, the other will be utterly excluded from your contemporary
+consciousness. How is it, then, with the whale? True, both his eyes, in
+themselves, must simultaneously act; but is his brain so much more
+comprehensive, combining, and subtle than man’s, that he can at the
+same moment of time attentively examine two distinct prospects, one on
+one side of him, and the other in an exactly opposite direction? If he
+can, then is it as marvellous a thing in him, as if a man were able
+simultaneously to go through the demonstrations of two distinct
+problems in Euclid. Nor, strictly investigated, is there any
+incongruity in this comparison.
+
+It may be but an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the
+extraordinary vacillations of movement displayed by some whales when
+beset by three or four boats; the timidity and liability to queer
+frights, so common to such whales; I think that all this indirectly
+proceeds from the helpless perplexity of volition, in which their
+divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision must involve them.
+
+But the ear of the whale is full as curious as the eye. If you are an
+entire stranger to their race, you might hunt over these two heads for
+hours, and never discover that organ. The ear has no external leaf
+whatever; and into the hole itself you can hardly insert a quill, so
+wondrously minute is it. It is lodged a little behind the eye. With
+respect to their ears, this important difference is to be observed
+between the sperm whale and the right. While the ear of the former has
+an external opening, that of the latter is entirely and evenly covered
+over with a membrane, so as to be quite imperceptible from without.
+
+Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the
+world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear
+which is smaller than a hare’s? But if his eyes were broad as the lens
+of Herschel’s great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of
+cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of
+hearing? Not at all.—Why then do you try to “enlarge” your mind?
+Subtilize it.
+
+Let us now with whatever levers and steam-engines we have at hand, cant
+over the sperm whale’s head, that it may lie bottom up; then, ascending
+by a ladder to the summit, have a peep down the mouth; and were it not
+that the body is now completely separated from it, with a lantern we
+might descend into the great Kentucky Mammoth Cave of his stomach. But
+let us hold on here by this tooth, and look about us where we are. What
+a really beautiful and chaste-looking mouth! from floor to ceiling,
+lined, or rather papered with a glistening white membrane, glossy as
+bridal satins.
+
+But come out now, and look at this portentous lower jaw, which seems
+like the long narrow lid of an immense snuff-box, with the hinge at one
+end, instead of one side. If you pry it up, so as to get it overhead,
+and expose its rows of teeth, it seems a terrific portcullis; and such,
+alas! it proves to many a poor wight in the fishery, upon whom these
+spikes fall with impaling force. But far more terrible is it to behold,
+when fathoms down in the sea, you see some sulky whale, floating there
+suspended, with his prodigious jaw, some fifteen feet long, hanging
+straight down at right-angles with his body, for all the world like a
+ship’s jib-boom. This whale is not dead; he is only dispirited; out of
+sorts, perhaps; hypochondriac; and so supine, that the hinges of his
+jaw have relaxed, leaving him there in that ungainly sort of plight, a
+reproach to all his tribe, who must, no doubt, imprecate lock-jaws upon
+him.
+
+In most cases this lower jaw—being easily unhinged by a practised
+artist—is disengaged and hoisted on deck for the purpose of extracting
+the ivory teeth, and furnishing a supply of that hard white whalebone
+with which the fishermen fashion all sorts of curious articles,
+including canes, umbrella-stocks, and handles to riding-whips.
+
+With a long, weary hoist the jaw is dragged on board, as if it were an
+anchor; and when the proper time comes—some few days after the other
+work—Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego, being all accomplished dentists,
+are set to drawing teeth. With a keen cutting-spade, Queequeg lances
+the gums; then the jaw is lashed down to ringbolts, and a tackle being
+rigged from aloft, they drag out these teeth, as Michigan oxen drag
+stumps of old oaks out of wild wood lands. There are generally
+forty-two teeth in all; in old whales, much worn down, but undecayed;
+nor filled after our artificial fashion. The jaw is afterwards sawn
+into slabs, and piled away like joists for building houses.
+
+
+CHAPTER 75. The Right Whale’s Head—Contrasted View.
+
+Crossing the deck, let us now have a good long look at the Right
+Whale’s head.
+
+As in general shape the noble Sperm Whale’s head may be compared to a
+Roman war-chariot (especially in front, where it is so broadly
+rounded); so, at a broad view, the Right Whale’s head bears a rather
+inelegant resemblance to a gigantic galliot-toed shoe. Two hundred
+years ago an old Dutch voyager likened its shape to that of a
+shoemaker’s last. And in this same last or shoe, that old woman of the
+nursery tale, with the swarming brood, might very comfortably be
+lodged, she and all her progeny.
+
+But as you come nearer to this great head it begins to assume different
+aspects, according to your point of view. If you stand on its summit
+and look at these two F-shaped spoutholes, you would take the whole
+head for an enormous bass-viol, and these spiracles, the apertures in
+its sounding-board. Then, again, if you fix your eye upon this strange,
+crested, comb-like incrustation on the top of the mass—this green,
+barnacled thing, which the Greenlanders call the “crown,” and the
+Southern fishers the “bonnet” of the Right Whale; fixing your eyes
+solely on this, you would take the head for the trunk of some huge oak,
+with a bird’s nest in its crotch. At any rate, when you watch those
+live crabs that nestle here on this bonnet, such an idea will be almost
+sure to occur to you; unless, indeed, your fancy has been fixed by the
+technical term “crown” also bestowed upon it; in which case you will
+take great interest in thinking how this mighty monster is actually a
+diademed king of the sea, whose green crown has been put together for
+him in this marvellous manner. But if this whale be a king, he is a
+very sulky looking fellow to grace a diadem. Look at that hanging lower
+lip! what a huge sulk and pout is there! a sulk and pout, by
+carpenter’s measurement, about twenty feet long and five feet deep; a
+sulk and pout that will yield you some 500 gallons of oil and more.
+
+A great pity, now, that this unfortunate whale should be hare-lipped.
+The fissure is about a foot across. Probably the mother during an
+important interval was sailing down the Peruvian coast, when
+earthquakes caused the beach to gape. Over this lip, as over a slippery
+threshold, we now slide into the mouth. Upon my word were I at
+Mackinaw, I should take this to be the inside of an Indian wigwam. Good
+Lord! is this the road that Jonah went? The roof is about twelve feet
+high, and runs to a pretty sharp angle, as if there were a regular
+ridge-pole there; while these ribbed, arched, hairy sides, present us
+with those wondrous, half vertical, scimetar-shaped slats of whalebone,
+say three hundred on a side, which depending from the upper part of the
+head or crown bone, form those Venetian blinds which have elsewhere
+been cursorily mentioned. The edges of these bones are fringed with
+hairy fibres, through which the Right Whale strains the water, and in
+whose intricacies he retains the small fish, when openmouthed he goes
+through the seas of brit in feeding time. In the central blinds of
+bone, as they stand in their natural order, there are certain curious
+marks, curves, hollows, and ridges, whereby some whalemen calculate the
+creature’s age, as the age of an oak by its circular rings. Though the
+certainty of this criterion is far from demonstrable, yet it has the
+savor of analogical probability. At any rate, if we yield to it, we
+must grant a far greater age to the Right Whale than at first glance
+will seem reasonable.
+
+In old times, there seem to have prevailed the most curious fancies
+concerning these blinds. One voyager in Purchas calls them the wondrous
+“whiskers” inside of the whale’s mouth;* another, “hogs’ bristles”; a
+third old gentleman in Hackluyt uses the following elegant language:
+“There are about two hundred and fifty fins growing on each side of his
+upper _chop_, which arch over his tongue on each side of his mouth.”
+
+*This reminds us that the Right Whale really has a sort of whisker, or
+rather a moustache, consisting of a few scattered white hairs on the
+upper part of the outer end of the lower jaw. Sometimes these tufts
+impart a rather brigandish expression to his otherwise solemn
+countenance.
+
+As every one knows, these same “hogs’ bristles,” “fins,” “whiskers,”
+“blinds,” or whatever you please, furnish to the ladies their busks and
+other stiffening contrivances. But in this particular, the demand has
+long been on the decline. It was in Queen Anne’s time that the bone was
+in its glory, the farthingale being then all the fashion. And as those
+ancient dames moved about gaily, though in the jaws of the whale, as
+you may say; even so, in a shower, with the like thoughtlessness, do we
+nowadays fly under the same jaws for protection; the umbrella being a
+tent spread over the same bone.
+
+But now forget all about blinds and whiskers for a moment, and,
+standing in the Right Whale’s mouth, look around you afresh. Seeing all
+these colonnades of bone so methodically ranged about, would you not
+think you were inside of the great Haarlem organ, and gazing upon its
+thousand pipes? For a carpet to the organ we have a rug of the softest
+Turkey—the tongue, which is glued, as it were, to the floor of the
+mouth. It is very fat and tender, and apt to tear in pieces in hoisting
+it on deck. This particular tongue now before us; at a passing glance I
+should say it was a six-barreler; that is, it will yield you about that
+amount of oil.
+
+Ere this, you must have plainly seen the truth of what I started
+with—that the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale have almost entirely
+different heads. To sum up, then: in the Right Whale’s there is no
+great well of sperm; no ivory teeth at all; no long, slender mandible
+of a lower jaw, like the Sperm Whale’s. Nor in the Sperm Whale are
+there any of those blinds of bone; no huge lower lip; and scarcely
+anything of a tongue. Again, the Right Whale has two external
+spout-holes, the Sperm Whale only one.
+
+Look your last, now, on these venerable hooded heads, while they yet
+lie together; for one will soon sink, unrecorded, in the sea; the other
+will not be very long in following.
+
+Can you catch the expression of the Sperm Whale’s there? It is the same
+he died with, only some of the longer wrinkles in the forehead seem now
+faded away. I think his broad brow to be full of a prairie-like
+placidity, born of a speculative indifference as to death. But mark the
+other head’s expression. See that amazing lower lip, pressed by
+accident against the vessel’s side, so as firmly to embrace the jaw.
+Does not this whole head seem to speak of an enormous practical
+resolution in facing death? This Right Whale I take to have been a
+Stoic; the Sperm Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in
+his latter years.
+
+
+CHAPTER 76. The Battering-Ram.
+
+Ere quitting, for the nonce, the Sperm Whale’s head, I would have you,
+as a sensible physiologist, simply—particularly remark its front
+aspect, in all its compacted collectedness. I would have you
+investigate it now with the sole view of forming to yourself some
+unexaggerated, intelligent estimate of whatever battering-ram power may
+be lodged there. Here is a vital point; for you must either
+satisfactorily settle this matter with yourself, or for ever remain an
+infidel as to one of the most appalling, but not the less true events,
+perhaps anywhere to be found in all recorded history.
+
+You observe that in the ordinary swimming position of the Sperm Whale,
+the front of his head presents an almost wholly vertical plane to the
+water; you observe that the lower part of that front slopes
+considerably backwards, so as to furnish more of a retreat for the long
+socket which receives the boom-like lower jaw; you observe that the
+mouth is entirely under the head, much in the same way, indeed, as
+though your own mouth were entirely under your chin. Moreover you
+observe that the whale has no external nose; and that what nose he
+has—his spout hole—is on the top of his head; you observe that his eyes
+and ears are at the sides of his head, nearly one third of his entire
+length from the front. Wherefore, you must now have perceived that the
+front of the Sperm Whale’s head is a dead, blind wall, without a single
+organ or tender prominence of any sort whatsoever. Furthermore, you are
+now to consider that only in the extreme, lower, backward sloping part
+of the front of the head, is there the slightest vestige of bone; and
+not till you get near twenty feet from the forehead do you come to the
+full cranial development. So that this whole enormous boneless mass is
+as one wad. Finally, though, as will soon be revealed, its contents
+partly comprise the most delicate oil; yet, you are now to be apprised
+of the nature of the substance which so impregnably invests all that
+apparent effeminacy. In some previous place I have described to you how
+the blubber wraps the body of the whale, as the rind wraps an orange.
+Just so with the head; but with this difference: about the head this
+envelope, though not so thick, is of a boneless toughness, inestimable
+by any man who has not handled it. The severest pointed harpoon, the
+sharpest lance darted by the strongest human arm, impotently rebounds
+from it. It is as though the forehead of the Sperm Whale were paved
+with horses’ hoofs. I do not think that any sensation lurks in it.
+
+Bethink yourself also of another thing. When two large, loaded Indiamen
+chance to crowd and crush towards each other in the docks, what do the
+sailors do? They do not suspend between them, at the point of coming
+contact, any merely hard substance, like iron or wood. No, they hold
+there a large, round wad of tow and cork, enveloped in the thickest and
+toughest of ox-hide. That bravely and uninjured takes the jam which
+would have snapped all their oaken handspikes and iron crow-bars. By
+itself this sufficiently illustrates the obvious fact I drive at. But
+supplementary to this, it has hypothetically occurred to me, that as
+ordinary fish possess what is called a swimming bladder in them,
+capable, at will, of distension or contraction; and as the Sperm Whale,
+as far as I know, has no such provision in him; considering, too, the
+otherwise inexplicable manner in which he now depresses his head
+altogether beneath the surface, and anon swims with it high elevated
+out of the water; considering the unobstructed elasticity of its
+envelope; considering the unique interior of his head; it has
+hypothetically occurred to me, I say, that those mystical lung-celled
+honeycombs there may possibly have some hitherto unknown and
+unsuspected connexion with the outer air, so as to be susceptible to
+atmospheric distension and contraction. If this be so, fancy the
+irresistibleness of that might, to which the most impalpable and
+destructive of all elements contributes.
+
+Now, mark. Unerringly impelling this dead, impregnable, uninjurable
+wall, and this most buoyant thing within; there swims behind it all a
+mass of tremendous life, only to be adequately estimated as piled wood
+is—by the cord; and all obedient to one volition, as the smallest
+insect. So that when I shall hereafter detail to you all the
+specialities and concentrations of potency everywhere lurking in this
+expansive monster; when I shall show you some of his more
+inconsiderable braining feats; I trust you will have renounced all
+ignorant incredulity, and be ready to abide by this; that though the
+Sperm Whale stove a passage through the Isthmus of Darien, and mixed
+the Atlantic with the Pacific, you would not elevate one hair of your
+eye-brow. For unless you own the whale, you are but a provincial and
+sentimentalist in Truth. But clear Truth is a thing for salamander
+giants only to encounter; how small the chances for the provincials
+then? What befell the weakling youth lifting the dread goddess’s veil
+at Lais?
+
+
+CHAPTER 77. The Great Heidelburgh Tun.
+
+Now comes the Baling of the Case. But to comprehend it aright, you must
+know something of the curious internal structure of the thing operated
+upon.
+
+Regarding the Sperm Whale’s head as a solid oblong, you may, on an
+inclined plane, sideways divide it into two quoins,* whereof the lower
+is the bony structure, forming the cranium and jaws, and the upper an
+unctuous mass wholly free from bones; its broad forward end forming the
+expanded vertical apparent forehead of the whale. At the middle of the
+forehead horizontally subdivide this upper quoin, and then you have two
+almost equal parts, which before were naturally divided by an internal
+wall of a thick tendinous substance.
+
+*Quoin is not a Euclidean term. It belongs to the pure nautical
+mathematics. I know not that it has been defined before. A quoin is a
+solid which differs from a wedge in having its sharp end formed by the
+steep inclination of one side, instead of the mutual tapering of both
+sides.
+
+The lower subdivided part, called the junk, is one immense honeycomb of
+oil, formed by the crossing and recrossing, into ten thousand
+infiltrated cells, of tough elastic white fibres throughout its whole
+extent. The upper part, known as the Case, may be regarded as the great
+Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale. And as that famous great tierce is
+mystically carved in front, so the whale’s vast plaited forehead forms
+innumerable strange devices for the emblematical adornment of his
+wondrous tun. Moreover, as that of Heidelburgh was always replenished
+with the most excellent of the wines of the Rhenish valleys, so the tun
+of the whale contains by far the most precious of all his oily
+vintages; namely, the highly-prized spermaceti, in its absolutely pure,
+limpid, and odoriferous state. Nor is this precious substance found
+unalloyed in any other part of the creature. Though in life it remains
+perfectly fluid, yet, upon exposure to the air, after death, it soon
+begins to concrete; sending forth beautiful crystalline shoots, as when
+the first thin delicate ice is just forming in water. A large whale’s
+case generally yields about five hundred gallons of sperm, though from
+unavoidable circumstances, considerable of it is spilled, leaks, and
+dribbles away, or is otherwise irrevocably lost in the ticklish
+business of securing what you can.
+
+I know not with what fine and costly material the Heidelburgh Tun was
+coated within, but in superlative richness that coating could not
+possibly have compared with the silken pearl-coloured membrane, like
+the lining of a fine pelisse, forming the inner surface of the Sperm
+Whale’s case.
+
+It will have been seen that the Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale
+embraces the entire length of the entire top of the head; and since—as
+has been elsewhere set forth—the head embraces one third of the whole
+length of the creature, then setting that length down at eighty feet
+for a good sized whale, you have more than twenty-six feet for the
+depth of the tun, when it is lengthwise hoisted up and down against a
+ship’s side.
+
+As in decapitating the whale, the operator’s instrument is brought
+close to the spot where an entrance is subsequently forced into the
+spermaceti magazine; he has, therefore, to be uncommonly heedful, lest
+a careless, untimely stroke should invade the sanctuary and wastingly
+let out its invaluable contents. It is this decapitated end of the
+head, also, which is at last elevated out of the water, and retained in
+that position by the enormous cutting tackles, whose hempen
+combinations, on one side, make quite a wilderness of ropes in that
+quarter.
+
+Thus much being said, attend now, I pray you, to that marvellous and—in
+this particular instance—almost fatal operation whereby the Sperm
+Whale’s great Heidelburgh Tun is tapped.
+
+
+CHAPTER 78. Cistern and Buckets.
+
+Nimble as a cat, Tashtego mounts aloft; and without altering his erect
+posture, runs straight out upon the overhanging mainyard-arm, to the
+part where it exactly projects over the hoisted Tun. He has carried
+with him a light tackle called a whip, consisting of only two parts,
+travelling through a single-sheaved block. Securing this block, so that
+it hangs down from the yard-arm, he swings one end of the rope, till it
+is caught and firmly held by a hand on deck. Then, hand-over-hand, down
+the other part, the Indian drops through the air, till dexterously he
+lands on the summit of the head. There—still high elevated above the
+rest of the company, to whom he vivaciously cries—he seems some Turkish
+Muezzin calling the good people to prayers from the top of a tower. A
+short-handled sharp spade being sent up to him, he diligently searches
+for the proper place to begin breaking into the Tun. In this business
+he proceeds very heedfully, like a treasure-hunter in some old house,
+sounding the walls to find where the gold is masoned in. By the time
+this cautious search is over, a stout iron-bound bucket, precisely like
+a well-bucket, has been attached to one end of the whip; while the
+other end, being stretched across the deck, is there held by two or
+three alert hands. These last now hoist the bucket within grasp of the
+Indian, to whom another person has reached up a very long pole.
+Inserting this pole into the bucket, Tashtego downward guides the
+bucket into the Tun, till it entirely disappears; then giving the word
+to the seamen at the whip, up comes the bucket again, all bubbling like
+a dairy-maid’s pail of new milk. Carefully lowered from its height, the
+full-freighted vessel is caught by an appointed hand, and quickly
+emptied into a large tub. Then remounting aloft, it again goes through
+the same round until the deep cistern will yield no more. Towards the
+end, Tashtego has to ram his long pole harder and harder, and deeper
+and deeper into the Tun, until some twenty feet of the pole have gone
+down.
+
+Now, the people of the Pequod had been baling some time in this way;
+several tubs had been filled with the fragrant sperm; when all at once
+a queer accident happened. Whether it was that Tashtego, that wild
+Indian, was so heedless and reckless as to let go for a moment his
+one-handed hold on the great cabled tackles suspending the head; or
+whether the place where he stood was so treacherous and oozy; or
+whether the Evil One himself would have it to fall out so, without
+stating his particular reasons; how it was exactly, there is no telling
+now; but, on a sudden, as the eightieth or ninetieth bucket came
+suckingly up—my God! poor Tashtego—like the twin reciprocating bucket
+in a veritable well, dropped head-foremost down into this great Tun of
+Heidelburgh, and with a horrible oily gurgling, went clean out of
+sight!
+
+“Man overboard!” cried Daggoo, who amid the general consternation first
+came to his senses. “Swing the bucket this way!” and putting one foot
+into it, so as the better to secure his slippery hand-hold on the whip
+itself, the hoisters ran him high up to the top of the head, almost
+before Tashtego could have reached its interior bottom. Meantime, there
+was a terrible tumult. Looking over the side, they saw the before
+lifeless head throbbing and heaving just below the surface of the sea,
+as if that moment seized with some momentous idea; whereas it was only
+the poor Indian unconsciously revealing by those struggles the perilous
+depth to which he had sunk.
+
+At this instant, while Daggoo, on the summit of the head, was clearing
+the whip—which had somehow got foul of the great cutting tackles—a
+sharp cracking noise was heard; and to the unspeakable horror of all,
+one of the two enormous hooks suspending the head tore out, and with a
+vast vibration the enormous mass sideways swung, till the drunk ship
+reeled and shook as if smitten by an iceberg. The one remaining hook,
+upon which the entire strain now depended, seemed every instant to be
+on the point of giving way; an event still more likely from the violent
+motions of the head.
+
+“Come down, come down!” yelled the seamen to Daggoo, but with one hand
+holding on to the heavy tackles, so that if the head should drop, he
+would still remain suspended; the negro having cleared the foul line,
+rammed down the bucket into the now collapsed well, meaning that the
+buried harpooneer should grasp it, and so be hoisted out.
+
+“In heaven’s name, man,” cried Stubb, “are you ramming home a cartridge
+there?—Avast! How will that help him; jamming that iron-bound bucket on
+top of his head? Avast, will ye!”
+
+“Stand clear of the tackle!” cried a voice like the bursting of a
+rocket.
+
+Almost in the same instant, with a thunder-boom, the enormous mass
+dropped into the sea, like Niagara’s Table-Rock into the whirlpool; the
+suddenly relieved hull rolled away from it, to far down her glittering
+copper; and all caught their breath, as half swinging—now over the
+sailors’ heads, and now over the water—Daggoo, through a thick mist of
+spray, was dimly beheld clinging to the pendulous tackles, while poor,
+buried-alive Tashtego was sinking utterly down to the bottom of the
+sea! But hardly had the blinding vapor cleared away, when a naked
+figure with a boarding-sword in his hand, was for one swift moment seen
+hovering over the bulwarks. The next, a loud splash announced that my
+brave Queequeg had dived to the rescue. One packed rush was made to the
+side, and every eye counted every ripple, as moment followed moment,
+and no sign of either the sinker or the diver could be seen. Some hands
+now jumped into a boat alongside, and pushed a little off from the
+ship.
+
+“Ha! ha!” cried Daggoo, all at once, from his now quiet, swinging perch
+overhead; and looking further off from the side, we saw an arm thrust
+upright from the blue waves; a sight strange to see, as an arm thrust
+forth from the grass over a grave.
+
+“Both! both!—it is both!”—cried Daggoo again with a joyful shout; and
+soon after, Queequeg was seen boldly striking out with one hand, and
+with the other clutching the long hair of the Indian. Drawn into the
+waiting boat, they were quickly brought to the deck; but Tashtego was
+long in coming to, and Queequeg did not look very brisk.
+
+Now, how had this noble rescue been accomplished? Why, diving after the
+slowly descending head, Queequeg with his keen sword had made side
+lunges near its bottom, so as to scuttle a large hole there; then
+dropping his sword, had thrust his long arm far inwards and upwards,
+and so hauled out poor Tash by the head. He averred, that upon first
+thrusting in for him, a leg was presented; but well knowing that that
+was not as it ought to be, and might occasion great trouble;—he had
+thrust back the leg, and by a dexterous heave and toss, had wrought a
+somerset upon the Indian; so that with the next trial, he came forth in
+the good old way—head foremost. As for the great head itself, that was
+doing as well as could be expected.
+
+And thus, through the courage and great skill in obstetrics of
+Queequeg, the deliverance, or rather, delivery of Tashtego, was
+successfully accomplished, in the teeth, too, of the most untoward and
+apparently hopeless impediments; which is a lesson by no means to be
+forgotten. Midwifery should be taught in the same course with fencing
+and boxing, riding and rowing.
+
+I know that this queer adventure of the Gay-Header’s will be sure to
+seem incredible to some landsmen, though they themselves may have
+either seen or heard of some one’s falling into a cistern ashore; an
+accident which not seldom happens, and with much less reason too than
+the Indian’s, considering the exceeding slipperiness of the curb of the
+Sperm Whale’s well.
+
+But, peradventure, it may be sagaciously urged, how is this? We thought
+the tissued, infiltrated head of the Sperm Whale, was the lightest and
+most corky part about him; and yet thou makest it sink in an element of
+a far greater specific gravity than itself. We have thee there. Not at
+all, but I have ye; for at the time poor Tash fell in, the case had
+been nearly emptied of its lighter contents, leaving little but the
+dense tendinous wall of the well—a double welded, hammered substance,
+as I have before said, much heavier than the sea water, and a lump of
+which sinks in it like lead almost. But the tendency to rapid sinking
+in this substance was in the present instance materially counteracted
+by the other parts of the head remaining undetached from it, so that it
+sank very slowly and deliberately indeed, affording Queequeg a fair
+chance for performing his agile obstetrics on the run, as you may say.
+Yes, it was a running delivery, so it was.
+
+Now, had Tashtego perished in that head, it had been a very precious
+perishing; smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of fragrant
+spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in the secret inner chamber
+and sanctum sanctorum of the whale. Only one sweeter end can readily be
+recalled—the delicious death of an Ohio honey-hunter, who seeking honey
+in the crotch of a hollow tree, found such exceeding store of it, that
+leaning too far over, it sucked him in, so that he died embalmed. How
+many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato’s honey head, and
+sweetly perished there?
+
+
+CHAPTER 79. The Prairie.
+
+To scan the lines of his face, or feel the bumps on the head of this
+Leviathan; this is a thing which no Physiognomist or Phrenologist has
+as yet undertaken. Such an enterprise would seem almost as hopeful as
+for Lavater to have scrutinized the wrinkles on the Rock of Gibraltar,
+or for Gall to have mounted a ladder and manipulated the Dome of the
+Pantheon. Still, in that famous work of his, Lavater not only treats of
+the various faces of men, but also attentively studies the faces of
+horses, birds, serpents, and fish; and dwells in detail upon the
+modifications of expression discernible therein. Nor have Gall and his
+disciple Spurzheim failed to throw out some hints touching the
+phrenological characteristics of other beings than man. Therefore,
+though I am but ill qualified for a pioneer, in the application of
+these two semi-sciences to the whale, I will do my endeavor. I try all
+things; I achieve what I can.
+
+Physiognomically regarded, the Sperm Whale is an anomalous creature. He
+has no proper nose. And since the nose is the central and most
+conspicuous of the features; and since it perhaps most modifies and
+finally controls their combined expression; hence it would seem that
+its entire absence, as an external appendage, must very largely affect
+the countenance of the whale. For as in landscape gardening, a spire,
+cupola, monument, or tower of some sort, is deemed almost indispensable
+to the completion of the scene; so no face can be physiognomically in
+keeping without the elevated open-work belfry of the nose. Dash the
+nose from Phidias’s marble Jove, and what a sorry remainder!
+Nevertheless, Leviathan is of so mighty a magnitude, all his
+proportions are so stately, that the same deficiency which in the
+sculptured Jove were hideous, in him is no blemish at all. Nay, it is
+an added grandeur. A nose to the whale would have been impertinent. As
+on your physiognomical voyage you sail round his vast head in your
+jolly-boat, your noble conceptions of him are never insulted by the
+reflection that he has a nose to be pulled. A pestilent conceit, which
+so often will insist upon obtruding even when beholding the mightiest
+royal beadle on his throne.
+
+In some particulars, perhaps the most imposing physiognomical view to
+be had of the Sperm Whale, is that of the full front of his head. This
+aspect is sublime.
+
+In thought, a fine human brow is like the East when troubled with the
+morning. In the repose of the pasture, the curled brow of the bull has
+a touch of the grand in it. Pushing heavy cannon up mountain defiles,
+the elephant’s brow is majestic. Human or animal, the mystical brow is
+as that great golden seal affixed by the German emperors to their
+decrees. It signifies—“God: done this day by my hand.” But in most
+creatures, nay in man himself, very often the brow is but a mere strip
+of alpine land lying along the snow line. Few are the foreheads which
+like Shakespeare’s or Melancthon’s rise so high, and descend so low,
+that the eyes themselves seem clear, eternal, tideless mountain lakes;
+and all above them in the forehead’s wrinkles, you seem to track the
+antlered thoughts descending there to drink, as the Highland hunters
+track the snow prints of the deer. But in the great Sperm Whale, this
+high and mighty god-like dignity inherent in the brow is so immensely
+amplified, that gazing on it, in that full front view, you feel the
+Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other
+object in living nature. For you see no one point precisely; not one
+distinct feature is revealed; no nose, eyes, ears, or mouth; no face;
+he has none, proper; nothing but that one broad firmament of a
+forehead, pleated with riddles; dumbly lowering with the doom of boats,
+and ships, and men. Nor, in profile, does this wondrous brow diminish;
+though that way viewed its grandeur does not domineer upon you so. In
+profile, you plainly perceive that horizontal, semi-crescentic
+depression in the forehead’s middle, which, in man, is Lavater’s mark
+of genius.
+
+But how? Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written a
+book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in his doing
+nothing particular to prove it. It is moreover declared in his
+pyramidical silence. And this reminds me that had the great Sperm Whale
+been known to the young Orient World, he would have been deified by
+their child-magian thoughts. They deified the crocodile of the Nile,
+because the crocodile is tongueless; and the Sperm Whale has no tongue,
+or at least it is so exceedingly small, as to be incapable of
+protrusion. If hereafter any highly cultured, poetical nation shall
+lure back to their birth-right, the merry May-day gods of old; and
+livingly enthrone them again in the now egotistical sky; in the now
+unhaunted hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove’s high seat, the great
+Sperm Whale shall lord it.
+
+Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is
+no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man’s and every being’s
+face. Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a passing
+fable. If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could
+not read the simplest peasant’s face in its profounder and more subtle
+meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of
+the Sperm Whale’s brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you
+can.
+
+
+CHAPTER 80. The Nut.
+
+If the Sperm Whale be physiognomically a Sphinx, to the phrenologist
+his brain seems that geometrical circle which it is impossible to
+square.
+
+In the full-grown creature the skull will measure at least twenty feet
+in length. Unhinge the lower jaw, and the side view of this skull is as
+the side of a moderately inclined plane resting throughout on a level
+base. But in life—as we have elsewhere seen—this inclined plane is
+angularly filled up, and almost squared by the enormous superincumbent
+mass of the junk and sperm. At the high end the skull forms a crater to
+bed that part of the mass; while under the long floor of this crater—in
+another cavity seldom exceeding ten inches in length and as many in
+depth—reposes the mere handful of this monster’s brain. The brain is at
+least twenty feet from his apparent forehead in life; it is hidden away
+behind its vast outworks, like the innermost citadel within the
+amplified fortifications of Quebec. So like a choice casket is it
+secreted in him, that I have known some whalemen who peremptorily deny
+that the Sperm Whale has any other brain than that palpable semblance
+of one formed by the cubic-yards of his sperm magazine. Lying in
+strange folds, courses, and convolutions, to their apprehensions, it
+seems more in keeping with the idea of his general might to regard that
+mystic part of him as the seat of his intelligence.
+
+It is plain, then, that phrenologically the head of this Leviathan, in
+the creature’s living intact state, is an entire delusion. As for his
+true brain, you can then see no indications of it, nor feel any. The
+whale, like all things that are mighty, wears a false brow to the
+common world.
+
+If you unload his skull of its spermy heaps and then take a rear view
+of its rear end, which is the high end, you will be struck by its
+resemblance to the human skull, beheld in the same situation, and from
+the same point of view. Indeed, place this reversed skull (scaled down
+to the human magnitude) among a plate of men’s skulls, and you would
+involuntarily confound it with them; and remarking the depressions on
+one part of its summit, in phrenological phrase you would say—This man
+had no self-esteem, and no veneration. And by those negations,
+considered along with the affirmative fact of his prodigious bulk and
+power, you can best form to yourself the truest, though not the most
+exhilarating conception of what the most exalted potency is.
+
+But if from the comparative dimensions of the whale’s proper brain, you
+deem it incapable of being adequately charted, then I have another idea
+for you. If you attentively regard almost any quadruped’s spine, you
+will be struck with the resemblance of its vertebræ to a strung
+necklace of dwarfed skulls, all bearing rudimental resemblance to the
+skull proper. It is a German conceit, that the vertebræ are absolutely
+undeveloped skulls. But the curious external resemblance, I take it the
+Germans were not the first men to perceive. A foreign friend once
+pointed it out to me, in the skeleton of a foe he had slain, and with
+the vertebræ of which he was inlaying, in a sort of basso-relievo, the
+beaked prow of his canoe. Now, I consider that the phrenologists have
+omitted an important thing in not pushing their investigations from the
+cerebellum through the spinal canal. For I believe that much of a man’s
+character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel
+your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine
+never yet upheld a full and noble soul. I rejoice in my spine, as in
+the firm audacious staff of that flag which I fling half out to the
+world.
+
+Apply this spinal branch of phrenology to the Sperm Whale. His cranial
+cavity is continuous with the first neck-vertebra; and in that vertebra
+the bottom of the spinal canal will measure ten inches across, being
+eight in height, and of a triangular figure with the base downwards. As
+it passes through the remaining vertebræ the canal tapers in size, but
+for a considerable distance remains of large capacity. Now, of course,
+this canal is filled with much the same strangely fibrous substance—the
+spinal cord—as the brain; and directly communicates with the brain. And
+what is still more, for many feet after emerging from the brain’s
+cavity, the spinal cord remains of an undecreasing girth, almost equal
+to that of the brain. Under all these circumstances, would it be
+unreasonable to survey and map out the whale’s spine phrenologically?
+For, viewed in this light, the wonderful comparative smallness of his
+brain proper is more than compensated by the wonderful comparative
+magnitude of his spinal cord.
+
+But leaving this hint to operate as it may with the phrenologists, I
+would merely assume the spinal theory for a moment, in reference to the
+Sperm Whale’s hump. This august hump, if I mistake not, rises over one
+of the larger vertebræ, and is, therefore, in some sort, the outer
+convex mould of it. From its relative situation then, I should call
+this high hump the organ of firmness or indomitableness in the Sperm
+Whale. And that the great monster is indomitable, you will yet have
+reason to know.
+
+
+CHAPTER 81. The Pequod Meets The Virgin.
+
+The predestinated day arrived, and we duly met the ship Jungfrau,
+Derick De Deer, master, of Bremen.
+
+At one time the greatest whaling people in the world, the Dutch and
+Germans are now among the least; but here and there at very wide
+intervals of latitude and longitude, you still occasionally meet with
+their flag in the Pacific.
+
+For some reason, the Jungfrau seemed quite eager to pay her respects.
+While yet some distance from the Pequod, she rounded to, and dropping a
+boat, her captain was impelled towards us, impatiently standing in the
+bows instead of the stern.
+
+“What has he in his hand there?” cried Starbuck, pointing to something
+wavingly held by the German. “Impossible!—a lamp-feeder!”
+
+“Not that,” said Stubb, “no, no, it’s a coffee-pot, Mr. Starbuck; he’s
+coming off to make us our coffee, is the Yarman; don’t you see that big
+tin can there alongside of him?—that’s his boiling water. Oh! he’s all
+right, is the Yarman.”
+
+“Go along with you,” cried Flask, “it’s a lamp-feeder and an oil-can.
+He’s out of oil, and has come a-begging.”
+
+However curious it may seem for an oil-ship to be borrowing oil on the
+whale-ground, and however much it may invertedly contradict the old
+proverb about carrying coals to Newcastle, yet sometimes such a thing
+really happens; and in the present case Captain Derick De Deer did
+indubitably conduct a lamp-feeder as Flask did declare.
+
+As he mounted the deck, Ahab abruptly accosted him, without at all
+heeding what he had in his hand; but in his broken lingo, the German
+soon evinced his complete ignorance of the White Whale; immediately
+turning the conversation to his lamp-feeder and oil can, with some
+remarks touching his having to turn into his hammock at night in
+profound darkness—his last drop of Bremen oil being gone, and not a
+single flying-fish yet captured to supply the deficiency; concluding by
+hinting that his ship was indeed what in the Fishery is technically
+called a _clean_ one (that is, an empty one), well deserving the name
+of Jungfrau or the Virgin.
+
+His necessities supplied, Derick departed; but he had not gained his
+ship’s side, when whales were almost simultaneously raised from the
+mast-heads of both vessels; and so eager for the chase was Derick, that
+without pausing to put his oil-can and lamp-feeder aboard, he slewed
+round his boat and made after the leviathan lamp-feeders.
+
+Now, the game having risen to leeward, he and the other three German
+boats that soon followed him, had considerably the start of the
+Pequod’s keels. There were eight whales, an average pod. Aware of their
+danger, they were going all abreast with great speed straight before
+the wind, rubbing their flanks as closely as so many spans of horses in
+harness. They left a great, wide wake, as though continually unrolling
+a great wide parchment upon the sea.
+
+Full in this rapid wake, and many fathoms in the rear, swam a huge,
+humped old bull, which by his comparatively slow progress, as well as
+by the unusual yellowish incrustations overgrowing him, seemed
+afflicted with the jaundice, or some other infirmity. Whether this
+whale belonged to the pod in advance, seemed questionable; for it is
+not customary for such venerable leviathans to be at all social.
+Nevertheless, he stuck to their wake, though indeed their back water
+must have retarded him, because the white-bone or swell at his broad
+muzzle was a dashed one, like the swell formed when two hostile
+currents meet. His spout was short, slow, and laborious; coming forth
+with a choking sort of gush, and spending itself in torn shreds,
+followed by strange subterranean commotions in him, which seemed to
+have egress at his other buried extremity, causing the waters behind
+him to upbubble.
+
+“Who’s got some paregoric?” said Stubb, “he has the stomach-ache, I’m
+afraid. Lord, think of having half an acre of stomach-ache! Adverse
+winds are holding mad Christmas in him, boys. It’s the first foul wind
+I ever knew to blow from astern; but look, did ever whale yaw so
+before? it must be, he’s lost his tiller.”
+
+As an overladen Indiaman bearing down the Hindostan coast with a deck
+load of frightened horses, careens, buries, rolls, and wallows on her
+way; so did this old whale heave his aged bulk, and now and then partly
+turning over on his cumbrous rib-ends, expose the cause of his devious
+wake in the unnatural stump of his starboard fin. Whether he had lost
+that fin in battle, or had been born without it, it were hard to say.
+
+“Only wait a bit, old chap, and I’ll give ye a sling for that wounded
+arm,” cried cruel Flask, pointing to the whale-line near him.
+
+“Mind he don’t sling thee with it,” cried Starbuck. “Give way, or the
+German will have him.”
+
+With one intent all the combined rival boats were pointed for this one
+fish, because not only was he the largest, and therefore the most
+valuable whale, but he was nearest to them, and the other whales were
+going with such great velocity, moreover, as almost to defy pursuit for
+the time. At this juncture the Pequod’s keels had shot by the three
+German boats last lowered; but from the great start he had had,
+Derick’s boat still led the chase, though every moment neared by his
+foreign rivals. The only thing they feared, was, that from being
+already so nigh to his mark, he would be enabled to dart his iron
+before they could completely overtake and pass him. As for Derick, he
+seemed quite confident that this would be the case, and occasionally
+with a deriding gesture shook his lamp-feeder at the other boats.
+
+“The ungracious and ungrateful dog!” cried Starbuck; “he mocks and
+dares me with the very poor-box I filled for him not five minutes
+ago!”—then in his old intense whisper—“Give way, greyhounds! Dog to
+it!”
+
+“I tell ye what it is, men”—cried Stubb to his crew—“it’s against my
+religion to get mad; but I’d like to eat that villainous
+Yarman—Pull—won’t ye? Are ye going to let that rascal beat ye? Do ye
+love brandy? A hogshead of brandy, then, to the best man. Come, why
+don’t some of ye burst a blood-vessel? Who’s that been dropping an
+anchor overboard—we don’t budge an inch—we’re becalmed. Halloo, here’s
+grass growing in the boat’s bottom—and by the Lord, the mast there’s
+budding. This won’t do, boys. Look at that Yarman! The short and long
+of it is, men, will ye spit fire or not?”
+
+“Oh! see the suds he makes!” cried Flask, dancing up and down—“What a
+hump—Oh, _do_ pile on the beef—lays like a log! Oh! my lads, _do_
+spring—slap-jacks and quahogs for supper, you know, my lads—baked clams
+and muffins—oh, _do_, _do_, spring,—he’s a hundred barreller—don’t lose
+him now—don’t oh, _don’t!_—see that Yarman—Oh, won’t ye pull for your
+duff, my lads—such a sog! such a sogger! Don’t ye love sperm? There
+goes three thousand dollars, men!—a bank!—a whole bank! The bank of
+England!—Oh, _do_, _do_, _do!_—What’s that Yarman about now?”
+
+At this moment Derick was in the act of pitching his lamp-feeder at the
+advancing boats, and also his oil-can; perhaps with the double view of
+retarding his rivals’ way, and at the same time economically
+accelerating his own by the momentary impetus of the backward toss.
+
+“The unmannerly Dutch dogger!” cried Stubb. “Pull now, men, like fifty
+thousand line-of-battle-ship loads of red-haired devils. What d’ye say,
+Tashtego; are you the man to snap your spine in two-and-twenty pieces
+for the honor of old Gayhead? What d’ye say?”
+
+“I say, pull like god-dam,”—cried the Indian.
+
+Fiercely, but evenly incited by the taunts of the German, the Pequod’s
+three boats now began ranging almost abreast; and, so disposed,
+momentarily neared him. In that fine, loose, chivalrous attitude of the
+headsman when drawing near to his prey, the three mates stood up
+proudly, occasionally backing the after oarsman with an exhilarating
+cry of, “There she slides, now! Hurrah for the white-ash breeze! Down
+with the Yarman! Sail over him!”
+
+But so decided an original start had Derick had, that spite of all
+their gallantry, he would have proved the victor in this race, had not
+a righteous judgment descended upon him in a crab which caught the
+blade of his midship oarsman. While this clumsy lubber was striving to
+free his white-ash, and while, in consequence, Derick’s boat was nigh
+to capsizing, and he thundering away at his men in a mighty rage;—that
+was a good time for Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask. With a shout, they took
+a mortal start forwards, and slantingly ranged up on the German’s
+quarter. An instant more, and all four boats were diagonically in the
+whale’s immediate wake, while stretching from them, on both sides, was
+the foaming swell that he made.
+
+It was a terrific, most pitiable, and maddening sight. The whale was
+now going head out, and sending his spout before him in a continual
+tormented jet; while his one poor fin beat his side in an agony of
+fright. Now to this hand, now to that, he yawed in his faltering
+flight, and still at every billow that he broke, he spasmodically sank
+in the sea, or sideways rolled towards the sky his one beating fin. So
+have I seen a bird with clipped wing making affrighted broken circles
+in the air, vainly striving to escape the piratical hawks. But the bird
+has a voice, and with plaintive cries will make known her fear; but the
+fear of this vast dumb brute of the sea, was chained up and enchanted
+in him; he had no voice, save that choking respiration through his
+spiracle, and this made the sight of him unspeakably pitiable; while
+still, in his amazing bulk, portcullis jaw, and omnipotent tail, there
+was enough to appal the stoutest man who so pitied.
+
+Seeing now that but a very few moments more would give the Pequod’s
+boats the advantage, and rather than be thus foiled of his game, Derick
+chose to hazard what to him must have seemed a most unusually long
+dart, ere the last chance would for ever escape.
+
+But no sooner did his harpooneer stand up for the stroke, than all
+three tigers—Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo—instinctively sprang to their
+feet, and standing in a diagonal row, simultaneously pointed their
+barbs; and darted over the head of the German harpooneer, their three
+Nantucket irons entered the whale. Blinding vapors of foam and
+white-fire! The three boats, in the first fury of the whale’s headlong
+rush, bumped the German’s aside with such force, that both Derick and
+his baffled harpooneer were spilled out, and sailed over by the three
+flying keels.
+
+“Don’t be afraid, my butter-boxes,” cried Stubb, casting a passing
+glance upon them as he shot by; “ye’ll be picked up presently—all
+right—I saw some sharks astern—St. Bernard’s dogs, you know—relieve
+distressed travellers. Hurrah! this is the way to sail now. Every keel
+a sunbeam! Hurrah!—Here we go like three tin kettles at the tail of a
+mad cougar! This puts me in mind of fastening to an elephant in a
+tilbury on a plain—makes the wheel-spokes fly, boys, when you fasten to
+him that way; and there’s danger of being pitched out too, when you
+strike a hill. Hurrah! this is the way a fellow feels when he’s going
+to Davy Jones—all a rush down an endless inclined plane! Hurrah! this
+whale carries the everlasting mail!”
+
+But the monster’s run was a brief one. Giving a sudden gasp, he
+tumultuously sounded. With a grating rush, the three lines flew round
+the loggerheads with such a force as to gouge deep grooves in them;
+while so fearful were the harpooneers that this rapid sounding would
+soon exhaust the lines, that using all their dexterous might, they
+caught repeated smoking turns with the rope to hold on; till at
+last—owing to the perpendicular strain from the lead-lined chocks of
+the boats, whence the three ropes went straight down into the blue—the
+gunwales of the bows were almost even with the water, while the three
+sterns tilted high in the air. And the whale soon ceasing to sound, for
+some time they remained in that attitude, fearful of expending more
+line, though the position was a little ticklish. But though boats have
+been taken down and lost in this way, yet it is this “holding on,” as
+it is called; this hooking up by the sharp barbs of his live flesh from
+the back; this it is that often torments the Leviathan into soon rising
+again to meet the sharp lance of his foes. Yet not to speak of the
+peril of the thing, it is to be doubted whether this course is always
+the best; for it is but reasonable to presume, that the longer the
+stricken whale stays under water, the more he is exhausted. Because,
+owing to the enormous surface of him—in a full grown sperm whale
+something less than 2000 square feet—the pressure of the water is
+immense. We all know what an astonishing atmospheric weight we
+ourselves stand up under; even here, above-ground, in the air; how
+vast, then, the burden of a whale, bearing on his back a column of two
+hundred fathoms of ocean! It must at least equal the weight of fifty
+atmospheres. One whaleman has estimated it at the weight of twenty
+line-of-battle ships, with all their guns, and stores, and men on
+board.
+
+As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down
+into its eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan or cry of any
+sort, nay, not so much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its depths;
+what landsman would have thought, that beneath all that silence and
+placidity, the utmost monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in
+agony! Not eight inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows.
+Seems it credible that by three such thin threads the great Leviathan
+was suspended like the big weight to an eight day clock. Suspended? and
+to what? To three bits of board. Is this the creature of whom it was
+once so triumphantly said—“Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons?
+or his head with fish-spears? The sword of him that layeth at him
+cannot hold, the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon: he esteemeth iron
+as straw; the arrow cannot make him flee; darts are counted as stubble;
+he laugheth at the shaking of a spear!” This the creature? this he? Oh!
+that unfulfilments should follow the prophets. For with the strength of
+a thousand thighs in his tail, Leviathan had run his head under the
+mountains of the sea, to hide him from the Pequod’s fish-spears!
+
+In that sloping afternoon sunlight, the shadows that the three boats
+sent down beneath the surface, must have been long enough and broad
+enough to shade half Xerxes’ army. Who can tell how appalling to the
+wounded whale must have been such huge phantoms flitting over his head!
+
+“Stand by, men; he stirs,” cried Starbuck, as the three lines suddenly
+vibrated in the water, distinctly conducting upwards to them, as by
+magnetic wires, the life and death throbs of the whale, so that every
+oarsman felt them in his seat. The next moment, relieved in great part
+from the downward strain at the bows, the boats gave a sudden bounce
+upwards, as a small icefield will, when a dense herd of white bears are
+scared from it into the sea.
+
+“Haul in! Haul in!” cried Starbuck again; “he’s rising.”
+
+The lines, of which, hardly an instant before, not one hand’s breadth
+could have been gained, were now in long quick coils flung back all
+dripping into the boats, and soon the whale broke water within two
+ship’s lengths of the hunters.
+
+His motions plainly denoted his extreme exhaustion. In most land
+animals there are certain valves or flood-gates in many of their veins,
+whereby when wounded, the blood is in some degree at least instantly
+shut off in certain directions. Not so with the whale; one of whose
+peculiarities it is to have an entire non-valvular structure of the
+blood-vessels, so that when pierced even by so small a point as a
+harpoon, a deadly drain is at once begun upon his whole arterial
+system; and when this is heightened by the extraordinary pressure of
+water at a great distance below the surface, his life may be said to
+pour from him in incessant streams. Yet so vast is the quantity of
+blood in him, and so distant and numerous its interior fountains, that
+he will keep thus bleeding and bleeding for a considerable period; even
+as in a drought a river will flow, whose source is in the well-springs
+of far-off and undiscernible hills. Even now, when the boats pulled
+upon this whale, and perilously drew over his swaying flukes, and the
+lances were darted into him, they were followed by steady jets from the
+new made wound, which kept continually playing, while the natural
+spout-hole in his head was only at intervals, however rapid, sending
+its affrighted moisture into the air. From this last vent no blood yet
+came, because no vital part of him had thus far been struck. His life,
+as they significantly call it, was untouched.
+
+As the boats now more closely surrounded him, the whole upper part of
+his form, with much of it that is ordinarily submerged, was plainly
+revealed. His eyes, or rather the places where his eyes had been, were
+beheld. As strange misgrown masses gather in the knot-holes of the
+noblest oaks when prostrate, so from the points which the whale’s eyes
+had once occupied, now protruded blind bulbs, horribly pitiable to see.
+But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his
+blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light
+the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate
+the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to
+all. Still rolling in his blood, at last he partially disclosed a
+strangely discoloured bunch or protuberance, the size of a bushel, low
+down on the flank.
+
+“A nice spot,” cried Flask; “just let me prick him there once.”
+
+“Avast!” cried Starbuck, “there’s no need of that!”
+
+But humane Starbuck was too late. At the instant of the dart an
+ulcerous jet shot from this cruel wound, and goaded by it into more
+than sufferable anguish, the whale now spouting thick blood, with swift
+fury blindly darted at the craft, bespattering them and their glorying
+crews all over with showers of gore, capsizing Flask’s boat and marring
+the bows. It was his death stroke. For, by this time, so spent was he
+by loss of blood, that he helplessly rolled away from the wreck he had
+made; lay panting on his side, impotently flapped with his stumped fin,
+then over and over slowly revolved like a waning world; turned up the
+white secrets of his belly; lay like a log, and died. It was most
+piteous, that last expiring spout. As when by unseen hands the water is
+gradually drawn off from some mighty fountain, and with half-stifled
+melancholy gurglings the spray-column lowers and lowers to the
+ground—so the last long dying spout of the whale.
+
+Soon, while the crews were awaiting the arrival of the ship, the body
+showed symptoms of sinking with all its treasures unrifled.
+Immediately, by Starbuck’s orders, lines were secured to it at
+different points, so that ere long every boat was a buoy; the sunken
+whale being suspended a few inches beneath them by the cords. By very
+heedful management, when the ship drew nigh, the whale was transferred
+to her side, and was strongly secured there by the stiffest
+fluke-chains, for it was plain that unless artificially upheld, the
+body would at once sink to the bottom.
+
+It so chanced that almost upon first cutting into him with the spade,
+the entire length of a corroded harpoon was found imbedded in his
+flesh, on the lower part of the bunch before described. But as the
+stumps of harpoons are frequently found in the dead bodies of captured
+whales, with the flesh perfectly healed around them, and no prominence
+of any kind to denote their place; therefore, there must needs have
+been some other unknown reason in the present case fully to account for
+the ulceration alluded to. But still more curious was the fact of a
+lance-head of stone being found in him, not far from the buried iron,
+the flesh perfectly firm about it. Who had darted that stone lance? And
+when? It might have been darted by some Nor’ West Indian long before
+America was discovered.
+
+What other marvels might have been rummaged out of this monstrous
+cabinet there is no telling. But a sudden stop was put to further
+discoveries, by the ship’s being unprecedentedly dragged over sideways
+to the sea, owing to the body’s immensely increasing tendency to sink.
+However, Starbuck, who had the ordering of affairs, hung on to it to
+the last; hung on to it so resolutely, indeed, that when at length the
+ship would have been capsized, if still persisting in locking arms with
+the body; then, when the command was given to break clear from it, such
+was the immovable strain upon the timber-heads to which the
+fluke-chains and cables were fastened, that it was impossible to cast
+them off. Meantime everything in the Pequod was aslant. To cross to the
+other side of the deck was like walking up the steep gabled roof of a
+house. The ship groaned and gasped. Many of the ivory inlayings of her
+bulwarks and cabins were started from their places, by the unnatural
+dislocation. In vain handspikes and crows were brought to bear upon the
+immovable fluke-chains, to pry them adrift from the timberheads; and so
+low had the whale now settled that the submerged ends could not be at
+all approached, while every moment whole tons of ponderosity seemed
+added to the sinking bulk, and the ship seemed on the point of going
+over.
+
+“Hold on, hold on, won’t ye?” cried Stubb to the body, “don’t be in
+such a devil of a hurry to sink! By thunder, men, we must do something
+or go for it. No use prying there; avast, I say with your handspikes,
+and run one of ye for a prayer book and a pen-knife, and cut the big
+chains.”
+
+“Knife? Aye, aye,” cried Queequeg, and seizing the carpenter’s heavy
+hatchet, he leaned out of a porthole, and steel to iron, began slashing
+at the largest fluke-chains. But a few strokes, full of sparks, were
+given, when the exceeding strain effected the rest. With a terrific
+snap, every fastening went adrift; the ship righted, the carcase sank.
+
+Now, this occasional inevitable sinking of the recently killed Sperm
+Whale is a very curious thing; nor has any fisherman yet adequately
+accounted for it. Usually the dead Sperm Whale floats with great
+buoyancy, with its side or belly considerably elevated above the
+surface. If the only whales that thus sank were old, meagre, and
+broken-hearted creatures, their pads of lard diminished and all their
+bones heavy and rheumatic; then you might with some reason assert that
+this sinking is caused by an uncommon specific gravity in the fish so
+sinking, consequent upon this absence of buoyant matter in him. But it
+is not so. For young whales, in the highest health, and swelling with
+noble aspirations, prematurely cut off in the warm flush and May of
+life, with all their panting lard about them; even these brawny,
+buoyant heroes do sometimes sink.
+
+Be it said, however, that the Sperm Whale is far less liable to this
+accident than any other species. Where one of that sort go down, twenty
+Right Whales do. This difference in the species is no doubt imputable
+in no small degree to the greater quantity of bone in the Right Whale;
+his Venetian blinds alone sometimes weighing more than a ton; from this
+incumbrance the Sperm Whale is wholly free. But there are instances
+where, after the lapse of many hours or several days, the sunken whale
+again rises, more buoyant than in life. But the reason of this is
+obvious. Gases are generated in him; he swells to a prodigious
+magnitude; becomes a sort of animal balloon. A line-of-battle ship
+could hardly keep him under then. In the Shore Whaling, on soundings,
+among the Bays of New Zealand, when a Right Whale gives token of
+sinking, they fasten buoys to him, with plenty of rope; so that when
+the body has gone down, they know where to look for it when it shall
+have ascended again.
+
+It was not long after the sinking of the body that a cry was heard from
+the Pequod’s mast-heads, announcing that the Jungfrau was again
+lowering her boats; though the only spout in sight was that of a
+Fin-Back, belonging to the species of uncapturable whales, because of
+its incredible power of swimming. Nevertheless, the Fin-Back’s spout is
+so similar to the Sperm Whale’s, that by unskilful fishermen it is
+often mistaken for it. And consequently Derick and all his host were
+now in valiant chase of this unnearable brute. The Virgin crowding all
+sail, made after her four young keels, and thus they all disappeared
+far to leeward, still in bold, hopeful chase.
+
+Oh! many are the Fin-Backs, and many are the Dericks, my friend.
+
+
+CHAPTER 82. The Honor and Glory of Whaling.
+
+There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the
+true method.
+
+The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up
+to the very spring-head of it so much the more am I impressed with its
+great honorableness and antiquity; and especially when I find so many
+great demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or other
+have shed distinction upon it, I am transported with the reflection
+that I myself belong, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned a
+fraternity.
+
+The gallant Perseus, a son of Jupiter, was the first whaleman; and to
+the eternal honor of our calling be it said, that the first whale
+attacked by our brotherhood was not killed with any sordid intent.
+Those were the knightly days of our profession, when we only bore arms
+to succor the distressed, and not to fill men’s lamp-feeders. Every one
+knows the fine story of Perseus and Andromeda; how the lovely
+Andromeda, the daughter of a king, was tied to a rock on the sea-coast,
+and as Leviathan was in the very act of carrying her off, Perseus, the
+prince of whalemen, intrepidly advancing, harpooned the monster, and
+delivered and married the maid. It was an admirable artistic exploit,
+rarely achieved by the best harpooneers of the present day; inasmuch as
+this Leviathan was slain at the very first dart. And let no man doubt
+this Arkite story; for in the ancient Joppa, now Jaffa, on the Syrian
+coast, in one of the Pagan temples, there stood for many ages the vast
+skeleton of a whale, which the city’s legends and all the inhabitants
+asserted to be the identical bones of the monster that Perseus slew.
+When the Romans took Joppa, the same skeleton was carried to Italy in
+triumph. What seems most singular and suggestively important in this
+story, is this: it was from Joppa that Jonah set sail.
+
+Akin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda—indeed, by some supposed
+to be indirectly derived from it—is that famous story of St. George and
+the Dragon; which dragon I maintain to have been a whale; for in many
+old chronicles whales and dragons are strangely jumbled together, and
+often stand for each other. “Thou art as a lion of the waters, and as a
+dragon of the sea,” saith Ezekiel; hereby, plainly meaning a whale; in
+truth, some versions of the Bible use that word itself. Besides, it
+would much subtract from the glory of the exploit had St. George but
+encountered a crawling reptile of the land, instead of doing battle
+with the great monster of the deep. Any man may kill a snake, but only
+a Perseus, a St. George, a Coffin, have the heart in them to march
+boldly up to a whale.
+
+Let not the modern paintings of this scene mislead us; for though the
+creature encountered by that valiant whaleman of old is vaguely
+represented of a griffin-like shape, and though the battle is depicted
+on land and the saint on horseback, yet considering the great ignorance
+of those times, when the true form of the whale was unknown to artists;
+and considering that as in Perseus’ case, St. George’s whale might have
+crawled up out of the sea on the beach; and considering that the animal
+ridden by St. George might have been only a large seal, or sea-horse;
+bearing all this in mind, it will not appear altogether incompatible
+with the sacred legend and the ancientest draughts of the scene, to
+hold this so-called dragon no other than the great Leviathan himself.
+In fact, placed before the strict and piercing truth, this whole story
+will fare like that fish, flesh, and fowl idol of the Philistines,
+Dagon by name; who being planted before the ark of Israel, his horse’s
+head and both the palms of his hands fell off from him, and only the
+stump or fishy part of him remained. Thus, then, one of our own noble
+stamp, even a whaleman, is the tutelary guardian of England; and by
+good rights, we harpooneers of Nantucket should be enrolled in the most
+noble order of St. George. And therefore, let not the knights of that
+honorable company (none of whom, I venture to say, have ever had to do
+with a whale like their great patron), let them never eye a Nantucketer
+with disdain, since even in our woollen frocks and tarred trowsers we
+are much better entitled to St. George’s decoration than they.
+
+Whether to admit Hercules among us or not, concerning this I long
+remained dubious: for though according to the Greek mythologies, that
+antique Crockett and Kit Carson—that brawny doer of rejoicing good
+deeds, was swallowed down and thrown up by a whale; still, whether that
+strictly makes a whaleman of him, that might be mooted. It nowhere
+appears that he ever actually harpooned his fish, unless, indeed, from
+the inside. Nevertheless, he may be deemed a sort of involuntary
+whaleman; at any rate the whale caught him, if he did not the whale. I
+claim him for one of our clan.
+
+But, by the best contradictory authorities, this Grecian story of
+Hercules and the whale is considered to be derived from the still more
+ancient Hebrew story of Jonah and the whale; and vice versâ; certainly
+they are very similar. If I claim the demi-god then, why not the
+prophet?
+
+Nor do heroes, saints, demigods, and prophets alone comprise the whole
+roll of our order. Our grand master is still to be named; for like
+royal kings of old times, we find the head waters of our fraternity in
+nothing short of the great gods themselves. That wondrous oriental
+story is now to be rehearsed from the Shaster, which gives us the dread
+Vishnoo, one of the three persons in the godhead of the Hindoos; gives
+us this divine Vishnoo himself for our Lord;—Vishnoo, who, by the first
+of his ten earthly incarnations, has for ever set apart and sanctified
+the whale. When Brahma, or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster, resolved
+to recreate the world after one of its periodical dissolutions, he gave
+birth to Vishnoo, to preside over the work; but the Vedas, or mystical
+books, whose perusal would seem to have been indispensable to Vishnoo
+before beginning the creation, and which therefore must have contained
+something in the shape of practical hints to young architects, these
+Vedas were lying at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo became
+incarnate in a whale, and sounding down in him to the uttermost depths,
+rescued the sacred volumes. Was not this Vishnoo a whaleman, then? even
+as a man who rides a horse is called a horseman?
+
+Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there’s a
+member-roll for you! What club but the whaleman’s can head off like
+that?
+
+
+CHAPTER 83. Jonah Historically Regarded.
+
+Reference was made to the historical story of Jonah and the whale in
+the preceding chapter. Now some Nantucketers rather distrust this
+historical story of Jonah and the whale. But then there were some
+sceptical Greeks and Romans, who, standing out from the orthodox pagans
+of their times, equally doubted the story of Hercules and the whale,
+and Arion and the dolphin; and yet their doubting those traditions did
+not make those traditions one whit the less facts, for all that.
+
+One old Sag-Harbor whaleman’s chief reason for questioning the Hebrew
+story was this:—He had one of those quaint old-fashioned Bibles,
+embellished with curious, unscientific plates; one of which represented
+Jonah’s whale with two spouts in his head—a peculiarity only true with
+respect to a species of the Leviathan (the Right Whale, and the
+varieties of that order), concerning which the fishermen have this
+saying, “A penny roll would choke him”; his swallow is so very small.
+But, to this, Bishop Jebb’s anticipative answer is ready. It is not
+necessary, hints the Bishop, that we consider Jonah as tombed in the
+whale’s belly, but as temporarily lodged in some part of his mouth. And
+this seems reasonable enough in the good Bishop. For truly, the Right
+Whale’s mouth would accommodate a couple of whist-tables, and
+comfortably seat all the players. Possibly, too, Jonah might have
+ensconced himself in a hollow tooth; but, on second thoughts, the Right
+Whale is toothless.
+
+Another reason which Sag-Harbor (he went by that name) urged for his
+want of faith in this matter of the prophet, was something obscurely in
+reference to his incarcerated body and the whale’s gastric juices. But
+this objection likewise falls to the ground, because a German exegetist
+supposes that Jonah must have taken refuge in the floating body of a
+_dead_ whale—even as the French soldiers in the Russian campaign turned
+their dead horses into tents, and crawled into them. Besides, it has
+been divined by other continental commentators, that when Jonah was
+thrown overboard from the Joppa ship, he straightway effected his
+escape to another vessel near by, some vessel with a whale for a
+figure-head; and, I would add, possibly called “The Whale,” as some
+craft are nowadays christened the “Shark,” the “Gull,” the “Eagle.” Nor
+have there been wanting learned exegetists who have opined that the
+whale mentioned in the book of Jonah merely meant a life-preserver—an
+inflated bag of wind—which the endangered prophet swam to, and so was
+saved from a watery doom. Poor Sag-Harbor, therefore, seems worsted all
+round. But he had still another reason for his want of faith. It was
+this, if I remember right: Jonah was swallowed by the whale in the
+Mediterranean Sea, and after three days he was vomited up somewhere
+within three days’ journey of Nineveh, a city on the Tigris, very much
+more than three days’ journey across from the nearest point of the
+Mediterranean coast. How is that?
+
+But was there no other way for the whale to land the prophet within
+that short distance of Nineveh? Yes. He might have carried him round by
+the way of the Cape of Good Hope. But not to speak of the passage
+through the whole length of the Mediterranean, and another passage up
+the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, such a supposition would involve the
+complete circumnavigation of all Africa in three days, not to speak of
+the Tigris waters, near the site of Nineveh, being too shallow for any
+whale to swim in. Besides, this idea of Jonah’s weathering the Cape of
+Good Hope at so early a day would wrest the honor of the discovery of
+that great headland from Bartholomew Diaz, its reputed discoverer, and
+so make modern history a liar.
+
+But all these foolish arguments of old Sag-Harbor only evinced his
+foolish pride of reason—a thing still more reprehensible in him, seeing
+that he had but little learning except what he had picked up from the
+sun and the sea. I say it only shows his foolish, impious pride, and
+abominable, devilish rebellion against the reverend clergy. For by a
+Portuguese Catholic priest, this very idea of Jonah’s going to Nineveh
+via the Cape of Good Hope was advanced as a signal magnification of the
+general miracle. And so it was. Besides, to this day, the highly
+enlightened Turks devoutly believe in the historical story of Jonah.
+And some three centuries ago, an English traveller in old Harris’s
+Voyages, speaks of a Turkish Mosque built in honor of Jonah, in which
+Mosque was a miraculous lamp that burnt without any oil.
+
+
+CHAPTER 84. Pitchpoling.
+
+To make them run easily and swiftly, the axles of carriages are
+anointed; and for much the same purpose, some whalers perform an
+analogous operation upon their boat; they grease the bottom. Nor is it
+to be doubted that as such a procedure can do no harm, it may possibly
+be of no contemptible advantage; considering that oil and water are
+hostile; that oil is a sliding thing, and that the object in view is to
+make the boat slide bravely. Queequeg believed strongly in anointing
+his boat, and one morning not long after the German ship Jungfrau
+disappeared, took more than customary pains in that occupation;
+crawling under its bottom, where it hung over the side, and rubbing in
+the unctuousness as though diligently seeking to insure a crop of hair
+from the craft’s bald keel. He seemed to be working in obedience to
+some particular presentiment. Nor did it remain unwarranted by the
+event.
+
+Towards noon whales were raised; but so soon as the ship sailed down to
+them, they turned and fled with swift precipitancy; a disordered
+flight, as of Cleopatra’s barges from Actium.
+
+Nevertheless, the boats pursued, and Stubb’s was foremost. By great
+exertion, Tashtego at last succeeded in planting one iron; but the
+stricken whale, without at all sounding, still continued his horizontal
+flight, with added fleetness. Such unintermitted strainings upon the
+planted iron must sooner or later inevitably extract it. It became
+imperative to lance the flying whale, or be content to lose him. But to
+haul the boat up to his flank was impossible, he swam so fast and
+furious. What then remained?
+
+Of all the wondrous devices and dexterities, the sleights of hand and
+countless subtleties, to which the veteran whaleman is so often forced,
+none exceed that fine manœuvre with the lance called pitchpoling. Small
+sword, or broad sword, in all its exercises boasts nothing like it. It
+is only indispensable with an inveterate running whale; its grand fact
+and feature is the wonderful distance to which the long lance is
+accurately darted from a violently rocking, jerking boat, under extreme
+headway. Steel and wood included, the entire spear is some ten or
+twelve feet in length; the staff is much slighter than that of the
+harpoon, and also of a lighter material—pine. It is furnished with a
+small rope called a warp, of considerable length, by which it can be
+hauled back to the hand after darting.
+
+But before going further, it is important to mention here, that though
+the harpoon may be pitchpoled in the same way with the lance, yet it is
+seldom done; and when done, is still less frequently successful, on
+account of the greater weight and inferior length of the harpoon as
+compared with the lance, which in effect become serious drawbacks. As a
+general thing, therefore, you must first get fast to a whale, before
+any pitchpoling comes into play.
+
+Look now at Stubb; a man who from his humorous, deliberate coolness and
+equanimity in the direst emergencies, was specially qualified to excel
+in pitchpoling. Look at him; he stands upright in the tossed bow of the
+flying boat; wrapt in fleecy foam, the towing whale is forty feet
+ahead. Handling the long lance lightly, glancing twice or thrice along
+its length to see if it be exactly straight, Stubb whistlingly gathers
+up the coil of the warp in one hand, so as to secure its free end in
+his grasp, leaving the rest unobstructed. Then holding the lance full
+before his waistband’s middle, he levels it at the whale; when,
+covering him with it, he steadily depresses the butt-end in his hand,
+thereby elevating the point till the weapon stands fairly balanced upon
+his palm, fifteen feet in the air. He minds you somewhat of a juggler,
+balancing a long staff on his chin. Next moment with a rapid, nameless
+impulse, in a superb lofty arch the bright steel spans the foaming
+distance, and quivers in the life spot of the whale. Instead of
+sparkling water, he now spouts red blood.
+
+“That drove the spigot out of him!” cried Stubb. “’Tis July’s immortal
+Fourth; all fountains must run wine today! Would now, it were old
+Orleans whiskey, or old Ohio, or unspeakable old Monongahela! Then,
+Tashtego, lad, I’d have ye hold a canakin to the jet, and we’d drink
+round it! Yea, verily, hearts alive, we’d brew choice punch in the
+spread of his spout-hole there, and from that live punch-bowl quaff the
+living stuff.”
+
+Again and again to such gamesome talk, the dexterous dart is repeated,
+the spear returning to its master like a greyhound held in skilful
+leash. The agonized whale goes into his flurry; the tow-line is
+slackened, and the pitchpoler dropping astern, folds his hands, and
+mutely watches the monster die.
+
+
+CHAPTER 85. The Fountain.
+
+That for six thousand years—and no one knows how many millions of ages
+before—the great whales should have been spouting all over the sea, and
+sprinkling and mistifying the gardens of the deep, as with so many
+sprinkling or mistifying pots; and that for some centuries back,
+thousands of hunters should have been close by the fountain of the
+whale, watching these sprinklings and spoutings—that all this should
+be, and yet, that down to this blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter
+minutes past one o’clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D.
+1851), it should still remain a problem, whether these spoutings are,
+after all, really water, or nothing but vapor—this is surely a
+noteworthy thing.
+
+Let us, then, look at this matter, along with some interesting items
+contingent. Every one knows that by the peculiar cunning of their
+gills, the finny tribes in general breathe the air which at all times
+is combined with the element in which they swim; hence, a herring or a
+cod might live a century, and never once raise its head above the
+surface. But owing to his marked internal structure which gives him
+regular lungs, like a human being’s, the whale can only live by
+inhaling the disengaged air in the open atmosphere. Wherefore the
+necessity for his periodical visits to the upper world. But he cannot
+in any degree breathe through his mouth, for, in his ordinary attitude,
+the Sperm Whale’s mouth is buried at least eight feet beneath the
+surface; and what is still more, his windpipe has no connexion with his
+mouth. No, he breathes through his spiracle alone; and this is on the
+top of his head.
+
+If I say, that in any creature breathing is only a function
+indispensable to vitality, inasmuch as it withdraws from the air a
+certain element, which being subsequently brought into contact with the
+blood imparts to the blood its vivifying principle, I do not think I
+shall err; though I may possibly use some superfluous scientific words.
+Assume it, and it follows that if all the blood in a man could be
+aerated with one breath, he might then seal up his nostrils and not
+fetch another for a considerable time. That is to say, he would then
+live without breathing. Anomalous as it may seem, this is precisely the
+case with the whale, who systematically lives, by intervals, his full
+hour and more (when at the bottom) without drawing a single breath, or
+so much as in any way inhaling a particle of air; for, remember, he has
+no gills. How is this? Between his ribs and on each side of his spine
+he is supplied with a remarkable involved Cretan labyrinth of
+vermicelli-like vessels, which vessels, when he quits the surface, are
+completely distended with oxygenated blood. So that for an hour or
+more, a thousand fathoms in the sea, he carries a surplus stock of
+vitality in him, just as the camel crossing the waterless desert
+carries a surplus supply of drink for future use in its four
+supplementary stomachs. The anatomical fact of this labyrinth is
+indisputable; and that the supposition founded upon it is reasonable
+and true, seems the more cogent to me, when I consider the otherwise
+inexplicable obstinacy of that leviathan in _having his spoutings out_,
+as the fishermen phrase it. This is what I mean. If unmolested, upon
+rising to the surface, the Sperm Whale will continue there for a period
+of time exactly uniform with all his other unmolested risings. Say he
+stays eleven minutes, and jets seventy times, that is, respires seventy
+breaths; then whenever he rises again, he will be sure to have his
+seventy breaths over again, to a minute. Now, if after he fetches a few
+breaths you alarm him, so that he sounds, he will be always dodging up
+again to make good his regular allowance of air. And not till those
+seventy breaths are told, will he finally go down to stay out his full
+term below. Remark, however, that in different individuals these rates
+are different; but in any one they are alike. Now, why should the whale
+thus insist upon having his spoutings out, unless it be to replenish
+his reservoir of air, ere descending for good? How obvious is it, too,
+that this necessity for the whale’s rising exposes him to all the fatal
+hazards of the chase. For not by hook or by net could this vast
+leviathan be caught, when sailing a thousand fathoms beneath the
+sunlight. Not so much thy skill, then, O hunter, as the great
+necessities that strike the victory to thee!
+
+In man, breathing is incessantly going on—one breath only serving for
+two or three pulsations; so that whatever other business he has to
+attend to, waking or sleeping, breathe he must, or die he will. But the
+Sperm Whale only breathes about one seventh or Sunday of his time.
+
+It has been said that the whale only breathes through his spout-hole;
+if it could truthfully be added that his spouts are mixed with water,
+then I opine we should be furnished with the reason why his sense of
+smell seems obliterated in him; for the only thing about him that at
+all answers to his nose is that identical spout-hole; and being so
+clogged with two elements, it could not be expected to have the power
+of smelling. But owing to the mystery of the spout—whether it be water
+or whether it be vapor—no absolute certainty can as yet be arrived at
+on this head. Sure it is, nevertheless, that the Sperm Whale has no
+proper olfactories. But what does he want of them? No roses, no
+violets, no Cologne-water in the sea.
+
+Furthermore, as his windpipe solely opens into the tube of his spouting
+canal, and as that long canal—like the grand Erie Canal—is furnished
+with a sort of locks (that open and shut) for the downward retention of
+air or the upward exclusion of water, therefore the whale has no voice;
+unless you insult him by saying, that when he so strangely rumbles, he
+talks through his nose. But then again, what has the whale to say?
+Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to this
+world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a
+living. Oh! happy that the world is such an excellent listener!
+
+Now, the spouting canal of the Sperm Whale, chiefly intended as it is
+for the conveyance of air, and for several feet laid along,
+horizontally, just beneath the upper surface of his head, and a little
+to one side; this curious canal is very much like a gas-pipe laid down
+in a city on one side of a street. But the question returns whether
+this gas-pipe is also a water-pipe; in other words, whether the spout
+of the Sperm Whale is the mere vapor of the exhaled breath, or whether
+that exhaled breath is mixed with water taken in at the mouth, and
+discharged through the spiracle. It is certain that the mouth
+indirectly communicates with the spouting canal; but it cannot be
+proved that this is for the purpose of discharging water through the
+spiracle. Because the greatest necessity for so doing would seem to be,
+when in feeding he accidentally takes in water. But the Sperm Whale’s
+food is far beneath the surface, and there he cannot spout even if he
+would. Besides, if you regard him very closely, and time him with your
+watch, you will find that when unmolested, there is an undeviating
+rhyme between the periods of his jets and the ordinary periods of
+respiration.
+
+But why pester one with all this reasoning on the subject? Speak out!
+You have seen him spout; then declare what the spout is; can you not
+tell water from air? My dear sir, in this world it is not so easy to
+settle these plain things. I have ever found your plain things the
+knottiest of all. And as for this whale spout, you might almost stand
+in it, and yet be undecided as to what it is precisely.
+
+The central body of it is hidden in the snowy sparkling mist enveloping
+it; and how can you certainly tell whether any water falls from it,
+when, always, when you are close enough to a whale to get a close view
+of his spout, he is in a prodigious commotion, the water cascading all
+around him. And if at such times you should think that you really
+perceived drops of moisture in the spout, how do you know that they are
+not merely condensed from its vapor; or how do you know that they are
+not those identical drops superficially lodged in the spout-hole
+fissure, which is countersunk into the summit of the whale’s head? For
+even when tranquilly swimming through the mid-day sea in a calm, with
+his elevated hump sun-dried as a dromedary’s in the desert; even then,
+the whale always carries a small basin of water on his head, as under a
+blazing sun you will sometimes see a cavity in a rock filled up with
+rain.
+
+Nor is it at all prudent for the hunter to be over curious touching the
+precise nature of the whale spout. It will not do for him to be peering
+into it, and putting his face in it. You cannot go with your pitcher to
+this fountain and fill it, and bring it away. For even when coming into
+slight contact with the outer, vapory shreds of the jet, which will
+often happen, your skin will feverishly smart, from the acridness of
+the thing so touching it. And I know one, who coming into still closer
+contact with the spout, whether with some scientific object in view, or
+otherwise, I cannot say, the skin peeled off from his cheek and arm.
+Wherefore, among whalemen, the spout is deemed poisonous; they try to
+evade it. Another thing; I have heard it said, and I do not much doubt
+it, that if the jet is fairly spouted into your eyes, it will blind
+you. The wisest thing the investigator can do then, it seems to me, is
+to let this deadly spout alone.
+
+Still, we can hypothesize, even if we cannot prove and establish. My
+hypothesis is this: that the spout is nothing but mist. And besides
+other reasons, to this conclusion I am impelled, by considerations
+touching the great inherent dignity and sublimity of the Sperm Whale; I
+account him no common, shallow being, inasmuch as it is an undisputed
+fact that he is never found on soundings, or near shores; all other
+whales sometimes are. He is both ponderous and profound. And I am
+convinced that from the heads of all ponderous profound beings, such as
+Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always goes
+up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the act of thinking deep
+thoughts. While composing a little treatise on Eternity, I had the
+curiosity to place a mirror before me; and ere long saw reflected
+there, a curious involved worming and undulation in the atmosphere over
+my head. The invariable moisture of my hair, while plunged in deep
+thought, after six cups of hot tea in my thin shingled attic, of an
+August noon; this seems an additional argument for the above
+supposition.
+
+And how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster, to
+behold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea; his vast, mild
+head overhung by a canopy of vapor, engendered by his incommunicable
+contemplations, and that vapor—as you will sometimes see it—glorified
+by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his thoughts.
+For, d’ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air; they only irradiate
+vapor. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my
+mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a
+heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny;
+but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of
+all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this
+combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who
+regards them both with equal eye.
+
+
+CHAPTER 86. The Tail.
+
+Other poets have warbled the praises of the soft eye of the antelope,
+and the lovely plumage of the bird that never alights; less celestial,
+I celebrate a tail.
+
+Reckoning the largest sized Sperm Whale’s tail to begin at that point
+of the trunk where it tapers to about the girth of a man, it comprises
+upon its upper surface alone, an area of at least fifty square feet.
+The compact round body of its root expands into two broad, firm, flat
+palms or flukes, gradually shoaling away to less than an inch in
+thickness. At the crotch or junction, these flukes slightly overlap,
+then sideways recede from each other like wings, leaving a wide vacancy
+between. In no living thing are the lines of beauty more exquisitely
+defined than in the crescentic borders of these flukes. At its utmost
+expansion in the full grown whale, the tail will considerably exceed
+twenty feet across.
+
+The entire member seems a dense webbed bed of welded sinews; but cut
+into it, and you find that three distinct strata compose it:—upper,
+middle, and lower. The fibres in the upper and lower layers, are long
+and horizontal; those of the middle one, very short, and running
+crosswise between the outside layers. This triune structure, as much as
+anything else, imparts power to the tail. To the student of old Roman
+walls, the middle layer will furnish a curious parallel to the thin
+course of tiles always alternating with the stone in those wonderful
+relics of the antique, and which undoubtedly contribute so much to the
+great strength of the masonry.
+
+But as if this vast local power in the tendinous tail were not enough,
+the whole bulk of the leviathan is knit over with a warp and woof of
+muscular fibres and filaments, which passing on either side the loins
+and running down into the flukes, insensibly blend with them, and
+largely contribute to their might; so that in the tail the confluent
+measureless force of the whole whale seems concentrated to a point.
+Could annihilation occur to matter, this were the thing to do it.
+
+Nor does this—its amazing strength, at all tend to cripple the graceful
+flexion of its motions; where infantileness of ease undulates through a
+Titanism of power. On the contrary, those motions derive their most
+appalling beauty from it. Real strength never impairs beauty or
+harmony, but it often bestows it; and in everything imposingly
+beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic. Take away the tied
+tendons that all over seem bursting from the marble in the carved
+Hercules, and its charm would be gone. As devout Eckerman lifted the
+linen sheet from the naked corpse of Goethe, he was overwhelmed with
+the massive chest of the man, that seemed as a Roman triumphal arch.
+When Angelo paints even God the Father in human form, mark what
+robustness is there. And whatever they may reveal of the divine love in
+the Son, the soft, curled, hermaphroditical Italian pictures, in which
+his idea has been most successfully embodied; these pictures, so
+destitute as they are of all brawniness, hint nothing of any power, but
+the mere negative, feminine one of submission and endurance, which on
+all hands it is conceded, form the peculiar practical virtues of his
+teachings.
+
+Such is the subtle elasticity of the organ I treat of, that whether
+wielded in sport, or in earnest, or in anger, whatever be the mood it
+be in, its flexions are invariably marked by exceeding grace. Therein
+no fairy’s arm can transcend it.
+
+Five great motions are peculiar to it. First, when used as a fin for
+progression; Second, when used as a mace in battle; Third, in sweeping;
+Fourth, in lobtailing; Fifth, in peaking flukes.
+
+First: Being horizontal in its position, the Leviathan’s tail acts in a
+different manner from the tails of all other sea creatures. It never
+wriggles. In man or fish, wriggling is a sign of inferiority. To the
+whale, his tail is the sole means of propulsion. Scroll-wise coiled
+forwards beneath the body, and then rapidly sprung backwards, it is
+this which gives that singular darting, leaping motion to the monster
+when furiously swimming. His side-fins only serve to steer by.
+
+Second: It is a little significant, that while one sperm whale only
+fights another sperm whale with his head and jaw, nevertheless, in his
+conflicts with man, he chiefly and contemptuously uses his tail. In
+striking at a boat, he swiftly curves away his flukes from it, and the
+blow is only inflicted by the recoil. If it be made in the unobstructed
+air, especially if it descend to its mark, the stroke is then simply
+irresistible. No ribs of man or boat can withstand it. Your only
+salvation lies in eluding it; but if it comes sideways through the
+opposing water, then partly owing to the light buoyancy of the
+whale-boat, and the elasticity of its materials, a cracked rib or a
+dashed plank or two, a sort of stitch in the side, is generally the
+most serious result. These submerged side blows are so often received
+in the fishery, that they are accounted mere child’s play. Some one
+strips off a frock, and the hole is stopped.
+
+Third: I cannot demonstrate it, but it seems to me, that in the whale
+the sense of touch is concentrated in the tail; for in this respect
+there is a delicacy in it only equalled by the daintiness of the
+elephant’s trunk. This delicacy is chiefly evinced in the action of
+sweeping, when in maidenly gentleness the whale with a certain soft
+slowness moves his immense flukes from side to side upon the surface of
+the sea; and if he feel but a sailor’s whisker, woe to that sailor,
+whiskers and all. What tenderness there is in that preliminary touch!
+Had this tail any prehensile power, I should straightway bethink me of
+Darmonodes’ elephant that so frequented the flower-market, and with low
+salutations presented nosegays to damsels, and then caressed their
+zones. On more accounts than one, a pity it is that the whale does not
+possess this prehensile virtue in his tail; for I have heard of yet
+another elephant, that when wounded in the fight, curved round his
+trunk and extracted the dart.
+
+Fourth: Stealing unawares upon the whale in the fancied security of the
+middle of solitary seas, you find him unbent from the vast corpulence
+of his dignity, and kitten-like, he plays on the ocean as if it were a
+hearth. But still you see his power in his play. The broad palms of his
+tail are flirted high into the air; then smiting the surface, the
+thunderous concussion resounds for miles. You would almost think a
+great gun had been discharged; and if you noticed the light wreath of
+vapor from the spiracle at his other extremity, you would think that
+that was the smoke from the touch-hole.
+
+Fifth: As in the ordinary floating posture of the leviathan the flukes
+lie considerably below the level of his back, they are then completely
+out of sight beneath the surface; but when he is about to plunge into
+the deeps, his entire flukes with at least thirty feet of his body are
+tossed erect in the air, and so remain vibrating a moment, till they
+downwards shoot out of view. Excepting the sublime _breach_—somewhere
+else to be described—this peaking of the whale’s flukes is perhaps the
+grandest sight to be seen in all animated nature. Out of the bottomless
+profundities the gigantic tail seems spasmodically snatching at the
+highest heaven. So in dreams, have I seen majestic Satan thrusting
+forth his tormented colossal claw from the flame Baltic of Hell. But in
+gazing at such scenes, it is all in all what mood you are in; if in the
+Dantean, the devils will occur to you; if in that of Isaiah, the
+archangels. Standing at the mast-head of my ship during a sunrise that
+crimsoned sky and sea, I once saw a large herd of whales in the east,
+all heading towards the sun, and for a moment vibrating in concert with
+peaked flukes. As it seemed to me at the time, such a grand embodiment
+of adoration of the gods was never beheld, even in Persia, the home of
+the fire worshippers. As Ptolemy Philopater testified of the African
+elephant, I then testified of the whale, pronouncing him the most
+devout of all beings. For according to King Juba, the military
+elephants of antiquity often hailed the morning with their trunks
+uplifted in the profoundest silence.
+
+The chance comparison in this chapter, between the whale and the
+elephant, so far as some aspects of the tail of the one and the trunk
+of the other are concerned, should not tend to place those two opposite
+organs on an equality, much less the creatures to which they
+respectively belong. For as the mightiest elephant is but a terrier to
+Leviathan, so, compared with Leviathan’s tail, his trunk is but the
+stalk of a lily. The most direful blow from the elephant’s trunk were
+as the playful tap of a fan, compared with the measureless crush and
+crash of the sperm whale’s ponderous flukes, which in repeated
+instances have one after the other hurled entire boats with all their
+oars and crews into the air, very much as an Indian juggler tosses his
+balls.*
+
+*Though all comparison in the way of general bulk between the whale and
+the elephant is preposterous, inasmuch as in that particular the
+elephant stands in much the same respect to the whale that a dog does
+to the elephant; nevertheless, there are not wanting some points of
+curious similitude; among these is the spout. It is well known that the
+elephant will often draw up water or dust in his trunk, and then
+elevating it, jet it forth in a stream.
+
+The more I consider this mighty tail, the more do I deplore my
+inability to express it. At times there are gestures in it, which,
+though they would well grace the hand of man, remain wholly
+inexplicable. In an extensive herd, so remarkable, occasionally, are
+these mystic gestures, that I have heard hunters who have declared them
+akin to Free-Mason signs and symbols; that the whale, indeed, by these
+methods intelligently conversed with the world. Nor are there wanting
+other motions of the whale in his general body, full of strangeness,
+and unaccountable to his most experienced assailant. Dissect him how I
+may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will. But if I
+know not even the tail of this whale, how understand his head? much
+more, how comprehend his face, when face he has none? Thou shalt see my
+back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen.
+But I cannot completely make out his back parts; and hint what he will
+about his face, I say again he has no face.
+
+
+CHAPTER 87. The Grand Armada.
+
+The long and narrow peninsula of Malacca, extending south-eastward from
+the territories of Birmah, forms the most southerly point of all Asia.
+In a continuous line from that peninsula stretch the long islands of
+Sumatra, Java, Bally, and Timor; which, with many others, form a vast
+mole, or rampart, lengthwise connecting Asia with Australia, and
+dividing the long unbroken Indian ocean from the thickly studded
+oriental archipelagoes. This rampart is pierced by several sally-ports
+for the convenience of ships and whales; conspicuous among which are
+the straits of Sunda and Malacca. By the straits of Sunda, chiefly,
+vessels bound to China from the west, emerge into the China seas.
+
+Those narrow straits of Sunda divide Sumatra from Java; and standing
+midway in that vast rampart of islands, buttressed by that bold green
+promontory, known to seamen as Java Head; they not a little correspond
+to the central gateway opening into some vast walled empire: and
+considering the inexhaustible wealth of spices, and silks, and jewels,
+and gold, and ivory, with which the thousand islands of that oriental
+sea are enriched, it seems a significant provision of nature, that such
+treasures, by the very formation of the land, should at least bear the
+appearance, however ineffectual, of being guarded from the all-grasping
+western world. The shores of the Straits of Sunda are unsupplied with
+those domineering fortresses which guard the entrances to the
+Mediterranean, the Baltic, and the Propontis. Unlike the Danes, these
+Orientals do not demand the obsequious homage of lowered top-sails from
+the endless procession of ships before the wind, which for centuries
+past, by night and by day, have passed between the islands of Sumatra
+and Java, freighted with the costliest cargoes of the east. But while
+they freely waive a ceremonial like this, they do by no means renounce
+their claim to more solid tribute.
+
+Time out of mind the piratical proas of the Malays, lurking among the
+low shaded coves and islets of Sumatra, have sallied out upon the
+vessels sailing through the straits, fiercely demanding tribute at the
+point of their spears. Though by the repeated bloody chastisements they
+have received at the hands of European cruisers, the audacity of these
+corsairs has of late been somewhat repressed; yet, even at the present
+day, we occasionally hear of English and American vessels, which, in
+those waters, have been remorselessly boarded and pillaged.
+
+With a fair, fresh wind, the Pequod was now drawing nigh to these
+straits; Ahab purposing to pass through them into the Javan sea, and
+thence, cruising northwards, over waters known to be frequented here
+and there by the Sperm Whale, sweep inshore by the Philippine Islands,
+and gain the far coast of Japan, in time for the great whaling season
+there. By these means, the circumnavigating Pequod would sweep almost
+all the known Sperm Whale cruising grounds of the world, previous to
+descending upon the Line in the Pacific; where Ahab, though everywhere
+else foiled in his pursuit, firmly counted upon giving battle to Moby
+Dick, in the sea he was most known to frequent; and at a season when he
+might most reasonably be presumed to be haunting it.
+
+But how now? in this zoned quest, does Ahab touch no land? does his
+crew drink air? Surely, he will stop for water. Nay. For a long time,
+now, the circus-running sun has raced within his fiery ring, and needs
+no sustenance but what’s in himself. So Ahab. Mark this, too, in the
+whaler. While other hulls are loaded down with alien stuff, to be
+transferred to foreign wharves; the world-wandering whale-ship carries
+no cargo but herself and crew, their weapons and their wants. She has a
+whole lake’s contents bottled in her ample hold. She is ballasted with
+utilities; not altogether with unusable pig-lead and kentledge. She
+carries years’ water in her. Clear old prime Nantucket water; which,
+when three years afloat, the Nantucketer, in the Pacific, prefers to
+drink before the brackish fluid, but yesterday rafted off in casks,
+from the Peruvian or Indian streams. Hence it is, that, while other
+ships may have gone to China from New York, and back again, touching at
+a score of ports, the whale-ship, in all that interval, may not have
+sighted one grain of soil; her crew having seen no man but floating
+seamen like themselves. So that did you carry them the news that
+another flood had come; they would only answer—“Well, boys, here’s the
+ark!”
+
+Now, as many Sperm Whales had been captured off the western coast of
+Java, in the near vicinity of the Straits of Sunda; indeed, as most of
+the ground, roundabout, was generally recognised by the fishermen as an
+excellent spot for cruising; therefore, as the Pequod gained more and
+more upon Java Head, the look-outs were repeatedly hailed, and
+admonished to keep wide awake. But though the green palmy cliffs of the
+land soon loomed on the starboard bow, and with delighted nostrils the
+fresh cinnamon was snuffed in the air, yet not a single jet was
+descried. Almost renouncing all thought of falling in with any game
+hereabouts, the ship had well nigh entered the straits, when the
+customary cheering cry was heard from aloft, and ere long a spectacle
+of singular magnificence saluted us.
+
+But here be it premised, that owing to the unwearied activity with
+which of late they have been hunted over all four oceans, the Sperm
+Whales, instead of almost invariably sailing in small detached
+companies, as in former times, are now frequently met with in extensive
+herds, sometimes embracing so great a multitude, that it would almost
+seem as if numerous nations of them had sworn solemn league and
+covenant for mutual assistance and protection. To this aggregation of
+the Sperm Whale into such immense caravans, may be imputed the
+circumstance that even in the best cruising grounds, you may now
+sometimes sail for weeks and months together, without being greeted by
+a single spout; and then be suddenly saluted by what sometimes seems
+thousands on thousands.
+
+Broad on both bows, at the distance of some two or three miles, and
+forming a great semicircle, embracing one half of the level horizon, a
+continuous chain of whale-jets were up-playing and sparkling in the
+noon-day air. Unlike the straight perpendicular twin-jets of the Right
+Whale, which, dividing at top, fall over in two branches, like the
+cleft drooping boughs of a willow, the single forward-slanting spout of
+the Sperm Whale presents a thick curled bush of white mist, continually
+rising and falling away to leeward.
+
+Seen from the Pequod’s deck, then, as she would rise on a high hill of
+the sea, this host of vapory spouts, individually curling up into the
+air, and beheld through a blending atmosphere of bluish haze, showed
+like the thousand cheerful chimneys of some dense metropolis, descried
+of a balmy autumnal morning, by some horseman on a height.
+
+As marching armies approaching an unfriendly defile in the mountains,
+accelerate their march, all eagerness to place that perilous passage in
+their rear, and once more expand in comparative security upon the
+plain; even so did this vast fleet of whales now seem hurrying forward
+through the straits; gradually contracting the wings of their
+semicircle, and swimming on, in one solid, but still crescentic centre.
+
+Crowding all sail the Pequod pressed after them; the harpooneers
+handling their weapons, and loudly cheering from the heads of their yet
+suspended boats. If the wind only held, little doubt had they, that
+chased through these Straits of Sunda, the vast host would only deploy
+into the Oriental seas to witness the capture of not a few of their
+number. And who could tell whether, in that congregated caravan, Moby
+Dick himself might not temporarily be swimming, like the worshipped
+white-elephant in the coronation procession of the Siamese! So with
+stun-sail piled on stun-sail, we sailed along, driving these leviathans
+before us; when, of a sudden, the voice of Tashtego was heard, loudly
+directing attention to something in our wake.
+
+Corresponding to the crescent in our van, we beheld another in our
+rear. It seemed formed of detached white vapors, rising and falling
+something like the spouts of the whales; only they did not so
+completely come and go; for they constantly hovered, without finally
+disappearing. Levelling his glass at this sight, Ahab quickly revolved
+in his pivot-hole, crying, “Aloft there, and rig whips and buckets to
+wet the sails;—Malays, sir, and after us!”
+
+As if too long lurking behind the headlands, till the Pequod should
+fairly have entered the straits, these rascally Asiatics were now in
+hot pursuit, to make up for their over-cautious delay. But when the
+swift Pequod, with a fresh leading wind, was herself in hot chase; how
+very kind of these tawny philanthropists to assist in speeding her on
+to her own chosen pursuit,—mere riding-whips and rowels to her, that
+they were. As with glass under arm, Ahab to-and-fro paced the deck; in
+his forward turn beholding the monsters he chased, and in the after one
+the bloodthirsty pirates chasing _him_; some such fancy as the above
+seemed his. And when he glanced upon the green walls of the watery
+defile in which the ship was then sailing, and bethought him that
+through that gate lay the route to his vengeance, and beheld, how that
+through that same gate he was now both chasing and being chased to his
+deadly end; and not only that, but a herd of remorseless wild pirates
+and inhuman atheistical devils were infernally cheering him on with
+their curses;—when all these conceits had passed through his brain,
+Ahab’s brow was left gaunt and ribbed, like the black sand beach after
+some stormy tide has been gnawing it, without being able to drag the
+firm thing from its place.
+
+But thoughts like these troubled very few of the reckless crew; and
+when, after steadily dropping and dropping the pirates astern, the
+Pequod at last shot by the vivid green Cockatoo Point on the Sumatra
+side, emerging at last upon the broad waters beyond; then, the
+harpooneers seemed more to grieve that the swift whales had been
+gaining upon the ship, than to rejoice that the ship had so
+victoriously gained upon the Malays. But still driving on in the wake
+of the whales, at length they seemed abating their speed; gradually the
+ship neared them; and the wind now dying away, word was passed to
+spring to the boats. But no sooner did the herd, by some presumed
+wonderful instinct of the Sperm Whale, become notified of the three
+keels that were after them,—though as yet a mile in their rear,—than
+they rallied again, and forming in close ranks and battalions, so that
+their spouts all looked like flashing lines of stacked bayonets, moved
+on with redoubled velocity.
+
+Stripped to our shirts and drawers, we sprang to the white-ash, and
+after several hours’ pulling were almost disposed to renounce the
+chase, when a general pausing commotion among the whales gave animating
+token that they were now at last under the influence of that strange
+perplexity of inert irresolution, which, when the fishermen perceive it
+in the whale, they say he is gallied. The compact martial columns in
+which they had been hitherto rapidly and steadily swimming, were now
+broken up in one measureless rout; and like King Porus’ elephants in
+the Indian battle with Alexander, they seemed going mad with
+consternation. In all directions expanding in vast irregular circles,
+and aimlessly swimming hither and thither, by their short thick
+spoutings, they plainly betrayed their distraction of panic. This was
+still more strangely evinced by those of their number, who, completely
+paralysed as it were, helplessly floated like water-logged dismantled
+ships on the sea. Had these Leviathans been but a flock of simple
+sheep, pursued over the pasture by three fierce wolves, they could not
+possibly have evinced such excessive dismay. But this occasional
+timidity is characteristic of almost all herding creatures. Though
+banding together in tens of thousands, the lion-maned buffaloes of the
+West have fled before a solitary horseman. Witness, too, all human
+beings, how when herded together in the sheepfold of a theatre’s pit,
+they will, at the slightest alarm of fire, rush helter-skelter for the
+outlets, crowding, trampling, jamming, and remorselessly dashing each
+other to death. Best, therefore, withhold any amazement at the
+strangely gallied whales before us, for there is no folly of the beasts
+of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.
+
+Though many of the whales, as has been said, were in violent motion,
+yet it is to be observed that as a whole the herd neither advanced nor
+retreated, but collectively remained in one place. As is customary in
+those cases, the boats at once separated, each making for some one lone
+whale on the outskirts of the shoal. In about three minutes’ time,
+Queequeg’s harpoon was flung; the stricken fish darted blinding spray
+in our faces, and then running away with us like light, steered
+straight for the heart of the herd. Though such a movement on the part
+of the whale struck under such circumstances, is in no wise
+unprecedented; and indeed is almost always more or less anticipated;
+yet does it present one of the more perilous vicissitudes of the
+fishery. For as the swift monster drags you deeper and deeper into the
+frantic shoal, you bid adieu to circumspect life and only exist in a
+delirious throb.
+
+As, blind and deaf, the whale plunged forward, as if by sheer power of
+speed to rid himself of the iron leech that had fastened to him; as we
+thus tore a white gash in the sea, on all sides menaced as we flew, by
+the crazed creatures to and fro rushing about us; our beset boat was
+like a ship mobbed by ice-isles in a tempest, and striving to steer
+through their complicated channels and straits, knowing not at what
+moment it may be locked in and crushed.
+
+But not a bit daunted, Queequeg steered us manfully; now sheering off
+from this monster directly across our route in advance; now edging away
+from that, whose colossal flukes were suspended overhead, while all the
+time, Starbuck stood up in the bows, lance in hand, pricking out of our
+way whatever whales he could reach by short darts, for there was no
+time to make long ones. Nor were the oarsmen quite idle, though their
+wonted duty was now altogether dispensed with. They chiefly attended to
+the shouting part of the business. “Out of the way, Commodore!” cried
+one, to a great dromedary that of a sudden rose bodily to the surface,
+and for an instant threatened to swamp us. “Hard down with your tail,
+there!” cried a second to another, which, close to our gunwale, seemed
+calmly cooling himself with his own fan-like extremity.
+
+All whaleboats carry certain curious contrivances, originally invented
+by the Nantucket Indians, called druggs. Two thick squares of wood of
+equal size are stoutly clenched together, so that they cross each
+other’s grain at right angles; a line of considerable length is then
+attached to the middle of this block, and the other end of the line
+being looped, it can in a moment be fastened to a harpoon. It is
+chiefly among gallied whales that this drugg is used. For then, more
+whales are close round you than you can possibly chase at one time. But
+sperm whales are not every day encountered; while you may, then, you
+must kill all you can. And if you cannot kill them all at once, you
+must wing them, so that they can be afterwards killed at your leisure.
+Hence it is, that at times like these the drugg, comes into
+requisition. Our boat was furnished with three of them. The first and
+second were successfully darted, and we saw the whales staggeringly
+running off, fettered by the enormous sidelong resistance of the towing
+drugg. They were cramped like malefactors with the chain and ball. But
+upon flinging the third, in the act of tossing overboard the clumsy
+wooden block, it caught under one of the seats of the boat, and in an
+instant tore it out and carried it away, dropping the oarsman in the
+boat’s bottom as the seat slid from under him. On both sides the sea
+came in at the wounded planks, but we stuffed two or three drawers and
+shirts in, and so stopped the leaks for the time.
+
+It had been next to impossible to dart these drugged-harpoons, were it
+not that as we advanced into the herd, our whale’s way greatly
+diminished; moreover, that as we went still further and further from
+the circumference of commotion, the direful disorders seemed waning. So
+that when at last the jerking harpoon drew out, and the towing whale
+sideways vanished; then, with the tapering force of his parting
+momentum, we glided between two whales into the innermost heart of the
+shoal, as if from some mountain torrent we had slid into a serene
+valley lake. Here the storms in the roaring glens between the outermost
+whales, were heard but not felt. In this central expanse the sea
+presented that smooth satin-like surface, called a sleek, produced by
+the subtle moisture thrown off by the whale in his more quiet moods.
+Yes, we were now in that enchanted calm which they say lurks at the
+heart of every commotion. And still in the distracted distance we
+beheld the tumults of the outer concentric circles, and saw successive
+pods of whales, eight or ten in each, swiftly going round and round,
+like multiplied spans of horses in a ring; and so closely shoulder to
+shoulder, that a Titanic circus-rider might easily have over-arched the
+middle ones, and so have gone round on their backs. Owing to the
+density of the crowd of reposing whales, more immediately surrounding
+the embayed axis of the herd, no possible chance of escape was at
+present afforded us. We must watch for a breach in the living wall that
+hemmed us in; the wall that had only admitted us in order to shut us
+up. Keeping at the centre of the lake, we were occasionally visited by
+small tame cows and calves; the women and children of this routed host.
+
+Now, inclusive of the occasional wide intervals between the revolving
+outer circles, and inclusive of the spaces between the various pods in
+any one of those circles, the entire area at this juncture, embraced by
+the whole multitude, must have contained at least two or three square
+miles. At any rate—though indeed such a test at such a time might be
+deceptive—spoutings might be discovered from our low boat that seemed
+playing up almost from the rim of the horizon. I mention this
+circumstance, because, as if the cows and calves had been purposely
+locked up in this innermost fold; and as if the wide extent of the herd
+had hitherto prevented them from learning the precise cause of its
+stopping; or, possibly, being so young, unsophisticated, and every way
+innocent and inexperienced; however it may have been, these smaller
+whales—now and then visiting our becalmed boat from the margin of the
+lake—evinced a wondrous fearlessness and confidence, or else a still
+becharmed panic which it was impossible not to marvel at. Like
+household dogs they came snuffling round us, right up to our gunwales,
+and touching them; till it almost seemed that some spell had suddenly
+domesticated them. Queequeg patted their foreheads; Starbuck scratched
+their backs with his lance; but fearful of the consequences, for the
+time refrained from darting it.
+
+But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still
+stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended
+in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the
+whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become
+mothers. The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth
+exceedingly transparent; and as human infants while suckling will
+calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two
+different lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment,
+be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence;—even so
+did the young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at
+us, as if we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their new-born sight.
+Floating on their sides, the mothers also seemed quietly eyeing us. One
+of these little infants, that from certain queer tokens seemed hardly a
+day old, might have measured some fourteen feet in length, and some six
+feet in girth. He was a little frisky; though as yet his body seemed
+scarce yet recovered from that irksome position it had so lately
+occupied in the maternal reticule; where, tail to head, and all ready
+for the final spring, the unborn whale lies bent like a Tartar’s bow.
+The delicate side-fins, and the palms of his flukes, still freshly
+retained the plaited crumpled appearance of a baby’s ears newly arrived
+from foreign parts.
+
+“Line! line!” cried Queequeg, looking over the gunwale; “him fast! him
+fast!—Who line him! Who struck?—Two whale; one big, one little!”
+
+“What ails ye, man?” cried Starbuck.
+
+“Look-e here,” said Queequeg, pointing down.
+
+As when the stricken whale, that from the tub has reeled out hundreds
+of fathoms of rope; as, after deep sounding, he floats up again, and
+shows the slackened curling line buoyantly rising and spiralling
+towards the air; so now, Starbuck saw long coils of the umbilical cord
+of Madame Leviathan, by which the young cub seemed still tethered to
+its dam. Not seldom in the rapid vicissitudes of the chase, this
+natural line, with the maternal end loose, becomes entangled with the
+hempen one, so that the cub is thereby trapped. Some of the subtlest
+secrets of the seas seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond. We
+saw young Leviathan amours in the deep.*
+
+*The sperm whale, as with all other species of the Leviathan, but
+unlike most other fish, breeds indifferently at all seasons; after a
+gestation which may probably be set down at nine months, producing but
+one at a time; though in some few known instances giving birth to an
+Esau and Jacob:—a contingency provided for in suckling by two teats,
+curiously situated, one on each side of the anus; but the breasts
+themselves extend upwards from that. When by chance these precious
+parts in a nursing whale are cut by the hunter’s lance, the mother’s
+pouring milk and blood rivallingly discolour the sea for rods. The milk
+is very sweet and rich; it has been tasted by man; it might do well
+with strawberries. When overflowing with mutual esteem, the whales
+salute _more hominum_.
+
+And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and
+affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and
+fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely revelled
+in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of
+my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm;
+and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down
+and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.
+
+Meanwhile, as we thus lay entranced, the occasional sudden frantic
+spectacles in the distance evinced the activity of the other boats,
+still engaged in drugging the whales on the frontier of the host; or
+possibly carrying on the war within the first circle, where abundance
+of room and some convenient retreats were afforded them. But the sight
+of the enraged drugged whales now and then blindly darting to and fro
+across the circles, was nothing to what at last met our eyes. It is
+sometimes the custom when fast to a whale more than commonly powerful
+and alert, to seek to hamstring him, as it were, by sundering or
+maiming his gigantic tail-tendon. It is done by darting a short-handled
+cutting-spade, to which is attached a rope for hauling it back again. A
+whale wounded (as we afterwards learned) in this part, but not
+effectually, as it seemed, had broken away from the boat, carrying
+along with him half of the harpoon line; and in the extraordinary agony
+of the wound, he was now dashing among the revolving circles like the
+lone mounted desperado Arnold, at the battle of Saratoga, carrying
+dismay wherever he went.
+
+But agonizing as was the wound of this whale, and an appalling
+spectacle enough, any way; yet the peculiar horror with which he seemed
+to inspire the rest of the herd, was owing to a cause which at first
+the intervening distance obscured from us. But at length we perceived
+that by one of the unimaginable accidents of the fishery, this whale
+had become entangled in the harpoon-line that he towed; he had also run
+away with the cutting-spade in him; and while the free end of the rope
+attached to that weapon, had permanently caught in the coils of the
+harpoon-line round his tail, the cutting-spade itself had worked loose
+from his flesh. So that tormented to madness, he was now churning
+through the water, violently flailing with his flexible tail, and
+tossing the keen spade about him, wounding and murdering his own
+comrades.
+
+This terrific object seemed to recall the whole herd from their
+stationary fright. First, the whales forming the margin of our lake
+began to crowd a little, and tumble against each other, as if lifted by
+half spent billows from afar; then the lake itself began faintly to
+heave and swell; the submarine bridal-chambers and nurseries vanished;
+in more and more contracting orbits the whales in the more central
+circles began to swim in thickening clusters. Yes, the long calm was
+departing. A low advancing hum was soon heard; and then like to the
+tumultuous masses of block-ice when the great river Hudson breaks up in
+Spring, the entire host of whales came tumbling upon their inner
+centre, as if to pile themselves up in one common mountain. Instantly
+Starbuck and Queequeg changed places; Starbuck taking the stern.
+
+“Oars! Oars!” he intensely whispered, seizing the helm—“gripe your
+oars, and clutch your souls, now! My God, men, stand by! Shove him off,
+you Queequeg—the whale there!—prick him!—hit him! Stand up—stand up,
+and stay so! Spring, men—pull, men; never mind their backs—scrape
+them!—scrape away!”
+
+The boat was now all but jammed between two vast black bulks, leaving a
+narrow Dardanelles between their long lengths. But by desperate
+endeavor we at last shot into a temporary opening; then giving way
+rapidly, and at the same time earnestly watching for another outlet.
+After many similar hair-breadth escapes, we at last swiftly glided into
+what had just been one of the outer circles, but now crossed by random
+whales, all violently making for one centre. This lucky salvation was
+cheaply purchased by the loss of Queequeg’s hat, who, while standing in
+the bows to prick the fugitive whales, had his hat taken clean from his
+head by the air-eddy made by the sudden tossing of a pair of broad
+flukes close by.
+
+Riotous and disordered as the universal commotion now was, it soon
+resolved itself into what seemed a systematic movement; for having
+clumped together at last in one dense body, they then renewed their
+onward flight with augmented fleetness. Further pursuit was useless;
+but the boats still lingered in their wake to pick up what drugged
+whales might be dropped astern, and likewise to secure one which Flask
+had killed and waifed. The waif is a pennoned pole, two or three of
+which are carried by every boat; and which, when additional game is at
+hand, are inserted upright into the floating body of a dead whale, both
+to mark its place on the sea, and also as token of prior possession,
+should the boats of any other ship draw near.
+
+The result of this lowering was somewhat illustrative of that sagacious
+saying in the Fishery,—the more whales the less fish. Of all the
+drugged whales only one was captured. The rest contrived to escape for
+the time, but only to be taken, as will hereafter be seen, by some
+other craft than the Pequod.
+
+
+CHAPTER 88. Schools and Schoolmasters.
+
+The previous chapter gave account of an immense body or herd of Sperm
+Whales, and there was also then given the probable cause inducing those
+vast aggregations.
+
+Now, though such great bodies are at times encountered, yet, as must
+have been seen, even at the present day, small detached bands are
+occasionally observed, embracing from twenty to fifty individuals each.
+Such bands are known as schools. They generally are of two sorts; those
+composed almost entirely of females, and those mustering none but young
+vigorous males, or bulls, as they are familiarly designated.
+
+In cavalier attendance upon the school of females, you invariably see a
+male of full grown magnitude, but not old; who, upon any alarm, evinces
+his gallantry by falling in the rear and covering the flight of his
+ladies. In truth, this gentleman is a luxurious Ottoman, swimming about
+over the watery world, surroundingly accompanied by all the solaces and
+endearments of the harem. The contrast between this Ottoman and his
+concubines is striking; because, while he is always of the largest
+leviathanic proportions, the ladies, even at full growth, are not more
+than one-third of the bulk of an average-sized male. They are
+comparatively delicate, indeed; I dare say, not to exceed half a dozen
+yards round the waist. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied, that upon the
+whole they are hereditarily entitled to _en bon point_.
+
+It is very curious to watch this harem and its lord in their indolent
+ramblings. Like fashionables, they are for ever on the move in
+leisurely search of variety. You meet them on the Line in time for the
+full flower of the Equatorial feeding season, having just returned,
+perhaps, from spending the summer in the Northern seas, and so cheating
+summer of all unpleasant weariness and warmth. By the time they have
+lounged up and down the promenade of the Equator awhile, they start for
+the Oriental waters in anticipation of the cool season there, and so
+evade the other excessive temperature of the year.
+
+When serenely advancing on one of these journeys, if any strange
+suspicious sights are seen, my lord whale keeps a wary eye on his
+interesting family. Should any unwarrantably pert young Leviathan
+coming that way, presume to draw confidentially close to one of the
+ladies, with what prodigious fury the Bashaw assails him, and chases
+him away! High times, indeed, if unprincipled young rakes like him are
+to be permitted to invade the sanctity of domestic bliss; though do
+what the Bashaw will, he cannot keep the most notorious Lothario out of
+his bed; for, alas! all fish bed in common. As ashore, the ladies often
+cause the most terrible duels among their rival admirers; just so with
+the whales, who sometimes come to deadly battle, and all for love. They
+fence with their long lower jaws, sometimes locking them together, and
+so striving for the supremacy like elks that warringly interweave their
+antlers. Not a few are captured having the deep scars of these
+encounters,—furrowed heads, broken teeth, scolloped fins; and in some
+instances, wrenched and dislocated mouths.
+
+But supposing the invader of domestic bliss to betake himself away at
+the first rush of the harem’s lord, then is it very diverting to watch
+that lord. Gently he insinuates his vast bulk among them again and
+revels there awhile, still in tantalizing vicinity to young Lothario,
+like pious Solomon devoutly worshipping among his thousand concubines.
+Granting other whales to be in sight, the fishermen will seldom give
+chase to one of these Grand Turks; for these Grand Turks are too lavish
+of their strength, and hence their unctuousness is small. As for the
+sons and the daughters they beget, why, those sons and daughters must
+take care of themselves; at least, with only the maternal help. For
+like certain other omnivorous roving lovers that might be named, my
+Lord Whale has no taste for the nursery, however much for the bower;
+and so, being a great traveller, he leaves his anonymous babies all
+over the world; every baby an exotic. In good time, nevertheless, as
+the ardour of youth declines; as years and dumps increase; as
+reflection lends her solemn pauses; in short, as a general lassitude
+overtakes the sated Turk; then a love of ease and virtue supplants the
+love for maidens; our Ottoman enters upon the impotent, repentant,
+admonitory stage of life, forswears, disbands the harem, and grown to
+an exemplary, sulky old soul, goes about all alone among the meridians
+and parallels saying his prayers, and warning each young Leviathan from
+his amorous errors.
+
+Now, as the harem of whales is called by the fishermen a school, so is
+the lord and master of that school technically known as the
+schoolmaster. It is therefore not in strict character, however
+admirably satirical, that after going to school himself, he should then
+go abroad inculcating not what he learned there, but the folly of it.
+His title, schoolmaster, would very naturally seem derived from the
+name bestowed upon the harem itself, but some have surmised that the
+man who first thus entitled this sort of Ottoman whale, must have read
+the memoirs of Vidocq, and informed himself what sort of a
+country-schoolmaster that famous Frenchman was in his younger days, and
+what was the nature of those occult lessons he inculcated into some of
+his pupils.
+
+The same secludedness and isolation to which the schoolmaster whale
+betakes himself in his advancing years, is true of all aged Sperm
+Whales. Almost universally, a lone whale—as a solitary Leviathan is
+called—proves an ancient one. Like venerable moss-bearded Daniel Boone,
+he will have no one near him but Nature herself; and her he takes to
+wife in the wilderness of waters, and the best of wives she is, though
+she keeps so many moody secrets.
+
+The schools composing none but young and vigorous males, previously
+mentioned, offer a strong contrast to the harem schools. For while
+those female whales are characteristically timid, the young males, or
+forty-barrel-bulls, as they call them, are by far the most pugnacious
+of all Leviathans, and proverbially the most dangerous to encounter;
+excepting those wondrous grey-headed, grizzled whales, sometimes met,
+and these will fight you like grim fiends exasperated by a penal gout.
+
+The Forty-barrel-bull schools are larger than the harem schools. Like a
+mob of young collegians, they are full of fight, fun, and wickedness,
+tumbling round the world at such a reckless, rollicking rate, that no
+prudent underwriter would insure them any more than he would a riotous
+lad at Yale or Harvard. They soon relinquish this turbulence though,
+and when about three-fourths grown, break up, and separately go about
+in quest of settlements, that is, harems.
+
+Another point of difference between the male and female schools is
+still more characteristic of the sexes. Say you strike a
+Forty-barrel-bull—poor devil! all his comrades quit him. But strike a
+member of the harem school, and her companions swim around her with
+every token of concern, sometimes lingering so near her and so long, as
+themselves to fall a prey.
+
+
+CHAPTER 89. Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish.
+
+The allusion to the waif and waif-poles in the last chapter but one,
+necessitates some account of the laws and regulations of the whale
+fishery, of which the waif may be deemed the grand symbol and badge.
+
+It frequently happens that when several ships are cruising in company,
+a whale may be struck by one vessel, then escape, and be finally killed
+and captured by another vessel; and herein are indirectly comprised
+many minor contingencies, all partaking of this one grand feature. For
+example,—after a weary and perilous chase and capture of a whale, the
+body may get loose from the ship by reason of a violent storm; and
+drifting far away to leeward, be retaken by a second whaler, who, in a
+calm, snugly tows it alongside, without risk of life or line. Thus the
+most vexatious and violent disputes would often arise between the
+fishermen, were there not some written or unwritten, universal,
+undisputed law applicable to all cases.
+
+Perhaps the only formal whaling code authorized by legislative
+enactment, was that of Holland. It was decreed by the States-General in
+A.D. 1695. But though no other nation has ever had any written whaling
+law, yet the American fishermen have been their own legislators and
+lawyers in this matter. They have provided a system which for terse
+comprehensiveness surpasses Justinian’s Pandects and the By-laws of the
+Chinese Society for the Suppression of Meddling with other People’s
+Business. Yes; these laws might be engraven on a Queen Anne’s farthing,
+or the barb of a harpoon, and worn round the neck, so small are they.
+
+I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it.
+
+II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it.
+
+But what plays the mischief with this masterly code is the admirable
+brevity of it, which necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to
+expound it.
+
+First: What is a Fast-Fish? Alive or dead a fish is technically fast,
+when it is connected with an occupied ship or boat, by any medium at
+all controllable by the occupant or occupants,—a mast, an oar, a
+nine-inch cable, a telegraph wire, or a strand of cobweb, it is all the
+same. Likewise a fish is technically fast when it bears a waif, or any
+other recognised symbol of possession; so long as the party waifing it
+plainly evince their ability at any time to take it alongside, as well
+as their intention so to do.
+
+These are scientific commentaries; but the commentaries of the whalemen
+themselves sometimes consist in hard words and harder knocks—the
+Coke-upon-Littleton of the fist. True, among the more upright and
+honorable whalemen allowances are always made for peculiar cases, where
+it would be an outrageous moral injustice for one party to claim
+possession of a whale previously chased or killed by another party. But
+others are by no means so scrupulous.
+
+Some fifty years ago there was a curious case of whale-trover litigated
+in England, wherein the plaintiffs set forth that after a hard chase of
+a whale in the Northern seas; and when indeed they (the plaintiffs) had
+succeeded in harpooning the fish; they were at last, through peril of
+their lives, obliged to forsake not only their lines, but their boat
+itself. Ultimately the defendants (the crew of another ship) came up
+with the whale, struck, killed, seized, and finally appropriated it
+before the very eyes of the plaintiffs. And when those defendants were
+remonstrated with, their captain snapped his fingers in the plaintiffs’
+teeth, and assured them that by way of doxology to the deed he had
+done, he would now retain their line, harpoons, and boat, which had
+remained attached to the whale at the time of the seizure. Wherefore
+the plaintiffs now sued for the recovery of the value of their whale,
+line, harpoons, and boat.
+
+Mr. Erskine was counsel for the defendants; Lord Ellenborough was the
+judge. In the course of the defence, the witty Erskine went on to
+illustrate his position, by alluding to a recent crim. con. case,
+wherein a gentleman, after in vain trying to bridle his wife’s
+viciousness, had at last abandoned her upon the seas of life; but in
+the course of years, repenting of that step, he instituted an action to
+recover possession of her. Erskine was on the other side; and he then
+supported it by saying, that though the gentleman had originally
+harpooned the lady, and had once had her fast, and only by reason of
+the great stress of her plunging viciousness, had at last abandoned
+her; yet abandon her he did, so that she became a loose-fish; and
+therefore when a subsequent gentleman re-harpooned her, the lady then
+became that subsequent gentleman’s property, along with whatever
+harpoon might have been found sticking in her.
+
+Now in the present case Erskine contended that the examples of the
+whale and the lady were reciprocally illustrative of each other.
+
+These pleadings, and the counter pleadings, being duly heard, the very
+learned judge in set terms decided, to wit,—That as for the boat, he
+awarded it to the plaintiffs, because they had merely abandoned it to
+save their lives; but that with regard to the controverted whale,
+harpoons, and line, they belonged to the defendants; the whale, because
+it was a Loose-Fish at the time of the final capture; and the harpoons
+and line because when the fish made off with them, it (the fish)
+acquired a property in those articles; and hence anybody who afterwards
+took the fish had a right to them. Now the defendants afterwards took
+the fish; ergo, the aforesaid articles were theirs.
+
+A common man looking at this decision of the very learned Judge, might
+possibly object to it. But ploughed up to the primary rock of the
+matter, the two great principles laid down in the twin whaling laws
+previously quoted, and applied and elucidated by Lord Ellenborough in
+the above cited case; these two laws touching Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish,
+I say, will, on reflection, be found the fundamentals of all human
+jurisprudence; for notwithstanding its complicated tracery of
+sculpture, the Temple of the Law, like the Temple of the Philistines,
+has but two props to stand on.
+
+Is it not a saying in every one’s mouth, Possession is half of the law:
+that is, regardless of how the thing came into possession? But often
+possession is the whole of the law. What are the sinews and souls of
+Russian serfs and Republican slaves but Fast-Fish, whereof possession
+is the whole of the law? What to the rapacious landlord is the widow’s
+last mite but a Fast-Fish? What is yonder undetected villain’s marble
+mansion with a door-plate for a waif; what is that but a Fast-Fish?
+What is the ruinous discount which Mordecai, the broker, gets from poor
+Woebegone, the bankrupt, on a loan to keep Woebegone’s family from
+starvation; what is that ruinous discount but a Fast-Fish? What is the
+Archbishop of Savesoul’s income of £100,000 seized from the scant bread
+and cheese of hundreds of thousands of broken-backed laborers (all sure
+of heaven without any of Savesoul’s help) what is that globular
+£100,000 but a Fast-Fish? What are the Duke of Dunder’s hereditary
+towns and hamlets but Fast-Fish? What to that redoubted harpooneer,
+John Bull, is poor Ireland, but a Fast-Fish? What to that apostolic
+lancer, Brother Jonathan, is Texas but a Fast-Fish? And concerning all
+these, is not Possession the whole of the law?
+
+But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable, the
+kindred doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so. That is
+internationally and universally applicable.
+
+What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the
+Spanish standard by way of waifing it for his royal master and
+mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What
+India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All
+Loose-Fish.
+
+What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but
+Loose-Fish? What all men’s minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is
+the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the
+ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but
+Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what
+are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?
+
+
+CHAPTER 90. Heads or Tails.
+
+“De balena vero sufficit, si rex habeat caput, et regina caudam.”
+_Bracton, l. 3, c. 3._
+
+Latin from the books of the Laws of England, which taken along with the
+context, means, that of all whales captured by anybody on the coast of
+that land, the King, as Honorary Grand Harpooneer, must have the head,
+and the Queen be respectfully presented with the tail. A division
+which, in the whale, is much like halving an apple; there is no
+intermediate remainder. Now as this law, under a modified form, is to
+this day in force in England; and as it offers in various respects a
+strange anomaly touching the general law of Fast and Loose-Fish, it is
+here treated of in a separate chapter, on the same courteous principle
+that prompts the English railways to be at the expense of a separate
+car, specially reserved for the accommodation of royalty. In the first
+place, in curious proof of the fact that the above-mentioned law is
+still in force, I proceed to lay before you a circumstance that
+happened within the last two years.
+
+It seems that some honest mariners of Dover, or Sandwich, or some one
+of the Cinque Ports, had after a hard chase succeeded in killing and
+beaching a fine whale which they had originally descried afar off from
+the shore. Now the Cinque Ports are partially or somehow under the
+jurisdiction of a sort of policeman or beadle, called a Lord Warden.
+Holding the office directly from the crown, I believe, all the royal
+emoluments incident to the Cinque Port territories become by assignment
+his. By some writers this office is called a sinecure. But not so.
+Because the Lord Warden is busily employed at times in fobbing his
+perquisites; which are his chiefly by virtue of that same fobbing of
+them.
+
+Now when these poor sun-burnt mariners, bare-footed, and with their
+trowsers rolled high up on their eely legs, had wearily hauled their
+fat fish high and dry, promising themselves a good £150 from the
+precious oil and bone; and in fantasy sipping rare tea with their
+wives, and good ale with their cronies, upon the strength of their
+respective shares; up steps a very learned and most Christian and
+charitable gentleman, with a copy of Blackstone under his arm; and
+laying it upon the whale’s head, he says—“Hands off! this fish, my
+masters, is a Fast-Fish. I seize it as the Lord Warden’s.” Upon this
+the poor mariners in their respectful consternation—so truly
+English—knowing not what to say, fall to vigorously scratching their
+heads all round; meanwhile ruefully glancing from the whale to the
+stranger. But that did in nowise mend the matter, or at all soften the
+hard heart of the learned gentleman with the copy of Blackstone. At
+length one of them, after long scratching about for his ideas, made
+bold to speak,
+
+“Please, sir, who is the Lord Warden?”
+
+“The Duke.”
+
+“But the duke had nothing to do with taking this fish?”
+
+“It is his.”
+
+“We have been at great trouble, and peril, and some expense, and is all
+that to go to the Duke’s benefit; we getting nothing at all for our
+pains but our blisters?”
+
+“It is his.”
+
+“Is the Duke so very poor as to be forced to this desperate mode of
+getting a livelihood?”
+
+“It is his.”
+
+“I thought to relieve my old bed-ridden mother by part of my share of
+this whale.”
+
+“It is his.”
+
+“Won’t the Duke be content with a quarter or a half?”
+
+“It is his.”
+
+In a word, the whale was seized and sold, and his Grace the Duke of
+Wellington received the money. Thinking that viewed in some particular
+lights, the case might by a bare possibility in some small degree be
+deemed, under the circumstances, a rather hard one, an honest clergyman
+of the town respectfully addressed a note to his Grace, begging him to
+take the case of those unfortunate mariners into full consideration. To
+which my Lord Duke in substance replied (both letters were published)
+that he had already done so, and received the money, and would be
+obliged to the reverend gentleman if for the future he (the reverend
+gentleman) would decline meddling with other people’s business. Is this
+the still militant old man, standing at the corners of the three
+kingdoms, on all hands coercing alms of beggars?
+
+It will readily be seen that in this case the alleged right of the Duke
+to the whale was a delegated one from the Sovereign. We must needs
+inquire then on what principle the Sovereign is originally invested
+with that right. The law itself has already been set forth. But Plowdon
+gives us the reason for it. Says Plowdon, the whale so caught belongs
+to the King and Queen, “because of its superior excellence.” And by the
+soundest commentators this has ever been held a cogent argument in such
+matters.
+
+But why should the King have the head, and the Queen the tail? A reason
+for that, ye lawyers!
+
+In his treatise on “Queen-Gold,” or Queen-pinmoney, an old King’s Bench
+author, one William Prynne, thus discourseth: “Ye tail is ye Queen’s,
+that ye Queen’s wardrobe may be supplied with ye whalebone.” Now this
+was written at a time when the black limber bone of the Greenland or
+Right whale was largely used in ladies’ bodices. But this same bone is
+not in the tail; it is in the head, which is a sad mistake for a
+sagacious lawyer like Prynne. But is the Queen a mermaid, to be
+presented with a tail? An allegorical meaning may lurk here.
+
+There are two royal fish so styled by the English law writers—the whale
+and the sturgeon; both royal property under certain limitations, and
+nominally supplying the tenth branch of the crown’s ordinary revenue. I
+know not that any other author has hinted of the matter; but by
+inference it seems to me that the sturgeon must be divided in the same
+way as the whale, the King receiving the highly dense and elastic head
+peculiar to that fish, which, symbolically regarded, may possibly be
+humorously grounded upon some presumed congeniality. And thus there
+seems a reason in all things, even in law.
+
+
+CHAPTER 91. The Pequod Meets The Rose-Bud.
+
+“In vain it was to rake for Ambergriese in the paunch of this
+Leviathan, insufferable fetor denying not inquiry.” _Sir T. Browne,
+V.E._
+
+It was a week or two after the last whaling scene recounted, and when
+we were slowly sailing over a sleepy, vapory, mid-day sea, that the
+many noses on the Pequod’s deck proved more vigilant discoverers than
+the three pairs of eyes aloft. A peculiar and not very pleasant smell
+was smelt in the sea.
+
+“I will bet something now,” said Stubb, “that somewhere hereabouts are
+some of those drugged whales we tickled the other day. I thought they
+would keel up before long.”
+
+Presently, the vapors in advance slid aside; and there in the distance
+lay a ship, whose furled sails betokened that some sort of whale must
+be alongside. As we glided nearer, the stranger showed French colours
+from his peak; and by the eddying cloud of vulture sea-fowl that
+circled, and hovered, and swooped around him, it was plain that the
+whale alongside must be what the fishermen call a blasted whale, that
+is, a whale that has died unmolested on the sea, and so floated an
+unappropriated corpse. It may well be conceived, what an unsavory odor
+such a mass must exhale; worse than an Assyrian city in the plague,
+when the living are incompetent to bury the departed. So intolerable
+indeed is it regarded by some, that no cupidity could persuade them to
+moor alongside of it. Yet are there those who will still do it;
+notwithstanding the fact that the oil obtained from such subjects is of
+a very inferior quality, and by no means of the nature of
+attar-of-rose.
+
+Coming still nearer with the expiring breeze, we saw that the Frenchman
+had a second whale alongside; and this second whale seemed even more of
+a nosegay than the first. In truth, it turned out to be one of those
+problematical whales that seem to dry up and die with a sort of
+prodigious dyspepsia, or indigestion; leaving their defunct bodies
+almost entirely bankrupt of anything like oil. Nevertheless, in the
+proper place we shall see that no knowing fisherman will ever turn up
+his nose at such a whale as this, however much he may shun blasted
+whales in general.
+
+The Pequod had now swept so nigh to the stranger, that Stubb vowed he
+recognised his cutting spade-pole entangled in the lines that were
+knotted round the tail of one of these whales.
+
+“There’s a pretty fellow, now,” he banteringly laughed, standing in the
+ship’s bows, “there’s a jackal for ye! I well know that these Crappoes
+of Frenchmen are but poor devils in the fishery; sometimes lowering
+their boats for breakers, mistaking them for Sperm Whale spouts; yes,
+and sometimes sailing from their port with their hold full of boxes of
+tallow candles, and cases of snuffers, foreseeing that all the oil they
+will get won’t be enough to dip the Captain’s wick into; aye, we all
+know these things; but look ye, here’s a Crappo that is content with
+our leavings, the drugged whale there, I mean; aye, and is content too
+with scraping the dry bones of that other precious fish he has there.
+Poor devil! I say, pass round a hat, some one, and let’s make him a
+present of a little oil for dear charity’s sake. For what oil he’ll get
+from that drugged whale there, wouldn’t be fit to burn in a jail; no,
+not in a condemned cell. And as for the other whale, why, I’ll agree to
+get more oil by chopping up and trying out these three masts of ours,
+than he’ll get from that bundle of bones; though, now that I think of
+it, it may contain something worth a good deal more than oil; yes,
+ambergris. I wonder now if our old man has thought of that. It’s worth
+trying. Yes, I’m for it;” and so saying he started for the
+quarter-deck.
+
+By this time the faint air had become a complete calm; so that whether
+or no, the Pequod was now fairly entrapped in the smell, with no hope
+of escaping except by its breezing up again. Issuing from the cabin,
+Stubb now called his boat’s crew, and pulled off for the stranger.
+Drawing across her bow, he perceived that in accordance with the
+fanciful French taste, the upper part of her stem-piece was carved in
+the likeness of a huge drooping stalk, was painted green, and for
+thorns had copper spikes projecting from it here and there; the whole
+terminating in a symmetrical folded bulb of a bright red colour. Upon
+her head boards, in large gilt letters, he read “Bouton de
+Rose,”—Rose-button, or Rose-bud; and this was the romantic name of this
+aromatic ship.
+
+Though Stubb did not understand the _Bouton_ part of the inscription,
+yet the word _rose_, and the bulbous figure-head put together,
+sufficiently explained the whole to him.
+
+“A wooden rose-bud, eh?” he cried with his hand to his nose, “that will
+do very well; but how like all creation it smells!”
+
+Now in order to hold direct communication with the people on deck, he
+had to pull round the bows to the starboard side, and thus come close
+to the blasted whale; and so talk over it.
+
+Arrived then at this spot, with one hand still to his nose, he
+bawled—“Bouton-de-Rose, ahoy! are there any of you Bouton-de-Roses that
+speak English?”
+
+“Yes,” rejoined a Guernsey-man from the bulwarks, who turned out to be
+the chief-mate.
+
+“Well, then, my Bouton-de-Rose-bud, have you seen the White Whale?”
+
+“_What_ whale?”
+
+“The _White_ Whale—a Sperm Whale—Moby Dick, have ye seen him?
+
+“Never heard of such a whale. Cachalot Blanche! White Whale—no.”
+
+“Very good, then; good bye now, and I’ll call again in a minute.”
+
+Then rapidly pulling back towards the Pequod, and seeing Ahab leaning
+over the quarter-deck rail awaiting his report, he moulded his two
+hands into a trumpet and shouted—“No, Sir! No!” Upon which Ahab
+retired, and Stubb returned to the Frenchman.
+
+He now perceived that the Guernsey-man, who had just got into the
+chains, and was using a cutting-spade, had slung his nose in a sort of
+bag.
+
+“What’s the matter with your nose, there?” said Stubb. “Broke it?”
+
+“I wish it was broken, or that I didn’t have any nose at all!” answered
+the Guernsey-man, who did not seem to relish the job he was at very
+much. “But what are you holding _yours_ for?”
+
+“Oh, nothing! It’s a wax nose; I have to hold it on. Fine day, ain’t
+it? Air rather gardenny, I should say; throw us a bunch of posies, will
+ye, Bouton-de-Rose?”
+
+“What in the devil’s name do you want here?” roared the Guernseyman,
+flying into a sudden passion.
+
+“Oh! keep cool—cool? yes, that’s the word! why don’t you pack those
+whales in ice while you’re working at ’em? But joking aside, though; do
+you know, Rose-bud, that it’s all nonsense trying to get any oil out of
+such whales? As for that dried up one, there, he hasn’t a gill in his
+whole carcase.”
+
+“I know that well enough; but, d’ye see, the Captain here won’t believe
+it; this is his first voyage; he was a Cologne manufacturer before. But
+come aboard, and mayhap he’ll believe you, if he won’t me; and so I’ll
+get out of this dirty scrape.”
+
+“Anything to oblige ye, my sweet and pleasant fellow,” rejoined Stubb,
+and with that he soon mounted to the deck. There a queer scene
+presented itself. The sailors, in tasselled caps of red worsted, were
+getting the heavy tackles in readiness for the whales. But they worked
+rather slow and talked very fast, and seemed in anything but a good
+humor. All their noses upwardly projected from their faces like so many
+jib-booms. Now and then pairs of them would drop their work, and run up
+to the mast-head to get some fresh air. Some thinking they would catch
+the plague, dipped oakum in coal-tar, and at intervals held it to their
+nostrils. Others having broken the stems of their pipes almost short
+off at the bowl, were vigorously puffing tobacco-smoke, so that it
+constantly filled their olfactories.
+
+Stubb was struck by a shower of outcries and anathemas proceeding from
+the Captain’s round-house abaft; and looking in that direction saw a
+fiery face thrust from behind the door, which was held ajar from
+within. This was the tormented surgeon, who, after in vain
+remonstrating against the proceedings of the day, had betaken himself
+to the Captain’s round-house (_cabinet_ he called it) to avoid the
+pest; but still, could not help yelling out his entreaties and
+indignations at times.
+
+Marking all this, Stubb argued well for his scheme, and turning to the
+Guernsey-man had a little chat with him, during which the stranger mate
+expressed his detestation of his Captain as a conceited ignoramus, who
+had brought them all into so unsavory and unprofitable a pickle.
+Sounding him carefully, Stubb further perceived that the Guernsey-man
+had not the slightest suspicion concerning the ambergris. He therefore
+held his peace on that head, but otherwise was quite frank and
+confidential with him, so that the two quickly concocted a little plan
+for both circumventing and satirizing the Captain, without his at all
+dreaming of distrusting their sincerity. According to this little plan
+of theirs, the Guernsey-man, under cover of an interpreter’s office,
+was to tell the Captain what he pleased, but as coming from Stubb; and
+as for Stubb, he was to utter any nonsense that should come uppermost
+in him during the interview.
+
+By this time their destined victim appeared from his cabin. He was a
+small and dark, but rather delicate looking man for a sea-captain, with
+large whiskers and moustache, however; and wore a red cotton velvet
+vest with watch-seals at his side. To this gentleman, Stubb was now
+politely introduced by the Guernsey-man, who at once ostentatiously put
+on the aspect of interpreting between them.
+
+“What shall I say to him first?” said he.
+
+“Why,” said Stubb, eyeing the velvet vest and the watch and seals, “you
+may as well begin by telling him that he looks a sort of babyish to me,
+though I don’t pretend to be a judge.”
+
+“He says, Monsieur,” said the Guernsey-man, in French, turning to his
+captain, “that only yesterday his ship spoke a vessel, whose captain
+and chief-mate, with six sailors, had all died of a fever caught from a
+blasted whale they had brought alongside.”
+
+Upon this the captain started, and eagerly desired to know more.
+
+“What now?” said the Guernsey-man to Stubb.
+
+“Why, since he takes it so easy, tell him that now I have eyed him
+carefully, I’m quite certain that he’s no more fit to command a
+whale-ship than a St. Jago monkey. In fact, tell him from me he’s a
+baboon.”
+
+“He vows and declares, Monsieur, that the other whale, the dried one,
+is far more deadly than the blasted one; in fine, Monsieur, he conjures
+us, as we value our lives, to cut loose from these fish.”
+
+Instantly the captain ran forward, and in a loud voice commanded his
+crew to desist from hoisting the cutting-tackles, and at once cast
+loose the cables and chains confining the whales to the ship.
+
+“What now?” said the Guernsey-man, when the Captain had returned to
+them.
+
+“Why, let me see; yes, you may as well tell him now that—that—in fact,
+tell him I’ve diddled him, and (aside to himself) perhaps somebody
+else.”
+
+“He says, Monsieur, that he’s very happy to have been of any service to
+us.”
+
+Hearing this, the captain vowed that they were the grateful parties
+(meaning himself and mate) and concluded by inviting Stubb down into
+his cabin to drink a bottle of Bordeaux.
+
+“He wants you to take a glass of wine with him,” said the interpreter.
+
+“Thank him heartily; but tell him it’s against my principles to drink
+with the man I’ve diddled. In fact, tell him I must go.”
+
+“He says, Monsieur, that his principles won’t admit of his drinking;
+but that if Monsieur wants to live another day to drink, then Monsieur
+had best drop all four boats, and pull the ship away from these whales,
+for it’s so calm they won’t drift.”
+
+By this time Stubb was over the side, and getting into his boat, hailed
+the Guernsey-man to this effect,—that having a long tow-line in his
+boat, he would do what he could to help them, by pulling out the
+lighter whale of the two from the ship’s side. While the Frenchman’s
+boats, then, were engaged in towing the ship one way, Stubb
+benevolently towed away at his whale the other way, ostentatiously
+slacking out a most unusually long tow-line.
+
+Presently a breeze sprang up; Stubb feigned to cast off from the whale;
+hoisting his boats, the Frenchman soon increased his distance, while
+the Pequod slid in between him and Stubb’s whale. Whereupon Stubb
+quickly pulled to the floating body, and hailing the Pequod to give
+notice of his intentions, at once proceeded to reap the fruit of his
+unrighteous cunning. Seizing his sharp boat-spade, he commenced an
+excavation in the body, a little behind the side fin. You would almost
+have thought he was digging a cellar there in the sea; and when at
+length his spade struck against the gaunt ribs, it was like turning up
+old Roman tiles and pottery buried in fat English loam. His boat’s crew
+were all in high excitement, eagerly helping their chief, and looking
+as anxious as gold-hunters.
+
+And all the time numberless fowls were diving, and ducking, and
+screaming, and yelling, and fighting around them. Stubb was beginning
+to look disappointed, especially as the horrible nosegay increased,
+when suddenly from out the very heart of this plague, there stole a
+faint stream of perfume, which flowed through the tide of bad smells
+without being absorbed by it, as one river will flow into and then
+along with another, without at all blending with it for a time.
+
+“I have it, I have it,” cried Stubb, with delight, striking something
+in the subterranean regions, “a purse! a purse!”
+
+Dropping his spade, he thrust both hands in, and drew out handfuls of
+something that looked like ripe Windsor soap, or rich mottled old
+cheese; very unctuous and savory withal. You might easily dent it with
+your thumb; it is of a hue between yellow and ash colour. And this,
+good friends, is ambergris, worth a gold guinea an ounce to any
+druggist. Some six handfuls were obtained; but more was unavoidably
+lost in the sea, and still more, perhaps, might have been secured were
+it not for impatient Ahab’s loud command to Stubb to desist, and come
+on board, else the ship would bid them good bye.
+
+
+CHAPTER 92. Ambergris.
+
+Now this ambergris is a very curious substance, and so important as an
+article of commerce, that in 1791 a certain Nantucket-born Captain
+Coffin was examined at the bar of the English House of Commons on that
+subject. For at that time, and indeed until a comparatively late day,
+the precise origin of ambergris remained, like amber itself, a problem
+to the learned. Though the word ambergris is but the French compound
+for grey amber, yet the two substances are quite distinct. For amber,
+though at times found on the sea-coast, is also dug up in some far
+inland soils, whereas ambergris is never found except upon the sea.
+Besides, amber is a hard, transparent, brittle, odorless substance,
+used for mouth-pieces to pipes, for beads and ornaments; but ambergris
+is soft, waxy, and so highly fragrant and spicy, that it is largely
+used in perfumery, in pastiles, precious candles, hair-powders, and
+pomatum. The Turks use it in cooking, and also carry it to Mecca, for
+the same purpose that frankincense is carried to St. Peter’s in Rome.
+Some wine merchants drop a few grains into claret, to flavor it.
+
+Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should
+regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a
+sick whale! Yet so it is. By some, ambergris is supposed to be the
+cause, and by others the effect, of the dyspepsia in the whale. How to
+cure such a dyspepsia it were hard to say, unless by administering
+three or four boat loads of Brandreth’s pills, and then running out of
+harm’s way, as laborers do in blasting rocks.
+
+I have forgotten to say that there were found in this ambergris,
+certain hard, round, bony plates, which at first Stubb thought might be
+sailors’ trowsers buttons; but it afterwards turned out that they were
+nothing more than pieces of small squid bones embalmed in that manner.
+
+Now that the incorruption of this most fragrant ambergris should be
+found in the heart of such decay; is this nothing? Bethink thee of that
+saying of St. Paul in Corinthians, about corruption and incorruption;
+how that we are sown in dishonor, but raised in glory. And likewise
+call to mind that saying of Paracelsus about what it is that maketh the
+best musk. Also forget not the strange fact that of all things of
+ill-savor, Cologne-water, in its rudimental manufacturing stages, is
+the worst.
+
+I should like to conclude the chapter with the above appeal, but
+cannot, owing to my anxiety to repel a charge often made against
+whalemen, and which, in the estimation of some already biased minds,
+might be considered as indirectly substantiated by what has been said
+of the Frenchman’s two whales. Elsewhere in this volume the slanderous
+aspersion has been disproved, that the vocation of whaling is
+throughout a slatternly, untidy business. But there is another thing to
+rebut. They hint that all whales always smell bad. Now how did this
+odious stigma originate?
+
+I opine, that it is plainly traceable to the first arrival of the
+Greenland whaling ships in London, more than two centuries ago. Because
+those whalemen did not then, and do not now, try out their oil at sea
+as the Southern ships have always done; but cutting up the fresh
+blubber in small bits, thrust it through the bung holes of large casks,
+and carry it home in that manner; the shortness of the season in those
+Icy Seas, and the sudden and violent storms to which they are exposed,
+forbidding any other course. The consequence is, that upon breaking
+into the hold, and unloading one of these whale cemeteries, in the
+Greenland dock, a savor is given forth somewhat similar to that arising
+from excavating an old city grave-yard, for the foundations of a
+Lying-in Hospital.
+
+I partly surmise also, that this wicked charge against whalers may be
+likewise imputed to the existence on the coast of Greenland, in former
+times, of a Dutch village called Schmerenburgh or Smeerenberg, which
+latter name is the one used by the learned Fogo Von Slack, in his great
+work on Smells, a text-book on that subject. As its name imports
+(smeer, fat; berg, to put up), this village was founded in order to
+afford a place for the blubber of the Dutch whale fleet to be tried
+out, without being taken home to Holland for that purpose. It was a
+collection of furnaces, fat-kettles, and oil sheds; and when the works
+were in full operation certainly gave forth no very pleasant savor. But
+all this is quite different with a South Sea Sperm Whaler; which in a
+voyage of four years perhaps, after completely filling her hold with
+oil, does not, perhaps, consume fifty days in the business of boiling
+out; and in the state that it is casked, the oil is nearly scentless.
+The truth is, that living or dead, if but decently treated, whales as a
+species are by no means creatures of ill odor; nor can whalemen be
+recognised, as the people of the middle ages affected to detect a Jew
+in the company, by the nose. Nor indeed can the whale possibly be
+otherwise than fragrant, when, as a general thing, he enjoys such high
+health; taking abundance of exercise; always out of doors; though, it
+is true, seldom in the open air. I say, that the motion of a Sperm
+Whale’s flukes above water dispenses a perfume, as when a musk-scented
+lady rustles her dress in a warm parlor. What then shall I liken the
+Sperm Whale to for fragrance, considering his magnitude? Must it not be
+to that famous elephant, with jewelled tusks, and redolent with myrrh,
+which was led out of an Indian town to do honor to Alexander the Great?
+
+
+CHAPTER 93. The Castaway.
+
+It was but some few days after encountering the Frenchman, that a most
+significant event befell the most insignificant of the Pequod’s crew;
+an event most lamentable; and which ended in providing the sometimes
+madly merry and predestinated craft with a living and ever accompanying
+prophecy of whatever shattered sequel might prove her own.
+
+Now, in the whale ship, it is not every one that goes in the boats.
+Some few hands are reserved called ship-keepers, whose province it is
+to work the vessel while the boats are pursuing the whale. As a general
+thing, these ship-keepers are as hardy fellows as the men comprising
+the boats’ crews. But if there happen to be an unduly slender, clumsy,
+or timorous wight in the ship, that wight is certain to be made a
+ship-keeper. It was so in the Pequod with the little negro Pippin by
+nick-name, Pip by abbreviation. Poor Pip! ye have heard of him before;
+ye must remember his tambourine on that dramatic midnight, so
+gloomy-jolly.
+
+In outer aspect, Pip and Dough-Boy made a match, like a black pony and
+a white one, of equal developments, though of dissimilar colour, driven
+in one eccentric span. But while hapless Dough-Boy was by nature dull
+and torpid in his intellects, Pip, though over tender-hearted, was at
+bottom very bright, with that pleasant, genial, jolly brightness
+peculiar to his tribe; a tribe, which ever enjoy all holidays and
+festivities with finer, freer relish than any other race. For blacks,
+the year’s calendar should show naught but three hundred and sixty-five
+Fourth of Julys and New Year’s Days. Nor smile so, while I write that
+this little black was brilliant, for even blackness has its brilliancy;
+behold yon lustrous ebony, panelled in king’s cabinets. But Pip loved
+life, and all life’s peaceable securities; so that the panic-striking
+business in which he had somehow unaccountably become entrapped, had
+most sadly blurred his brightness; though, as ere long will be seen,
+what was thus temporarily subdued in him, in the end was destined to be
+luridly illumined by strange wild fires, that fictitiously showed him
+off to ten times the natural lustre with which in his native Tolland
+County in Connecticut, he had once enlivened many a fiddler’s frolic on
+the green; and at melodious even-tide, with his gay ha-ha! had turned
+the round horizon into one star-belled tambourine. So, though in the
+clear air of day, suspended against a blue-veined neck, the
+pure-watered diamond drop will healthful glow; yet, when the cunning
+jeweller would show you the diamond in its most impressive lustre, he
+lays it against a gloomy ground, and then lights it up, not by the sun,
+but by some unnatural gases. Then come out those fiery effulgences,
+infernally superb; then the evil-blazing diamond, once the divinest
+symbol of the crystal skies, looks like some crown-jewel stolen from
+the King of Hell. But let us to the story.
+
+It came to pass, that in the ambergris affair Stubb’s after-oarsman
+chanced so to sprain his hand, as for a time to become quite maimed;
+and, temporarily, Pip was put into his place.
+
+The first time Stubb lowered with him, Pip evinced much nervousness;
+but happily, for that time, escaped close contact with the whale; and
+therefore came off not altogether discreditably; though Stubb observing
+him, took care, afterwards, to exhort him to cherish his courageousness
+to the utmost, for he might often find it needful.
+
+Now upon the second lowering, the boat paddled upon the whale; and as
+the fish received the darted iron, it gave its customary rap, which
+happened, in this instance, to be right under poor Pip’s seat. The
+involuntary consternation of the moment caused him to leap, paddle in
+hand, out of the boat; and in such a way, that part of the slack whale
+line coming against his chest, he breasted it overboard with him, so as
+to become entangled in it, when at last plumping into the water. That
+instant the stricken whale started on a fierce run, the line swiftly
+straightened; and presto! poor Pip came all foaming up to the chocks of
+the boat, remorselessly dragged there by the line, which had taken
+several turns around his chest and neck.
+
+Tashtego stood in the bows. He was full of the fire of the hunt. He
+hated Pip for a poltroon. Snatching the boat-knife from its sheath, he
+suspended its sharp edge over the line, and turning towards Stubb,
+exclaimed interrogatively, “Cut?” Meantime Pip’s blue, choked face
+plainly looked, Do, for God’s sake! All passed in a flash. In less than
+half a minute, this entire thing happened.
+
+“Damn him, cut!” roared Stubb; and so the whale was lost and Pip was
+saved.
+
+So soon as he recovered himself, the poor little negro was assailed by
+yells and execrations from the crew. Tranquilly permitting these
+irregular cursings to evaporate, Stubb then in a plain, business-like,
+but still half humorous manner, cursed Pip officially; and that done,
+unofficially gave him much wholesome advice. The substance was, Never
+jump from a boat, Pip, except—but all the rest was indefinite, as the
+soundest advice ever is. Now, in general, _Stick to the boat_, is your
+true motto in whaling; but cases will sometimes happen when _Leap from
+the boat_, is still better. Moreover, as if perceiving at last that if
+he should give undiluted conscientious advice to Pip, he would be
+leaving him too wide a margin to jump in for the future; Stubb suddenly
+dropped all advice, and concluded with a peremptory command, “Stick to
+the boat, Pip, or by the Lord, I won’t pick you up if you jump; mind
+that. We can’t afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would
+sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama. Bear that in
+mind, and don’t jump any more.” Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted,
+that though man loved his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal,
+which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.
+
+But we are all in the hands of the Gods; and Pip jumped again. It was
+under very similar circumstances to the first performance; but this
+time he did not breast out the line; and hence, when the whale started
+to run, Pip was left behind on the sea, like a hurried traveller’s
+trunk. Alas! Stubb was but too true to his word. It was a beautiful,
+bounteous, blue day; the spangled sea calm and cool, and flatly
+stretching away, all round, to the horizon, like gold-beater’s skin
+hammered out to the extremest. Bobbing up and down in that sea, Pip’s
+ebon head showed like a head of cloves. No boat-knife was lifted when
+he fell so rapidly astern. Stubb’s inexorable back was turned upon him;
+and the whale was winged. In three minutes, a whole mile of shoreless
+ocean was between Pip and Stubb. Out from the centre of the sea, poor
+Pip turned his crisp, curling, black head to the sun, another lonely
+castaway, though the loftiest and the brightest.
+
+Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the
+practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful
+lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the
+middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it? Mark,
+how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea—mark how closely
+they hug their ship and only coast along her sides.
+
+But had Stubb really abandoned the poor little negro to his fate? No;
+he did not mean to, at least. Because there were two boats in his wake,
+and he supposed, no doubt, that they would of course come up to Pip
+very quickly, and pick him up; though, indeed, such considerations
+towards oarsmen jeopardized through their own timidity, is not always
+manifested by the hunters in all similar instances; and such instances
+not unfrequently occur; almost invariably in the fishery, a coward, so
+called, is marked with the same ruthless detestation peculiar to
+military navies and armies.
+
+But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly
+spying whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and
+Stubb’s boat was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent
+upon his fish, that Pip’s ringed horizon began to expand around him
+miserably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him;
+but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such,
+at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body
+up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though.
+Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of
+the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes;
+and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the
+joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous,
+God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters
+heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the
+loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So
+man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason,
+man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is
+absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised,
+indifferent as his God.
+
+For the rest, blame not Stubb too hardly. The thing is common in that
+fishery; and in the sequel of the narrative, it will then be seen what
+like abandonment befell myself.
+
+
+CHAPTER 94. A Squeeze of the Hand.
+
+That whale of Stubb’s, so dearly purchased, was duly brought to the
+Pequod’s side, where all those cutting and hoisting operations
+previously detailed, were regularly gone through, even to the baling of
+the Heidelburgh Tun, or Case.
+
+While some were occupied with this latter duty, others were employed in
+dragging away the larger tubs, so soon as filled with the sperm; and
+when the proper time arrived, this same sperm was carefully manipulated
+ere going to the try-works, of which anon.
+
+It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with
+several others, I sat down before a large Constantine’s bath of it, I
+found it strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about
+in the liquid part. It was our business to squeeze these lumps back
+into fluid. A sweet and unctuous duty! No wonder that in old times this
+sperm was such a favourite cosmetic. Such a clearer! such a sweetener!
+such a softener! such a delicious molifier! After having my hands in it
+for only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it
+were, to serpentine and spiralise.
+
+As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter
+exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under
+indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands
+among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost
+within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all
+their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that
+uncontaminated aroma,—literally and truly, like the smell of spring
+violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky
+meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible
+sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit
+the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in
+allaying the heat of anger; while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely
+free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort
+whatsoever.
+
+Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm
+till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a
+strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly
+squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the
+gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving
+feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually
+squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as
+much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish
+any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come;
+let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into
+each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and
+sperm of kindness.
+
+Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since
+by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all
+cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of
+attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the
+fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the
+fireside, the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready
+to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I
+saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of
+spermaceti.
+
+Now, while discoursing of sperm, it behooves to speak of other things
+akin to it, in the business of preparing the sperm whale for the
+try-works.
+
+First comes white-horse, so called, which is obtained from the tapering
+part of the fish, and also from the thicker portions of his flukes. It
+is tough with congealed tendons—a wad of muscle—but still contains some
+oil. After being severed from the whale, the white-horse is first cut
+into portable oblongs ere going to the mincer. They look much like
+blocks of Berkshire marble.
+
+Plum-pudding is the term bestowed upon certain fragmentary parts of the
+whale’s flesh, here and there adhering to the blanket of blubber, and
+often participating to a considerable degree in its unctuousness. It is
+a most refreshing, convivial, beautiful object to behold. As its name
+imports, it is of an exceedingly rich, mottled tint, with a bestreaked
+snowy and golden ground, dotted with spots of the deepest crimson and
+purple. It is plums of rubies, in pictures of citron. Spite of reason,
+it is hard to keep yourself from eating it. I confess, that once I
+stole behind the foremast to try it. It tasted something as I should
+conceive a royal cutlet from the thigh of Louis le Gros might have
+tasted, supposing him to have been killed the first day after the
+venison season, and that particular venison season contemporary with an
+unusually fine vintage of the vineyards of Champagne.
+
+There is another substance, and a very singular one, which turns up in
+the course of this business, but which I feel it to be very puzzling
+adequately to describe. It is called slobgollion; an appellation
+original with the whalemen, and even so is the nature of the substance.
+It is an ineffably oozy, stringy affair, most frequently found in the
+tubs of sperm, after a prolonged squeezing, and subsequent decanting. I
+hold it to be the wondrously thin, ruptured membranes of the case,
+coalescing.
+
+Gurry, so called, is a term properly belonging to right whalemen, but
+sometimes incidentally used by the sperm fishermen. It designates the
+dark, glutinous substance which is scraped off the back of the
+Greenland or right whale, and much of which covers the decks of those
+inferior souls who hunt that ignoble Leviathan.
+
+Nippers. Strictly this word is not indigenous to the whale’s
+vocabulary. But as applied by whalemen, it becomes so. A whaleman’s
+nipper is a short firm strip of tendinous stuff cut from the tapering
+part of Leviathan’s tail: it averages an inch in thickness, and for the
+rest, is about the size of the iron part of a hoe. Edgewise moved along
+the oily deck, it operates like a leathern squilgee; and by nameless
+blandishments, as of magic, allures along with it all impurities.
+
+But to learn all about these recondite matters, your best way is at
+once to descend into the blubber-room, and have a long talk with its
+inmates. This place has previously been mentioned as the receptacle for
+the blanket-pieces, when stript and hoisted from the whale. When the
+proper time arrives for cutting up its contents, this apartment is a
+scene of terror to all tyros, especially by night. On one side, lit by
+a dull lantern, a space has been left clear for the workmen. They
+generally go in pairs,—a pike-and-gaffman and a spade-man. The
+whaling-pike is similar to a frigate’s boarding-weapon of the same
+name. The gaff is something like a boat-hook. With his gaff, the
+gaffman hooks on to a sheet of blubber, and strives to hold it from
+slipping, as the ship pitches and lurches about. Meanwhile, the
+spade-man stands on the sheet itself, perpendicularly chopping it into
+the portable horse-pieces. This spade is sharp as hone can make it; the
+spademan’s feet are shoeless; the thing he stands on will sometimes
+irresistibly slide away from him, like a sledge. If he cuts off one of
+his own toes, or one of his assistants’, would you be very much
+astonished? Toes are scarce among veteran blubber-room men.
+
+
+CHAPTER 95. The Cassock.
+
+Had you stepped on board the Pequod at a certain juncture of this
+post-mortemizing of the whale; and had you strolled forward nigh the
+windlass, pretty sure am I that you would have scanned with no small
+curiosity a very strange, enigmatical object, which you would have seen
+there, lying along lengthwise in the lee scuppers. Not the wondrous
+cistern in the whale’s huge head; not the prodigy of his unhinged lower
+jaw; not the miracle of his symmetrical tail; none of these would so
+surprise you, as half a glimpse of that unaccountable cone,—longer than
+a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and
+jet-black as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg. And an idol, indeed, it
+is; or, rather, in old times, its likeness was. Such an idol as that
+found in the secret groves of Queen Maachah in Judea; and for
+worshipping which, King Asa, her son, did depose her, and destroyed the
+idol, and burnt it for an abomination at the brook Kedron, as darkly
+set forth in the 15th chapter of the First Book of Kings.
+
+Look at the sailor, called the mincer, who now comes along, and
+assisted by two allies, heavily backs the grandissimus, as the mariners
+call it, and with bowed shoulders, staggers off with it as if he were a
+grenadier carrying a dead comrade from the field. Extending it upon the
+forecastle deck, he now proceeds cylindrically to remove its dark pelt,
+as an African hunter the pelt of a boa. This done he turns the pelt
+inside out, like a pantaloon leg; gives it a good stretching, so as
+almost to double its diameter; and at last hangs it, well spread, in
+the rigging, to dry. Ere long, it is taken down; when removing some
+three feet of it, towards the pointed extremity, and then cutting two
+slits for arm-holes at the other end, he lengthwise slips himself
+bodily into it. The mincer now stands before you invested in the full
+canonicals of his calling. Immemorial to all his order, this
+investiture alone will adequately protect him, while employed in the
+peculiar functions of his office.
+
+That office consists in mincing the horse-pieces of blubber for the
+pots; an operation which is conducted at a curious wooden horse,
+planted endwise against the bulwarks, and with a capacious tub beneath
+it, into which the minced pieces drop, fast as the sheets from a rapt
+orator’s desk. Arrayed in decent black; occupying a conspicuous pulpit;
+intent on bible leaves; what a candidate for an archbishopric, what a
+lad for a Pope were this mincer!*
+
+*Bible leaves! Bible leaves! This is the invariable cry from the mates
+to the mincer. It enjoins him to be careful, and cut his work into as
+thin slices as possible, inasmuch as by so doing the business of
+boiling out the oil is much accelerated, and its quantity considerably
+increased, besides perhaps improving it in quality.
+
+
+CHAPTER 96. The Try-Works.
+
+Besides her hoisted boats, an American whaler is outwardly
+distinguished by her try-works. She presents the curious anomaly of the
+most solid masonry joining with oak and hemp in constituting the
+completed ship. It is as if from the open field a brick-kiln were
+transported to her planks.
+
+The try-works are planted between the foremast and mainmast, the most
+roomy part of the deck. The timbers beneath are of a peculiar strength,
+fitted to sustain the weight of an almost solid mass of brick and
+mortar, some ten feet by eight square, and five in height. The
+foundation does not penetrate the deck, but the masonry is firmly
+secured to the surface by ponderous knees of iron bracing it on all
+sides, and screwing it down to the timbers. On the flanks it is cased
+with wood, and at top completely covered by a large, sloping, battened
+hatchway. Removing this hatch we expose the great try-pots, two in
+number, and each of several barrels’ capacity. When not in use, they
+are kept remarkably clean. Sometimes they are polished with soapstone
+and sand, till they shine within like silver punch-bowls. During the
+night-watches some cynical old sailors will crawl into them and coil
+themselves away there for a nap. While employed in polishing them—one
+man in each pot, side by side—many confidential communications are
+carried on, over the iron lips. It is a place also for profound
+mathematical meditation. It was in the left hand try-pot of the Pequod,
+with the soapstone diligently circling round me, that I was first
+indirectly struck by the remarkable fact, that in geometry all bodies
+gliding along the cycloid, my soapstone for example, will descend from
+any point in precisely the same time.
+
+Removing the fire-board from the front of the try-works, the bare
+masonry of that side is exposed, penetrated by the two iron mouths of
+the furnaces, directly underneath the pots. These mouths are fitted
+with heavy doors of iron. The intense heat of the fire is prevented
+from communicating itself to the deck, by means of a shallow reservoir
+extending under the entire inclosed surface of the works. By a tunnel
+inserted at the rear, this reservoir is kept replenished with water as
+fast as it evaporates. There are no external chimneys; they open direct
+from the rear wall. And here let us go back for a moment.
+
+It was about nine o’clock at night that the Pequod’s try-works were
+first started on this present voyage. It belonged to Stubb to oversee
+the business.
+
+“All ready there? Off hatch, then, and start her. You cook, fire the
+works.” This was an easy thing, for the carpenter had been thrusting
+his shavings into the furnace throughout the passage. Here be it said
+that in a whaling voyage the first fire in the try-works has to be fed
+for a time with wood. After that no wood is used, except as a means of
+quick ignition to the staple fuel. In a word, after being tried out,
+the crisp, shrivelled blubber, now called scraps or fritters, still
+contains considerable of its unctuous properties. These fritters feed
+the flames. Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming
+misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by
+his own body. Would that he consumed his own smoke! for his smoke is
+horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you
+must live in it for the time. It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor
+about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres. It smells
+like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the
+pit.
+
+By midnight the works were in full operation. We were clear from the
+carcase; sail had been made; the wind was freshening; the wild ocean
+darkness was intense. But that darkness was licked up by the fierce
+flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and
+illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek
+fire. The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to
+some vengeful deed. So the pitch and sulphur-freighted brigs of the
+bold Hydriote, Canaris, issuing from their midnight harbors, with broad
+sheets of flame for sails, bore down upon the Turkish frigates, and
+folded them in conflagrations.
+
+The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide
+hearth in front of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of
+the pagan harpooneers, always the whale-ship’s stokers. With huge
+pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding
+pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted,
+curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled
+away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of
+the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces.
+Opposite the mouth of the works, on the further side of the wide wooden
+hearth, was the windlass. This served for a sea-sofa. Here lounged the
+watch, when not otherwise employed, looking into the red heat of the
+fire, till their eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their tawny
+features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards,
+and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were
+strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works. As they
+narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror
+told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards
+out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their
+front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged
+forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the
+ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further
+and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully
+champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on
+all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden
+with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of
+darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s
+soul.
+
+So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently
+guided the way of this fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped, for that
+interval, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, the
+madness, the ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the fiend
+shapes before me, capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at
+last begat kindred visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield to
+that unaccountable drowsiness which ever would come over me at a
+midnight helm.
+
+But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since inexplicable)
+thing occurred to me. Starting from a brief standing sleep, I was
+horribly conscious of something fatally wrong. The jaw-bone tiller
+smote my side, which leaned against it; in my ears was the low hum of
+sails, just beginning to shake in the wind; I thought my eyes were
+open; I was half conscious of putting my fingers to the lids and
+mechanically stretching them still further apart. But, spite of all
+this, I could see no compass before me to steer by; though it seemed
+but a minute since I had been watching the card, by the steady binnacle
+lamp illuminating it. Nothing seemed before me but a jet gloom, now and
+then made ghastly by flashes of redness. Uppermost was the impression,
+that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to
+any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern. A stark, bewildered
+feeling, as of death, came over me. Convulsively my hands grasped the
+tiller, but with the crazy conceit that the tiller was, somehow, in
+some enchanted way, inverted. My God! what is the matter with me?
+thought I. Lo! in my brief sleep I had turned myself about, and was
+fronting the ship’s stern, with my back to her prow and the compass. In
+an instant I faced back, just in time to prevent the vessel from flying
+up into the wind, and very probably capsizing her. How glad and how
+grateful the relief from this unnatural hallucination of the night, and
+the fatal contingency of being brought by the lee!
+
+Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy
+hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first
+hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its
+redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun,
+the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking
+flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the
+glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp—all others but liars!
+
+Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia’s Dismal Swamp, nor Rome’s
+accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of
+deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean,
+which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this
+earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow
+in him, that mortal man cannot be true—not true, or undeveloped. With
+books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the
+truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered
+steel of woe. “All is vanity.” ALL. This wilful world hath not got hold
+of unchristian Solomon’s wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals and
+jails, and walks fast crossing graveyards, and would rather talk of
+operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils
+all of sick men; and throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais
+as passing wise, and therefore jolly;—not that man is fitted to sit
+down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably
+wondrous Solomon.
+
+But even Solomon, he says, “the man that wandereth out of the way of
+understanding shall remain” (_i.e._, even while living) “in the
+congregation of the dead.” Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it
+invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom
+that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a
+Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest
+gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny
+spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is
+in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle
+is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.
+
+
+CHAPTER 97. The Lamp.
+
+Had you descended from the Pequod’s try-works to the Pequod’s
+forecastle, where the off duty watch were sleeping, for one single
+moment you would have almost thought you were standing in some
+illuminated shrine of canonized kings and counsellors. There they lay
+in their triangular oaken vaults, each mariner a chiselled muteness; a
+score of lamps flashing upon his hooded eyes.
+
+In merchantmen, oil for the sailor is more scarce than the milk of
+queens. To dress in the dark, and eat in the dark, and stumble in
+darkness to his pallet, this is his usual lot. But the whaleman, as he
+seeks the food of light, so he lives in light. He makes his berth an
+Aladdin’s lamp, and lays him down in it; so that in the pitchiest night
+the ship’s black hull still houses an illumination.
+
+See with what entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful of
+lamps—often but old bottles and vials, though—to the copper cooler at
+the try-works, and replenishes them there, as mugs of ale at a vat. He
+burns, too, the purest of oil, in its unmanufactured, and, therefore,
+unvitiated state; a fluid unknown to solar, lunar, or astral
+contrivances ashore. It is sweet as early grass butter in April. He
+goes and hunts for his oil, so as to be sure of its freshness and
+genuineness, even as the traveller on the prairie hunts up his own
+supper of game.
+
+
+CHAPTER 98. Stowing Down and Clearing Up.
+
+Already has it been related how the great leviathan is afar off
+descried from the mast-head; how he is chased over the watery moors,
+and slaughtered in the valleys of the deep; how he is then towed
+alongside and beheaded; and how (on the principle which entitled the
+headsman of old to the garments in which the beheaded was killed) his
+great padded surtout becomes the property of his executioner; how, in
+due time, he is condemned to the pots, and, like Shadrach, Meshach, and
+Abednego, his spermaceti, oil, and bone pass unscathed through the
+fire;—but now it remains to conclude the last chapter of this part of
+the description by rehearsing—singing, if I may—the romantic proceeding
+of decanting off his oil into the casks and striking them down into the
+hold, where once again leviathan returns to his native profundities,
+sliding along beneath the surface as before; but, alas! never more to
+rise and blow.
+
+While still warm, the oil, like hot punch, is received into the
+six-barrel casks; and while, perhaps, the ship is pitching and rolling
+this way and that in the midnight sea, the enormous casks are slewed
+round and headed over, end for end, and sometimes perilously scoot
+across the slippery deck, like so many land slides, till at last
+man-handled and stayed in their course; and all round the hoops, rap,
+rap, go as many hammers as can play upon them, for now, _ex officio_,
+every sailor is a cooper.
+
+At length, when the last pint is casked, and all is cool, then the
+great hatchways are unsealed, the bowels of the ship are thrown open,
+and down go the casks to their final rest in the sea. This done, the
+hatches are replaced, and hermetically closed, like a closet walled up.
+
+In the sperm fishery, this is perhaps one of the most remarkable
+incidents in all the business of whaling. One day the planks stream
+with freshets of blood and oil; on the sacred quarter-deck enormous
+masses of the whale’s head are profanely piled; great rusty casks lie
+about, as in a brewery yard; the smoke from the try-works has besooted
+all the bulwarks; the mariners go about suffused with unctuousness; the
+entire ship seems great leviathan himself; while on all hands the din
+is deafening.
+
+But a day or two after, you look about you, and prick your ears in this
+self-same ship; and were it not for the tell-tale boats and try-works,
+you would all but swear you trod some silent merchant vessel, with a
+most scrupulously neat commander. The unmanufactured sperm oil
+possesses a singularly cleansing virtue. This is the reason why the
+decks never look so white as just after what they call an affair of
+oil. Besides, from the ashes of the burned scraps of the whale, a
+potent lye is readily made; and whenever any adhesiveness from the back
+of the whale remains clinging to the side, that lye quickly
+exterminates it. Hands go diligently along the bulwarks, and with
+buckets of water and rags restore them to their full tidiness. The soot
+is brushed from the lower rigging. All the numerous implements which
+have been in use are likewise faithfully cleansed and put away. The
+great hatch is scrubbed and placed upon the try-works, completely
+hiding the pots; every cask is out of sight; all tackles are coiled in
+unseen nooks; and when by the combined and simultaneous industry of
+almost the entire ship’s company, the whole of this conscientious duty
+is at last concluded, then the crew themselves proceed to their own
+ablutions; shift themselves from top to toe; and finally issue to the
+immaculate deck, fresh and all aglow, as bridegrooms new-leaped from
+out the daintiest Holland.
+
+Now, with elated step, they pace the planks in twos and threes, and
+humorously discourse of parlors, sofas, carpets, and fine cambrics;
+propose to mat the deck; think of having hanging to the top; object not
+to taking tea by moonlight on the piazza of the forecastle. To hint to
+such musked mariners of oil, and bone, and blubber, were little short
+of audacity. They know not the thing you distantly allude to. Away, and
+bring us napkins!
+
+But mark: aloft there, at the three mast heads, stand three men intent
+on spying out more whales, which, if caught, infallibly will again soil
+the old oaken furniture, and drop at least one small grease-spot
+somewhere. Yes; and many is the time, when, after the severest
+uninterrupted labors, which know no night; continuing straight through
+for ninety-six hours; when from the boat, where they have swelled their
+wrists with all day rowing on the Line,—they only step to the deck to
+carry vast chains, and heave the heavy windlass, and cut and slash,
+yea, and in their very sweatings to be smoked and burned anew by the
+combined fires of the equatorial sun and the equatorial try-works;
+when, on the heel of all this, they have finally bestirred themselves
+to cleanse the ship, and make a spotless dairy room of it; many is the
+time the poor fellows, just buttoning the necks of their clean frocks,
+are startled by the cry of “There she blows!” and away they fly to
+fight another whale, and go through the whole weary thing again. Oh! my
+friends, but this is man-killing! Yet this is life. For hardly have we
+mortals by long toilings extracted from this world’s vast bulk its
+small but valuable sperm; and then, with weary patience, cleansed
+ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live here in clean
+tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when—_There she
+blows!_—the ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other
+world, and go through young life’s old routine again.
+
+Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two
+thousand years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with
+thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage—and, foolish as I am, taught
+thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope!
+
+
+CHAPTER 99. The Doubloon.
+
+Ere now it has been related how Ahab was wont to pace his quarter-deck,
+taking regular turns at either limit, the binnacle and mainmast; but in
+the multiplicity of other things requiring narration it has not been
+added how that sometimes in these walks, when most plunged in his mood,
+he was wont to pause in turn at each spot, and stand there strangely
+eyeing the particular object before him. When he halted before the
+binnacle, with his glance fastened on the pointed needle in the
+compass, that glance shot like a javelin with the pointed intensity of
+his purpose; and when resuming his walk he again paused before the
+mainmast, then, as the same riveted glance fastened upon the riveted
+gold coin there, he still wore the same aspect of nailed firmness, only
+dashed with a certain wild longing, if not hopefulness.
+
+But one morning, turning to pass the doubloon, he seemed to be newly
+attracted by the strange figures and inscriptions stamped on it, as
+though now for the first time beginning to interpret for himself in
+some monomaniac way whatever significance might lurk in them. And some
+certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little
+worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell
+by the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass
+in the Milky Way.
+
+Now this doubloon was of purest, virgin gold, raked somewhere out of
+the heart of gorgeous hills, whence, east and west, over golden sands,
+the head-waters of many a Pactolus flows. And though now nailed amidst
+all the rustiness of iron bolts and the verdigris of copper spikes,
+yet, untouchable and immaculate to any foulness, it still preserved its
+Quito glow. Nor, though placed amongst a ruthless crew and every hour
+passed by ruthless hands, and through the livelong nights shrouded with
+thick darkness which might cover any pilfering approach, nevertheless
+every sunrise found the doubloon where the sunset left it last. For it
+was set apart and sanctified to one awe-striking end; and however
+wanton in their sailor ways, one and all, the mariners revered it as
+the white whale’s talisman. Sometimes they talked it over in the weary
+watch by night, wondering whose it was to be at last, and whether he
+would ever live to spend it.
+
+Now those noble golden coins of South America are as medals of the sun
+and tropic token-pieces. Here palms, alpacas, and volcanoes; sun’s
+disks and stars; ecliptics, horns-of-plenty, and rich banners waving,
+are in luxuriant profusion stamped; so that the precious gold seems
+almost to derive an added preciousness and enhancing glories, by
+passing through those fancy mints, so Spanishly poetic.
+
+It so chanced that the doubloon of the Pequod was a most wealthy
+example of these things. On its round border it bore the letters,
+REPUBLICA DEL ECUADOR: QUITO. So this bright coin came from a country
+planted in the middle of the world, and beneath the great equator, and
+named after it; and it had been cast midway up the Andes, in the
+unwaning clime that knows no autumn. Zoned by those letters you saw the
+likeness of three Andes’ summits; from one a flame; a tower on another;
+on the third a crowing cock; while arching over all was a segment of
+the partitioned zodiac, the signs all marked with their usual
+cabalistics, and the keystone sun entering the equinoctial point at
+Libra.
+
+Before this equatorial coin, Ahab, not unobserved by others, was now
+pausing.
+
+“There’s something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and
+all other grand and lofty things; look here,—three peaks as proud as
+Lucifer. The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the
+courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all
+are Ahab; and this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe,
+which, like a magician’s glass, to each and every man in turn but
+mirrors back his own mysterious self. Great pains, small gains for
+those who ask the world to solve them; it cannot solve itself. Methinks
+now this coined sun wears a ruddy face; but see! aye, he enters the
+sign of storms, the equinox! and but six months before he wheeled out
+of a former equinox at Aries! From storm to storm! So be it, then. Born
+in throes, ’tis fit that man should live in pains and die in pangs! So
+be it, then! Here’s stout stuff for woe to work on. So be it, then.”
+
+“No fairy fingers can have pressed the gold, but devil’s claws must
+have left their mouldings there since yesterday,” murmured Starbuck to
+himself, leaning against the bulwarks. “The old man seems to read
+Belshazzar’s awful writing. I have never marked the coin inspectingly.
+He goes below; let me read. A dark valley between three mighty,
+heaven-abiding peaks, that almost seem the Trinity, in some faint
+earthly symbol. So in this vale of Death, God girds us round; and over
+all our gloom, the sun of Righteousness still shines a beacon and a
+hope. If we bend down our eyes, the dark vale shows her mouldy soil;
+but if we lift them, the bright sun meets our glance half way, to
+cheer. Yet, oh, the great sun is no fixture; and if, at midnight, we
+would fain snatch some sweet solace from him, we gaze for him in vain!
+This coin speaks wisely, mildly, truly, but still sadly to me. I will
+quit it, lest Truth shake me falsely.”
+
+“There now’s the old Mogul,” soliloquized Stubb by the try-works, “he’s
+been twigging it; and there goes Starbuck from the same, and both with
+faces which I should say might be somewhere within nine fathoms long.
+And all from looking at a piece of gold, which did I have it now on
+Negro Hill or in Corlaer’s Hook, I’d not look at it very long ere
+spending it. Humph! in my poor, insignificant opinion, I regard this as
+queer. I have seen doubloons before now in my voyagings; your doubloons
+of old Spain, your doubloons of Peru, your doubloons of Chili, your
+doubloons of Bolivia, your doubloons of Popayan; with plenty of gold
+moidores and pistoles, and joes, and half joes, and quarter joes. What
+then should there be in this doubloon of the Equator that is so killing
+wonderful? By Golconda! let me read it once. Halloa! here’s signs and
+wonders truly! That, now, is what old Bowditch in his Epitome calls the
+zodiac, and what my almanac below calls ditto. I’ll get the almanac and
+as I have heard devils can be raised with Daboll’s arithmetic, I’ll try
+my hand at raising a meaning out of these queer curvicues here with the
+Massachusetts calendar. Here’s the book. Let’s see now. Signs and
+wonders; and the sun, he’s always among ’em. Hem, hem, hem; here they
+are—here they go—all alive:—Aries, or the Ram; Taurus, or the Bull and
+Jimimi! here’s Gemini himself, or the Twins. Well; the sun he wheels
+among ’em. Aye, here on the coin he’s just crossing the threshold
+between two of twelve sitting-rooms all in a ring. Book! you lie there;
+the fact is, you books must know your places. You’ll do to give us the
+bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts. That’s my
+small experience, so far as the Massachusetts calendar, and Bowditch’s
+navigator, and Daboll’s arithmetic go. Signs and wonders, eh? Pity if
+there is nothing wonderful in signs, and significant in wonders!
+There’s a clue somewhere; wait a bit; hist—hark! By Jove, I have it!
+Look you, Doubloon, your zodiac here is the life of man in one round
+chapter; and now I’ll read it off, straight out of the book. Come,
+Almanack! To begin: there’s Aries, or the Ram—lecherous dog, he begets
+us; then, Taurus, or the Bull—he bumps us the first thing; then Gemini,
+or the Twins—that is, Virtue and Vice; we try to reach Virtue, when lo!
+comes Cancer the Crab, and drags us back; and here, going from Virtue,
+Leo, a roaring Lion, lies in the path—he gives a few fierce bites and
+surly dabs with his paw; we escape, and hail Virgo, the Virgin! that’s
+our first love; we marry and think to be happy for aye, when pop comes
+Libra, or the Scales—happiness weighed and found wanting; and while we
+are very sad about that, Lord! how we suddenly jump, as Scorpio, or the
+Scorpion, stings us in the rear; we are curing the wound, when whang
+come the arrows all round; Sagittarius, or the Archer, is amusing
+himself. As we pluck out the shafts, stand aside! here’s the
+battering-ram, Capricornus, or the Goat; full tilt, he comes rushing,
+and headlong we are tossed; when Aquarius, or the Water-bearer, pours
+out his whole deluge and drowns us; and to wind up with Pisces, or the
+Fishes, we sleep. There’s a sermon now, writ in high heaven, and the
+sun goes through it every year, and yet comes out of it all alive and
+hearty. Jollily he, aloft there, wheels through toil and trouble; and
+so, alow here, does jolly Stubb. Oh, jolly’s the word for aye! Adieu,
+Doubloon! But stop; here comes little King-Post; dodge round the
+try-works, now, and let’s hear what he’ll have to say. There; he’s
+before it; he’ll out with something presently. So, so; he’s beginning.”
+
+“I see nothing here, but a round thing made of gold, and whoever raises
+a certain whale, this round thing belongs to him. So, what’s all this
+staring been about? It is worth sixteen dollars, that’s true; and at
+two cents the cigar, that’s nine hundred and sixty cigars. I won’t
+smoke dirty pipes like Stubb, but I like cigars, and here’s nine
+hundred and sixty of them; so here goes Flask aloft to spy ’em out.”
+
+“Shall I call that wise or foolish, now; if it be really wise it has a
+foolish look to it; yet, if it be really foolish, then has it a sort of
+wiseish look to it. But, avast; here comes our old Manxman—the old
+hearse-driver, he must have been, that is, before he took to the sea.
+He luffs up before the doubloon; halloa, and goes round on the other
+side of the mast; why, there’s a horse-shoe nailed on that side; and
+now he’s back again; what does that mean? Hark! he’s muttering—voice
+like an old worn-out coffee-mill. Prick ears, and listen!”
+
+“If the White Whale be raised, it must be in a month and a day, when
+the sun stands in some one of these signs. I’ve studied signs, and know
+their marks; they were taught me two score years ago, by the old witch
+in Copenhagen. Now, in what sign will the sun then be? The horse-shoe
+sign; for there it is, right opposite the gold. And what’s the
+horse-shoe sign? The lion is the horse-shoe sign—the roaring and
+devouring lion. Ship, old ship! my old head shakes to think of thee.”
+
+“There’s another rendering now; but still one text. All sorts of men in
+one kind of world, you see. Dodge again! here comes Queequeg—all
+tattooing—looks like the signs of the Zodiac himself. What says the
+Cannibal? As I live he’s comparing notes; looking at his thigh bone;
+thinks the sun is in the thigh, or in the calf, or in the bowels, I
+suppose, as the old women talk Surgeon’s Astronomy in the back country.
+And by Jove, he’s found something there in the vicinity of his thigh—I
+guess it’s Sagittarius, or the Archer. No: he don’t know what to make
+of the doubloon; he takes it for an old button off some king’s
+trowsers. But, aside again! here comes that ghost-devil, Fedallah; tail
+coiled out of sight as usual, oakum in the toes of his pumps as usual.
+What does he say, with that look of his? Ah, only makes a sign to the
+sign and bows himself; there is a sun on the coin—fire worshipper,
+depend upon it. Ho! more and more. This way comes Pip—poor boy! would
+he had died, or I; he’s half horrible to me. He too has been watching
+all of these interpreters—myself included—and look now, he comes to
+read, with that unearthly idiot face. Stand away again and hear him.
+Hark!”
+
+“I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.”
+
+“Upon my soul, he’s been studying Murray’s Grammar! Improving his mind,
+poor fellow! But what’s that he says now—hist!”
+
+“I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.”
+
+“Why, he’s getting it by heart—hist! again.”
+
+“I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.”
+
+“Well, that’s funny.”
+
+“And I, you, and he; and we, ye, and they, are all bats; and I’m a
+crow, especially when I stand a’top of this pine tree here. Caw! caw!
+caw! caw! caw! caw! Ain’t I a crow? And where’s the scare-crow? There
+he stands; two bones stuck into a pair of old trowsers, and two more
+poked into the sleeves of an old jacket.”
+
+“Wonder if he means me?—complimentary!—poor lad!—I could go hang
+myself. Any way, for the present, I’ll quit Pip’s vicinity. I can stand
+the rest, for they have plain wits; but he’s too crazy-witty for my
+sanity. So, so, I leave him muttering.”
+
+“Here’s the ship’s navel, this doubloon here, and they are all on fire
+to unscrew it. But, unscrew your navel, and what’s the consequence?
+Then again, if it stays here, that is ugly, too, for when aught’s
+nailed to the mast it’s a sign that things grow desperate. Ha, ha! old
+Ahab! the White Whale; he’ll nail ye! This is a pine tree. My father,
+in old Tolland county, cut down a pine tree once, and found a silver
+ring grown over in it; some old darkey’s wedding ring. How did it get
+there? And so they’ll say in the resurrection, when they come to fish
+up this old mast, and find a doubloon lodged in it, with bedded oysters
+for the shaggy bark. Oh, the gold! the precious, precious, gold! the
+green miser’ll hoard ye soon! Hish! hish! God goes ’mong the worlds
+blackberrying. Cook! ho, cook! and cook us! Jenny! hey, hey, hey, hey,
+hey, Jenny, Jenny! and get your hoe-cake done!”
+
+
+CHAPTER 100. Leg and Arm.
+
+The Pequod, of Nantucket, Meets the Samuel Enderby, of London.
+
+“Ship, ahoy! Hast seen the White Whale?”
+
+So cried Ahab, once more hailing a ship showing English colours,
+bearing down under the stern. Trumpet to mouth, the old man was
+standing in his hoisted quarter-boat, his ivory leg plainly revealed to
+the stranger captain, who was carelessly reclining in his own boat’s
+bow. He was a darkly-tanned, burly, good-natured, fine-looking man, of
+sixty or thereabouts, dressed in a spacious roundabout, that hung round
+him in festoons of blue pilot-cloth; and one empty arm of this jacket
+streamed behind him like the broidered arm of a hussar’s surcoat.
+
+“Hast seen the White Whale?”
+
+“See you this?” and withdrawing it from the folds that had hidden it,
+he held up a white arm of sperm whale bone, terminating in a wooden
+head like a mallet.
+
+“Man my boat!” cried Ahab, impetuously, and tossing about the oars near
+him—“Stand by to lower!”
+
+In less than a minute, without quitting his little craft, he and his
+crew were dropped to the water, and were soon alongside of the
+stranger. But here a curious difficulty presented itself. In the
+excitement of the moment, Ahab had forgotten that since the loss of his
+leg he had never once stepped on board of any vessel at sea but his
+own, and then it was always by an ingenious and very handy mechanical
+contrivance peculiar to the Pequod, and a thing not to be rigged and
+shipped in any other vessel at a moment’s warning. Now, it is no very
+easy matter for anybody—except those who are almost hourly used to it,
+like whalemen—to clamber up a ship’s side from a boat on the open sea;
+for the great swells now lift the boat high up towards the bulwarks,
+and then instantaneously drop it half way down to the kelson. So,
+deprived of one leg, and the strange ship of course being altogether
+unsupplied with the kindly invention, Ahab now found himself abjectly
+reduced to a clumsy landsman again; hopelessly eyeing the uncertain
+changeful height he could hardly hope to attain.
+
+It has before been hinted, perhaps, that every little untoward
+circumstance that befell him, and which indirectly sprang from his
+luckless mishap, almost invariably irritated or exasperated Ahab. And
+in the present instance, all this was heightened by the sight of the
+two officers of the strange ship, leaning over the side, by the
+perpendicular ladder of nailed cleets there, and swinging towards him a
+pair of tastefully-ornamented man-ropes; for at first they did not seem
+to bethink them that a one-legged man must be too much of a cripple to
+use their sea bannisters. But this awkwardness only lasted a minute,
+because the strange captain, observing at a glance how affairs stood,
+cried out, “I see, I see!—avast heaving there! Jump, boys, and swing
+over the cutting-tackle.”
+
+As good luck would have it, they had had a whale alongside a day or two
+previous, and the great tackles were still aloft, and the massive
+curved blubber-hook, now clean and dry, was still attached to the end.
+This was quickly lowered to Ahab, who at once comprehending it all,
+slid his solitary thigh into the curve of the hook (it was like sitting
+in the fluke of an anchor, or the crotch of an apple tree), and then
+giving the word, held himself fast, and at the same time also helped to
+hoist his own weight, by pulling hand-over-hand upon one of the running
+parts of the tackle. Soon he was carefully swung inside the high
+bulwarks, and gently landed upon the capstan head. With his ivory arm
+frankly thrust forth in welcome, the other captain advanced, and Ahab,
+putting out his ivory leg, and crossing the ivory arm (like two
+sword-fish blades) cried out in his walrus way, “Aye, aye, hearty! let
+us shake bones together!—an arm and a leg!—an arm that never can
+shrink, d’ye see; and a leg that never can run. Where did’st thou see
+the White Whale?—how long ago?”
+
+“The White Whale,” said the Englishman, pointing his ivory arm towards
+the East, and taking a rueful sight along it, as if it had been a
+telescope; “there I saw him, on the Line, last season.”
+
+“And he took that arm off, did he?” asked Ahab, now sliding down from
+the capstan, and resting on the Englishman’s shoulder, as he did so.
+
+“Aye, he was the cause of it, at least; and that leg, too?”
+
+“Spin me the yarn,” said Ahab; “how was it?”
+
+“It was the first time in my life that I ever cruised on the Line,”
+began the Englishman. “I was ignorant of the White Whale at that time.
+Well, one day we lowered for a pod of four or five whales, and my boat
+fastened to one of them; a regular circus horse he was, too, that went
+milling and milling round so, that my boat’s crew could only trim dish,
+by sitting all their sterns on the outer gunwale. Presently up breaches
+from the bottom of the sea a bouncing great whale, with a milky-white
+head and hump, all crows’ feet and wrinkles.”
+
+“It was he, it was he!” cried Ahab, suddenly letting out his suspended
+breath.
+
+“And harpoons sticking in near his starboard fin.”
+
+“Aye, aye—they were mine—_my_ irons,” cried Ahab, exultingly—“but on!”
+
+“Give me a chance, then,” said the Englishman, good-humoredly. “Well,
+this old great-grandfather, with the white head and hump, runs all
+afoam into the pod, and goes to snapping furiously at my fast-line!
+
+“Aye, I see!—wanted to part it; free the fast-fish—an old trick—I know
+him.”
+
+“How it was exactly,” continued the one-armed commander, “I do not
+know; but in biting the line, it got foul of his teeth, caught there
+somehow; but we didn’t know it then; so that when we afterwards pulled
+on the line, bounce we came plump on to his hump! instead of the other
+whale’s; that went off to windward, all fluking. Seeing how matters
+stood, and what a noble great whale it was—the noblest and biggest I
+ever saw, sir, in my life—I resolved to capture him, spite of the
+boiling rage he seemed to be in. And thinking the hap-hazard line would
+get loose, or the tooth it was tangled to might draw (for I have a
+devil of a boat’s crew for a pull on a whale-line); seeing all this, I
+say, I jumped into my first mate’s boat—Mr. Mounttop’s here (by the
+way, Captain—Mounttop; Mounttop—the captain);—as I was saying, I jumped
+into Mounttop’s boat, which, d’ye see, was gunwale and gunwale with
+mine, then; and snatching the first harpoon, let this old
+great-grandfather have it. But, Lord, look you, sir—hearts and souls
+alive, man—the next instant, in a jiff, I was blind as a bat—both eyes
+out—all befogged and bedeadened with black foam—the whale’s tail
+looming straight up out of it, perpendicular in the air, like a marble
+steeple. No use sterning all, then; but as I was groping at midday,
+with a blinding sun, all crown-jewels; as I was groping, I say, after
+the second iron, to toss it overboard—down comes the tail like a Lima
+tower, cutting my boat in two, leaving each half in splinters; and,
+flukes first, the white hump backed through the wreck, as though it was
+all chips. We all struck out. To escape his terrible flailings, I
+seized hold of my harpoon-pole sticking in him, and for a moment clung
+to that like a sucking fish. But a combing sea dashed me off, and at
+the same instant, the fish, taking one good dart forwards, went down
+like a flash; and the barb of that cursed second iron towing along near
+me caught me here” (clapping his hand just below his shoulder); “yes,
+caught me just here, I say, and bore me down to Hell’s flames, I was
+thinking; when, when, all of a sudden, thank the good God, the barb
+ript its way along the flesh—clear along the whole length of my
+arm—came out nigh my wrist, and up I floated;—and that gentleman there
+will tell you the rest (by the way, captain—Dr. Bunger, ship’s surgeon:
+Bunger, my lad,—the captain). Now, Bunger boy, spin your part of the
+yarn.”
+
+The professional gentleman thus familiarly pointed out, had been all
+the time standing near them, with nothing specific visible, to denote
+his gentlemanly rank on board. His face was an exceedingly round but
+sober one; he was dressed in a faded blue woollen frock or shirt, and
+patched trowsers; and had thus far been dividing his attention between
+a marlingspike he held in one hand, and a pill-box held in the other,
+occasionally casting a critical glance at the ivory limbs of the two
+crippled captains. But, at his superior’s introduction of him to Ahab,
+he politely bowed, and straightway went on to do his captain’s bidding.
+
+“It was a shocking bad wound,” began the whale-surgeon; “and, taking my
+advice, Captain Boomer here, stood our old Sammy—”
+
+“Samuel Enderby is the name of my ship,” interrupted the one-armed
+captain, addressing Ahab; “go on, boy.”
+
+“Stood our old Sammy off to the northward, to get out of the blazing
+hot weather there on the Line. But it was no use—I did all I could; sat
+up with him nights; was very severe with him in the matter of diet—”
+
+“Oh, very severe!” chimed in the patient himself; then suddenly
+altering his voice, “Drinking hot rum toddies with me every night, till
+he couldn’t see to put on the bandages; and sending me to bed, half
+seas over, about three o’clock in the morning. Oh, ye stars! he sat up
+with me indeed, and was very severe in my diet. Oh! a great watcher,
+and very dietetically severe, is Dr. Bunger. (Bunger, you dog, laugh
+out! why don’t ye? You know you’re a precious jolly rascal.) But, heave
+ahead, boy, I’d rather be killed by you than kept alive by any other
+man.”
+
+“My captain, you must have ere this perceived, respected sir”—said the
+imperturbable godly-looking Bunger, slightly bowing to Ahab—“is apt to
+be facetious at times; he spins us many clever things of that sort. But
+I may as well say—en passant, as the French remark—that I myself—that
+is to say, Jack Bunger, late of the reverend clergy—am a strict total
+abstinence man; I never drink—”
+
+“Water!” cried the captain; “he never drinks it; it’s a sort of fits to
+him; fresh water throws him into the hydrophobia; but go on—go on with
+the arm story.”
+
+“Yes, I may as well,” said the surgeon, coolly. “I was about observing,
+sir, before Captain Boomer’s facetious interruption, that spite of my
+best and severest endeavors, the wound kept getting worse and worse;
+the truth was, sir, it was as ugly gaping wound as surgeon ever saw;
+more than two feet and several inches long. I measured it with the lead
+line. In short, it grew black; I knew what was threatened, and off it
+came. But I had no hand in shipping that ivory arm there; that thing is
+against all rule”—pointing at it with the marlingspike—“that is the
+captain’s work, not mine; he ordered the carpenter to make it; he had
+that club-hammer there put to the end, to knock some one’s brains out
+with, I suppose, as he tried mine once. He flies into diabolical
+passions sometimes. Do ye see this dent, sir”—removing his hat, and
+brushing aside his hair, and exposing a bowl-like cavity in his skull,
+but which bore not the slightest scarry trace, or any token of ever
+having been a wound—“Well, the captain there will tell you how that
+came here; he knows.”
+
+“No, I don’t,” said the captain, “but his mother did; he was born with
+it. Oh, you solemn rogue, you—you Bunger! was there ever such another
+Bunger in the watery world? Bunger, when you die, you ought to die in
+pickle, you dog; you should be preserved to future ages, you rascal.”
+
+“What became of the White Whale?” now cried Ahab, who thus far had been
+impatiently listening to this by-play between the two Englishmen.
+
+“Oh!” cried the one-armed captain, “oh, yes! Well; after he sounded, we
+didn’t see him again for some time; in fact, as I before hinted, I
+didn’t then know what whale it was that had served me such a trick,
+till some time afterwards, when coming back to the Line, we heard about
+Moby Dick—as some call him—and then I knew it was he.”
+
+“Did’st thou cross his wake again?”
+
+“Twice.”
+
+“But could not fasten?”
+
+“Didn’t want to try to: ain’t one limb enough? What should I do without
+this other arm? And I’m thinking Moby Dick doesn’t bite so much as he
+swallows.”
+
+“Well, then,” interrupted Bunger, “give him your left arm for bait to
+get the right. Do you know, gentlemen”—very gravely and mathematically
+bowing to each Captain in succession—“Do you know, gentlemen, that the
+digestive organs of the whale are so inscrutably constructed by Divine
+Providence, that it is quite impossible for him to completely digest
+even a man’s arm? And he knows it too. So that what you take for the
+White Whale’s malice is only his awkwardness. For he never means to
+swallow a single limb; he only thinks to terrify by feints. But
+sometimes he is like the old juggling fellow, formerly a patient of
+mine in Ceylon, that making believe swallow jack-knives, once upon a
+time let one drop into him in good earnest, and there it stayed for a
+twelvemonth or more; when I gave him an emetic, and he heaved it up in
+small tacks, d’ye see. No possible way for him to digest that
+jack-knife, and fully incorporate it into his general bodily system.
+Yes, Captain Boomer, if you are quick enough about it, and have a mind
+to pawn one arm for the sake of the privilege of giving decent burial
+to the other, why in that case the arm is yours; only let the whale
+have another chance at you shortly, that’s all.”
+
+“No, thank ye, Bunger,” said the English Captain, “he’s welcome to the
+arm he has, since I can’t help it, and didn’t know him then; but not to
+another one. No more White Whales for me; I’ve lowered for him once,
+and that has satisfied me. There would be great glory in killing him, I
+know that; and there is a ship-load of precious sperm in him, but, hark
+ye, he’s best let alone; don’t you think so, Captain?”—glancing at the
+ivory leg.
+
+“He is. But he will still be hunted, for all that. What is best let
+alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures. He’s all a
+magnet! How long since thou saw’st him last? Which way heading?”
+
+“Bless my soul, and curse the foul fiend’s,” cried Bunger, stoopingly
+walking round Ahab, and like a dog, strangely snuffing; “this man’s
+blood—bring the thermometer!—it’s at the boiling point!—his pulse makes
+these planks beat!—sir!”—taking a lancet from his pocket, and drawing
+near to Ahab’s arm.
+
+“Avast!” roared Ahab, dashing him against the bulwarks—“Man the boat!
+Which way heading?”
+
+“Good God!” cried the English Captain, to whom the question was put.
+“What’s the matter? He was heading east, I think.—Is your Captain
+crazy?” whispering Fedallah.
+
+But Fedallah, putting a finger on his lip, slid over the bulwarks to
+take the boat’s steering oar, and Ahab, swinging the cutting-tackle
+towards him, commanded the ship’s sailors to stand by to lower.
+
+In a moment he was standing in the boat’s stern, and the Manilla men
+were springing to their oars. In vain the English Captain hailed him.
+With back to the stranger ship, and face set like a flint to his own,
+Ahab stood upright till alongside of the Pequod.
+
+
+CHAPTER 101. The Decanter.
+
+Ere the English ship fades from sight, be it set down here, that she
+hailed from London, and was named after the late Samuel Enderby,
+merchant of that city, the original of the famous whaling house of
+Enderby & Sons; a house which in my poor whaleman’s opinion, comes not
+far behind the united royal houses of the Tudors and Bourbons, in point
+of real historical interest. How long, prior to the year of our Lord
+1775, this great whaling house was in existence, my numerous
+fish-documents do not make plain; but in that year (1775) it fitted out
+the first English ships that ever regularly hunted the Sperm Whale;
+though for some score of years previous (ever since 1726) our valiant
+Coffins and Maceys of Nantucket and the Vineyard had in large fleets
+pursued that Leviathan, but only in the North and South Atlantic: not
+elsewhere. Be it distinctly recorded here, that the Nantucketers were
+the first among mankind to harpoon with civilized steel the great Sperm
+Whale; and that for half a century they were the only people of the
+whole globe who so harpooned him.
+
+In 1778, a fine ship, the Amelia, fitted out for the express purpose,
+and at the sole charge of the vigorous Enderbys, boldly rounded Cape
+Horn, and was the first among the nations to lower a whale-boat of any
+sort in the great South Sea. The voyage was a skilful and lucky one;
+and returning to her berth with her hold full of the precious sperm,
+the Amelia’s example was soon followed by other ships, English and
+American, and thus the vast Sperm Whale grounds of the Pacific were
+thrown open. But not content with this good deed, the indefatigable
+house again bestirred itself: Samuel and all his Sons—how many, their
+mother only knows—and under their immediate auspices, and partly, I
+think, at their expense, the British government was induced to send the
+sloop-of-war Rattler on a whaling voyage of discovery into the South
+Sea. Commanded by a naval Post-Captain, the Rattler made a rattling
+voyage of it, and did some service; how much does not appear. But this
+is not all. In 1819, the same house fitted out a discovery whale ship
+of their own, to go on a tasting cruise to the remote waters of Japan.
+That ship—well called the “Syren”—made a noble experimental cruise; and
+it was thus that the great Japanese Whaling Ground first became
+generally known. The Syren in this famous voyage was commanded by a
+Captain Coffin, a Nantucketer.
+
+All honor to the Enderbies, therefore, whose house, I think, exists to
+the present day; though doubtless the original Samuel must long ago
+have slipped his cable for the great South Sea of the other world.
+
+The ship named after him was worthy of the honor, being a very fast
+sailer and a noble craft every way. I boarded her once at midnight
+somewhere off the Patagonian coast, and drank good flip down in the
+forecastle. It was a fine gam we had, and they were all trumps—every
+soul on board. A short life to them, and a jolly death. And that fine
+gam I had—long, very long after old Ahab touched her planks with his
+ivory heel—it minds me of the noble, solid, Saxon hospitality of that
+ship; and may my parson forget me, and the devil remember me, if I ever
+lose sight of it. Flip? Did I say we had flip? Yes, and we flipped it
+at the rate of ten gallons the hour; and when the squall came (for it’s
+squally off there by Patagonia), and all hands—visitors and all—were
+called to reef topsails, we were so top-heavy that we had to swing each
+other aloft in bowlines; and we ignorantly furled the skirts of our
+jackets into the sails, so that we hung there, reefed fast in the
+howling gale, a warning example to all drunken tars. However, the masts
+did not go overboard; and by and by we scrambled down, so sober, that
+we had to pass the flip again, though the savage salt spray bursting
+down the forecastle scuttle, rather too much diluted and pickled it to
+my taste.
+
+The beef was fine—tough, but with body in it. They said it was
+bull-beef; others, that it was dromedary beef; but I do not know, for
+certain, how that was. They had dumplings too; small, but substantial,
+symmetrically globular, and indestructible dumplings. I fancied that
+you could feel them, and roll them about in you after they were
+swallowed. If you stooped over too far forward, you risked their
+pitching out of you like billiard-balls. The bread—but that couldn’t be
+helped; besides, it was an anti-scorbutic; in short, the bread
+contained the only fresh fare they had. But the forecastle was not very
+light, and it was very easy to step over into a dark corner when you
+ate it. But all in all, taking her from truck to helm, considering the
+dimensions of the cook’s boilers, including his own live parchment
+boilers; fore and aft, I say, the Samuel Enderby was a jolly ship; of
+good fare and plenty; fine flip and strong; crack fellows all, and
+capital from boot heels to hat-band.
+
+But why was it, think ye, that the Samuel Enderby, and some other
+English whalers I know of—not all though—were such famous, hospitable
+ships; that passed round the beef, and the bread, and the can, and the
+joke; and were not soon weary of eating, and drinking, and laughing? I
+will tell you. The abounding good cheer of these English whalers is
+matter for historical research. Nor have I been at all sparing of
+historical whale research, when it has seemed needed.
+
+The English were preceded in the whale fishery by the Hollanders,
+Zealanders, and Danes; from whom they derived many terms still extant
+in the fishery; and what is yet more, their fat old fashions, touching
+plenty to eat and drink. For, as a general thing, the English
+merchant-ship scrimps her crew; but not so the English whaler. Hence,
+in the English, this thing of whaling good cheer is not normal and
+natural, but incidental and particular; and, therefore, must have some
+special origin, which is here pointed out, and will be still further
+elucidated.
+
+During my researches in the Leviathanic histories, I stumbled upon an
+ancient Dutch volume, which, by the musty whaling smell of it, I knew
+must be about whalers. The title was, “Dan Coopman,” wherefore I
+concluded that this must be the invaluable memoirs of some Amsterdam
+cooper in the fishery, as every whale ship must carry its cooper. I was
+reinforced in this opinion by seeing that it was the production of one
+“Fitz Swackhammer.” But my friend Dr. Snodhead, a very learned man,
+professor of Low Dutch and High German in the college of Santa Claus
+and St. Pott’s, to whom I handed the work for translation, giving him a
+box of sperm candles for his trouble—this same Dr. Snodhead, so soon as
+he spied the book, assured me that “Dan Coopman” did not mean “The
+Cooper,” but “The Merchant.” In short, this ancient and learned Low
+Dutch book treated of the commerce of Holland; and, among other
+subjects, contained a very interesting account of its whale fishery.
+And in this chapter it was, headed, “Smeer,” or “Fat,” that I found a
+long detailed list of the outfits for the larders and cellars of 180
+sail of Dutch whalemen; from which list, as translated by Dr. Snodhead,
+I transcribe the following:
+
+400,000 lbs. of beef. 60,000 lbs. Friesland pork. 150,000 lbs. of stock
+fish. 550,000 lbs. of biscuit. 72,000 lbs. of soft bread. 2,800 firkins
+of butter. 20,000 lbs. Texel & Leyden cheese. 144,000 lbs. cheese
+(probably an inferior article). 550 ankers of Geneva. 10,800 barrels of
+beer.
+
+Most statistical tables are parchingly dry in the reading; not so in
+the present case, however, where the reader is flooded with whole
+pipes, barrels, quarts, and gills of good gin and good cheer.
+
+At the time, I devoted three days to the studious digesting of all this
+beer, beef, and bread, during which many profound thoughts were
+incidentally suggested to me, capable of a transcendental and Platonic
+application; and, furthermore, I compiled supplementary tables of my
+own, touching the probable quantity of stock-fish, etc., consumed by
+every Low Dutch harpooneer in that ancient Greenland and Spitzbergen
+whale fishery. In the first place, the amount of butter, and Texel and
+Leyden cheese consumed, seems amazing. I impute it, though, to their
+naturally unctuous natures, being rendered still more unctuous by the
+nature of their vocation, and especially by their pursuing their game
+in those frigid Polar Seas, on the very coasts of that Esquimaux
+country where the convivial natives pledge each other in bumpers of
+train oil.
+
+The quantity of beer, too, is very large, 10,800 barrels. Now, as those
+polar fisheries could only be prosecuted in the short summer of that
+climate, so that the whole cruise of one of these Dutch whalemen,
+including the short voyage to and from the Spitzbergen sea, did not
+much exceed three months, say, and reckoning 30 men to each of their
+fleet of 180 sail, we have 5,400 Low Dutch seamen in all; therefore, I
+say, we have precisely two barrels of beer per man, for a twelve weeks’
+allowance, exclusive of his fair proportion of that 550 ankers of gin.
+Now, whether these gin and beer harpooneers, so fuddled as one might
+fancy them to have been, were the right sort of men to stand up in a
+boat’s head, and take good aim at flying whales; this would seem
+somewhat improbable. Yet they did aim at them, and hit them too. But
+this was very far North, be it remembered, where beer agrees well with
+the constitution; upon the Equator, in our southern fishery, beer would
+be apt to make the harpooneer sleepy at the mast-head and boozy in his
+boat; and grievous loss might ensue to Nantucket and New Bedford.
+
+But no more; enough has been said to show that the old Dutch whalers of
+two or three centuries ago were high livers; and that the English
+whalers have not neglected so excellent an example. For, say they, when
+cruising in an empty ship, if you can get nothing better out of the
+world, get a good dinner out of it, at least. And this empties the
+decanter.
+
+
+CHAPTER 102. A Bower in the Arsacides.
+
+Hitherto, in descriptively treating of the Sperm Whale, I have chiefly
+dwelt upon the marvels of his outer aspect; or separately and in detail
+upon some few interior structural features. But to a large and thorough
+sweeping comprehension of him, it behooves me now to unbutton him still
+further, and untagging the points of his hose, unbuckling his garters,
+and casting loose the hooks and the eyes of the joints of his innermost
+bones, set him before you in his ultimatum; that is to say, in his
+unconditional skeleton.
+
+But how now, Ishmael? How is it, that you, a mere oarsman in the
+fishery, pretend to know aught about the subterranean parts of the
+whale? Did erudite Stubb, mounted upon your capstan, deliver lectures
+on the anatomy of the Cetacea; and by help of the windlass, hold up a
+specimen rib for exhibition? Explain thyself, Ishmael. Can you land a
+full-grown whale on your deck for examination, as a cook dishes a
+roast-pig? Surely not. A veritable witness have you hitherto been,
+Ishmael; but have a care how you seize the privilege of Jonah alone;
+the privilege of discoursing upon the joists and beams; the rafters,
+ridge-pole, sleepers, and under-pinnings, making up the frame-work of
+leviathan; and belike of the tallow-vats, dairy-rooms, butteries, and
+cheeseries in his bowels.
+
+I confess, that since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated very far
+beneath the skin of the adult whale; nevertheless, I have been blessed
+with an opportunity to dissect him in miniature. In a ship I belonged
+to, a small cub Sperm Whale was once bodily hoisted to the deck for his
+poke or bag, to make sheaths for the barbs of the harpoons, and for the
+heads of the lances. Think you I let that chance go, without using my
+boat-hatchet and jack-knife, and breaking the seal and reading all the
+contents of that young cub?
+
+And as for my exact knowledge of the bones of the leviathan in their
+gigantic, full grown development, for that rare knowledge I am indebted
+to my late royal friend Tranquo, king of Tranque, one of the Arsacides.
+For being at Tranque, years ago, when attached to the trading-ship Dey
+of Algiers, I was invited to spend part of the Arsacidean holidays with
+the lord of Tranque, at his retired palm villa at Pupella; a sea-side
+glen not very far distant from what our sailors called Bamboo-Town, his
+capital.
+
+Among many other fine qualities, my royal friend Tranquo, being gifted
+with a devout love for all matters of barbaric vertu, had brought
+together in Pupella whatever rare things the more ingenious of his
+people could invent; chiefly carved woods of wonderful devices,
+chiselled shells, inlaid spears, costly paddles, aromatic canoes; and
+all these distributed among whatever natural wonders, the
+wonder-freighted, tribute-rendering waves had cast upon his shores.
+
+Chief among these latter was a great Sperm Whale, which, after an
+unusually long raging gale, had been found dead and stranded, with his
+head against a cocoa-nut tree, whose plumage-like, tufted droopings
+seemed his verdant jet. When the vast body had at last been stripped of
+its fathom-deep enfoldings, and the bones become dust dry in the sun,
+then the skeleton was carefully transported up the Pupella glen, where
+a grand temple of lordly palms now sheltered it.
+
+The ribs were hung with trophies; the vertebræ were carved with
+Arsacidean annals, in strange hieroglyphics; in the skull, the priests
+kept up an unextinguished aromatic flame, so that the mystic head again
+sent forth its vapory spout; while, suspended from a bough, the
+terrific lower jaw vibrated over all the devotees, like the hair-hung
+sword that so affrighted Damocles.
+
+It was a wondrous sight. The wood was green as mosses of the Icy Glen;
+the trees stood high and haughty, feeling their living sap; the
+industrious earth beneath was as a weaver’s loom, with a gorgeous
+carpet on it, whereof the ground-vine tendrils formed the warp and
+woof, and the living flowers the figures. All the trees, with all their
+laden branches; all the shrubs, and ferns, and grasses; the
+message-carrying air; all these unceasingly were active. Through the
+lacings of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving
+the unwearied verdure. Oh, busy weaver! unseen weaver!—pause!—one
+word!—whither flows the fabric? what palace may it deck? wherefore all
+these ceaseless toilings? Speak, weaver!—stay thy hand!—but one single
+word with thee! Nay—the shuttle flies—the figures float from forth the
+loom; the freshet-rushing carpet for ever slides away. The weaver-god,
+he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal
+voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened;
+and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak
+through it. For even so it is in all material factories. The spoken
+words that are inaudible among the flying spindles; those same words
+are plainly heard without the walls, bursting from the opened
+casements. Thereby have villainies been detected. Ah, mortal! then, be
+heedful; for so, in all this din of the great world’s loom, thy
+subtlest thinkings may be overheard afar.
+
+Now, amid the green, life-restless loom of that Arsacidean wood, the
+great, white, worshipped skeleton lay lounging—a gigantic idler! Yet,
+as the ever-woven verdant warp and woof intermixed and hummed around
+him, the mighty idler seemed the cunning weaver; himself all woven over
+with the vines; every month assuming greener, fresher verdure; but
+himself a skeleton. Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim
+god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories.
+
+Now, when with royal Tranquo I visited this wondrous whale, and saw the
+skull an altar, and the artificial smoke ascending from where the real
+jet had issued, I marvelled that the king should regard a chapel as an
+object of vertu. He laughed. But more I marvelled that the priests
+should swear that smoky jet of his was genuine. To and fro I paced
+before this skeleton—brushed the vines aside—broke through the ribs—and
+with a ball of Arsacidean twine, wandered, eddied long amid its many
+winding, shaded colonnades and arbours. But soon my line was out; and
+following it back, I emerged from the opening where I entered. I saw no
+living thing within; naught was there but bones.
+
+Cutting me a green measuring-rod, I once more dived within the
+skeleton. From their arrow-slit in the skull, the priests perceived me
+taking the altitude of the final rib, “How now!” they shouted; “Dar’st
+thou measure this our god! That’s for us.” “Aye, priests—well, how long
+do ye make him, then?” But hereupon a fierce contest rose among them,
+concerning feet and inches; they cracked each other’s sconces with
+their yard-sticks—the great skull echoed—and seizing that lucky chance,
+I quickly concluded my own admeasurements.
+
+These admeasurements I now propose to set before you. But first, be it
+recorded, that, in this matter, I am not free to utter any fancied
+measurement I please. Because there are skeleton authorities you can
+refer to, to test my accuracy. There is a Leviathanic Museum, they tell
+me, in Hull, England, one of the whaling ports of that country, where
+they have some fine specimens of fin-backs and other whales. Likewise,
+I have heard that in the museum of Manchester, in New Hampshire, they
+have what the proprietors call “the only perfect specimen of a
+Greenland or River Whale in the United States.” Moreover, at a place in
+Yorkshire, England, Burton Constable by name, a certain Sir Clifford
+Constable has in his possession the skeleton of a Sperm Whale, but of
+moderate size, by no means of the full-grown magnitude of my friend
+King Tranquo’s.
+
+In both cases, the stranded whales to which these two skeletons
+belonged, were originally claimed by their proprietors upon similar
+grounds. King Tranquo seizing his because he wanted it; and Sir
+Clifford, because he was lord of the seignories of those parts. Sir
+Clifford’s whale has been articulated throughout; so that, like a great
+chest of drawers, you can open and shut him, in all his bony
+cavities—spread out his ribs like a gigantic fan—and swing all day upon
+his lower jaw. Locks are to be put upon some of his trap-doors and
+shutters; and a footman will show round future visitors with a bunch of
+keys at his side. Sir Clifford thinks of charging twopence for a peep
+at the whispering gallery in the spinal column; threepence to hear the
+echo in the hollow of his cerebellum; and sixpence for the unrivalled
+view from his forehead.
+
+The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied
+verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild
+wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving
+such valuable statistics. But as I was crowded for space, and wished
+the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then
+composing—at least, what untattooed parts might remain—I did not
+trouble myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at all
+enter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale.
+
+
+CHAPTER 103. Measurement of The Whale’s Skeleton.
+
+In the first place, I wish to lay before you a particular, plain
+statement, touching the living bulk of this leviathan, whose skeleton
+we are briefly to exhibit. Such a statement may prove useful here.
+
+According to a careful calculation I have made, and which I partly base
+upon Captain Scoresby’s estimate, of seventy tons for the largest sized
+Greenland whale of sixty feet in length; according to my careful
+calculation, I say, a Sperm Whale of the largest magnitude, between
+eighty-five and ninety feet in length, and something less than forty
+feet in its fullest circumference, such a whale will weigh at least
+ninety tons; so that, reckoning thirteen men to a ton, he would
+considerably outweigh the combined population of a whole village of one
+thousand one hundred inhabitants.
+
+Think you not then that brains, like yoked cattle, should be put to
+this leviathan, to make him at all budge to any landsman’s imagination?
+
+Having already in various ways put before you his skull, spout-hole,
+jaw, teeth, tail, forehead, fins, and divers other parts, I shall now
+simply point out what is most interesting in the general bulk of his
+unobstructed bones. But as the colossal skull embraces so very large a
+proportion of the entire extent of the skeleton; as it is by far the
+most complicated part; and as nothing is to be repeated concerning it
+in this chapter, you must not fail to carry it in your mind, or under
+your arm, as we proceed, otherwise you will not gain a complete notion
+of the general structure we are about to view.
+
+In length, the Sperm Whale’s skeleton at Tranque measured seventy-two
+feet; so that when fully invested and extended in life, he must have
+been ninety feet long; for in the whale, the skeleton loses about one
+fifth in length compared with the living body. Of this seventy-two
+feet, his skull and jaw comprised some twenty feet, leaving some fifty
+feet of plain back-bone. Attached to this back-bone, for something less
+than a third of its length, was the mighty circular basket of ribs
+which once enclosed his vitals.
+
+To me this vast ivory-ribbed chest, with the long, unrelieved spine,
+extending far away from it in a straight line, not a little resembled
+the hull of a great ship new-laid upon the stocks, when only some
+twenty of her naked bow-ribs are inserted, and the keel is otherwise,
+for the time, but a long, disconnected timber.
+
+The ribs were ten on a side. The first, to begin from the neck, was
+nearly six feet long; the second, third, and fourth were each
+successively longer, till you came to the climax of the fifth, or one
+of the middle ribs, which measured eight feet and some inches. From
+that part, the remaining ribs diminished, till the tenth and last only
+spanned five feet and some inches. In general thickness, they all bore
+a seemly correspondence to their length. The middle ribs were the most
+arched. In some of the Arsacides they are used for beams whereon to lay
+footpath bridges over small streams.
+
+In considering these ribs, I could not but be struck anew with the
+circumstance, so variously repeated in this book, that the skeleton of
+the whale is by no means the mould of his invested form. The largest of
+the Tranque ribs, one of the middle ones, occupied that part of the
+fish which, in life, is greatest in depth. Now, the greatest depth of
+the invested body of this particular whale must have been at least
+sixteen feet; whereas, the corresponding rib measured but little more
+than eight feet. So that this rib only conveyed half of the true notion
+of the living magnitude of that part. Besides, for some way, where I
+now saw but a naked spine, all that had been once wrapped round with
+tons of added bulk in flesh, muscle, blood, and bowels. Still more, for
+the ample fins, I here saw but a few disordered joints; and in place of
+the weighty and majestic, but boneless flukes, an utter blank!
+
+How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man to try
+to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring over his
+dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood. No. Only in
+the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his
+angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully
+invested whale be truly and livingly found out.
+
+But the spine. For that, the best way we can consider it is, with a
+crane, to pile its bones high up on end. No speedy enterprise. But now
+it’s done, it looks much like Pompey’s Pillar.
+
+There are forty and odd vertebræ in all, which in the skeleton are not
+locked together. They mostly lie like the great knobbed blocks on a
+Gothic spire, forming solid courses of heavy masonry. The largest, a
+middle one, is in width something less than three feet, and in depth
+more than four. The smallest, where the spine tapers away into the
+tail, is only two inches in width, and looks something like a white
+billiard-ball. I was told that there were still smaller ones, but they
+had been lost by some little cannibal urchins, the priest’s children,
+who had stolen them to play marbles with. Thus we see how that the
+spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into
+simple child’s play.
+
+
+CHAPTER 104. The Fossil Whale.
+
+From his mighty bulk the whale affords a most congenial theme whereon
+to enlarge, amplify, and generally expatiate. Would you, you could not
+compress him. By good rights he should only be treated of in imperial
+folio. Not to tell over again his furlongs from spiracle to tail, and
+the yards he measures about the waist; only think of the gigantic
+involutions of his intestines, where they lie in him like great cables
+and hawsers coiled away in the subterranean orlop-deck of a
+line-of-battle-ship.
+
+Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behooves me to
+approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise; not
+overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood, and spinning him
+out to the uttermost coil of his bowels. Having already described him
+in most of his present habitatory and anatomical peculiarities, it now
+remains to magnify him in an archæological, fossiliferous, and
+antediluvian point of view. Applied to any other creature than the
+Leviathan—to an ant or a flea—such portly terms might justly be deemed
+unwarrantably grandiloquent. But when Leviathan is the text, the case
+is altered. Fain am I to stagger to this emprise under the weightiest
+words of the dictionary. And here be it said, that whenever it has been
+convenient to consult one in the course of these dissertations, I have
+invariably used a huge quarto edition of Johnson, expressly purchased
+for that purpose; because that famous lexicographer’s uncommon personal
+bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon to be used by a whale author
+like me.
+
+One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject,
+though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of
+this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard
+capitals. Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an
+inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my
+thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their
+outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole
+circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and
+mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas
+of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding
+its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and
+liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you
+must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be
+written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.
+
+Ere entering upon the subject of Fossil Whales, I present my
+credentials as a geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous time I
+have been a stone-mason, and also a great digger of ditches, canals and
+wells, wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts. Likewise, by
+way of preliminary, I desire to remind the reader, that while in the
+earlier geological strata there are found the fossils of monsters now
+almost completely extinct; the subsequent relics discovered in what are
+called the Tertiary formations seem the connecting, or at any rate
+intercepted links, between the antichronical creatures, and those whose
+remote posterity are said to have entered the Ark; all the Fossil
+Whales hitherto discovered belong to the Tertiary period, which is the
+last preceding the superficial formations. And though none of them
+precisely answer to any known species of the present time, they are yet
+sufficiently akin to them in general respects, to justify their taking
+rank as Cetacean fossils.
+
+Detached broken fossils of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their bones
+and skeletons, have within thirty years past, at various intervals,
+been found at the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, in France, in England,
+in Scotland, and in the States of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.
+Among the more curious of such remains is part of a skull, which in the
+year 1779 was disinterred in the Rue Dauphine in Paris, a short street
+opening almost directly upon the palace of the Tuileries; and bones
+disinterred in excavating the great docks of Antwerp, in Napoleon’s
+time. Cuvier pronounced these fragments to have belonged to some
+utterly unknown Leviathanic species.
+
+But by far the most wonderful of all Cetacean relics was the almost
+complete vast skeleton of an extinct monster, found in the year 1842,
+on the plantation of Judge Creagh, in Alabama. The awe-stricken
+credulous slaves in the vicinity took it for the bones of one of the
+fallen angels. The Alabama doctors declared it a huge reptile, and
+bestowed upon it the name of Basilosaurus. But some specimen bones of
+it being taken across the sea to Owen, the English Anatomist, it turned
+out that this alleged reptile was a whale, though of a departed
+species. A significant illustration of the fact, again and again
+repeated in this book, that the skeleton of the whale furnishes but
+little clue to the shape of his fully invested body. So Owen
+rechristened the monster Zeuglodon; and in his paper read before the
+London Geological Society, pronounced it, in substance, one of the most
+extraordinary creatures which the mutations of the globe have blotted
+out of existence.
+
+When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks,
+jaws, ribs, and vertebræ, all characterized by partial resemblances to
+the existing breeds of sea-monsters; but at the same time bearing on
+the other hand similar affinities to the annihilated antichronical
+Leviathans, their incalculable seniors; I am, by a flood, borne back to
+that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun; for
+time began with man. Here Saturn’s grey chaos rolls over me, and I
+obtain dim, shuddering glimpses into those Polar eternities; when
+wedged bastions of ice pressed hard upon what are now the Tropics; and
+in all the 25,000 miles of this world’s circumference, not an
+inhabitable hand’s breadth of land was visible. Then the whole world
+was the whale’s; and, king of creation, he left his wake along the
+present lines of the Andes and the Himmalehs. Who can show a pedigree
+like Leviathan? Ahab’s harpoon had shed older blood than the Pharaoh’s.
+Methuselah seems a school-boy. I look round to shake hands with Shem. I
+am horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the
+unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been before all time,
+must needs exist after all humane ages are over.
+
+But not alone has this Leviathan left his pre-adamite traces in the
+stereotype plates of nature, and in limestone and marl bequeathed his
+ancient bust; but upon Egyptian tablets, whose antiquity seems to claim
+for them an almost fossiliferous character, we find the unmistakable
+print of his fin. In an apartment of the great temple of Denderah, some
+fifty years ago, there was discovered upon the granite ceiling a
+sculptured and painted planisphere, abounding in centaurs, griffins,
+and dolphins, similar to the grotesque figures on the celestial globe
+of the moderns. Gliding among them, old Leviathan swam as of yore; was
+there swimming in that planisphere, centuries before Solomon was
+cradled.
+
+Nor must there be omitted another strange attestation of the antiquity
+of the whale, in his own osseous post-diluvian reality, as set down by
+the venerable John Leo, the old Barbary traveller.
+
+“Not far from the Sea-side, they have a Temple, the Rafters and Beams
+of which are made of Whale-Bones; for Whales of a monstrous size are
+oftentimes cast up dead upon that shore. The Common People imagine,
+that by a secret Power bestowed by God upon the Temple, no Whale can
+pass it without immediate death. But the truth of the Matter is, that
+on either side of the Temple, there are Rocks that shoot two Miles into
+the Sea, and wound the Whales when they light upon ’em. They keep a
+Whale’s Rib of an incredible length for a Miracle, which lying upon the
+Ground with its convex part uppermost, makes an Arch, the Head of which
+cannot be reached by a Man upon a Camel’s Back. This Rib (says John
+Leo) is said to have layn there a hundred Years before I saw it. Their
+Historians affirm, that a Prophet who prophesy’d of Mahomet, came from
+this Temple, and some do not stand to assert, that the Prophet Jonas
+was cast forth by the Whale at the Base of the Temple.”
+
+In this Afric Temple of the Whale I leave you, reader, and if you be a
+Nantucketer, and a whaleman, you will silently worship there.
+
+
+CHAPTER 105. Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish?—Will He Perish?
+
+Inasmuch, then, as this Leviathan comes floundering down upon us from
+the head-waters of the Eternities, it may be fitly inquired, whether,
+in the long course of his generations, he has not degenerated from the
+original bulk of his sires.
+
+But upon investigation we find, that not only are the whales of the
+present day superior in magnitude to those whose fossil remains are
+found in the Tertiary system (embracing a distinct geological period
+prior to man), but of the whales found in that Tertiary system, those
+belonging to its latter formations exceed in size those of its earlier
+ones.
+
+Of all the pre-adamite whales yet exhumed, by far the largest is the
+Alabama one mentioned in the last chapter, and that was less than
+seventy feet in length in the skeleton. Whereas, we have already seen,
+that the tape-measure gives seventy-two feet for the skeleton of a
+large sized modern whale. And I have heard, on whalemen’s authority,
+that Sperm Whales have been captured near a hundred feet long at the
+time of capture.
+
+But may it not be, that while the whales of the present hour are an
+advance in magnitude upon those of all previous geological periods; may
+it not be, that since Adam’s time they have degenerated?
+
+Assuredly, we must conclude so, if we are to credit the accounts of
+such gentlemen as Pliny, and the ancient naturalists generally. For
+Pliny tells us of whales that embraced acres of living bulk, and
+Aldrovandus of others which measured eight hundred feet in length—Rope
+Walks and Thames Tunnels of Whales! And even in the days of Banks and
+Solander, Cooke’s naturalists, we find a Danish member of the Academy
+of Sciences setting down certain Iceland Whales (reydan-siskur, or
+Wrinkled Bellies) at one hundred and twenty yards; that is, three
+hundred and sixty feet. And Lacépède, the French naturalist, in his
+elaborate history of whales, in the very beginning of his work (page
+3), sets down the Right Whale at one hundred metres, three hundred and
+twenty-eight feet. And this work was published so late as A.D. 1825.
+
+But will any whaleman believe these stories? No. The whale of to-day is
+as big as his ancestors in Pliny’s time. And if ever I go where Pliny
+is, I, a whaleman (more than he was), will make bold to tell him so.
+Because I cannot understand how it is, that while the Egyptian mummies
+that were buried thousands of years before even Pliny was born, do not
+measure so much in their coffins as a modern Kentuckian in his socks;
+and while the cattle and other animals sculptured on the oldest
+Egyptian and Nineveh tablets, by the relative proportions in which they
+are drawn, just as plainly prove that the high-bred, stall-fed, prize
+cattle of Smithfield, not only equal, but far exceed in magnitude the
+fattest of Pharaoh’s fat kine; in the face of all this, I will not
+admit that of all animals the whale alone should have degenerated.
+
+But still another inquiry remains; one often agitated by the more
+recondite Nantucketers. Whether owing to the almost omniscient
+look-outs at the mast-heads of the whale-ships, now penetrating even
+through Behring’s straits, and into the remotest secret drawers and
+lockers of the world; and the thousand harpoons and lances darted along
+all continental coasts; the moot point is, whether Leviathan can long
+endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not
+at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the
+last man, smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final
+puff.
+
+Comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo,
+which, not forty years ago, overspread by tens of thousands the
+prairies of Illinois and Missouri, and shook their iron manes and
+scowled with their thunder-clotted brows upon the sites of populous
+river-capitals, where now the polite broker sells you land at a dollar
+an inch; in such a comparison an irresistible argument would seem
+furnished, to show that the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy
+extinction.
+
+But you must look at this matter in every light. Though so short a
+period ago—not a good lifetime—the census of the buffalo in Illinois
+exceeded the census of men now in London, and though at the present day
+not one horn or hoof of them remains in all that region; and though the
+cause of this wondrous extermination was the spear of man; yet the far
+different nature of the whale-hunt peremptorily forbids so inglorious
+an end to the Leviathan. Forty men in one ship hunting the Sperm Whales
+for forty-eight months think they have done extremely well, and thank
+God, if at last they carry home the oil of forty fish. Whereas, in the
+days of the old Canadian and Indian hunters and trappers of the West,
+when the far west (in whose sunset suns still rise) was a wilderness
+and a virgin, the same number of moccasined men, for the same number of
+months, mounted on horse instead of sailing in ships, would have slain
+not forty, but forty thousand and more buffaloes; a fact that, if need
+were, could be statistically stated.
+
+Nor, considered aright, does it seem any argument in favour of the
+gradual extinction of the Sperm Whale, for example, that in former
+years (the latter part of the last century, say) these Leviathans, in
+small pods, were encountered much oftener than at present, and, in
+consequence, the voyages were not so prolonged, and were also much more
+remunerative. Because, as has been elsewhere noticed, those whales,
+influenced by some views to safety, now swim the seas in immense
+caravans, so that to a large degree the scattered solitaries, yokes,
+and pods, and schools of other days are now aggregated into vast but
+widely separated, unfrequent armies. That is all. And equally
+fallacious seems the conceit, that because the so-called whale-bone
+whales no longer haunt many grounds in former years abounding with
+them, hence that species also is declining. For they are only being
+driven from promontory to cape; and if one coast is no longer enlivened
+with their jets, then, be sure, some other and remoter strand has been
+very recently startled by the unfamiliar spectacle.
+
+Furthermore: concerning these last mentioned Leviathans, they have two
+firm fortresses, which, in all human probability, will for ever remain
+impregnable. And as upon the invasion of their valleys, the frosty
+Swiss have retreated to their mountains; so, hunted from the savannas
+and glades of the middle seas, the whale-bone whales can at last resort
+to their Polar citadels, and diving under the ultimate glassy barriers
+and walls there, come up among icy fields and floes; and in a charmed
+circle of everlasting December, bid defiance to all pursuit from man.
+
+But as perhaps fifty of these whale-bone whales are harpooned for one
+cachalot, some philosophers of the forecastle have concluded that this
+positive havoc has already very seriously diminished their battalions.
+But though for some time past a number of these whales, not less than
+13,000, have been annually slain on the nor’ west coast by the
+Americans alone; yet there are considerations which render even this
+circumstance of little or no account as an opposing argument in this
+matter.
+
+Natural as it is to be somewhat incredulous concerning the populousness
+of the more enormous creatures of the globe, yet what shall we say to
+Harto, the historian of Goa, when he tells us that at one hunting the
+King of Siam took 4,000 elephants; that in those regions elephants are
+numerous as droves of cattle in the temperate climes. And there seems
+no reason to doubt that if these elephants, which have now been hunted
+for thousands of years, by Semiramis, by Porus, by Hannibal, and by all
+the successive monarchs of the East—if they still survive there in
+great numbers, much more may the great whale outlast all hunting, since
+he has a pasture to expatiate in, which is precisely twice as large as
+all Asia, both Americas, Europe and Africa, New Holland, and all the
+Isles of the sea combined.
+
+Moreover: we are to consider, that from the presumed great longevity of
+whales, their probably attaining the age of a century and more,
+therefore at any one period of time, several distinct adult generations
+must be contemporary. And what that is, we may soon gain some idea of,
+by imagining all the grave-yards, cemeteries, and family vaults of
+creation yielding up the live bodies of all the men, women, and
+children who were alive seventy-five years ago; and adding this
+countless host to the present human population of the globe.
+
+Wherefore, for all these things, we account the whale immortal in his
+species, however perishable in his individuality. He swam the seas
+before the continents broke water; he once swam over the site of the
+Tuileries, and Windsor Castle, and the Kremlin. In Noah’s flood he
+despised Noah’s Ark; and if ever the world is to be again flooded, like
+the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will
+still survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial
+flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies.
+
+
+CHAPTER 106. Ahab’s Leg.
+
+The precipitating manner in which Captain Ahab had quitted the Samuel
+Enderby of London, had not been unattended with some small violence to
+his own person. He had lighted with such energy upon a thwart of his
+boat that his ivory leg had received a half-splintering shock. And when
+after gaining his own deck, and his own pivot-hole there, he so
+vehemently wheeled round with an urgent command to the steersman (it
+was, as ever, something about his not steering inflexibly enough);
+then, the already shaken ivory received such an additional twist and
+wrench, that though it still remained entire, and to all appearances
+lusty, yet Ahab did not deem it entirely trustworthy.
+
+And, indeed, it seemed small matter for wonder, that for all his
+pervading, mad recklessness, Ahab did at times give careful heed to the
+condition of that dead bone upon which he partly stood. For it had not
+been very long prior to the Pequod’s sailing from Nantucket, that he
+had been found one night lying prone upon the ground, and insensible;
+by some unknown, and seemingly inexplicable, unimaginable casualty, his
+ivory limb having been so violently displaced, that it had stake-wise
+smitten, and all but pierced his groin; nor was it without extreme
+difficulty that the agonizing wound was entirely cured.
+
+Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that all
+the anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct issue of
+a former woe; and he too plainly seemed to see, that as the most
+poisonous reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as
+the sweetest songster of the grove; so, equally with every felicity,
+all miserable events do naturally beget their like. Yea, more than
+equally, thought Ahab; since both the ancestry and posterity of Grief
+go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy. For, not to hint of
+this: that it is an inference from certain canonic teachings, that
+while some natural enjoyments here shall have no children born to them
+for the other world, but, on the contrary, shall be followed by the
+joy-childlessness of all hell’s despair; whereas, some guilty mortal
+miseries shall still fertilely beget to themselves an eternally
+progressive progeny of griefs beyond the grave; not at all to hint of
+this, there still seems an inequality in the deeper analysis of the
+thing. For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities
+ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at
+bottom, all heartwoes, a mystic significance, and, in some men, an
+archangelic grandeur; so do their diligent tracings-out not belie the
+obvious deduction. To trail the genealogies of these high mortal
+miseries, carries us at last among the sourceless primogenitures of the
+gods; so that, in the face of all the glad, hay-making suns, and soft
+cymballing, round harvest-moons, we must needs give in to this: that
+the gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad
+birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the
+signers.
+
+Unwittingly here a secret has been divulged, which perhaps might more
+properly, in set way, have been disclosed before. With many other
+particulars concerning Ahab, always had it remained a mystery to some,
+why it was, that for a certain period, both before and after the
+sailing of the Pequod, he had hidden himself away with such
+Grand-Lama-like exclusiveness; and, for that one interval, sought
+speechless refuge, as it were, among the marble senate of the dead.
+Captain Peleg’s bruited reason for this thing appeared by no means
+adequate; though, indeed, as touching all Ahab’s deeper part, every
+revelation partook more of significant darkness than of explanatory
+light. But, in the end, it all came out; this one matter did, at least.
+That direful mishap was at the bottom of his temporary recluseness. And
+not only this, but to that ever-contracting, dropping circle ashore,
+who, for any reason, possessed the privilege of a less banned approach
+to him; to that timid circle the above hinted casualty—remaining, as it
+did, moodily unaccounted for by Ahab—invested itself with terrors, not
+entirely underived from the land of spirits and of wails. So that,
+through their zeal for him, they had all conspired, so far as in them
+lay, to muffle up the knowledge of this thing from others; and hence it
+was, that not till a considerable interval had elapsed, did it
+transpire upon the Pequod’s decks.
+
+But be all this as it may; let the unseen, ambiguous synod in the air,
+or the vindictive princes and potentates of fire, have to do or not
+with earthly Ahab, yet, in this present matter of his leg, he took
+plain practical procedures;—he called the carpenter.
+
+And when that functionary appeared before him, he bade him without
+delay set about making a new leg, and directed the mates to see him
+supplied with all the studs and joists of jaw-ivory (Sperm Whale) which
+had thus far been accumulated on the voyage, in order that a careful
+selection of the stoutest, clearest-grained stuff might be secured.
+This done, the carpenter received orders to have the leg completed that
+night; and to provide all the fittings for it, independent of those
+pertaining to the distrusted one in use. Moreover, the ship’s forge was
+ordered to be hoisted out of its temporary idleness in the hold; and,
+to accelerate the affair, the blacksmith was commanded to proceed at
+once to the forging of whatever iron contrivances might be needed.
+
+
+CHAPTER 107. The Carpenter.
+
+Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high
+abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But
+from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they
+seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.
+But most humble though he was, and far from furnishing an example of
+the high, humane abstraction; the Pequod’s carpenter was no duplicate;
+hence, he now comes in person on this stage.
+
+Like all sea-going ship carpenters, and more especially those belonging
+to whaling vessels, he was, to a certain off-handed, practical extent,
+alike experienced in numerous trades and callings collateral to his
+own; the carpenter’s pursuit being the ancient and outbranching trunk
+of all those numerous handicrafts which more or less have to do with
+wood as an auxiliary material. But, besides the application to him of
+the generic remark above, this carpenter of the Pequod was singularly
+efficient in those thousand nameless mechanical emergencies continually
+recurring in a large ship, upon a three or four years’ voyage, in
+uncivilized and far-distant seas. For not to speak of his readiness in
+ordinary duties:—repairing stove boats, sprung spars, reforming the
+shape of clumsy-bladed oars, inserting bull’s eyes in the deck, or new
+tree-nails in the side planks, and other miscellaneous matters more
+directly pertaining to his special business; he was moreover
+unhesitatingly expert in all manner of conflicting aptitudes, both
+useful and capricious.
+
+The one grand stage where he enacted all his various parts so manifold,
+was his vice-bench; a long rude ponderous table furnished with several
+vices, of different sizes, and both of iron and of wood. At all times
+except when whales were alongside, this bench was securely lashed
+athwartships against the rear of the Try-works.
+
+A belaying pin is found too large to be easily inserted into its hole:
+the carpenter claps it into one of his ever-ready vices, and
+straightway files it smaller. A lost land-bird of strange plumage
+strays on board, and is made a captive: out of clean shaved rods of
+right-whale bone, and cross-beams of sperm whale ivory, the carpenter
+makes a pagoda-looking cage for it. An oarsman sprains his wrist: the
+carpenter concocts a soothing lotion. Stubb longed for vermillion stars
+to be painted upon the blade of his every oar; screwing each oar in his
+big vice of wood, the carpenter symmetrically supplies the
+constellation. A sailor takes a fancy to wear shark-bone ear-rings: the
+carpenter drills his ears. Another has the toothache: the carpenter out
+pincers, and clapping one hand upon his bench bids him be seated there;
+but the poor fellow unmanageably winces under the unconcluded
+operation; whirling round the handle of his wooden vice, the carpenter
+signs him to clap his jaw in that, if he would have him draw the tooth.
+
+Thus, this carpenter was prepared at all points, and alike indifferent
+and without respect in all. Teeth he accounted bits of ivory; heads he
+deemed but top-blocks; men themselves he lightly held for capstans. But
+while now upon so wide a field thus variously accomplished and with
+such liveliness of expertness in him, too; all this would seem to argue
+some uncommon vivacity of intelligence. But not precisely so. For
+nothing was this man more remarkable, than for a certain impersonal
+stolidity as it were; impersonal, I say; for it so shaded off into the
+surrounding infinite of things, that it seemed one with the general
+stolidity discernible in the whole visible world; which while
+pauselessly active in uncounted modes, still eternally holds its peace,
+and ignores you, though you dig foundations for cathedrals. Yet was
+this half-horrible stolidity in him, involving, too, as it appeared, an
+all-ramifying heartlessness;—yet was it oddly dashed at times, with an
+old, crutch-like, antediluvian, wheezing humorousness, not unstreaked
+now and then with a certain grizzled wittiness; such as might have
+served to pass the time during the midnight watch on the bearded
+forecastle of Noah’s ark. Was it that this old carpenter had been a
+life-long wanderer, whose much rolling, to and fro, not only had
+gathered no moss; but what is more, had rubbed off whatever small
+outward clingings might have originally pertained to him? He was a
+stript abstract; an unfractioned integral; uncompromised as a new-born
+babe; living without premeditated reference to this world or the next.
+You might almost say, that this strange uncompromisedness in him
+involved a sort of unintelligence; for in his numerous trades, he did
+not seem to work so much by reason or by instinct, or simply because he
+had been tutored to it, or by any intermixture of all these, even or
+uneven; but merely by a kind of deaf and dumb, spontaneous literal
+process. He was a pure manipulator; his brain, if he had ever had one,
+must have early oozed along into the muscles of his fingers. He was
+like one of those unreasoning but still highly useful, _multum in
+parvo_, Sheffield contrivances, assuming the exterior—though a little
+swelled—of a common pocket knife; but containing, not only blades of
+various sizes, but also screw-drivers, cork-screws, tweezers, awls,
+pens, rulers, nail-filers, countersinkers. So, if his superiors wanted
+to use the carpenter for a screw-driver, all they had to do was to open
+that part of him, and the screw was fast: or if for tweezers, take him
+up by the legs, and there they were.
+
+Yet, as previously hinted, this omnitooled, open-and-shut carpenter,
+was, after all, no mere machine of an automaton. If he did not have a
+common soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow anomalously
+did its duty. What that was, whether essence of quicksilver, or a few
+drops of hartshorn, there is no telling. But there it was; and there it
+had abided for now some sixty years or more. And this it was, this same
+unaccountable, cunning life-principle in him; this it was, that kept
+him a great part of the time soliloquizing; but only like an
+unreasoning wheel, which also hummingly soliloquizes; or rather, his
+body was a sentry-box and this soliloquizer on guard there, and talking
+all the time to keep himself awake.
+
+
+CHAPTER 108. Ahab and the Carpenter.
+
+The Deck—First Night Watch.
+
+(_Carpenter standing before his vice-bench, and by the light of two
+lanterns busily filing the ivory joist for the leg, which joist is
+firmly fixed in the vice. Slabs of ivory, leather straps, pads, screws,
+and various tools of all sorts lying about the bench. Forward, the red
+flame of the forge is seen, where the blacksmith is at work._)
+
+Drat the file, and drat the bone! That is hard which should be soft,
+and that is soft which should be hard. So we go, who file old jaws and
+shinbones. Let’s try another. Aye, now, this works better (_sneezes_).
+Halloa, this bone dust is (_sneezes_)—why it’s (_sneezes_)—yes it’s
+(_sneezes_)—bless my soul, it won’t let me speak! This is what an old
+fellow gets now for working in dead lumber. Saw a live tree, and you
+don’t get this dust; amputate a live bone, and you don’t get it
+(_sneezes_). Come, come, you old Smut, there, bear a hand, and let’s
+have that ferule and buckle-screw; I’ll be ready for them presently.
+Lucky now (_sneezes_) there’s no knee-joint to make; that might puzzle
+a little; but a mere shinbone—why it’s easy as making hop-poles; only I
+should like to put a good finish on. Time, time; if I but only had the
+time, I could turn him out as neat a leg now as ever (_sneezes_)
+scraped to a lady in a parlor. Those buckskin legs and calves of legs
+I’ve seen in shop windows wouldn’t compare at all. They soak water,
+they do; and of course get rheumatic, and have to be doctored
+(_sneezes_) with washes and lotions, just like live legs. There; before
+I saw it off, now, I must call his old Mogulship, and see whether the
+length will be all right; too short, if anything, I guess. Ha! that’s
+the heel; we are in luck; here he comes, or it’s somebody else, that’s
+certain.
+
+AHAB (_advancing_). (_During the ensuing scene, the carpenter continues
+sneezing at times._)
+
+Well, manmaker!
+
+Just in time, sir. If the captain pleases, I will now mark the length.
+Let me measure, sir.
+
+Measured for a leg! good. Well, it’s not the first time. About it!
+There; keep thy finger on it. This is a cogent vice thou hast here,
+carpenter; let me feel its grip once. So, so; it does pinch some.
+
+Oh, sir, it will break bones—beware, beware!
+
+No fear; I like a good grip; I like to feel something in this slippery
+world that can hold, man. What’s Prometheus about there?—the
+blacksmith, I mean—what’s he about?
+
+He must be forging the buckle-screw, sir, now.
+
+Right. It’s a partnership; he supplies the muscle part. He makes a
+fierce red flame there!
+
+Aye, sir; he must have the white heat for this kind of fine work.
+
+Um-m. So he must. I do deem it now a most meaning thing, that that old
+Greek, Prometheus, who made men, they say, should have been a
+blacksmith, and animated them with fire; for what’s made in fire must
+properly belong to fire; and so hell’s probable. How the soot flies!
+This must be the remainder the Greek made the Africans of. Carpenter,
+when he’s through with that buckle, tell him to forge a pair of steel
+shoulder-blades; there’s a pedlar aboard with a crushing pack.
+
+Sir?
+
+Hold; while Prometheus is about it, I’ll order a complete man after a
+desirable pattern. Imprimis, fifty feet high in his socks; then, chest
+modelled after the Thames Tunnel; then, legs with roots to ’em, to stay
+in one place; then, arms three feet through the wrist; no heart at all,
+brass forehead, and about a quarter of an acre of fine brains; and let
+me see—shall I order eyes to see outwards? No, but put a sky-light on
+top of his head to illuminate inwards. There, take the order, and away.
+
+Now, what’s he speaking about, and who’s he speaking to, I should like
+to know? Shall I keep standing here? (_aside_).
+
+’Tis but indifferent architecture to make a blind dome; here’s one. No,
+no, no; I must have a lantern.
+
+Ho, ho! That’s it, hey? Here are two, sir; one will serve my turn.
+
+What art thou thrusting that thief-catcher into my face for, man?
+Thrusted light is worse than presented pistols.
+
+I thought, sir, that you spoke to carpenter.
+
+Carpenter? why that’s—but no;—a very tidy, and, I may say, an extremely
+gentlemanlike sort of business thou art in here, carpenter;—or would’st
+thou rather work in clay?
+
+Sir?—Clay? clay, sir? That’s mud; we leave clay to ditchers, sir.
+
+The fellow’s impious! What art thou sneezing about?
+
+Bone is rather dusty, sir.
+
+Take the hint, then; and when thou art dead, never bury thyself under
+living people’s noses.
+
+Sir?—oh! ah!—I guess so;—yes—oh, dear!
+
+Look ye, carpenter, I dare say thou callest thyself a right good
+workmanlike workman, eh? Well, then, will it speak thoroughly well for
+thy work, if, when I come to mount this leg thou makest, I shall
+nevertheless feel another leg in the same identical place with it; that
+is, carpenter, my old lost leg; the flesh and blood one, I mean. Canst
+thou not drive that old Adam away?
+
+Truly, sir, I begin to understand somewhat now. Yes, I have heard
+something curious on that score, sir; how that a dismasted man never
+entirely loses the feeling of his old spar, but it will be still
+pricking him at times. May I humbly ask if it be really so, sir?
+
+It is, man. Look, put thy live leg here in the place where mine once
+was; so, now, here is only one distinct leg to the eye, yet two to the
+soul. Where thou feelest tingling life; there, exactly there, there to
+a hair, do I. Is’t a riddle?
+
+I should humbly call it a poser, sir.
+
+Hist, then. How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing
+may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where
+thou now standest; aye, and standing there in thy spite? In thy most
+solitary hours, then, dost thou not fear eavesdroppers? Hold, don’t
+speak! And if I still feel the smart of my crushed leg, though it be
+now so long dissolved; then, why mayst not thou, carpenter, feel the
+fiery pains of hell for ever, and without a body? Hah!
+
+Good Lord! Truly, sir, if it comes to that, I must calculate over
+again; I think I didn’t carry a small figure, sir.
+
+Look ye, pudding-heads should never grant premises.—How long before the
+leg is done?
+
+Perhaps an hour, sir.
+
+Bungle away at it then, and bring it to me (_turns to go_). Oh, Life!
+Here I am, proud as Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this
+blockhead for a bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal
+inter-indebtedness which will not do away with ledgers. I would be free
+as air; and I’m down in the whole world’s books. I am so rich, I could
+have given bid for bid with the wealthiest Prætorians at the auction of
+the Roman empire (which was the world’s); and yet I owe for the flesh
+in the tongue I brag with. By heavens! I’ll get a crucible, and into
+it, and dissolve myself down to one small, compendious vertebra. So.
+
+CARPENTER (_resuming his work_).
+
+Well, well, well! Stubb knows him best of all, and Stubb always says
+he’s queer; says nothing but that one sufficient little word queer;
+he’s queer, says Stubb; he’s queer—queer, queer; and keeps dinning it
+into Mr. Starbuck all the time—queer—sir—queer, queer, very queer. And
+here’s his leg! Yes, now that I think of it, here’s his bedfellow! has
+a stick of whale’s jaw-bone for a wife! And this is his leg; he’ll
+stand on this. What was that now about one leg standing in three
+places, and all three places standing in one hell—how was that? Oh! I
+don’t wonder he looked so scornful at me! I’m a sort of
+strange-thoughted sometimes, they say; but that’s only haphazard-like.
+Then, a short, little old body like me, should never undertake to wade
+out into deep waters with tall, heron-built captains; the water chucks
+you under the chin pretty quick, and there’s a great cry for
+life-boats. And here’s the heron’s leg! long and slim, sure enough!
+Now, for most folks one pair of legs lasts a lifetime, and that must be
+because they use them mercifully, as a tender-hearted old lady uses her
+roly-poly old coach-horses. But Ahab; oh he’s a hard driver. Look,
+driven one leg to death, and spavined the other for life, and now wears
+out bone legs by the cord. Halloa, there, you Smut! bear a hand there
+with those screws, and let’s finish it before the resurrection fellow
+comes a-calling with his horn for all legs, true or false, as
+brewery-men go round collecting old beer barrels, to fill ’em up again.
+What a leg this is! It looks like a real live leg, filed down to
+nothing but the core; he’ll be standing on this to-morrow; he’ll be
+taking altitudes on it. Halloa! I almost forgot the little oval slate,
+smoothed ivory, where he figures up the latitude. So, so; chisel, file,
+and sand-paper, now!
+
+
+CHAPTER 109. Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin.
+
+According to usage they were pumping the ship next morning; and lo! no
+inconsiderable oil came up with the water; the casks below must have
+sprung a bad leak. Much concern was shown; and Starbuck went down into
+the cabin to report this unfavourable affair.*
+
+*In Sperm-whalemen with any considerable quantity of oil on board, it
+is a regular semi-weekly duty to conduct a hose into the hold, and
+drench the casks with sea-water; which afterwards, at varying
+intervals, is removed by the ship’s pumps. Hereby the casks are sought
+to be kept damply tight; while by the changed character of the
+withdrawn water, the mariners readily detect any serious leakage in the
+precious cargo.
+
+Now, from the South and West the Pequod was drawing nigh to Formosa and
+the Bashee Isles, between which lies one of the tropical outlets from
+the China waters into the Pacific. And so Starbuck found Ahab with a
+general chart of the oriental archipelagoes spread before him; and
+another separate one representing the long eastern coasts of the
+Japanese islands—Niphon, Matsmai, and Sikoke. With his snow-white new
+ivory leg braced against the screwed leg of his table, and with a long
+pruning-hook of a jack-knife in his hand, the wondrous old man, with
+his back to the gangway door, was wrinkling his brow, and tracing his
+old courses again.
+
+“Who’s there?” hearing the footstep at the door, but not turning round
+to it. “On deck! Begone!”
+
+“Captain Ahab mistakes; it is I. The oil in the hold is leaking, sir.
+We must up Burtons and break out.”
+
+“Up Burtons and break out? Now that we are nearing Japan; heave-to here
+for a week to tinker a parcel of old hoops?”
+
+“Either do that, sir, or waste in one day more oil than we may make
+good in a year. What we come twenty thousand miles to get is worth
+saving, sir.”
+
+“So it is, so it is; if we get it.”
+
+“I was speaking of the oil in the hold, sir.”
+
+“And I was not speaking or thinking of that at all. Begone! Let it
+leak! I’m all aleak myself. Aye! leaks in leaks! not only full of leaky
+casks, but those leaky casks are in a leaky ship; and that’s a far
+worse plight than the Pequod’s, man. Yet I don’t stop to plug my leak;
+for who can find it in the deep-loaded hull; or how hope to plug it,
+even if found, in this life’s howling gale? Starbuck! I’ll not have the
+Burtons hoisted.”
+
+“What will the owners say, sir?”
+
+“Let the owners stand on Nantucket beach and outyell the Typhoons. What
+cares Ahab? Owners, owners? Thou art always prating to me, Starbuck,
+about those miserly owners, as if the owners were my conscience. But
+look ye, the only real owner of anything is its commander; and hark ye,
+my conscience is in this ship’s keel.—On deck!”
+
+“Captain Ahab,” said the reddening mate, moving further into the cabin,
+with a daring so strangely respectful and cautious that it almost
+seemed not only every way seeking to avoid the slightest outward
+manifestation of itself, but within also seemed more than half
+distrustful of itself; “A better man than I might well pass over in
+thee what he would quickly enough resent in a younger man; aye, and in
+a happier, Captain Ahab.”
+
+“Devils! Dost thou then so much as dare to critically think of me?—On
+deck!”
+
+“Nay, sir, not yet; I do entreat. And I do dare, sir—to be forbearing!
+Shall we not understand each other better than hitherto, Captain Ahab?”
+
+Ahab seized a loaded musket from the rack (forming part of most
+South-Sea-men’s cabin furniture), and pointing it towards Starbuck,
+exclaimed: “There is one God that is Lord over the earth, and one
+Captain that is lord over the Pequod.—On deck!”
+
+For an instant in the flashing eyes of the mate, and his fiery cheeks,
+you would have almost thought that he had really received the blaze of
+the levelled tube. But, mastering his emotion, he half calmly rose, and
+as he quitted the cabin, paused for an instant and said: “Thou hast
+outraged, not insulted me, sir; but for that I ask thee not to beware
+of Starbuck; thou wouldst but laugh; but let Ahab beware of Ahab;
+beware of thyself, old man.”
+
+“He waxes brave, but nevertheless obeys; most careful bravery that!”
+murmured Ahab, as Starbuck disappeared. “What’s that he said—Ahab
+beware of Ahab—there’s something there!” Then unconsciously using the
+musket for a staff, with an iron brow he paced to and fro in the little
+cabin; but presently the thick plaits of his forehead relaxed, and
+returning the gun to the rack, he went to the deck.
+
+“Thou art but too good a fellow, Starbuck,” he said lowly to the mate;
+then raising his voice to the crew: “Furl the t’gallant-sails, and
+close-reef the top-sails, fore and aft; back the main-yard; up Burton,
+and break out in the main-hold.”
+
+It were perhaps vain to surmise exactly why it was, that as respecting
+Starbuck, Ahab thus acted. It may have been a flash of honesty in him;
+or mere prudential policy which, under the circumstance, imperiously
+forbade the slightest symptom of open disaffection, however transient,
+in the important chief officer of his ship. However it was, his orders
+were executed; and the Burtons were hoisted.
+
+
+CHAPTER 110. Queequeg in His Coffin.
+
+Upon searching, it was found that the casks last struck into the hold
+were perfectly sound, and that the leak must be further off. So, it
+being calm weather, they broke out deeper and deeper, disturbing the
+slumbers of the huge ground-tier butts; and from that black midnight
+sending those gigantic moles into the daylight above. So deep did they
+go; and so ancient, and corroded, and weedy the aspect of the lowermost
+puncheons, that you almost looked next for some mouldy corner-stone
+cask containing coins of Captain Noah, with copies of the posted
+placards, vainly warning the infatuated old world from the flood.
+Tierce after tierce, too, of water, and bread, and beef, and shooks of
+staves, and iron bundles of hoops, were hoisted out, till at last the
+piled decks were hard to get about; and the hollow hull echoed under
+foot, as if you were treading over empty catacombs, and reeled and
+rolled in the sea like an air-freighted demijohn. Top-heavy was the
+ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head. Well was
+it that the Typhoons did not visit them then.
+
+Now, at this time it was that my poor pagan companion, and fast
+bosom-friend, Queequeg, was seized with a fever, which brought him nigh
+to his endless end.
+
+Be it said, that in this vocation of whaling, sinecures are unknown;
+dignity and danger go hand in hand; till you get to be Captain, the
+higher you rise the harder you toil. So with poor Queequeg, who, as
+harpooneer, must not only face all the rage of the living whale, but—as
+we have elsewhere seen—mount his dead back in a rolling sea; and
+finally descend into the gloom of the hold, and bitterly sweating all
+day in that subterraneous confinement, resolutely manhandle the
+clumsiest casks and see to their stowage. To be short, among whalemen,
+the harpooneers are the holders, so called.
+
+Poor Queequeg! when the ship was about half disembowelled, you should
+have stooped over the hatchway, and peered down upon him there; where,
+stripped to his woollen drawers, the tattooed savage was crawling about
+amid that dampness and slime, like a green spotted lizard at the bottom
+of a well. And a well, or an ice-house, it somehow proved to him, poor
+pagan; where, strange to say, for all the heat of his sweatings, he
+caught a terrible chill which lapsed into a fever; and at last, after
+some days’ suffering, laid him in his hammock, close to the very sill
+of the door of death. How he wasted and wasted away in those few
+long-lingering days, till there seemed but little left of him but his
+frame and tattooing. But as all else in him thinned, and his
+cheek-bones grew sharper, his eyes, nevertheless, seemed growing fuller
+and fuller; they became of a strange softness of lustre; and mildly but
+deeply looked out at you there from his sickness, a wondrous testimony
+to that immortal health in him which could not die, or be weakened. And
+like circles on the water, which, as they grow fainter, expand; so his
+eyes seemed rounding and rounding, like the rings of Eternity. An awe
+that cannot be named would steal over you as you sat by the side of
+this waning savage, and saw as strange things in his face, as any
+beheld who were bystanders when Zoroaster died. For whatever is truly
+wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books. And
+the drawing near of Death, which alike levels all, alike impresses all
+with a last revelation, which only an author from the dead could
+adequately tell. So that—let us say it again—no dying Chaldee or Greek
+had higher and holier thoughts than those, whose mysterious shades you
+saw creeping over the face of poor Queequeg, as he quietly lay in his
+swaying hammock, and the rolling sea seemed gently rocking him to his
+final rest, and the ocean’s invisible flood-tide lifted him higher and
+higher towards his destined heaven.
+
+Not a man of the crew but gave him up; and, as for Queequeg himself,
+what he thought of his case was forcibly shown by a curious favour he
+asked. He called one to him in the grey morning watch, when the day was
+just breaking, and taking his hand, said that while in Nantucket he had
+chanced to see certain little canoes of dark wood, like the rich
+war-wood of his native isle; and upon inquiry, he had learned that all
+whalemen who died in Nantucket, were laid in those same dark canoes,
+and that the fancy of being so laid had much pleased him; for it was
+not unlike the custom of his own race, who, after embalming a dead
+warrior, stretched him out in his canoe, and so left him to be floated
+away to the starry archipelagoes; for not only do they believe that the
+stars are isles, but that far beyond all visible horizons, their own
+mild, uncontinented seas, interflow with the blue heavens; and so form
+the white breakers of the milky way. He added, that he shuddered at the
+thought of being buried in his hammock, according to the usual
+sea-custom, tossed like something vile to the death-devouring sharks.
+No: he desired a canoe like those of Nantucket, all the more congenial
+to him, being a whaleman, that like a whale-boat these coffin-canoes
+were without a keel; though that involved but uncertain steering, and
+much lee-way adown the dim ages.
+
+Now, when this strange circumstance was made known aft, the carpenter
+was at once commanded to do Queequeg’s bidding, whatever it might
+include. There was some heathenish, coffin-coloured old lumber aboard,
+which, upon a long previous voyage, had been cut from the aboriginal
+groves of the Lackaday islands, and from these dark planks the coffin
+was recommended to be made. No sooner was the carpenter apprised of the
+order, than taking his rule, he forthwith with all the indifferent
+promptitude of his character, proceeded into the forecastle and took
+Queequeg’s measure with great accuracy, regularly chalking Queequeg’s
+person as he shifted the rule.
+
+“Ah! poor fellow! he’ll have to die now,” ejaculated the Long Island
+sailor.
+
+Going to his vice-bench, the carpenter for convenience sake and general
+reference, now transferringly measured on it the exact length the
+coffin was to be, and then made the transfer permanent by cutting two
+notches at its extremities. This done, he marshalled the planks and his
+tools, and to work.
+
+When the last nail was driven, and the lid duly planed and fitted, he
+lightly shouldered the coffin and went forward with it, inquiring
+whether they were ready for it yet in that direction.
+
+Overhearing the indignant but half-humorous cries with which the people
+on deck began to drive the coffin away, Queequeg, to every one’s
+consternation, commanded that the thing should be instantly brought to
+him, nor was there any denying him; seeing that, of all mortals, some
+dying men are the most tyrannical; and certainly, since they will
+shortly trouble us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be
+indulged.
+
+Leaning over in his hammock, Queequeg long regarded the coffin with an
+attentive eye. He then called for his harpoon, had the wooden stock
+drawn from it, and then had the iron part placed in the coffin along
+with one of the paddles of his boat. All by his own request, also,
+biscuits were then ranged round the sides within: a flask of fresh
+water was placed at the head, and a small bag of woody earth scraped up
+in the hold at the foot; and a piece of sail-cloth being rolled up for
+a pillow, Queequeg now entreated to be lifted into his final bed, that
+he might make trial of its comforts, if any it had. He lay without
+moving a few minutes, then told one to go to his bag and bring out his
+little god, Yojo. Then crossing his arms on his breast with Yojo
+between, he called for the coffin lid (hatch he called it) to be placed
+over him. The head part turned over with a leather hinge, and there lay
+Queequeg in his coffin with little but his composed countenance in
+view. “Rarmai” (it will do; it is easy), he murmured at last, and
+signed to be replaced in his hammock.
+
+But ere this was done, Pip, who had been slily hovering near by all
+this while, drew nigh to him where he lay, and with soft sobbings, took
+him by the hand; in the other, holding his tambourine.
+
+“Poor rover! will ye never have done with all this weary roving? where
+go ye now? But if the currents carry ye to those sweet Antilles where
+the beaches are only beat with water-lilies, will ye do one little
+errand for me? Seek out one Pip, who’s now been missing long: I think
+he’s in those far Antilles. If ye find him, then comfort him; for he
+must be very sad; for look! he’s left his tambourine behind;—I found
+it. Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! Now, Queequeg, die; and I’ll beat ye your
+dying march.”
+
+“I have heard,” murmured Starbuck, gazing down the scuttle, “that in
+violent fevers, men, all ignorance, have talked in ancient tongues; and
+that when the mystery is probed, it turns out always that in their
+wholly forgotten childhood those ancient tongues had been really spoken
+in their hearing by some lofty scholars. So, to my fond faith, poor
+Pip, in this strange sweetness of his lunacy, brings heavenly vouchers
+of all our heavenly homes. Where learned he that, but there?—Hark! he
+speaks again: but more wildly now.”
+
+“Form two and two! Let’s make a General of him! Ho, where’s his
+harpoon? Lay it across here.—Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! huzza! Oh for a game
+cock now to sit upon his head and crow! Queequeg dies game!—mind ye
+that; Queequeg dies game!—take ye good heed of that; Queequeg dies
+game! I say; game, game, game! but base little Pip, he died a coward;
+died all a’shiver;—out upon Pip! Hark ye; if ye find Pip, tell all the
+Antilles he’s a runaway; a coward, a coward, a coward! Tell them he
+jumped from a whale-boat! I’d never beat my tambourine over base Pip,
+and hail him General, if he were once more dying here. No, no! shame
+upon all cowards—shame upon them! Let ’em go drown like Pip, that
+jumped from a whale-boat. Shame! shame!”
+
+During all this, Queequeg lay with closed eyes, as if in a dream. Pip
+was led away, and the sick man was replaced in his hammock.
+
+But now that he had apparently made every preparation for death; now
+that his coffin was proved a good fit, Queequeg suddenly rallied; soon
+there seemed no need of the carpenter’s box: and thereupon, when some
+expressed their delighted surprise, he, in substance, said, that the
+cause of his sudden convalescence was this;—at a critical moment, he
+had just recalled a little duty ashore, which he was leaving undone;
+and therefore had changed his mind about dying: he could not die yet,
+he averred. They asked him, then, whether to live or die was a matter
+of his own sovereign will and pleasure. He answered, certainly. In a
+word, it was Queequeg’s conceit, that if a man made up his mind to
+live, mere sickness could not kill him: nothing but a whale, or a gale,
+or some violent, ungovernable, unintelligent destroyer of that sort.
+
+Now, there is this noteworthy difference between savage and civilized;
+that while a sick, civilized man may be six months convalescing,
+generally speaking, a sick savage is almost half-well again in a day.
+So, in good time my Queequeg gained strength; and at length after
+sitting on the windlass for a few indolent days (but eating with a
+vigorous appetite) he suddenly leaped to his feet, threw out his arms
+and legs, gave himself a good stretching, yawned a little bit, and then
+springing into the head of his hoisted boat, and poising a harpoon,
+pronounced himself fit for a fight.
+
+With a wild whimsiness, he now used his coffin for a sea-chest; and
+emptying into it his canvas bag of clothes, set them in order there.
+Many spare hours he spent, in carving the lid with all manner of
+grotesque figures and drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was
+striving, in his rude way, to copy parts of the twisted tattooing on
+his body. And this tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet
+and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written
+out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a
+mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in
+his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one
+volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own
+live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore
+destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon
+they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last. And this thought
+it must have been which suggested to Ahab that wild exclamation of his,
+when one morning turning away from surveying poor Queequeg—“Oh,
+devilish tantalization of the gods!”
+
+
+CHAPTER 111. The Pacific.
+
+When gliding by the Bashee isles we emerged at last upon the great
+South Sea; were it not for other things, I could have greeted my dear
+Pacific with uncounted thanks, for now the long supplication of my
+youth was answered; that serene ocean rolled eastwards from me a
+thousand leagues of blue.
+
+There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently
+awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those
+fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St.
+John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery
+prairies and Potters’ Fields of all four continents, the waves should
+rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of
+mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all
+that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing
+like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by
+their restlessness.
+
+To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once beheld, must
+ever after be the sea of his adoption. It rolls the midmost waters of
+the world, the Indian ocean and Atlantic being but its arms. The same
+waves wash the moles of the new-built Californian towns, but yesterday
+planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still
+gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham; while all between
+float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, unknown
+Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans. Thus this mysterious, divine
+Pacific zones the world’s whole bulk about; makes all coasts one bay to
+it; seems the tide-beating heart of earth. Lifted by those eternal
+swells, you needs must own the seductive god, bowing your head to Pan.
+
+But few thoughts of Pan stirred Ahab’s brain, as standing like an iron
+statue at his accustomed place beside the mizen rigging, with one
+nostril he unthinkingly snuffed the sugary musk from the Bashee isles
+(in whose sweet woods mild lovers must be walking), and with the other
+consciously inhaled the salt breath of the new found sea; that sea in
+which the hated White Whale must even then be swimming. Launched at
+length upon these almost final waters, and gliding towards the Japanese
+cruising-ground, the old man’s purpose intensified itself. His firm
+lips met like the lips of a vice; the Delta of his forehead’s veins
+swelled like overladen brooks; in his very sleep, his ringing cry ran
+through the vaulted hull, “Stern all! the White Whale spouts thick
+blood!”
+
+
+CHAPTER 112. The Blacksmith.
+
+Availing himself of the mild, summer-cool weather that now reigned in
+these latitudes, and in preparation for the peculiarly active pursuits
+shortly to be anticipated, Perth, the begrimed, blistered old
+blacksmith, had not removed his portable forge to the hold again, after
+concluding his contributory work for Ahab’s leg, but still retained it
+on deck, fast lashed to ringbolts by the foremast; being now almost
+incessantly invoked by the headsmen, and harpooneers, and bowsmen to do
+some little job for them; altering, or repairing, or new shaping their
+various weapons and boat furniture. Often he would be surrounded by an
+eager circle, all waiting to be served; holding boat-spades,
+pike-heads, harpoons, and lances, and jealously watching his every
+sooty movement, as he toiled. Nevertheless, this old man’s was a
+patient hammer wielded by a patient arm. No murmur, no impatience, no
+petulance did come from him. Silent, slow, and solemn; bowing over
+still further his chronically broken back, he toiled away, as if toil
+were life itself, and the heavy beating of his hammer the heavy beating
+of his heart. And so it was.—Most miserable!
+
+A peculiar walk in this old man, a certain slight but painful appearing
+yawing in his gait, had at an early period of the voyage excited the
+curiosity of the mariners. And to the importunity of their persisted
+questionings he had finally given in; and so it came to pass that every
+one now knew the shameful story of his wretched fate.
+
+Belated, and not innocently, one bitter winter’s midnight, on the road
+running between two country towns, the blacksmith half-stupidly felt
+the deadly numbness stealing over him, and sought refuge in a leaning,
+dilapidated barn. The issue was, the loss of the extremities of both
+feet. Out of this revelation, part by part, at last came out the four
+acts of the gladness, and the one long, and as yet uncatastrophied
+fifth act of the grief of his life’s drama.
+
+He was an old man, who, at the age of nearly sixty, had postponedly
+encountered that thing in sorrow’s technicals called ruin. He had been
+an artisan of famed excellence, and with plenty to do; owned a house
+and garden; embraced a youthful, daughter-like, loving wife, and three
+blithe, ruddy children; every Sunday went to a cheerful-looking church,
+planted in a grove. But one night, under cover of darkness, and further
+concealed in a most cunning disguisement, a desperate burglar slid into
+his happy home, and robbed them all of everything. And darker yet to
+tell, the blacksmith himself did ignorantly conduct this burglar into
+his family’s heart. It was the Bottle Conjuror! Upon the opening of
+that fatal cork, forth flew the fiend, and shrivelled up his home. Now,
+for prudent, most wise, and economic reasons, the blacksmith’s shop was
+in the basement of his dwelling, but with a separate entrance to it; so
+that always had the young and loving healthy wife listened with no
+unhappy nervousness, but with vigorous pleasure, to the stout ringing
+of her young-armed old husband’s hammer; whose reverberations, muffled
+by passing through the floors and walls, came up to her, not unsweetly,
+in her nursery; and so, to stout Labor’s iron lullaby, the blacksmith’s
+infants were rocked to slumber.
+
+Oh, woe on woe! Oh, Death, why canst thou not sometimes be timely?
+Hadst thou taken this old blacksmith to thyself ere his full ruin came
+upon him, then had the young widow had a delicious grief, and her
+orphans a truly venerable, legendary sire to dream of in their after
+years; and all of them a care-killing competency. But Death plucked
+down some virtuous elder brother, on whose whistling daily toil solely
+hung the responsibilities of some other family, and left the worse than
+useless old man standing, till the hideous rot of life should make him
+easier to harvest.
+
+Why tell the whole? The blows of the basement hammer every day grew
+more and more between; and each blow every day grew fainter than the
+last; the wife sat frozen at the window, with tearless eyes,
+glitteringly gazing into the weeping faces of her children; the bellows
+fell; the forge choked up with cinders; the house was sold; the mother
+dived down into the long church-yard grass; her children twice followed
+her thither; and the houseless, familyless old man staggered off a
+vagabond in crape; his every woe unreverenced; his grey head a scorn to
+flaxen curls!
+
+Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but Death
+is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but
+the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the
+Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of
+such men, who still have left in them some interior compunctions
+against suicide, does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean
+alluringly spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking
+terrors, and wonderful, new-life adventures; and from the hearts of
+infinite Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them—“Come hither,
+broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate
+death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them. Come
+hither! bury thyself in a life which, to your now equally abhorred and
+abhorring, landed world, is more oblivious than death. Come hither! put
+up _thy_ gravestone, too, within the churchyard, and come hither, till
+we marry thee!”
+
+Hearkening to these voices, East and West, by early sunrise, and by
+fall of eve, the blacksmith’s soul responded, Aye, I come! And so Perth
+went a-whaling.
+
+
+CHAPTER 113. The Forge.
+
+With matted beard, and swathed in a bristling shark-skin apron, about
+mid-day, Perth was standing between his forge and anvil, the latter
+placed upon an iron-wood log, with one hand holding a pike-head in the
+coals, and with the other at his forge’s lungs, when Captain Ahab came
+along, carrying in his hand a small rusty-looking leathern bag. While
+yet a little distance from the forge, moody Ahab paused; till at last,
+Perth, withdrawing his iron from the fire, began hammering it upon the
+anvil—the red mass sending off the sparks in thick hovering flights,
+some of which flew close to Ahab.
+
+“Are these thy Mother Carey’s chickens, Perth? they are always flying
+in thy wake; birds of good omen, too, but not to all;—look here, they
+burn; but thou—thou liv’st among them without a scorch.”
+
+“Because I am scorched all over, Captain Ahab,” answered Perth, resting
+for a moment on his hammer; “I am past scorching; not easily can’st
+thou scorch a scar.”
+
+“Well, well; no more. Thy shrunk voice sounds too calmly, sanely woeful
+to me. In no Paradise myself, I am impatient of all misery in others
+that is not mad. Thou should’st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou
+not go mad? How can’st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens
+yet hate thee, that thou can’st not go mad?—What wert thou making
+there?”
+
+“Welding an old pike-head, sir; there were seams and dents in it.”
+
+“And can’st thou make it all smooth again, blacksmith, after such hard
+usage as it had?”
+
+“I think so, sir.”
+
+“And I suppose thou can’st smoothe almost any seams and dents; never
+mind how hard the metal, blacksmith?”
+
+“Aye, sir, I think I can; all seams and dents but one.”
+
+“Look ye here, then,” cried Ahab, passionately advancing, and leaning
+with both hands on Perth’s shoulders; “look ye here—_here_—can ye
+smoothe out a seam like this, blacksmith,” sweeping one hand across his
+ribbed brow; “if thou could’st, blacksmith, glad enough would I lay my
+head upon thy anvil, and feel thy heaviest hammer between my eyes.
+Answer! Can’st thou smoothe this seam?”
+
+“Oh! that is the one, sir! Said I not all seams and dents but one?”
+
+“Aye, blacksmith, it is the one; aye, man, it is unsmoothable; for
+though thou only see’st it here in my flesh, it has worked down into
+the bone of my skull—_that_ is all wrinkles! But, away with child’s
+play; no more gaffs and pikes to-day. Look ye here!” jingling the
+leathern bag, as if it were full of gold coins. “I, too, want a harpoon
+made; one that a thousand yoke of fiends could not part, Perth;
+something that will stick in a whale like his own fin-bone. There’s the
+stuff,” flinging the pouch upon the anvil. “Look ye, blacksmith, these
+are the gathered nail-stubbs of the steel shoes of racing horses.”
+
+“Horse-shoe stubbs, sir? Why, Captain Ahab, thou hast here, then, the
+best and stubbornest stuff we blacksmiths ever work.”
+
+“I know it, old man; these stubbs will weld together like glue from the
+melted bones of murderers. Quick! forge me the harpoon. And forge me
+first, twelve rods for its shank; then wind, and twist, and hammer
+these twelve together like the yarns and strands of a tow-line. Quick!
+I’ll blow the fire.”
+
+When at last the twelve rods were made, Ahab tried them, one by one, by
+spiralling them, with his own hand, round a long, heavy iron bolt. “A
+flaw!” rejecting the last one. “Work that over again, Perth.”
+
+This done, Perth was about to begin welding the twelve into one, when
+Ahab stayed his hand, and said he would weld his own iron. As, then,
+with regular, gasping hems, he hammered on the anvil, Perth passing to
+him the glowing rods, one after the other, and the hard pressed forge
+shooting up its intense straight flame, the Parsee passed silently, and
+bowing over his head towards the fire, seemed invoking some curse or
+some blessing on the toil. But, as Ahab looked up, he slid aside.
+
+“What’s that bunch of lucifers dodging about there for?” muttered
+Stubb, looking on from the forecastle. “That Parsee smells fire like a
+fusee; and smells of it himself, like a hot musket’s powder-pan.”
+
+At last the shank, in one complete rod, received its final heat; and as
+Perth, to temper it, plunged it all hissing into the cask of water near
+by, the scalding steam shot up into Ahab’s bent face.
+
+“Would’st thou brand me, Perth?” wincing for a moment with the pain;
+“have I been but forging my own branding-iron, then?”
+
+“Pray God, not that; yet I fear something, Captain Ahab. Is not this
+harpoon for the White Whale?”
+
+“For the white fiend! But now for the barbs; thou must make them
+thyself, man. Here are my razors—the best of steel; here, and make the
+barbs sharp as the needle-sleet of the Icy Sea.”
+
+For a moment, the old blacksmith eyed the razors as though he would
+fain not use them.
+
+“Take them, man, I have no need for them; for I now neither shave, sup,
+nor pray till—but here—to work!”
+
+Fashioned at last into an arrowy shape, and welded by Perth to the
+shank, the steel soon pointed the end of the iron; and as the
+blacksmith was about giving the barbs their final heat, prior to
+tempering them, he cried to Ahab to place the water-cask near.
+
+“No, no—no water for that; I want it of the true death-temper. Ahoy,
+there! Tashtego, Queequeg, Daggoo! What say ye, pagans! Will ye give me
+as much blood as will cover this barb?” holding it high up. A cluster
+of dark nods replied, Yes. Three punctures were made in the heathen
+flesh, and the White Whale’s barbs were then tempered.
+
+“Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!”
+deliriously howled Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the
+baptismal blood.
+
+Now, mustering the spare poles from below, and selecting one of
+hickory, with the bark still investing it, Ahab fitted the end to the
+socket of the iron. A coil of new tow-line was then unwound, and some
+fathoms of it taken to the windlass, and stretched to a great tension.
+Pressing his foot upon it, till the rope hummed like a harp-string,
+then eagerly bending over it, and seeing no strandings, Ahab exclaimed,
+“Good! and now for the seizings.”
+
+At one extremity the rope was unstranded, and the separate spread yarns
+were all braided and woven round the socket of the harpoon; the pole
+was then driven hard up into the socket; from the lower end the rope
+was traced half-way along the pole’s length, and firmly secured so,
+with intertwistings of twine. This done, pole, iron, and rope—like the
+Three Fates—remained inseparable, and Ahab moodily stalked away with
+the weapon; the sound of his ivory leg, and the sound of the hickory
+pole, both hollowly ringing along every plank. But ere he entered his
+cabin, light, unnatural, half-bantering, yet most piteous sound was
+heard. Oh, Pip! thy wretched laugh, thy idle but unresting eye; all thy
+strange mummeries not unmeaningly blended with the black tragedy of the
+melancholy ship, and mocked it!
+
+
+CHAPTER 114. The Gilder.
+
+Penetrating further and further into the heart of the Japanese cruising
+ground, the Pequod was soon all astir in the fishery. Often, in mild,
+pleasant weather, for twelve, fifteen, eighteen, and twenty hours on
+the stretch, they were engaged in the boats, steadily pulling, or
+sailing, or paddling after the whales, or for an interlude of sixty or
+seventy minutes calmly awaiting their uprising; though with but small
+success for their pains.
+
+At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow
+heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so
+sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearth-stone
+cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy
+quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the
+ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and
+would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a
+remorseless fang.
+
+These are the times, when in his whale-boat the rover softly feels a
+certain filial, confident, land-like feeling towards the sea; that he
+regards it as so much flowery earth; and the distant ship revealing
+only the tops of her masts, seems struggling forward, not through high
+rolling waves, but through the tall grass of a rolling prairie: as when
+the western emigrants’ horses only show their erected ears, while their
+hidden bodies widely wade through the amazing verdure.
+
+The long-drawn virgin vales; the mild blue hill-sides; as over these
+there steals the hush, the hum; you almost swear that play-wearied
+children lie sleeping in these solitudes, in some glad May-time, when
+the flowers of the woods are plucked. And all this mixes with your most
+mystic mood; so that fact and fancy, half-way meeting, interpenetrate,
+and form one seamless whole.
+
+Nor did such soothing scenes, however temporary, fail of at least as
+temporary an effect on Ahab. But if these secret golden keys did seem
+to open in him his own secret golden treasuries, yet did his breath
+upon them prove but tarnishing.
+
+Oh, grassy glades! oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in
+ye,—though long parched by the dead drought of the earthy life,—in ye,
+men yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some
+few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them.
+Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling
+threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a
+storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this
+life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one
+pause:—through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless
+faith, adolescence’ doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then
+disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But
+once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and
+men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor
+no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will
+never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like
+those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of
+our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.
+
+And that same day, too, gazing far down from his boat’s side into that
+same golden sea, Starbuck lowly murmured:—
+
+“Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride’s
+eye!—Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping
+cannibal ways. Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep
+down and do believe.”
+
+And Stubb, fish-like, with sparkling scales, leaped up in that same
+golden light:—
+
+“I am Stubb, and Stubb has his history; but here Stubb takes oaths that
+he has always been jolly!”
+
+
+CHAPTER 115. The Pequod Meets The Bachelor.
+
+And jolly enough were the sights and the sounds that came bearing down
+before the wind, some few weeks after Ahab’s harpoon had been welded.
+
+It was a Nantucket ship, the Bachelor, which had just wedged in her
+last cask of oil, and bolted down her bursting hatches; and now, in
+glad holiday apparel, was joyously, though somewhat vain-gloriously,
+sailing round among the widely-separated ships on the ground, previous
+to pointing her prow for home.
+
+The three men at her mast-head wore long streamers of narrow red
+bunting at their hats; from the stern, a whale-boat was suspended,
+bottom down; and hanging captive from the bowsprit was seen the long
+lower jaw of the last whale they had slain. Signals, ensigns, and jacks
+of all colours were flying from her rigging, on every side. Sideways
+lashed in each of her three basketed tops were two barrels of sperm;
+above which, in her top-mast cross-trees, you saw slender breakers of
+the same precious fluid; and nailed to her main truck was a brazen
+lamp.
+
+As was afterwards learned, the Bachelor had met with the most
+surprising success; all the more wonderful, for that while cruising in
+the same seas numerous other vessels had gone entire months without
+securing a single fish. Not only had barrels of beef and bread been
+given away to make room for the far more valuable sperm, but additional
+supplemental casks had been bartered for, from the ships she had met;
+and these were stowed along the deck, and in the captain’s and
+officers’ state-rooms. Even the cabin table itself had been knocked
+into kindling-wood; and the cabin mess dined off the broad head of an
+oil-butt, lashed down to the floor for a centrepiece. In the
+forecastle, the sailors had actually caulked and pitched their chests,
+and filled them; it was humorously added, that the cook had clapped a
+head on his largest boiler, and filled it; that the steward had plugged
+his spare coffee-pot and filled it; that the harpooneers had headed the
+sockets of their irons and filled them; that indeed everything was
+filled with sperm, except the captain’s pantaloons pockets, and those
+he reserved to thrust his hands into, in self-complacent testimony of
+his entire satisfaction.
+
+As this glad ship of good luck bore down upon the moody Pequod, the
+barbarian sound of enormous drums came from her forecastle; and drawing
+still nearer, a crowd of her men were seen standing round her huge
+try-pots, which, covered with the parchment-like _poke_ or stomach skin
+of the black fish, gave forth a loud roar to every stroke of the
+clenched hands of the crew. On the quarter-deck, the mates and
+harpooneers were dancing with the olive-hued girls who had eloped with
+them from the Polynesian Isles; while suspended in an ornamented boat,
+firmly secured aloft between the foremast and mainmast, three Long
+Island negroes, with glittering fiddle-bows of whale ivory, were
+presiding over the hilarious jig. Meanwhile, others of the ship’s
+company were tumultuously busy at the masonry of the try-works, from
+which the huge pots had been removed. You would have almost thought
+they were pulling down the cursed Bastille, such wild cries they
+raised, as the now useless brick and mortar were being hurled into the
+sea.
+
+Lord and master over all this scene, the captain stood erect on the
+ship’s elevated quarter-deck, so that the whole rejoicing drama was
+full before him, and seemed merely contrived for his own individual
+diversion.
+
+And Ahab, he too was standing on his quarter-deck, shaggy and black,
+with a stubborn gloom; and as the two ships crossed each other’s
+wakes—one all jubilations for things passed, the other all forebodings
+as to things to come—their two captains in themselves impersonated the
+whole striking contrast of the scene.
+
+“Come aboard, come aboard!” cried the gay Bachelor’s commander, lifting
+a glass and a bottle in the air.
+
+“Hast seen the White Whale?” gritted Ahab in reply.
+
+“No; only heard of him; but don’t believe in him at all,” said the
+other good-humoredly. “Come aboard!”
+
+“Thou art too damned jolly. Sail on. Hast lost any men?”
+
+“Not enough to speak of—two islanders, that’s all;—but come aboard, old
+hearty, come along. I’ll soon take that black from your brow. Come
+along, will ye (merry’s the play); a full ship and homeward-bound.”
+
+“How wondrous familiar is a fool!” muttered Ahab; then aloud, “Thou art
+a full ship and homeward bound, thou sayst; well, then, call me an
+empty ship, and outward-bound. So go thy ways, and I will mine. Forward
+there! Set all sail, and keep her to the wind!”
+
+And thus, while the one ship went cheerily before the breeze, the other
+stubbornly fought against it; and so the two vessels parted; the crew
+of the Pequod looking with grave, lingering glances towards the
+receding Bachelor; but the Bachelor’s men never heeding their gaze for
+the lively revelry they were in. And as Ahab, leaning over the
+taffrail, eyed the homeward-bound craft, he took from his pocket a
+small vial of sand, and then looking from the ship to the vial, seemed
+thereby bringing two remote associations together, for that vial was
+filled with Nantucket soundings.
+
+
+CHAPTER 116. The Dying Whale.
+
+Not seldom in this life, when, on the right side, fortune’s favourites
+sail close by us, we, though all adroop before, catch somewhat of the
+rushing breeze, and joyfully feel our bagging sails fill out. So seemed
+it with the Pequod. For next day after encountering the gay Bachelor,
+whales were seen and four were slain; and one of them by Ahab.
+
+It was far down the afternoon; and when all the spearings of the
+crimson fight were done: and floating in the lovely sunset sea and sky,
+sun and whale both stilly died together; then, such a sweetness and
+such plaintiveness, such inwreathing orisons curled up in that rosy
+air, that it almost seemed as if far over from the deep green convent
+valleys of the Manilla isles, the Spanish land-breeze, wantonly turned
+sailor, had gone to sea, freighted with these vesper hymns.
+
+Soothed again, but only soothed to deeper gloom, Ahab, who had sterned
+off from the whale, sat intently watching his final wanings from the
+now tranquil boat. For that strange spectacle observable in all sperm
+whales dying—the turning sunwards of the head, and so expiring—that
+strange spectacle, beheld of such a placid evening, somehow to Ahab
+conveyed a wondrousness unknown before.
+
+“He turns and turns him to it,—how slowly, but how steadfastly, his
+homage-rendering and invoking brow, with his last dying motions. He too
+worships fire; most faithful, broad, baronial vassal of the sun!—Oh
+that these too-favouring eyes should see these too-favouring sights.
+Look! here, far water-locked; beyond all hum of human weal or woe; in
+these most candid and impartial seas; where to traditions no rocks
+furnish tablets; where for long Chinese ages, the billows have still
+rolled on speechless and unspoken to, as stars that shine upon the
+Niger’s unknown source; here, too, life dies sunwards full of faith;
+but see! no sooner dead, than death whirls round the corpse, and it
+heads some other way.
+
+“Oh, thou dark Hindoo half of nature, who of drowned bones hast builded
+thy separate throne somewhere in the heart of these unverdured seas;
+thou art an infidel, thou queen, and too truly speakest to me in the
+wide-slaughtering Typhoon, and the hushed burial of its after calm. Nor
+has this thy whale sunwards turned his dying head, and then gone round
+again, without a lesson to me.
+
+“Oh, trebly hooped and welded hip of power! Oh, high aspiring,
+rainbowed jet!—that one strivest, this one jettest all in vain! In
+vain, oh whale, dost thou seek intercedings with yon all-quickening
+sun, that only calls forth life, but gives it not again. Yet dost thou,
+darker half, rock me with a prouder, if a darker faith. All thy
+unnamable imminglings float beneath me here; I am buoyed by breaths of
+once living things, exhaled as air, but water now.
+
+“Then hail, for ever hail, O sea, in whose eternal tossings the wild
+fowl finds his only rest. Born of earth, yet suckled by the sea; though
+hill and valley mothered me, ye billows are my foster-brothers!”
+
+
+CHAPTER 117. The Whale Watch.
+
+The four whales slain that evening had died wide apart; one, far to
+windward; one, less distant, to leeward; one ahead; one astern. These
+last three were brought alongside ere nightfall; but the windward one
+could not be reached till morning; and the boat that had killed it lay
+by its side all night; and that boat was Ahab’s.
+
+The waif-pole was thrust upright into the dead whale’s spout-hole; and
+the lantern hanging from its top, cast a troubled flickering glare upon
+the black, glossy back, and far out upon the midnight waves, which
+gently chafed the whale’s broad flank, like soft surf upon a beach.
+
+Ahab and all his boat’s crew seemed asleep but the Parsee; who
+crouching in the bow, sat watching the sharks, that spectrally played
+round the whale, and tapped the light cedar planks with their tails. A
+sound like the moaning in squadrons over Asphaltites of unforgiven
+ghosts of Gomorrah, ran shuddering through the air.
+
+Started from his slumbers, Ahab, face to face, saw the Parsee; and
+hooped round by the gloom of the night they seemed the last men in a
+flooded world. “I have dreamed it again,” said he.
+
+“Of the hearses? Have I not said, old man, that neither hearse nor
+coffin can be thine?”
+
+“And who are hearsed that die on the sea?”
+
+“But I said, old man, that ere thou couldst die on this voyage, two
+hearses must verily be seen by thee on the sea; the first not made by
+mortal hands; and the visible wood of the last one must be grown in
+America.”
+
+“Aye, aye! a strange sight that, Parsee:—a hearse and its plumes
+floating over the ocean with the waves for the pall-bearers. Ha! Such a
+sight we shall not soon see.”
+
+“Believe it or not, thou canst not die till it be seen, old man.”
+
+“And what was that saying about thyself?”
+
+“Though it come to the last, I shall still go before thee thy pilot.”
+
+“And when thou art so gone before—if that ever befall—then ere I can
+follow, thou must still appear to me, to pilot me still?—Was it not so?
+Well, then, did I believe all ye say, oh my pilot! I have here two
+pledges that I shall yet slay Moby Dick and survive it.”
+
+“Take another pledge, old man,” said the Parsee, as his eyes lighted up
+like fire-flies in the gloom—“Hemp only can kill thee.”
+
+“The gallows, ye mean.—I am immortal then, on land and on sea,” cried
+Ahab, with a laugh of derision;—“Immortal on land and on sea!”
+
+Both were silent again, as one man. The grey dawn came on, and the
+slumbering crew arose from the boat’s bottom, and ere noon the dead
+whale was brought to the ship.
+
+
+CHAPTER 118. The Quadrant.
+
+The season for the Line at length drew near; and every day when Ahab,
+coming from his cabin, cast his eyes aloft, the vigilant helmsman would
+ostentatiously handle his spokes, and the eager mariners quickly run to
+the braces, and would stand there with all their eyes centrally fixed
+on the nailed doubloon; impatient for the order to point the ship’s
+prow for the equator. In good time the order came. It was hard upon
+high noon; and Ahab, seated in the bows of his high-hoisted boat, was
+about taking his wonted daily observation of the sun to determine his
+latitude.
+
+Now, in that Japanese sea, the days in summer are as freshets of
+effulgences. That unblinkingly vivid Japanese sun seems the blazing
+focus of the glassy ocean’s immeasurable burning-glass. The sky looks
+lacquered; clouds there are none; the horizon floats; and this
+nakedness of unrelieved radiance is as the insufferable splendors of
+God’s throne. Well that Ahab’s quadrant was furnished with coloured
+glasses, through which to take sight of that solar fire. So, swinging
+his seated form to the roll of the ship, and with his
+astrological-looking instrument placed to his eye, he remained in that
+posture for some moments to catch the precise instant when the sun
+should gain its precise meridian. Meantime while his whole attention
+was absorbed, the Parsee was kneeling beneath him on the ship’s deck,
+and with face thrown up like Ahab’s, was eyeing the same sun with him;
+only the lids of his eyes half hooded their orbs, and his wild face was
+subdued to an earthly passionlessness. At length the desired
+observation was taken; and with his pencil upon his ivory leg, Ahab
+soon calculated what his latitude must be at that precise instant. Then
+falling into a moment’s revery, he again looked up towards the sun and
+murmured to himself: “Thou sea-mark! thou high and mighty Pilot! thou
+tellest me truly where I _am_—but canst thou cast the least hint where
+I _shall_ be? Or canst thou tell where some other thing besides me is
+this moment living? Where is Moby Dick? This instant thou must be
+eyeing him. These eyes of mine look into the very eye that is even now
+beholding him; aye, and into the eye that is even now equally beholding
+the objects on the unknown, thither side of thee, thou sun!”
+
+Then gazing at his quadrant, and handling, one after the other, its
+numerous cabalistical contrivances, he pondered again, and muttered:
+“Foolish toy! babies’ plaything of haughty Admirals, and Commodores,
+and Captains; the world brags of thee, of thy cunning and might; but
+what after all canst thou do, but tell the poor, pitiful point, where
+thou thyself happenest to be on this wide planet, and the hand that
+holds thee: no! not one jot more! Thou canst not tell where one drop of
+water or one grain of sand will be to-morrow noon; and yet with thy
+impotence thou insultest the sun! Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy;
+and cursed be all the things that cast man’s eyes aloft to that heaven,
+whose live vividness but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now
+scorched with thy light, O sun! Level by nature to this earth’s horizon
+are the glances of man’s eyes; not shot from the crown of his head, as
+if God had meant him to gaze on his firmament. Curse thee, thou
+quadrant!” dashing it to the deck, “no longer will I guide my earthly
+way by thee; the level ship’s compass, and the level dead-reckoning, by
+log and by line; _these_ shall conduct me, and show me my place on the
+sea. Aye,” lighting from the boat to the deck, “thus I trample on thee,
+thou paltry thing that feebly pointest on high; thus I split and
+destroy thee!”
+
+As the frantic old man thus spoke and thus trampled with his live and
+dead feet, a sneering triumph that seemed meant for Ahab, and a
+fatalistic despair that seemed meant for himself—these passed over the
+mute, motionless Parsee’s face. Unobserved he rose and glided away;
+while, awestruck by the aspect of their commander, the seamen clustered
+together on the forecastle, till Ahab, troubledly pacing the deck,
+shouted out—“To the braces! Up helm!—square in!”
+
+In an instant the yards swung round; and as the ship half-wheeled upon
+her heel, her three firm-seated graceful masts erectly poised upon her
+long, ribbed hull, seemed as the three Horatii pirouetting on one
+sufficient steed.
+
+Standing between the knight-heads, Starbuck watched the Pequod’s
+tumultuous way, and Ahab’s also, as he went lurching along the deck.
+
+“I have sat before the dense coal fire and watched it all aglow, full
+of its tormented flaming life; and I have seen it wane at last, down,
+down, to dumbest dust. Old man of oceans! of all this fiery life of
+thine, what will at length remain but one little heap of ashes!”
+
+“Aye,” cried Stubb, “but sea-coal ashes—mind ye that, Mr.
+Starbuck—sea-coal, not your common charcoal. Well, well; I heard Ahab
+mutter, ‘Here some one thrusts these cards into these old hands of
+mine; swears that I must play them, and no others.’ And damn me, Ahab,
+but thou actest right; live in the game, and die in it!”
+
+
+CHAPTER 119. The Candles.
+
+Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs: the tiger of Bengal
+crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure. Skies the most
+effulgent but basket the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba knows
+tornadoes that never swept tame northern lands. So, too, it is, that in
+these resplendent Japanese seas the mariner encounters the direst of
+all storms, the Typhoon. It will sometimes burst from out that
+cloudless sky, like an exploding bomb upon a dazed and sleepy town.
+
+Towards evening of that day, the Pequod was torn of her canvas, and
+bare-poled was left to fight a Typhoon which had struck her directly
+ahead. When darkness came on, sky and sea roared and split with the
+thunder, and blazed with the lightning, that showed the disabled masts
+fluttering here and there with the rags which the first fury of the
+tempest had left for its after sport.
+
+Holding by a shroud, Starbuck was standing on the quarter-deck; at
+every flash of the lightning glancing aloft, to see what additional
+disaster might have befallen the intricate hamper there; while Stubb
+and Flask were directing the men in the higher hoisting and firmer
+lashing of the boats. But all their pains seemed naught. Though lifted
+to the very top of the cranes, the windward quarter boat (Ahab’s) did
+not escape. A great rolling sea, dashing high up against the reeling
+ship’s high teetering side, stove in the boat’s bottom at the stern,
+and left it again, all dripping through like a sieve.
+
+“Bad work, bad work! Mr. Starbuck,” said Stubb, regarding the wreck,
+“but the sea will have its way. Stubb, for one, can’t fight it. You
+see, Mr. Starbuck, a wave has such a great long start before it leaps,
+all round the world it runs, and then comes the spring! But as for me,
+all the start I have to meet it, is just across the deck here. But
+never mind; it’s all in fun: so the old song says;”—(_sings_.)
+
+
+  Oh! jolly is the gale, And a joker is the whale, A’ flourishin’ his
+  tail,— Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the
+  Ocean, oh!
+
+  The scud all a flyin’, That’s his flip only foamin’; When he stirs in
+  the spicin’,— Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad,
+  is the Ocean, oh!
+
+  Thunder splits the ships, But he only smacks his lips, A tastin’ of
+  this flip,— Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad,
+  is the Ocean, oh!
+
+
+
+“Avast Stubb,” cried Starbuck, “let the Typhoon sing, and strike his
+harp here in our rigging; but if thou art a brave man thou wilt hold
+thy peace.”
+
+“But I am not a brave man; never said I was a brave man; I am a coward;
+and I sing to keep up my spirits. And I tell you what it is, Mr.
+Starbuck, there’s no way to stop my singing in this world but to cut my
+throat. And when that’s done, ten to one I sing ye the doxology for a
+wind-up.”
+
+“Madman! look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own.”
+
+“What! how can you see better of a dark night than anybody else, never
+mind how foolish?”
+
+“Here!” cried Starbuck, seizing Stubb by the shoulder, and pointing his
+hand towards the weather bow, “markest thou not that the gale comes
+from the eastward, the very course Ahab is to run for Moby Dick? the
+very course he swung to this day noon? now mark his boat there; where
+is that stove? In the stern-sheets, man; where he is wont to stand—his
+stand-point is stove, man! Now jump overboard, and sing away, if thou
+must!
+
+“I don’t half understand ye: what’s in the wind?”
+
+“Yes, yes, round the Cape of Good Hope is the shortest way to
+Nantucket,” soliloquized Starbuck suddenly, heedless of Stubb’s
+question. “The gale that now hammers at us to stave us, we can turn it
+into a fair wind that will drive us towards home. Yonder, to windward,
+all is blackness of doom; but to leeward, homeward—I see it lightens up
+there; but not with the lightning.”
+
+At that moment in one of the intervals of profound darkness, following
+the flashes, a voice was heard at his side; and almost at the same
+instant a volley of thunder peals rolled overhead.
+
+“Who’s there?”
+
+“Old Thunder!” said Ahab, groping his way along the bulwarks to his
+pivot-hole; but suddenly finding his path made plain to him by elbowed
+lances of fire.
+
+Now, as the lightning rod to a spire on shore is intended to carry off
+the perilous fluid into the soil; so the kindred rod which at sea some
+ships carry to each mast, is intended to conduct it into the water. But
+as this conductor must descend to considerable depth, that its end may
+avoid all contact with the hull; and as moreover, if kept constantly
+towing there, it would be liable to many mishaps, besides interfering
+not a little with some of the rigging, and more or less impeding the
+vessel’s way in the water; because of all this, the lower parts of a
+ship’s lightning-rods are not always overboard; but are generally made
+in long slender links, so as to be the more readily hauled up into the
+chains outside, or thrown down into the sea, as occasion may require.
+
+“The rods! the rods!” cried Starbuck to the crew, suddenly admonished
+to vigilance by the vivid lightning that had just been darting
+flambeaux, to light Ahab to his post. “Are they overboard? drop them
+over, fore and aft. Quick!”
+
+“Avast!” cried Ahab; “let’s have fair play here, though we be the
+weaker side. Yet I’ll contribute to raise rods on the Himmalehs and
+Andes, that all the world may be secured; but out on privileges! Let
+them be, sir.”
+
+“Look aloft!” cried Starbuck. “The corpusants! the corpusants!”
+
+All the yard-arms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each
+tri-pointed lightning-rod-end with three tapering white flames, each of
+the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air, like
+three gigantic wax tapers before an altar.
+
+“Blast the boat! let it go!” cried Stubb at this instant, as a swashing
+sea heaved up under his own little craft, so that its gunwale violently
+jammed his hand, as he was passing a lashing. “Blast it!”—but slipping
+backward on the deck, his uplifted eyes caught the flames; and
+immediately shifting his tone he cried—“The corpusants have mercy on us
+all!”
+
+To sailors, oaths are household words; they will swear in the trance of
+the calm, and in the teeth of the tempest; they will imprecate curses
+from the topsail-yard-arms, when most they teeter over to a seething
+sea; but in all my voyagings, seldom have I heard a common oath when
+God’s burning finger has been laid on the ship; when His “Mene, Mene,
+Tekel Upharsin” has been woven into the shrouds and the cordage.
+
+While this pallidness was burning aloft, few words were heard from the
+enchanted crew; who in one thick cluster stood on the forecastle, all
+their eyes gleaming in that pale phosphorescence, like a far away
+constellation of stars. Relieved against the ghostly light, the
+gigantic jet negro, Daggoo, loomed up to thrice his real stature, and
+seemed the black cloud from which the thunder had come. The parted
+mouth of Tashtego revealed his shark-white teeth, which strangely
+gleamed as if they too had been tipped by corpusants; while lit up by
+the preternatural light, Queequeg’s tattooing burned like Satanic blue
+flames on his body.
+
+The tableau all waned at last with the pallidness aloft; and once more
+the Pequod and every soul on her decks were wrapped in a pall. A moment
+or two passed, when Starbuck, going forward, pushed against some one.
+It was Stubb. “What thinkest thou now, man; I heard thy cry; it was not
+the same in the song.”
+
+“No, no, it wasn’t; I said the corpusants have mercy on us all; and I
+hope they will, still. But do they only have mercy on long faces?—have
+they no bowels for a laugh? And look ye, Mr. Starbuck—but it’s too dark
+to look. Hear me, then: I take that mast-head flame we saw for a sign
+of good luck; for those masts are rooted in a hold that is going to be
+chock a’ block with sperm-oil, d’ye see; and so, all that sperm will
+work up into the masts, like sap in a tree. Yes, our three masts will
+yet be as three spermaceti candles—that’s the good promise we saw.”
+
+At that moment Starbuck caught sight of Stubb’s face slowly beginning
+to glimmer into sight. Glancing upwards, he cried: “See! see!” and once
+more the high tapering flames were beheld with what seemed redoubled
+supernaturalness in their pallor.
+
+“The corpusants have mercy on us all,” cried Stubb, again.
+
+At the base of the mainmast, full beneath the doubloon and the flame,
+the Parsee was kneeling in Ahab’s front, but with his head bowed away
+from him; while near by, from the arched and overhanging rigging, where
+they had just been engaged securing a spar, a number of the seamen,
+arrested by the glare, now cohered together, and hung pendulous, like a
+knot of numbed wasps from a drooping, orchard twig. In various
+enchanted attitudes, like the standing, or stepping, or running
+skeletons in Herculaneum, others remained rooted to the deck; but all
+their eyes upcast.
+
+“Aye, aye, men!” cried Ahab. “Look up at it; mark it well; the white
+flame but lights the way to the White Whale! Hand me those mainmast
+links there; I would fain feel this pulse, and let mine beat against
+it; blood against fire! So.”
+
+Then turning—the last link held fast in his left hand, he put his foot
+upon the Parsee; and with fixed upward eye, and high-flung right arm,
+he stood erect before the lofty tri-pointed trinity of flames.
+
+“Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian
+once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that
+to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I
+now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor
+reverence wilt thou be kind; and e’en for hate thou canst but kill; and
+all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless,
+placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will
+dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of
+the personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but a
+point at best; whencesoe’er I came; wheresoe’er I go; yet while I
+earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal
+rights. But war is pain, and hate is woe. Come in thy lowest form of
+love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere
+supernal power; and though thou launchest navies of full-freighted
+worlds, there’s that in here that still remains indifferent. Oh, thou
+clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of
+fire, I breathe it back to thee.”
+
+[_Sudden, repeated flashes of lightning; the nine flames leap
+lengthwise to thrice their previous height; Ahab, with the rest, closes
+his eyes, his right hand pressed hard upon them._]
+
+“I own thy speechless, placeless power; said I not so? Nor was it wrung
+from me; nor do I now drop these links. Thou canst blind; but I can
+then grope. Thou canst consume; but I can then be ashes. Take the
+homage of these poor eyes, and shutter-hands. I would not take it. The
+lightning flashes through my skull; mine eye-balls ache and ache; my
+whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning
+ground. Oh, oh! Yet blindfold, yet will I talk to thee. Light though
+thou be, thou leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of
+light, leaping out of thee! The javelins cease; open eyes; see, or not?
+There burn the flames! Oh, thou magnanimous! now I do glory in my
+genealogy. But thou art but my fiery father; my sweet mother, I know
+not. Oh, cruel! what hast thou done with her? There lies my puzzle; but
+thine is greater. Thou knowest not how came ye, hence callest thyself
+unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy beginning, hence callest thyself
+unbegun. I know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou
+omnipotent. There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear
+spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness
+mechanical. Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly
+see it. Oh, thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast
+thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again with
+haughty agony, I read my sire. Leap! leap up, and lick the sky! I leap
+with thee; I burn with thee; would fain be welded with thee; defyingly
+I worship thee!”
+
+“The boat! the boat!” cried Starbuck, “look at thy boat, old man!”
+
+Ahab’s harpoon, the one forged at Perth’s fire, remained firmly lashed
+in its conspicuous crotch, so that it projected beyond his whale-boat’s
+bow; but the sea that had stove its bottom had caused the loose leather
+sheath to drop off; and from the keen steel barb there now came a
+levelled flame of pale, forked fire. As the silent harpoon burned there
+like a serpent’s tongue, Starbuck grasped Ahab by the arm—“God, God is
+against thee, old man; forbear! ’tis an ill voyage! ill begun, ill
+continued; let me square the yards, while we may, old man, and make a
+fair wind of it homewards, to go on a better voyage than this.”
+
+Overhearing Starbuck, the panic-stricken crew instantly ran to the
+braces—though not a sail was left aloft. For the moment all the aghast
+mate’s thoughts seemed theirs; they raised a half mutinous cry. But
+dashing the rattling lightning links to the deck, and snatching the
+burning harpoon, Ahab waved it like a torch among them; swearing to
+transfix with it the first sailor that but cast loose a rope’s end.
+Petrified by his aspect, and still more shrinking from the fiery dart
+that he held, the men fell back in dismay, and Ahab again spoke:—
+
+“All your oaths to hunt the White Whale are as binding as mine; and
+heart, soul, and body, lungs and life, old Ahab is bound. And that ye
+may know to what tune this heart beats; look ye here; thus I blow out
+the last fear!” And with one blast of his breath he extinguished the
+flame.
+
+As in the hurricane that sweeps the plain, men fly the neighborhood of
+some lone, gigantic elm, whose very height and strength but render it
+so much the more unsafe, because so much the more a mark for
+thunderbolts; so at those last words of Ahab’s many of the mariners did
+run from him in a terror of dismay.
+
+
+CHAPTER 120. The Deck Towards the End of the First Night Watch.
+
+_Ahab standing by the helm. Starbuck approaching him._
+
+“We must send down the main-top-sail yard, sir. The band is working
+loose and the lee lift is half-stranded. Shall I strike it, sir?”
+
+“Strike nothing; lash it. If I had sky-sail poles, I’d sway them up
+now.”
+
+“Sir!—in God’s name!—sir?”
+
+“Well.”
+
+“The anchors are working, sir. Shall I get them inboard?”
+
+“Strike nothing, and stir nothing, but lash everything. The wind rises,
+but it has not got up to my table-lands yet. Quick, and see to it.—By
+masts and keels! he takes me for the hunch-backed skipper of some
+coasting smack. Send down my main-top-sail yard! Ho, gluepots! Loftiest
+trucks were made for wildest winds, and this brain-truck of mine now
+sails amid the cloud-scud. Shall I strike that? Oh, none but cowards
+send down their brain-trucks in tempest time. What a hooroosh aloft
+there! I would e’en take it for sublime, did I not know that the colic
+is a noisy malady. Oh, take medicine, take medicine!”
+
+
+CHAPTER 121. Midnight.—The Forecastle Bulwarks.
+
+_Stubb and Flask mounted on them, and passing additional lashings over
+the anchors there hanging._
+
+“No, Stubb; you may pound that knot there as much as you please, but
+you will never pound into me what you were just now saying. And how
+long ago is it since you said the very contrary? Didn’t you once say
+that whatever ship Ahab sails in, that ship should pay something extra
+on its insurance policy, just as though it were loaded with powder
+barrels aft and boxes of lucifers forward? Stop, now; didn’t you say
+so?”
+
+“Well, suppose I did? What then? I’ve part changed my flesh since that
+time, why not my mind? Besides, supposing we _are_ loaded with powder
+barrels aft and lucifers forward; how the devil could the lucifers get
+afire in this drenching spray here? Why, my little man, you have pretty
+red hair, but you couldn’t get afire now. Shake yourself; you’re
+Aquarius, or the water-bearer, Flask; might fill pitchers at your coat
+collar. Don’t you see, then, that for these extra risks the Marine
+Insurance companies have extra guarantees? Here are hydrants, Flask.
+But hark, again, and I’ll answer ye the other thing. First take your
+leg off from the crown of the anchor here, though, so I can pass the
+rope; now listen. What’s the mighty difference between holding a mast’s
+lightning-rod in the storm, and standing close by a mast that hasn’t
+got any lightning-rod at all in a storm? Don’t you see, you
+timber-head, that no harm can come to the holder of the rod, unless the
+mast is first struck? What are you talking about, then? Not one ship in
+a hundred carries rods, and Ahab,—aye, man, and all of us,—were in no
+more danger then, in my poor opinion, than all the crews in ten
+thousand ships now sailing the seas. Why, you King-Post, you, I suppose
+you would have every man in the world go about with a small
+lightning-rod running up the corner of his hat, like a militia
+officer’s skewered feather, and trailing behind like his sash. Why
+don’t ye be sensible, Flask? it’s easy to be sensible; why don’t ye,
+then? any man with half an eye can be sensible.”
+
+“I don’t know that, Stubb. You sometimes find it rather hard.”
+
+“Yes, when a fellow’s soaked through, it’s hard to be sensible, that’s
+a fact. And I am about drenched with this spray. Never mind; catch the
+turn there, and pass it. Seems to me we are lashing down these anchors
+now as if they were never going to be used again. Tying these two
+anchors here, Flask, seems like tying a man’s hands behind him. And
+what big generous hands they are, to be sure. These are your iron
+fists, hey? What a hold they have, too! I wonder, Flask, whether the
+world is anchored anywhere; if she is, she swings with an uncommon long
+cable, though. There, hammer that knot down, and we’ve done. So; next
+to touching land, lighting on deck is the most satisfactory. I say,
+just wring out my jacket skirts, will ye? Thank ye. They laugh at
+long-togs so, Flask; but seems to me, a long tailed coat ought always
+to be worn in all storms afloat. The tails tapering down that way,
+serve to carry off the water, d’ye see. Same with cocked hats; the
+cocks form gable-end eave-troughs, Flask. No more monkey-jackets and
+tarpaulins for me; I must mount a swallow-tail, and drive down a
+beaver; so. Halloa! whew! there goes my tarpaulin overboard; Lord,
+Lord, that the winds that come from heaven should be so unmannerly!
+This is a nasty night, lad.”
+
+
+CHAPTER 122. Midnight Aloft.—Thunder and Lightning.
+
+_The main-top-sail yard_.—_Tashtego passing new lashings around it_.
+
+“Um, um, um. Stop that thunder! Plenty too much thunder up here. What’s
+the use of thunder? Um, um, um. We don’t want thunder; we want rum;
+give us a glass of rum. Um, um, um!”
+
+
+CHAPTER 123. The Musket.
+
+During the most violent shocks of the Typhoon, the man at the Pequod’s
+jaw-bone tiller had several times been reelingly hurled to the deck by
+its spasmodic motions, even though preventer tackles had been attached
+to it—for they were slack—because some play to the tiller was
+indispensable.
+
+In a severe gale like this, while the ship is but a tossed shuttlecock
+to the blast, it is by no means uncommon to see the needles in the
+compasses, at intervals, go round and round. It was thus with the
+Pequod’s; at almost every shock the helmsman had not failed to notice
+the whirling velocity with which they revolved upon the cards; it is a
+sight that hardly anyone can behold without some sort of unwonted
+emotion.
+
+Some hours after midnight, the Typhoon abated so much, that through the
+strenuous exertions of Starbuck and Stubb—one engaged forward and the
+other aft—the shivered remnants of the jib and fore and main-top-sails
+were cut adrift from the spars, and went eddying away to leeward, like
+the feathers of an albatross, which sometimes are cast to the winds
+when that storm-tossed bird is on the wing.
+
+The three corresponding new sails were now bent and reefed, and a
+storm-trysail was set further aft; so that the ship soon went through
+the water with some precision again; and the course—for the present,
+East-south-east—which he was to steer, if practicable, was once more
+given to the helmsman. For during the violence of the gale, he had only
+steered according to its vicissitudes. But as he was now bringing the
+ship as near her course as possible, watching the compass meanwhile,
+lo! a good sign! the wind seemed coming round astern; aye, the foul
+breeze became fair!
+
+Instantly the yards were squared, to the lively song of “_Ho! the fair
+wind! oh-ye-ho, cheerly men!_” the crew singing for joy, that so
+promising an event should so soon have falsified the evil portents
+preceding it.
+
+In compliance with the standing order of his commander—to report
+immediately, and at any one of the twenty-four hours, any decided
+change in the affairs of the deck,—Starbuck had no sooner trimmed the
+yards to the breeze—however reluctantly and gloomily,—than he
+mechanically went below to apprise Captain Ahab of the circumstance.
+
+Ere knocking at his state-room, he involuntarily paused before it a
+moment. The cabin lamp—taking long swings this way and that—was burning
+fitfully, and casting fitful shadows upon the old man’s bolted door,—a
+thin one, with fixed blinds inserted, in place of upper panels. The
+isolated subterraneousness of the cabin made a certain humming silence
+to reign there, though it was hooped round by all the roar of the
+elements. The loaded muskets in the rack were shiningly revealed, as
+they stood upright against the forward bulkhead. Starbuck was an
+honest, upright man; but out of Starbuck’s heart, at that instant when
+he saw the muskets, there strangely evolved an evil thought; but so
+blent with its neutral or good accompaniments that for the instant he
+hardly knew it for itself.
+
+“He would have shot me once,” he murmured, “yes, there’s the very
+musket that he pointed at me;—that one with the studded stock; let me
+touch it—lift it. Strange, that I, who have handled so many deadly
+lances, strange, that I should shake so now. Loaded? I must see. Aye,
+aye; and powder in the pan;—that’s not good. Best spill it?—wait. I’ll
+cure myself of this. I’ll hold the musket boldly while I think.—I come
+to report a fair wind to him. But how fair? Fair for death and
+doom,—_that’s_ fair for Moby Dick. It’s a fair wind that’s only fair
+for that accursed fish.—The very tube he pointed at me!—the very one;
+_this_ one—I hold it here; he would have killed me with the very thing
+I handle now.—Aye and he would fain kill all his crew. Does he not say
+he will not strike his spars to any gale? Has he not dashed his
+heavenly quadrant? and in these same perilous seas, gropes he not his
+way by mere dead reckoning of the error-abounding log? and in this very
+Typhoon, did he not swear that he would have no lightning-rods? But
+shall this crazed old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship’s
+company down to doom with him?—Yes, it would make him the wilful
+murderer of thirty men and more, if this ship come to any deadly harm;
+and come to deadly harm, my soul swears this ship will, if Ahab have
+his way. If, then, he were this instant—put aside, that crime would not
+be his. Ha! is he muttering in his sleep? Yes, just there,—in there,
+he’s sleeping. Sleeping? aye, but still alive, and soon awake again. I
+can’t withstand thee, then, old man. Not reasoning; not remonstrance;
+not entreaty wilt thou hearken to; all this thou scornest. Flat
+obedience to thy own flat commands, this is all thou breathest. Aye,
+and say’st the men have vow’d thy vow; say’st all of us are Ahabs.
+Great God forbid!—But is there no other way? no lawful way?—Make him a
+prisoner to be taken home? What! hope to wrest this old man’s living
+power from his own living hands? Only a fool would try it. Say he were
+pinioned even; knotted all over with ropes and hawsers; chained down to
+ring-bolts on this cabin floor; he would be more hideous than a caged
+tiger, then. I could not endure the sight; could not possibly fly his
+howlings; all comfort, sleep itself, inestimable reason would leave me
+on the long intolerable voyage. What, then, remains? The land is
+hundreds of leagues away, and locked Japan the nearest. I stand alone
+here upon an open sea, with two oceans and a whole continent between me
+and law.—Aye, aye, ’tis so.—Is heaven a murderer when its lightning
+strikes a would-be murderer in his bed, tindering sheets and skin
+together?—And would I be a murderer, then, if”—and slowly, stealthily,
+and half sideways looking, he placed the loaded musket’s end against
+the door.
+
+“On this level, Ahab’s hammock swings within; his head this way. A
+touch, and Starbuck may survive to hug his wife and child again.—Oh
+Mary! Mary!—boy! boy! boy!—But if I wake thee not to death, old man,
+who can tell to what unsounded deeps Starbuck’s body this day week may
+sink, with all the crew! Great God, where art Thou? Shall I? shall
+I?—The wind has gone down and shifted, sir; the fore and main topsails
+are reefed and set; she heads her course.”
+
+“Stern all! Oh Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart at last!”
+
+Such were the sounds that now came hurtling from out the old man’s
+tormented sleep, as if Starbuck’s voice had caused the long dumb dream
+to speak.
+
+The yet levelled musket shook like a drunkard’s arm against the panel;
+Starbuck seemed wrestling with an angel; but turning from the door, he
+placed the death-tube in its rack, and left the place.
+
+“He’s too sound asleep, Mr. Stubb; go thou down, and wake him, and tell
+him. I must see to the deck here. Thou know’st what to say.”
+
+
+CHAPTER 124. The Needle.
+
+Next morning the not-yet-subsided sea rolled in long slow billows of
+mighty bulk, and striving in the Pequod’s gurgling track, pushed her on
+like giants’ palms outspread. The strong, unstaggering breeze abounded
+so, that sky and air seemed vast outbellying sails; the whole world
+boomed before the wind. Muffled in the full morning light, the
+invisible sun was only known by the spread intensity of his place;
+where his bayonet rays moved on in stacks. Emblazonings, as of crowned
+Babylonian kings and queens, reigned over everything. The sea was as a
+crucible of molten gold, that bubblingly leaps with light and heat.
+
+Long maintaining an enchanted silence, Ahab stood apart; and every time
+the tetering ship loweringly pitched down her bowsprit, he turned to
+eye the bright sun’s rays produced ahead; and when she profoundly
+settled by the stern, he turned behind, and saw the sun’s rearward
+place, and how the same yellow rays were blending with his undeviating
+wake.
+
+“Ha, ha, my ship! thou mightest well be taken now for the sea-chariot
+of the sun. Ho, ho! all ye nations before my prow, I bring the sun to
+ye! Yoke on the further billows; hallo! a tandem, I drive the sea!”
+
+But suddenly reined back by some counter thought, he hurried towards
+the helm, huskily demanding how the ship was heading.
+
+“East-sou-east, sir,” said the frightened steersman.
+
+“Thou liest!” smiting him with his clenched fist. “Heading East at this
+hour in the morning, and the sun astern?”
+
+Upon this every soul was confounded; for the phenomenon just then
+observed by Ahab had unaccountably escaped every one else; but its very
+blinding palpableness must have been the cause.
+
+Thrusting his head half way into the binnacle, Ahab caught one glimpse
+of the compasses; his uplifted arm slowly fell; for a moment he almost
+seemed to stagger. Standing behind him Starbuck looked, and lo! the two
+compasses pointed East, and the Pequod was as infallibly going West.
+
+But ere the first wild alarm could get out abroad among the crew, the
+old man with a rigid laugh exclaimed, “I have it! It has happened
+before. Mr. Starbuck, last night’s thunder turned our compasses—that’s
+all. Thou hast before now heard of such a thing, I take it.”
+
+“Aye; but never before has it happened to me, sir,” said the pale mate,
+gloomily.
+
+Here, it must needs be said, that accidents like this have in more than
+one case occurred to ships in violent storms. The magnetic energy, as
+developed in the mariner’s needle, is, as all know, essentially one
+with the electricity beheld in heaven; hence it is not to be much
+marvelled at, that such things should be. Instances where the lightning
+has actually struck the vessel, so as to smite down some of the spars
+and rigging, the effect upon the needle has at times been still more
+fatal; all its loadstone virtue being annihilated, so that the before
+magnetic steel was of no more use than an old wife’s knitting needle.
+But in either case, the needle never again, of itself, recovers the
+original virtue thus marred or lost; and if the binnacle compasses be
+affected, the same fate reaches all the others that may be in the ship;
+even were the lowermost one inserted into the kelson.
+
+Deliberately standing before the binnacle, and eyeing the transpointed
+compasses, the old man, with the sharp of his extended hand, now took
+the precise bearing of the sun, and satisfied that the needles were
+exactly inverted, shouted out his orders for the ship’s course to be
+changed accordingly. The yards were hard up; and once more the Pequod
+thrust her undaunted bows into the opposing wind, for the supposed fair
+one had only been juggling her.
+
+Meanwhile, whatever were his own secret thoughts, Starbuck said
+nothing, but quietly he issued all requisite orders; while Stubb and
+Flask—who in some small degree seemed then to be sharing his
+feelings—likewise unmurmuringly acquiesced. As for the men, though some
+of them lowly rumbled, their fear of Ahab was greater than their fear
+of Fate. But as ever before, the pagan harpooneers remained almost
+wholly unimpressed; or if impressed, it was only with a certain
+magnetism shot into their congenial hearts from inflexible Ahab’s.
+
+For a space the old man walked the deck in rolling reveries. But
+chancing to slip with his ivory heel, he saw the crushed copper
+sight-tubes of the quadrant he had the day before dashed to the deck.
+
+“Thou poor, proud heaven-gazer and sun’s pilot! yesterday I wrecked
+thee, and to-day the compasses would fain have wrecked me. So, so. But
+Ahab is lord over the level loadstone yet. Mr. Starbuck—a lance without
+a pole; a top-maul, and the smallest of the sail-maker’s needles.
+Quick!”
+
+Accessory, perhaps, to the impulse dictating the thing he was now about
+to do, were certain prudential motives, whose object might have been to
+revive the spirits of his crew by a stroke of his subtile skill, in a
+matter so wondrous as that of the inverted compasses. Besides, the old
+man well knew that to steer by transpointed needles, though clumsily
+practicable, was not a thing to be passed over by superstitious
+sailors, without some shudderings and evil portents.
+
+“Men,” said he, steadily turning upon the crew, as the mate handed him
+the things he had demanded, “my men, the thunder turned old Ahab’s
+needles; but out of this bit of steel Ahab can make one of his own,
+that will point as true as any.”
+
+Abashed glances of servile wonder were exchanged by the sailors, as
+this was said; and with fascinated eyes they awaited whatever magic
+might follow. But Starbuck looked away.
+
+With a blow from the top-maul Ahab knocked off the steel head of the
+lance, and then handing to the mate the long iron rod remaining, bade
+him hold it upright, without its touching the deck. Then, with the
+maul, after repeatedly smiting the upper end of this iron rod, he
+placed the blunted needle endwise on the top of it, and less strongly
+hammered that, several times, the mate still holding the rod as before.
+Then going through some small strange motions with it—whether
+indispensable to the magnetizing of the steel, or merely intended to
+augment the awe of the crew, is uncertain—he called for linen thread;
+and moving to the binnacle, slipped out the two reversed needles there,
+and horizontally suspended the sail-needle by its middle, over one of
+the compass-cards. At first, the steel went round and round, quivering
+and vibrating at either end; but at last it settled to its place, when
+Ahab, who had been intently watching for this result, stepped frankly
+back from the binnacle, and pointing his stretched arm towards it,
+exclaimed,—“Look ye, for yourselves, if Ahab be not lord of the level
+loadstone! The sun is East, and that compass swears it!”
+
+One after another they peered in, for nothing but their own eyes could
+persuade such ignorance as theirs, and one after another they slunk
+away.
+
+In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all his
+fatal pride.
+
+
+CHAPTER 125. The Log and Line.
+
+While now the fated Pequod had been so long afloat this voyage, the log
+and line had but very seldom been in use. Owing to a confident reliance
+upon other means of determining the vessel’s place, some merchantmen,
+and many whalemen, especially when cruising, wholly neglect to heave
+the log; though at the same time, and frequently more for form’s sake
+than anything else, regularly putting down upon the customary slate the
+course steered by the ship, as well as the presumed average rate of
+progression every hour. It had been thus with the Pequod. The wooden
+reel and angular log attached hung, long untouched, just beneath the
+railing of the after bulwarks. Rains and spray had damped it; sun and
+wind had warped it; all the elements had combined to rot a thing that
+hung so idly. But heedless of all this, his mood seized Ahab, as he
+happened to glance upon the reel, not many hours after the magnet
+scene, and he remembered how his quadrant was no more, and recalled his
+frantic oath about the level log and line. The ship was sailing
+plungingly; astern the billows rolled in riots.
+
+“Forward, there! Heave the log!”
+
+Two seamen came. The golden-hued Tahitian and the grizzly Manxman.
+“Take the reel, one of ye, I’ll heave.”
+
+They went towards the extreme stern, on the ship’s lee side, where the
+deck, with the oblique energy of the wind, was now almost dipping into
+the creamy, sidelong-rushing sea.
+
+The Manxman took the reel, and holding it high up, by the projecting
+handle-ends of the spindle, round which the spool of line revolved, so
+stood with the angular log hanging downwards, till Ahab advanced to
+him.
+
+Ahab stood before him, and was lightly unwinding some thirty or forty
+turns to form a preliminary hand-coil to toss overboard, when the old
+Manxman, who was intently eyeing both him and the line, made bold to
+speak.
+
+“Sir, I mistrust it; this line looks far gone, long heat and wet have
+spoiled it.”
+
+“’Twill hold, old gentleman. Long heat and wet, have they spoiled thee?
+Thou seem’st to hold. Or, truer perhaps, life holds thee; not thou it.”
+
+“I hold the spool, sir. But just as my captain says. With these grey
+hairs of mine ’tis not worth while disputing, ’specially with a
+superior, who’ll ne’er confess.”
+
+“What’s that? There now’s a patched professor in Queen Nature’s
+granite-founded College; but methinks he’s too subservient. Where wert
+thou born?”
+
+“In the little rocky Isle of Man, sir.”
+
+“Excellent! Thou’st hit the world by that.”
+
+“I know not, sir, but I was born there.”
+
+“In the Isle of Man, hey? Well, the other way, it’s good. Here’s a man
+from Man; a man born in once independent Man, and now unmanned of Man;
+which is sucked in—by what? Up with the reel! The dead, blind wall
+butts all inquiring heads at last. Up with it! So.”
+
+The log was heaved. The loose coils rapidly straightened out in a long
+dragging line astern, and then, instantly, the reel began to whirl. In
+turn, jerkingly raised and lowered by the rolling billows, the towing
+resistance of the log caused the old reelman to stagger strangely.
+
+“Hold hard!”
+
+Snap! the overstrained line sagged down in one long festoon; the
+tugging log was gone.
+
+“I crush the quadrant, the thunder turns the needles, and now the mad
+sea parts the log-line. But Ahab can mend all. Haul in here, Tahitian;
+reel up, Manxman. And look ye, let the carpenter make another log, and
+mend thou the line. See to it.”
+
+“There he goes now; to him nothing’s happened; but to me, the skewer
+seems loosening out of the middle of the world. Haul in, haul in,
+Tahitian! These lines run whole, and whirling out: come in broken, and
+dragging slow. Ha, Pip? come to help; eh, Pip?”
+
+“Pip? whom call ye Pip? Pip jumped from the whale-boat. Pip’s missing.
+Let’s see now if ye haven’t fished him up here, fisherman. It drags
+hard; I guess he’s holding on. Jerk him, Tahiti! Jerk him off; we haul
+in no cowards here. Ho! there’s his arm just breaking water. A hatchet!
+a hatchet! cut it off—we haul in no cowards here. Captain Ahab! sir,
+sir! here’s Pip, trying to get on board again.”
+
+“Peace, thou crazy loon,” cried the Manxman, seizing him by the arm.
+“Away from the quarter-deck!”
+
+“The greater idiot ever scolds the lesser,” muttered Ahab, advancing.
+“Hands off from that holiness! Where sayest thou Pip was, boy?
+
+“Astern there, sir, astern! Lo! lo!”
+
+“And who art thou, boy? I see not my reflection in the vacant pupils of
+thy eyes. Oh God! that man should be a thing for immortal souls to
+sieve through! Who art thou, boy?”
+
+“Bell-boy, sir; ship’s-crier; ding, dong, ding! Pip! Pip! Pip! One
+hundred pounds of clay reward for Pip; five feet high—looks
+cowardly—quickest known by that! Ding, dong, ding! Who’s seen Pip the
+coward?”
+
+“There can be no hearts above the snow-line. Oh, ye frozen heavens!
+look down here. Ye did beget this luckless child, and have abandoned
+him, ye creative libertines. Here, boy; Ahab’s cabin shall be Pip’s
+home henceforth, while Ahab lives. Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy;
+thou art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings. Come, let’s
+down.”
+
+“What’s this? here’s velvet shark-skin,” intently gazing at Ahab’s
+hand, and feeling it. “Ah, now, had poor Pip but felt so kind a thing
+as this, perhaps he had ne’er been lost! This seems to me, sir, as a
+man-rope; something that weak souls may hold by. Oh, sir, let old Perth
+now come and rivet these two hands together; the black one with the
+white, for I will not let this go.”
+
+“Oh, boy, nor will I thee, unless I should thereby drag thee to worse
+horrors than are here. Come, then, to my cabin. Lo! ye believers in
+gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods
+oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not
+what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude. Come!
+I feel prouder leading thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an
+Emperor’s!”
+
+“There go two daft ones now,” muttered the old Manxman. “One daft with
+strength, the other daft with weakness. But here’s the end of the
+rotten line—all dripping, too. Mend it, eh? I think we had best have a
+new line altogether. I’ll see Mr. Stubb about it.”
+
+
+CHAPTER 126. The Life-Buoy.
+
+Steering now south-eastward by Ahab’s levelled steel, and her progress
+solely determined by Ahab’s level log and line; the Pequod held on her
+path towards the Equator. Making so long a passage through such
+unfrequented waters, descrying no ships, and ere long, sideways
+impelled by unvarying trade winds, over waves monotonously mild; all
+these seemed the strange calm things preluding some riotous and
+desperate scene.
+
+At last, when the ship drew near to the outskirts, as it were, of the
+Equatorial fishing-ground, and in the deep darkness that goes before
+the dawn, was sailing by a cluster of rocky islets; the watch—then
+headed by Flask—was startled by a cry so plaintively wild and
+unearthly—like half-articulated wailings of the ghosts of all Herod’s
+murdered Innocents—that one and all, they started from their reveries,
+and for the space of some moments stood, or sat, or leaned all
+transfixedly listening, like the carved Roman slave, while that wild
+cry remained within hearing. The Christian or civilized part of the
+crew said it was mermaids, and shuddered; but the pagan harpooneers
+remained unappalled. Yet the grey Manxman—the oldest mariner of
+all—declared that the wild thrilling sounds that were heard, were the
+voices of newly drowned men in the sea.
+
+Below in his hammock, Ahab did not hear of this till grey dawn, when he
+came to the deck; it was then recounted to him by Flask, not
+unaccompanied with hinted dark meanings. He hollowly laughed, and thus
+explained the wonder.
+
+Those rocky islands the ship had passed were the resort of great
+numbers of seals, and some young seals that had lost their dams, or
+some dams that had lost their cubs, must have risen nigh the ship and
+kept company with her, crying and sobbing with their human sort of
+wail. But this only the more affected some of them, because most
+mariners cherish a very superstitious feeling about seals, arising not
+only from their peculiar tones when in distress, but also from the
+human look of their round heads and semi-intelligent faces, seen
+peeringly uprising from the water alongside. In the sea, under certain
+circumstances, seals have more than once been mistaken for men.
+
+But the bodings of the crew were destined to receive a most plausible
+confirmation in the fate of one of their number that morning. At
+sun-rise this man went from his hammock to his mast-head at the fore;
+and whether it was that he was not yet half waked from his sleep (for
+sailors sometimes go aloft in a transition state), whether it was thus
+with the man, there is now no telling; but, be that as it may, he had
+not been long at his perch, when a cry was heard—a cry and a
+rushing—and looking up, they saw a falling phantom in the air; and
+looking down, a little tossed heap of white bubbles in the blue of the
+sea.
+
+The life-buoy—a long slender cask—was dropped from the stern, where it
+always hung obedient to a cunning spring; but no hand rose to seize it,
+and the sun having long beat upon this cask it had shrunken, so that it
+slowly filled, and that parched wood also filled at its every pore; and
+the studded iron-bound cask followed the sailor to the bottom, as if to
+yield him his pillow, though in sooth but a hard one.
+
+And thus the first man of the Pequod that mounted the mast to look out
+for the White Whale, on the White Whale’s own peculiar ground; that man
+was swallowed up in the deep. But few, perhaps, thought of that at the
+time. Indeed, in some sort, they were not grieved at this event, at
+least as a portent; for they regarded it, not as a foreshadowing of
+evil in the future, but as the fulfilment of an evil already presaged.
+They declared that now they knew the reason of those wild shrieks they
+had heard the night before. But again the old Manxman said nay.
+
+The lost life-buoy was now to be replaced; Starbuck was directed to see
+to it; but as no cask of sufficient lightness could be found, and as in
+the feverish eagerness of what seemed the approaching crisis of the
+voyage, all hands were impatient of any toil but what was directly
+connected with its final end, whatever that might prove to be;
+therefore, they were going to leave the ship’s stern unprovided with a
+buoy, when by certain strange signs and inuendoes Queequeg hinted a
+hint concerning his coffin.
+
+“A life-buoy of a coffin!” cried Starbuck, starting.
+
+“Rather queer, that, I should say,” said Stubb.
+
+“It will make a good enough one,” said Flask, “the carpenter here can
+arrange it easily.”
+
+“Bring it up; there’s nothing else for it,” said Starbuck, after a
+melancholy pause. “Rig it, carpenter; do not look at me so—the coffin,
+I mean. Dost thou hear me? Rig it.”
+
+“And shall I nail down the lid, sir?” moving his hand as with a hammer.
+
+“Aye.”
+
+“And shall I caulk the seams, sir?” moving his hand as with a
+caulking-iron.
+
+“Aye.”
+
+“And shall I then pay over the same with pitch, sir?” moving his hand
+as with a pitch-pot.
+
+“Away! what possesses thee to this? Make a life-buoy of the coffin, and
+no more.—Mr. Stubb, Mr. Flask, come forward with me.”
+
+“He goes off in a huff. The whole he can endure; at the parts he
+baulks. Now I don’t like this. I make a leg for Captain Ahab, and he
+wears it like a gentleman; but I make a bandbox for Queequeg, and he
+won’t put his head into it. Are all my pains to go for nothing with
+that coffin? And now I’m ordered to make a life-buoy of it. It’s like
+turning an old coat; going to bring the flesh on the other side now. I
+don’t like this cobbling sort of business—I don’t like it at all; it’s
+undignified; it’s not my place. Let tinkers’ brats do tinkerings; we
+are their betters. I like to take in hand none but clean, virgin,
+fair-and-square mathematical jobs, something that regularly begins at
+the beginning, and is at the middle when midway, and comes to an end at
+the conclusion; not a cobbler’s job, that’s at an end in the middle,
+and at the beginning at the end. It’s the old woman’s tricks to be
+giving cobbling jobs. Lord! what an affection all old women have for
+tinkers. I know an old woman of sixty-five who ran away with a
+bald-headed young tinker once. And that’s the reason I never would work
+for lonely widow old women ashore, when I kept my job-shop in the
+Vineyard; they might have taken it into their lonely old heads to run
+off with me. But heigh-ho! there are no caps at sea but snow-caps. Let
+me see. Nail down the lid; caulk the seams; pay over the same with
+pitch; batten them down tight, and hang it with the snap-spring over
+the ship’s stern. Were ever such things done before with a coffin? Some
+superstitious old carpenters, now, would be tied up in the rigging, ere
+they would do the job. But I’m made of knotty Aroostook hemlock; I
+don’t budge. Cruppered with a coffin! Sailing about with a grave-yard
+tray! But never mind. We workers in woods make bridal-bedsteads and
+card-tables, as well as coffins and hearses. We work by the month, or
+by the job, or by the profit; not for us to ask the why and wherefore
+of our work, unless it be too confounded cobbling, and then we stash it
+if we can. Hem! I’ll do the job, now, tenderly. I’ll have me—let’s
+see—how many in the ship’s company, all told? But I’ve forgotten. Any
+way, I’ll have me thirty separate, Turk’s-headed life-lines, each three
+feet long hanging all round to the coffin. Then, if the hull go down,
+there’ll be thirty lively fellows all fighting for one coffin, a sight
+not seen very often beneath the sun! Come hammer, caulking-iron,
+pitch-pot, and marling-spike! Let’s to it.”
+
+
+CHAPTER 127. The Deck.
+
+_The coffin laid upon two line-tubs, between the vice-bench and the
+open hatchway; the Carpenter caulking its seams; the string of twisted
+oakum slowly unwinding from a large roll of it placed in the bosom of
+his frock.—Ahab comes slowly from the cabin-gangway, and hears Pip
+following him._
+
+“Back, lad; I will be with ye again presently. He goes! Not this hand
+complies with my humor more genially than that boy.—Middle aisle of a
+church! What’s here?”
+
+“Life-buoy, sir. Mr. Starbuck’s orders. Oh, look, sir! Beware the
+hatchway!”
+
+“Thank ye, man. Thy coffin lies handy to the vault.”
+
+“Sir? The hatchway? oh! So it does, sir, so it does.”
+
+“Art not thou the leg-maker? Look, did not this stump come from thy
+shop?”
+
+“I believe it did, sir; does the ferrule stand, sir?”
+
+“Well enough. But art thou not also the undertaker?”
+
+“Aye, sir; I patched up this thing here as a coffin for Queequeg; but
+they’ve set me now to turning it into something else.”
+
+“Then tell me; art thou not an arrant, all-grasping, intermeddling,
+monopolising, heathenish old scamp, to be one day making legs, and the
+next day coffins to clap them in, and yet again life-buoys out of those
+same coffins? Thou art as unprincipled as the gods, and as much of a
+jack-of-all-trades.”
+
+“But I do not mean anything, sir. I do as I do.”
+
+“The gods again. Hark ye, dost thou not ever sing working about a
+coffin? The Titans, they say, hummed snatches when chipping out the
+craters for volcanoes; and the grave-digger in the play sings, spade in
+hand. Dost thou never?”
+
+“Sing, sir? Do I sing? Oh, I’m indifferent enough, sir, for that; but
+the reason why the grave-digger made music must have been because there
+was none in his spade, sir. But the caulking mallet is full of it. Hark
+to it.”
+
+“Aye, and that’s because the lid there’s a sounding-board; and what in
+all things makes the sounding-board is this—there’s naught beneath. And
+yet, a coffin with a body in it rings pretty much the same, Carpenter.
+Hast thou ever helped carry a bier, and heard the coffin knock against
+the churchyard gate, going in?
+
+“Faith, sir, I’ve——”
+
+“Faith? What’s that?”
+
+“Why, faith, sir, it’s only a sort of exclamation-like—that’s all,
+sir.”
+
+“Um, um; go on.”
+
+“I was about to say, sir, that——”
+
+“Art thou a silk-worm? Dost thou spin thy own shroud out of thyself?
+Look at thy bosom! Despatch! and get these traps out of sight.”
+
+“He goes aft. That was sudden, now; but squalls come sudden in hot
+latitudes. I’ve heard that the Isle of Albemarle, one of the
+Gallipagos, is cut by the Equator right in the middle. Seems to me some
+sort of Equator cuts yon old man, too, right in his middle. He’s always
+under the Line—fiery hot, I tell ye! He’s looking this way—come, oakum;
+quick. Here we go again. This wooden mallet is the cork, and I’m the
+professor of musical glasses—tap, tap!”
+
+(_Ahab to himself_.)
+
+“There’s a sight! There’s a sound! The greyheaded woodpecker tapping
+the hollow tree! Blind and dumb might well be envied now. See! that
+thing rests on two line-tubs, full of tow-lines. A most malicious wag,
+that fellow. Rat-tat! So man’s seconds tick! Oh! how immaterial are all
+materials! What things real are there, but imponderable thoughts? Here
+now’s the very dreaded symbol of grim death, by a mere hap, made the
+expressive sign of the help and hope of most endangered life. A
+life-buoy of a coffin! Does it go further? Can it be that in some
+spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but an immortality-preserver!
+I’ll think of that. But no. So far gone am I in the dark side of earth,
+that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain
+twilight to me. Will ye never have done, Carpenter, with that accursed
+sound? I go below; let me not see that thing here when I return again.
+Now, then, Pip, we’ll talk this over; I do suck most wondrous
+philosophies from thee! Some unknown conduits from the unknown worlds
+must empty into thee!”
+
+
+CHAPTER 128. The Pequod Meets The Rachel.
+
+Next day, a large ship, the Rachel, was descried, bearing directly down
+upon the Pequod, all her spars thickly clustering with men. At the time
+the Pequod was making good speed through the water; but as the
+broad-winged windward stranger shot nigh to her, the boastful sails all
+fell together as blank bladders that are burst, and all life fled from
+the smitten hull.
+
+“Bad news; she brings bad news,” muttered the old Manxman. But ere her
+commander, who, with trumpet to mouth, stood up in his boat; ere he
+could hopefully hail, Ahab’s voice was heard.
+
+“Hast seen the White Whale?”
+
+“Aye, yesterday. Have ye seen a whale-boat adrift?”
+
+Throttling his joy, Ahab negatively answered this unexpected question;
+and would then have fain boarded the stranger, when the stranger
+captain himself, having stopped his vessel’s way, was seen descending
+her side. A few keen pulls, and his boat-hook soon clinched the
+Pequod’s main-chains, and he sprang to the deck. Immediately he was
+recognised by Ahab for a Nantucketer he knew. But no formal salutation
+was exchanged.
+
+“Where was he?—not killed!—not killed!” cried Ahab, closely advancing.
+“How was it?”
+
+It seemed that somewhat late on the afternoon of the day previous,
+while three of the stranger’s boats were engaged with a shoal of
+whales, which had led them some four or five miles from the ship; and
+while they were yet in swift chase to windward, the white hump and head
+of Moby Dick had suddenly loomed up out of the water, not very far to
+leeward; whereupon, the fourth rigged boat—a reserved one—had been
+instantly lowered in chase. After a keen sail before the wind, this
+fourth boat—the swiftest keeled of all—seemed to have succeeded in
+fastening—at least, as well as the man at the mast-head could tell
+anything about it. In the distance he saw the diminished dotted boat;
+and then a swift gleam of bubbling white water; and after that nothing
+more; whence it was concluded that the stricken whale must have
+indefinitely run away with his pursuers, as often happens. There was
+some apprehension, but no positive alarm, as yet. The recall signals
+were placed in the rigging; darkness came on; and forced to pick up her
+three far to windward boats—ere going in quest of the fourth one in the
+precisely opposite direction—the ship had not only been necessitated to
+leave that boat to its fate till near midnight, but, for the time, to
+increase her distance from it. But the rest of her crew being at last
+safe aboard, she crowded all sail—stunsail on stunsail—after the
+missing boat; kindling a fire in her try-pots for a beacon; and every
+other man aloft on the look-out. But though when she had thus sailed a
+sufficient distance to gain the presumed place of the absent ones when
+last seen; though she then paused to lower her spare boats to pull all
+around her; and not finding anything, had again dashed on; again
+paused, and lowered her boats; and though she had thus continued doing
+till daylight; yet not the least glimpse of the missing keel had been
+seen.
+
+The story told, the stranger Captain immediately went on to reveal his
+object in boarding the Pequod. He desired that ship to unite with his
+own in the search; by sailing over the sea some four or five miles
+apart, on parallel lines, and so sweeping a double horizon, as it were.
+
+“I will wager something now,” whispered Stubb to Flask, “that some one
+in that missing boat wore off that Captain’s best coat; mayhap, his
+watch—he’s so cursed anxious to get it back. Who ever heard of two
+pious whale-ships cruising after one missing whale-boat in the height
+of the whaling season? See, Flask, only see how pale he looks—pale in
+the very buttons of his eyes—look—it wasn’t the coat—it must have been
+the—”
+
+“My boy, my own boy is among them. For God’s sake—I beg, I
+conjure”—here exclaimed the stranger Captain to Ahab, who thus far had
+but icily received his petition. “For eight-and-forty hours let me
+charter your ship—I will gladly pay for it, and roundly pay for it—if
+there be no other way—for eight-and-forty hours only—only that—you
+must, oh, you must, and you _shall_ do this thing.”
+
+“His son!” cried Stubb, “oh, it’s his son he’s lost! I take back the
+coat and watch—what says Ahab? We must save that boy.”
+
+“He’s drowned with the rest on ’em, last night,” said the old Manx
+sailor standing behind them; “I heard; all of ye heard their spirits.”
+
+Now, as it shortly turned out, what made this incident of the Rachel’s
+the more melancholy, was the circumstance, that not only was one of the
+Captain’s sons among the number of the missing boat’s crew; but among
+the number of the other boat’s crews, at the same time, but on the
+other hand, separated from the ship during the dark vicissitudes of the
+chase, there had been still another son; as that for a time, the
+wretched father was plunged to the bottom of the cruellest perplexity;
+which was only solved for him by his chief mate’s instinctively
+adopting the ordinary procedure of a whale-ship in such emergencies,
+that is, when placed between jeopardized but divided boats, always to
+pick up the majority first. But the captain, for some unknown
+constitutional reason, had refrained from mentioning all this, and not
+till forced to it by Ahab’s iciness did he allude to his one yet
+missing boy; a little lad, but twelve years old, whose father with the
+earnest but unmisgiving hardihood of a Nantucketer’s paternal love, had
+thus early sought to initiate him in the perils and wonders of a
+vocation almost immemorially the destiny of all his race. Nor does it
+unfrequently occur, that Nantucket captains will send a son of such
+tender age away from them, for a protracted three or four years’ voyage
+in some other ship than their own; so that their first knowledge of a
+whaleman’s career shall be unenervated by any chance display of a
+father’s natural but untimely partiality, or undue apprehensiveness and
+concern.
+
+Meantime, now the stranger was still beseeching his poor boon of Ahab;
+and Ahab still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock, but without
+the least quivering of his own.
+
+“I will not go,” said the stranger, “till you say _aye_ to me. Do to me
+as you would have me do to you in the like case. For _you_ too have a
+boy, Captain Ahab—though but a child, and nestling safely at home now—a
+child of your old age too—Yes, yes, you relent; I see it—run, run, men,
+now, and stand by to square in the yards.”
+
+“Avast,” cried Ahab—“touch not a rope-yarn”; then in a voice that
+prolongingly moulded every word—“Captain Gardiner, I will not do it.
+Even now I lose time. Good-bye, good-bye. God bless ye, man, and may I
+forgive myself, but I must go. Mr. Starbuck, look at the binnacle
+watch, and in three minutes from this present instant warn off all
+strangers: then brace forward again, and let the ship sail as before.”
+
+Hurriedly turning, with averted face, he descended into his cabin,
+leaving the strange captain transfixed at this unconditional and utter
+rejection of his so earnest suit. But starting from his enchantment,
+Gardiner silently hurried to the side; more fell than stepped into his
+boat, and returned to his ship.
+
+Soon the two ships diverged their wakes; and long as the strange vessel
+was in view, she was seen to yaw hither and thither at every dark spot,
+however small, on the sea. This way and that her yards were swung
+round; starboard and larboard, she continued to tack; now she beat
+against a head sea; and again it pushed her before it; while all the
+while, her masts and yards were thickly clustered with men, as three
+tall cherry trees, when the boys are cherrying among the boughs.
+
+But by her still halting course and winding, woeful way, you plainly
+saw that this ship that so wept with spray, still remained without
+comfort. She was Rachel, weeping for her children, because they were
+not.
+
+
+CHAPTER 129. The Cabin.
+
+(_Ahab moving to go on deck; Pip catches him by the hand to follow._)
+
+“Lad, lad, I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now. The hour is
+coming when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would not have thee
+by him. There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my
+malady. Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most
+desired health. Do thou abide below here, where they shall serve thee,
+as if thou wert the captain. Aye, lad, thou shalt sit here in my own
+screwed chair; another screw to it, thou must be.”
+
+“No, no, no! ye have not a whole body, sir; do ye but use poor me for
+your one lost leg; only tread upon me, sir; I ask no more, so I remain
+a part of ye.”
+
+“Oh! spite of million villains, this makes me a bigot in the fadeless
+fidelity of man!—and a black! and crazy!—but methinks like-cures-like
+applies to him too; he grows so sane again.”
+
+“They tell me, sir, that Stubb did once desert poor little Pip, whose
+drowned bones now show white, for all the blackness of his living skin.
+But I will never desert ye, sir, as Stubb did him. Sir, I must go with
+ye.”
+
+“If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab’s purpose keels up in him.
+I tell thee no; it cannot be.”
+
+“Oh good master, master, master!
+
+“Weep so, and I will murder thee! have a care, for Ahab too is mad.
+Listen, and thou wilt often hear my ivory foot upon the deck, and still
+know that I am there. And now I quit thee. Thy hand!—Met! True art
+thou, lad, as the circumference to its centre. So: God for ever bless
+thee; and if it come to that,—God for ever save thee, let what will
+befall.”
+
+(_Ahab goes; Pip steps one step forward._)
+
+“Here he this instant stood; I stand in his air,—but I’m alone. Now
+were even poor Pip here I could endure it, but he’s missing. Pip! Pip!
+Ding, dong, ding! Who’s seen Pip? He must be up here; let’s try the
+door. What? neither lock, nor bolt, nor bar; and yet there’s no opening
+it. It must be the spell; he told me to stay here: Aye, and told me
+this screwed chair was mine. Here, then, I’ll seat me, against the
+transom, in the ship’s full middle, all her keel and her three masts
+before me. Here, our old sailors say, in their black seventy-fours
+great admirals sometimes sit at table, and lord it over rows of
+captains and lieutenants. Ha! what’s this? epaulets! epaulets! the
+epaulets all come crowding! Pass round the decanters; glad to see ye;
+fill up, monsieurs! What an odd feeling, now, when a black boy’s host
+to white men with gold lace upon their coats!—Monsieurs, have ye seen
+one Pip?—a little negro lad, five feet high, hang-dog look, and
+cowardly! Jumped from a whale-boat once;—seen him? No! Well then, fill
+up again, captains, and let’s drink shame upon all cowards! I name no
+names. Shame upon them! Put one foot upon the table. Shame upon all
+cowards.—Hist! above there, I hear ivory—Oh, master! master! I am
+indeed down-hearted when you walk over me. But here I’ll stay, though
+this stern strikes rocks; and they bulge through; and oysters come to
+join me.”
+
+
+CHAPTER 130. The Hat.
+
+And now that at the proper time and place, after so long and wide a
+preliminary cruise, Ahab,—all other whaling waters swept—seemed to have
+chased his foe into an ocean-fold, to slay him the more securely there;
+now, that he found himself hard by the very latitude and longitude
+where his tormenting wound had been inflicted; now that a vessel had
+been spoken which on the very day preceding had actually encountered
+Moby Dick;—and now that all his successive meetings with various ships
+contrastingly concurred to show the demoniac indifference with which
+the white whale tore his hunters, whether sinning or sinned against;
+now it was that there lurked a something in the old man’s eyes, which
+it was hardly sufferable for feeble souls to see. As the unsetting
+polar star, which through the livelong, arctic, six months’ night
+sustains its piercing, steady, central gaze; so Ahab’s purpose now
+fixedly gleamed down upon the constant midnight of the gloomy crew. It
+domineered above them so, that all their bodings, doubts, misgivings,
+fears, were fain to hide beneath their souls, and not sprout forth a
+single spear or leaf.
+
+In this foreshadowing interval too, all humor, forced or natural,
+vanished. Stubb no more strove to raise a smile; Starbuck no more
+strove to check one. Alike, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, seemed
+ground to finest dust, and powdered, for the time, in the clamped
+mortar of Ahab’s iron soul. Like machines, they dumbly moved about the
+deck, ever conscious that the old man’s despot eye was on them.
+
+But did you deeply scan him in his more secret confidential hours; when
+he thought no glance but one was on him; then you would have seen that
+even as Ahab’s eyes so awed the crew’s, the inscrutable Parsee’s glance
+awed his; or somehow, at least, in some wild way, at times affected it.
+Such an added, gliding strangeness began to invest the thin Fedallah
+now; such ceaseless shudderings shook him; that the men looked dubious
+at him; half uncertain, as it seemed, whether indeed he were a mortal
+substance, or else a tremulous shadow cast upon the deck by some unseen
+being’s body. And that shadow was always hovering there. For not by
+night, even, had Fedallah ever certainly been known to slumber, or go
+below. He would stand still for hours: but never sat or leaned; his wan
+but wondrous eyes did plainly say—We two watchmen never rest.
+
+Nor, at any time, by night or day could the mariners now step upon the
+deck, unless Ahab was before them; either standing in his pivot-hole,
+or exactly pacing the planks between two undeviating limits,—the
+main-mast and the mizen; or else they saw him standing in the
+cabin-scuttle,—his living foot advanced upon the deck, as if to step;
+his hat slouched heavily over his eyes; so that however motionless he
+stood, however the days and nights were added on, that he had not swung
+in his hammock; yet hidden beneath that slouching hat, they could never
+tell unerringly whether, for all this, his eyes were really closed at
+times; or whether he was still intently scanning them; no matter,
+though he stood so in the scuttle for a whole hour on the stretch, and
+the unheeded night-damp gathered in beads of dew upon that stone-carved
+coat and hat. The clothes that the night had wet, the next day’s
+sunshine dried upon him; and so, day after day, and night after night;
+he went no more beneath the planks; whatever he wanted from the cabin
+that thing he sent for.
+
+He ate in the same open air; that is, his two only meals,—breakfast and
+dinner: supper he never touched; nor reaped his beard; which darkly
+grew all gnarled, as unearthed roots of trees blown over, which still
+grow idly on at naked base, though perished in the upper verdure. But
+though his whole life was now become one watch on deck; and though the
+Parsee’s mystic watch was without intermission as his own; yet these
+two never seemed to speak—one man to the other—unless at long intervals
+some passing unmomentous matter made it necessary. Though such a potent
+spell seemed secretly to join the twain; openly, and to the awe-struck
+crew, they seemed pole-like asunder. If by day they chanced to speak
+one word; by night, dumb men were both, so far as concerned the
+slightest verbal interchange. At times, for longest hours, without a
+single hail, they stood far parted in the starlight; Ahab in his
+scuttle, the Parsee by the mainmast; but still fixedly gazing upon each
+other; as if in the Parsee Ahab saw his forethrown shadow, in Ahab the
+Parsee his abandoned substance.
+
+And yet, somehow, did Ahab—in his own proper self, as daily, hourly,
+and every instant, commandingly revealed to his subordinates,—Ahab
+seemed an independent lord; the Parsee but his slave. Still again both
+seemed yoked together, and an unseen tyrant driving them; the lean
+shade siding the solid rib. For be this Parsee what he may, all rib and
+keel was solid Ahab.
+
+At the first faintest glimmering of the dawn, his iron voice was heard
+from aft,—“Man the mast-heads!”—and all through the day, till after
+sunset and after twilight, the same voice every hour, at the striking
+of the helmsman’s bell, was heard—“What d’ye see?—sharp! sharp!”
+
+But when three or four days had slided by, after meeting the
+children-seeking Rachel; and no spout had yet been seen; the monomaniac
+old man seemed distrustful of his crew’s fidelity; at least, of nearly
+all except the Pagan harpooneers; he seemed to doubt, even, whether
+Stubb and Flask might not willingly overlook the sight he sought. But
+if these suspicions were really his, he sagaciously refrained from
+verbally expressing them, however his actions might seem to hint them.
+
+“I will have the first sight of the whale myself,”—he said. “Aye! Ahab
+must have the doubloon!” and with his own hands he rigged a nest of
+basketed bowlines; and sending a hand aloft, with a single sheaved
+block, to secure to the main-mast head, he received the two ends of the
+downward-reeved rope; and attaching one to his basket prepared a pin
+for the other end, in order to fasten it at the rail. This done, with
+that end yet in his hand and standing beside the pin, he looked round
+upon his crew, sweeping from one to the other; pausing his glance long
+upon Daggoo, Queequeg, Tashtego; but shunning Fedallah; and then
+settling his firm relying eye upon the chief mate, said,—“Take the
+rope, sir—I give it into thy hands, Starbuck.” Then arranging his
+person in the basket, he gave the word for them to hoist him to his
+perch, Starbuck being the one who secured the rope at last; and
+afterwards stood near it. And thus, with one hand clinging round the
+royal mast, Ahab gazed abroad upon the sea for miles and miles,—ahead,
+astern, this side, and that,—within the wide expanded circle commanded
+at so great a height.
+
+When in working with his hands at some lofty almost isolated place in
+the rigging, which chances to afford no foothold, the sailor at sea is
+hoisted up to that spot, and sustained there by the rope; under these
+circumstances, its fastened end on deck is always given in strict
+charge to some one man who has the special watch of it. Because in such
+a wilderness of running rigging, whose various different relations
+aloft cannot always be infallibly discerned by what is seen of them at
+the deck; and when the deck-ends of these ropes are being every few
+minutes cast down from the fastenings, it would be but a natural
+fatality, if, unprovided with a constant watchman, the hoisted sailor
+should by some carelessness of the crew be cast adrift and fall all
+swooping to the sea. So Ahab’s proceedings in this matter were not
+unusual; the only strange thing about them seemed to be, that Starbuck,
+almost the one only man who had ever ventured to oppose him with
+anything in the slightest degree approaching to decision—one of those
+too, whose faithfulness on the look-out he had seemed to doubt
+somewhat;—it was strange, that this was the very man he should select
+for his watchman; freely giving his whole life into such an otherwise
+distrusted person’s hands.
+
+Now, the first time Ahab was perched aloft; ere he had been there ten
+minutes; one of those red-billed savage sea-hawks which so often fly
+incommodiously close round the manned mast-heads of whalemen in these
+latitudes; one of these birds came wheeling and screaming round his
+head in a maze of untrackably swift circlings. Then it darted a
+thousand feet straight up into the air; then spiralized downwards, and
+went eddying again round his head.
+
+But with his gaze fixed upon the dim and distant horizon, Ahab seemed
+not to mark this wild bird; nor, indeed, would any one else have marked
+it much, it being no uncommon circumstance; only now almost the least
+heedful eye seemed to see some sort of cunning meaning in almost every
+sight.
+
+“Your hat, your hat, sir!” suddenly cried the Sicilian seaman, who
+being posted at the mizen-mast-head, stood directly behind Ahab, though
+somewhat lower than his level, and with a deep gulf of air dividing
+them.
+
+But already the sable wing was before the old man’s eyes; the long
+hooked bill at his head: with a scream, the black hawk darted away with
+his prize.
+
+An eagle flew thrice round Tarquin’s head, removing his cap to replace
+it, and thereupon Tanaquil, his wife, declared that Tarquin would be
+king of Rome. But only by the replacing of the cap was that omen
+accounted good. Ahab’s hat was never restored; the wild hawk flew on
+and on with it; far in advance of the prow: and at last disappeared;
+while from the point of that disappearance, a minute black spot was
+dimly discerned, falling from that vast height into the sea.
+
+
+CHAPTER 131. The Pequod Meets The Delight.
+
+The intense Pequod sailed on; the rolling waves and days went by; the
+life-buoy-coffin still lightly swung; and another ship, most miserably
+misnamed the Delight, was descried. As she drew nigh, all eyes were
+fixed upon her broad beams, called shears, which, in some
+whaling-ships, cross the quarter-deck at the height of eight or nine
+feet; serving to carry the spare, unrigged, or disabled boats.
+
+Upon the stranger’s shears were beheld the shattered, white ribs, and
+some few splintered planks, of what had once been a whale-boat; but you
+now saw through this wreck, as plainly as you see through the peeled,
+half-unhinged, and bleaching skeleton of a horse.
+
+“Hast seen the White Whale?”
+
+“Look!” replied the hollow-cheeked captain from his taffrail; and with
+his trumpet he pointed to the wreck.
+
+“Hast killed him?”
+
+“The harpoon is not yet forged that ever will do that,” answered the
+other, sadly glancing upon a rounded hammock on the deck, whose
+gathered sides some noiseless sailors were busy in sewing together.
+
+“Not forged!” and snatching Perth’s levelled iron from the crotch, Ahab
+held it out, exclaiming—“Look ye, Nantucketer; here in this hand I hold
+his death! Tempered in blood, and tempered by lightning are these
+barbs; and I swear to temper them triply in that hot place behind the
+fin, where the White Whale most feels his accursed life!”
+
+“Then God keep thee, old man—see’st thou that”—pointing to the
+hammock—“I bury but one of five stout men, who were alive only
+yesterday; but were dead ere night. Only _that_ one I bury; the rest
+were buried before they died; you sail upon their tomb.” Then turning
+to his crew—“Are ye ready there? place the plank then on the rail, and
+lift the body; so, then—Oh! God”—advancing towards the hammock with
+uplifted hands—“may the resurrection and the life——”
+
+“Brace forward! Up helm!” cried Ahab like lightning to his men.
+
+But the suddenly started Pequod was not quick enough to escape the
+sound of the splash that the corpse soon made as it struck the sea; not
+so quick, indeed, but that some of the flying bubbles might have
+sprinkled her hull with their ghostly baptism.
+
+As Ahab now glided from the dejected Delight, the strange life-buoy
+hanging at the Pequod’s stern came into conspicuous relief.
+
+“Ha! yonder! look yonder, men!” cried a foreboding voice in her wake.
+“In vain, oh, ye strangers, ye fly our sad burial; ye but turn us your
+taffrail to show us your coffin!”
+
+
+CHAPTER 132. The Symphony.
+
+It was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea were
+hardly separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air was
+transparently pure and soft, with a woman’s look, and the robust and
+man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson’s
+chest in his sleep.
+
+Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small,
+unspeckled birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air;
+but to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed
+mighty leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; and these were the strong,
+troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea.
+
+But though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades and
+shadows without; those two seemed one; it was only the sex, as it were,
+that distinguished them.
+
+Aloft, like a royal czar and king, the sun seemed giving this gentle
+air to this bold and rolling sea; even as bride to groom. And at the
+girdling line of the horizon, a soft and tremulous motion—most seen
+here at the equator—denoted the fond, throbbing trust, the loving
+alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom away.
+
+Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm
+and unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the
+ashes of ruin; untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the
+morn; lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl’s
+forehead of heaven.
+
+Oh, immortal infancy, and innocency of the azure! Invisible winged
+creatures that frolic all round us! Sweet childhood of air and sky! how
+oblivious were ye of old Ahab’s close-coiled woe! But so have I seen
+little Miriam and Martha, laughing-eyed elves, heedlessly gambol around
+their old sire; sporting with the circle of singed locks which grew on
+the marge of that burnt-out crater of his brain.
+
+Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side
+and watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, the
+more and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity. But the
+lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel, for a
+moment, the cankerous thing in his soul. That glad, happy air, that
+winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother world,
+so long cruel—forbidding—now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn
+neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that
+however wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save
+and to bless. From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into
+the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee
+drop.
+
+Starbuck saw the old man; saw him, how he heavily leaned over the side;
+and he seemed to hear in his own true heart the measureless sobbing
+that stole out of the centre of the serenity around. Careful not to
+touch him, or be noticed by him, he yet drew near to him, and stood
+there.
+
+Ahab turned.
+
+“Starbuck!”
+
+“Sir.”
+
+“Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such
+a day—very much such a sweetness as this—I struck my first whale—a
+boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty—forty—forty years ago!—ago! Forty
+years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and
+storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab
+forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors
+of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not
+spent three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the
+desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a
+Captain’s exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any
+sympathy from the green country without—oh, weariness! heaviness!
+Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command!—when I think of all this;
+only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before—and how for forty
+years I have fed upon dry salted fare—fit emblem of the dry nourishment
+of my soil!—when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily
+hand, and broken the world’s fresh bread to my mouldy crusts—away,
+whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and
+sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage
+pillow—wife? wife?—rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I
+widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the
+madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with
+which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly
+chased his prey—more a demon than a man!—aye, aye! what a forty years’
+fool—fool—old fool, has old Ahab been! Why this strife of the chase?
+why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance?
+how the richer or better is Ahab now? Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not
+hard, that with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been
+snatched from under me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me,
+that I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never grow but from out some
+ashes! But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel
+deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering
+beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God! God! God!—crack my
+heart!—stave my brain!—mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey
+hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus
+intolerably old? Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a
+human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to
+gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is
+the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no;
+stay on board, on board!—lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives
+chase to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with
+the far away home I see in that eye!”
+
+“Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all!
+why should any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! let us
+fly these deadly waters! let us home! Wife and child, too, are
+Starbuck’s—wife and child of his brotherly, sisterly, play-fellow
+youth; even as thine, sir, are the wife and child of thy loving,
+longing, paternal old age! Away! let us away!—this instant let me alter
+the course! How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl
+on our way to see old Nantucket again! I think, sir, they have some
+such mild blue days, even as this, in Nantucket.”
+
+“They have, they have. I have seen them—some summer days in the
+morning. About this time—yes, it is his noon nap now—the boy
+vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me, of
+cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come back
+to dance him again.”
+
+“’Tis my Mary, my Mary herself! She promised that my boy, every
+morning, should be carried to the hill to catch the first glimpse of
+his father’s sail! Yes, yes! no more! it is done! we head for
+Nantucket! Come, my Captain, study out the course, and let us away!
+See, see! the boy’s face from the window! the boy’s hand on the hill!”
+
+But Ahab’s glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and
+cast his last, cindered apple to the soil.
+
+“What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what
+cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor
+commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep
+pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly
+making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not
+so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this
+arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy
+in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible
+power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain
+think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does
+that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round
+in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all
+the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon
+Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where
+do murderers go, man! Who’s to doom, when the judge himself is dragged
+to the bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and
+the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have
+been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and
+the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we
+how we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust
+amid greenness; as last year’s scythes flung down, and left in the
+half-cut swaths—Starbuck!”
+
+But blanched to a corpse’s hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away.
+
+Ahab crossed the deck to gaze over on the other side; but started at
+two reflected, fixed eyes in the water there. Fedallah was motionlessly
+leaning over the same rail.
+
+
+CHAPTER 133. The Chase—First Day.
+
+That night, in the mid-watch, when the old man—as his wont at
+intervals—stepped forth from the scuttle in which he leaned, and went
+to his pivot-hole, he suddenly thrust out his face fiercely, snuffing
+up the sea air as a sagacious ship’s dog will, in drawing nigh to some
+barbarous isle. He declared that a whale must be near. Soon that
+peculiar odor, sometimes to a great distance given forth by the living
+sperm whale, was palpable to all the watch; nor was any mariner
+surprised when, after inspecting the compass, and then the dog-vane,
+and then ascertaining the precise bearing of the odor as nearly as
+possible, Ahab rapidly ordered the ship’s course to be slightly
+altered, and the sail to be shortened.
+
+The acute policy dictating these movements was sufficiently vindicated
+at daybreak, by the sight of a long sleek on the sea directly and
+lengthwise ahead, smooth as oil, and resembling in the pleated watery
+wrinkles bordering it, the polished metallic-like marks of some swift
+tide-rip, at the mouth of a deep, rapid stream.
+
+“Man the mast-heads! Call all hands!”
+
+Thundering with the butts of three clubbed handspikes on the forecastle
+deck, Daggoo roused the sleepers with such judgment claps that they
+seemed to exhale from the scuttle, so instantaneously did they appear
+with their clothes in their hands.
+
+“What d’ye see?” cried Ahab, flattening his face to the sky.
+
+“Nothing, nothing sir!” was the sound hailing down in reply.
+
+“T’gallant sails!—stunsails! alow and aloft, and on both sides!”
+
+All sail being set, he now cast loose the life-line, reserved for
+swaying him to the main royal-mast head; and in a few moments they were
+hoisting him thither, when, while but two thirds of the way aloft, and
+while peering ahead through the horizontal vacancy between the
+main-top-sail and top-gallant-sail, he raised a gull-like cry in the
+air. “There she blows!—there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is
+Moby Dick!”
+
+Fired by the cry which seemed simultaneously taken up by the three
+look-outs, the men on deck rushed to the rigging to behold the famous
+whale they had so long been pursuing. Ahab had now gained his final
+perch, some feet above the other look-outs, Tashtego standing just
+beneath him on the cap of the top-gallant-mast, so that the Indian’s
+head was almost on a level with Ahab’s heel. From this height the whale
+was now seen some mile or so ahead, at every roll of the sea revealing
+his high sparkling hump, and regularly jetting his silent spout into
+the air. To the credulous mariners it seemed the same silent spout they
+had so long ago beheld in the moonlit Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
+
+“And did none of ye see it before?” cried Ahab, hailing the perched men
+all around him.
+
+“I saw him almost that same instant, sir, that Captain Ahab did, and I
+cried out,” said Tashtego.
+
+“Not the same instant; not the same—no, the doubloon is mine, Fate
+reserved the doubloon for me. _I_ only; none of ye could have raised
+the White Whale first. There she blows!—there she blows!—there she
+blows! There again!—there again!” he cried, in long-drawn, lingering,
+methodic tones, attuned to the gradual prolongings of the whale’s
+visible jets. “He’s going to sound! In stunsails! Down
+top-gallant-sails! Stand by three boats. Mr. Starbuck, remember, stay
+on board, and keep the ship. Helm there! Luff, luff a point! So;
+steady, man, steady! There go flukes! No, no; only black water! All
+ready the boats there? Stand by, stand by! Lower me, Mr. Starbuck;
+lower, lower,—quick, quicker!” and he slid through the air to the deck.
+
+“He is heading straight to leeward, sir,” cried Stubb, “right away from
+us; cannot have seen the ship yet.”
+
+“Be dumb, man! Stand by the braces! Hard down the helm!—brace up!
+Shiver her!—shiver her!—So; well that! Boats, boats!”
+
+Soon all the boats but Starbuck’s were dropped; all the boat-sails
+set—all the paddles plying; with rippling swiftness, shooting to
+leeward; and Ahab heading the onset. A pale, death-glimmer lit up
+Fedallah’s sunken eyes; a hideous motion gnawed his mouth.
+
+Like noiseless nautilus shells, their light prows sped through the sea;
+but only slowly they neared the foe. As they neared him, the ocean grew
+still more smooth; seemed drawing a carpet over its waves; seemed a
+noon-meadow, so serenely it spread. At length the breathless hunter
+came so nigh his seemingly unsuspecting prey, that his entire dazzling
+hump was distinctly visible, sliding along the sea as if an isolated
+thing, and continually set in a revolving ring of finest, fleecy,
+greenish foam. He saw the vast, involved wrinkles of the slightly
+projecting head beyond. Before it, far out on the soft Turkish-rugged
+waters, went the glistening white shadow from his broad, milky
+forehead, a musical rippling playfully accompanying the shade; and
+behind, the blue waters interchangeably flowed over into the moving
+valley of his steady wake; and on either hand bright bubbles arose and
+danced by his side. But these were broken again by the light toes of
+hundreds of gay fowl softly feathering the sea, alternate with their
+fitful flight; and like to some flag-staff rising from the painted hull
+of an argosy, the tall but shattered pole of a recent lance projected
+from the white whale’s back; and at intervals one of the cloud of
+soft-toed fowls hovering, and to and fro skimming like a canopy over
+the fish, silently perched and rocked on this pole, the long tail
+feathers streaming like pennons.
+
+A gentle joyousness—a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested
+the gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with
+ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns; his lovely, leering
+eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness,
+rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that
+great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so
+divinely swam.
+
+On each soft side—coincident with the parted swell, that but once
+leaving him, then flowed so wide away—on each bright side, the whale
+shed off enticings. No wonder there had been some among the hunters who
+namelessly transported and allured by all this serenity, had ventured
+to assail it; but had fatally found that quietude but the vesture of
+tornadoes. Yet calm, enticing calm, oh, whale! thou glidest on, to all
+who for the first time eye thee, no matter how many in that same way
+thou may’st have bejuggled and destroyed before.
+
+And thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical sea, among
+waves whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture, Moby
+Dick moved on, still withholding from sight the full terrors of his
+submerged trunk, entirely hiding the wrenched hideousness of his jaw.
+But soon the fore part of him slowly rose from the water; for an
+instant his whole marbleized body formed a high arch, like Virginia’s
+Natural Bridge, and warningly waving his bannered flukes in the air,
+the grand god revealed himself, sounded, and went out of sight.
+Hoveringly halting, and dipping on the wing, the white sea-fowls
+longingly lingered over the agitated pool that he left.
+
+With oars apeak, and paddles down, the sheets of their sails adrift,
+the three boats now stilly floated, awaiting Moby Dick’s reappearance.
+
+“An hour,” said Ahab, standing rooted in his boat’s stern; and he gazed
+beyond the whale’s place, towards the dim blue spaces and wide wooing
+vacancies to leeward. It was only an instant; for again his eyes seemed
+whirling round in his head as he swept the watery circle. The breeze
+now freshened; the sea began to swell.
+
+“The birds!—the birds!” cried Tashtego.
+
+In long Indian file, as when herons take wing, the white birds were now
+all flying towards Ahab’s boat; and when within a few yards began
+fluttering over the water there, wheeling round and round, with joyous,
+expectant cries. Their vision was keener than man’s; Ahab could
+discover no sign in the sea. But suddenly as he peered down and down
+into its depths, he profoundly saw a white living spot no bigger than a
+white weasel, with wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying as it
+rose, till it turned, and then there were plainly revealed two long
+crooked rows of white, glistening teeth, floating up from the
+undiscoverable bottom. It was Moby Dick’s open mouth and scrolled jaw;
+his vast, shadowed bulk still half blending with the blue of the sea.
+The glittering mouth yawned beneath the boat like an open-doored marble
+tomb; and giving one sidelong sweep with his steering oar, Ahab whirled
+the craft aside from this tremendous apparition. Then, calling upon
+Fedallah to change places with him, went forward to the bows, and
+seizing Perth’s harpoon, commanded his crew to grasp their oars and
+stand by to stern.
+
+Now, by reason of this timely spinning round the boat upon its axis,
+its bow, by anticipation, was made to face the whale’s head while yet
+under water. But as if perceiving this stratagem, Moby Dick, with that
+malicious intelligence ascribed to him, sidelingly transplanted
+himself, as it were, in an instant, shooting his pleated head
+lengthwise beneath the boat.
+
+Through and through; through every plank and each rib, it thrilled for
+an instant, the whale obliquely lying on his back, in the manner of a
+biting shark, slowly and feelingly taking its bows full within his
+mouth, so that the long, narrow, scrolled lower jaw curled high up into
+the open air, and one of the teeth caught in a row-lock. The bluish
+pearl-white of the inside of the jaw was within six inches of Ahab’s
+head, and reached higher than that. In this attitude the White Whale
+now shook the slight cedar as a mildly cruel cat her mouse. With
+unastonished eyes Fedallah gazed, and crossed his arms; but the
+tiger-yellow crew were tumbling over each other’s heads to gain the
+uttermost stern.
+
+And now, while both elastic gunwales were springing in and out, as the
+whale dallied with the doomed craft in this devilish way; and from his
+body being submerged beneath the boat, he could not be darted at from
+the bows, for the bows were almost inside of him, as it were; and while
+the other boats involuntarily paused, as before a quick crisis
+impossible to withstand, then it was that monomaniac Ahab, furious with
+this tantalizing vicinity of his foe, which placed him all alive and
+helpless in the very jaws he hated; frenzied with all this, he seized
+the long bone with his naked hands, and wildly strove to wrench it from
+its gripe. As now he thus vainly strove, the jaw slipped from him; the
+frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped, as both jaws, like an
+enormous shears, sliding further aft, bit the craft completely in
+twain, and locked themselves fast again in the sea, midway between the
+two floating wrecks. These floated aside, the broken ends drooping, the
+crew at the stern-wreck clinging to the gunwales, and striving to hold
+fast to the oars to lash them across.
+
+At that preluding moment, ere the boat was yet snapped, Ahab, the first
+to perceive the whale’s intent, by the crafty upraising of his head, a
+movement that loosed his hold for the time; at that moment his hand had
+made one final effort to push the boat out of the bite. But only
+slipping further into the whale’s mouth, and tilting over sideways as
+it slipped, the boat had shaken off his hold on the jaw; spilled him
+out of it, as he leaned to the push; and so he fell flat-faced upon the
+sea.
+
+Ripplingly withdrawing from his prey, Moby Dick now lay at a little
+distance, vertically thrusting his oblong white head up and down in the
+billows; and at the same time slowly revolving his whole spindled body;
+so that when his vast wrinkled forehead rose—some twenty or more feet
+out of the water—the now rising swells, with all their confluent waves,
+dazzlingly broke against it; vindictively tossing their shivered spray
+still higher into the air.* So, in a gale, the but half baffled Channel
+billows only recoil from the base of the Eddystone, triumphantly to
+overleap its summit with their scud.
+
+*This motion is peculiar to the sperm whale. It receives its
+designation (pitchpoling) from its being likened to that preliminary
+up-and-down poise of the whale-lance, in the exercise called
+pitchpoling, previously described. By this motion the whale must best
+and most comprehensively view whatever objects may be encircling him.
+
+But soon resuming his horizontal attitude, Moby Dick swam swiftly round
+and round the wrecked crew; sideways churning the water in his vengeful
+wake, as if lashing himself up to still another and more deadly
+assault. The sight of the splintered boat seemed to madden him, as the
+blood of grapes and mulberries cast before Antiochus’s elephants in the
+book of Maccabees. Meanwhile Ahab half smothered in the foam of the
+whale’s insolent tail, and too much of a cripple to swim,—though he
+could still keep afloat, even in the heart of such a whirlpool as that;
+helpless Ahab’s head was seen, like a tossed bubble which the least
+chance shock might burst. From the boat’s fragmentary stern, Fedallah
+incuriously and mildly eyed him; the clinging crew, at the other
+drifting end, could not succor him; more than enough was it for them to
+look to themselves. For so revolvingly appalling was the White Whale’s
+aspect, and so planetarily swift the ever-contracting circles he made,
+that he seemed horizontally swooping upon them. And though the other
+boats, unharmed, still hovered hard by; still they dared not pull into
+the eddy to strike, lest that should be the signal for the instant
+destruction of the jeopardized castaways, Ahab and all; nor in that
+case could they themselves hope to escape. With straining eyes, then,
+they remained on the outer edge of the direful zone, whose centre had
+now become the old man’s head.
+
+Meantime, from the beginning all this had been descried from the ship’s
+mast heads; and squaring her yards, she had borne down upon the scene;
+and was now so nigh, that Ahab in the water hailed her!—“Sail on
+the”—but that moment a breaking sea dashed on him from Moby Dick, and
+whelmed him for the time. But struggling out of it again, and chancing
+to rise on a towering crest, he shouted,—“Sail on the whale!—Drive him
+off!”
+
+The Pequod’s prows were pointed; and breaking up the charmed circle,
+she effectually parted the white whale from his victim. As he sullenly
+swam off, the boats flew to the rescue.
+
+Dragged into Stubb’s boat with blood-shot, blinded eyes, the white
+brine caking in his wrinkles; the long tension of Ahab’s bodily
+strength did crack, and helplessly he yielded to his body’s doom: for a
+time, lying all crushed in the bottom of Stubb’s boat, like one trodden
+under foot of herds of elephants. Far inland, nameless wails came from
+him, as desolate sounds from out ravines.
+
+But this intensity of his physical prostration did but so much the more
+abbreviate it. In an instant’s compass, great hearts sometimes condense
+to one deep pang, the sum total of those shallow pains kindly diffused
+through feebler men’s whole lives. And so, such hearts, though summary
+in each one suffering; still, if the gods decree it, in their life-time
+aggregate a whole age of woe, wholly made up of instantaneous
+intensities; for even in their pointless centres, those noble natures
+contain the entire circumferences of inferior souls.
+
+“The harpoon,” said Ahab, half way rising, and draggingly leaning on
+one bended arm—“is it safe?”
+
+“Aye, sir, for it was not darted; this is it,” said Stubb, showing it.
+
+“Lay it before me;—any missing men?”
+
+“One, two, three, four, five;—there were five oars, sir, and here are
+five men.”
+
+“That’s good.—Help me, man; I wish to stand. So, so, I see him! there!
+there! going to leeward still; what a leaping spout!—Hands off from me!
+The eternal sap runs up in Ahab’s bones again! Set the sail; out oars;
+the helm!”
+
+It is often the case that when a boat is stove, its crew, being picked
+up by another boat, help to work that second boat; and the chase is
+thus continued with what is called double-banked oars. It was thus now.
+But the added power of the boat did not equal the added power of the
+whale, for he seemed to have treble-banked his every fin; swimming with
+a velocity which plainly showed, that if now, under these
+circumstances, pushed on, the chase would prove an indefinitely
+prolonged, if not a hopeless one; nor could any crew endure for so long
+a period, such an unintermitted, intense straining at the oar; a thing
+barely tolerable only in some one brief vicissitude. The ship itself,
+then, as it sometimes happens, offered the most promising intermediate
+means of overtaking the chase. Accordingly, the boats now made for her,
+and were soon swayed up to their cranes—the two parts of the wrecked
+boat having been previously secured by her—and then hoisting everything
+to her side, and stacking her canvas high up, and sideways
+outstretching it with stun-sails, like the double-jointed wings of an
+albatross; the Pequod bore down in the leeward wake of Moby-Dick. At
+the well known, methodic intervals, the whale’s glittering spout was
+regularly announced from the manned mast-heads; and when he would be
+reported as just gone down, Ahab would take the time, and then pacing
+the deck, binnacle-watch in hand, so soon as the last second of the
+allotted hour expired, his voice was heard.—“Whose is the doubloon now?
+D’ye see him?” and if the reply was, No, sir! straightway he commanded
+them to lift him to his perch. In this way the day wore on; Ahab, now
+aloft and motionless; anon, unrestingly pacing the planks.
+
+As he was thus walking, uttering no sound, except to hail the men
+aloft, or to bid them hoist a sail still higher, or to spread one to a
+still greater breadth—thus to and fro pacing, beneath his slouched hat,
+at every turn he passed his own wrecked boat, which had been dropped
+upon the quarter-deck, and lay there reversed; broken bow to shattered
+stern. At last he paused before it; and as in an already over-clouded
+sky fresh troops of clouds will sometimes sail across, so over the old
+man’s face there now stole some such added gloom as this.
+
+Stubb saw him pause; and perhaps intending, not vainly, though, to
+evince his own unabated fortitude, and thus keep up a valiant place in
+his Captain’s mind, he advanced, and eyeing the wreck exclaimed—“The
+thistle the ass refused; it pricked his mouth too keenly, sir; ha! ha!”
+
+“What soulless thing is this that laughs before a wreck? Man, man! did
+I not know thee brave as fearless fire (and as mechanical) I could
+swear thou wert a poltroon. Groan nor laugh should be heard before a
+wreck.”
+
+“Aye, sir,” said Starbuck drawing near, “’tis a solemn sight; an omen,
+and an ill one.”
+
+“Omen? omen?—the dictionary! If the gods think to speak outright to
+man, they will honorably speak outright; not shake their heads, and
+give an old wives’ darkling hint.—Begone! Ye two are the opposite poles
+of one thing; Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck; and ye
+two are all mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of the
+peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors! Cold, cold—I shiver!—How
+now? Aloft there! D’ye see him? Sing out for every spout, though he
+spout ten times a second!”
+
+The day was nearly done; only the hem of his golden robe was rustling.
+Soon, it was almost dark, but the look-out men still remained unset.
+
+“Can’t see the spout now, sir;—too dark”—cried a voice from the air.
+
+“How heading when last seen?”
+
+“As before, sir,—straight to leeward.”
+
+“Good! he will travel slower now ’tis night. Down royals and
+top-gallant stun-sails, Mr. Starbuck. We must not run over him before
+morning; he’s making a passage now, and may heave-to a while. Helm
+there! keep her full before the wind!—Aloft! come down!—Mr. Stubb, send
+a fresh hand to the fore-mast head, and see it manned till
+morning.”—Then advancing towards the doubloon in the main-mast—“Men,
+this gold is mine, for I earned it; but I shall let it abide here till
+the White Whale is dead; and then, whosoever of ye first raises him,
+upon the day he shall be killed, this gold is that man’s; and if on
+that day I shall again raise him, then, ten times its sum shall be
+divided among all of ye! Away now!—the deck is thine, sir!”
+
+And so saying, he placed himself half way within the scuttle, and
+slouching his hat, stood there till dawn, except when at intervals
+rousing himself to see how the night wore on.
+
+
+CHAPTER 134. The Chase—Second Day.
+
+At day-break, the three mast-heads were punctually manned afresh.
+
+“D’ye see him?” cried Ahab after allowing a little space for the light
+to spread.
+
+“See nothing, sir.”
+
+“Turn up all hands and make sail! he travels faster than I thought
+for;—the top-gallant sails!—aye, they should have been kept on her all
+night. But no matter—’tis but resting for the rush.”
+
+Here be it said, that this pertinacious pursuit of one particular
+whale, continued through day into night, and through night into day, is
+a thing by no means unprecedented in the South sea fishery. For such is
+the wonderful skill, prescience of experience, and invincible
+confidence acquired by some great natural geniuses among the Nantucket
+commanders; that from the simple observation of a whale when last
+descried, they will, under certain given circumstances, pretty
+accurately foretell both the direction in which he will continue to
+swim for a time, while out of sight, as well as his probable rate of
+progression during that period. And, in these cases, somewhat as a
+pilot, when about losing sight of a coast, whose general trending he
+well knows, and which he desires shortly to return to again, but at
+some further point; like as this pilot stands by his compass, and takes
+the precise bearing of the cape at present visible, in order the more
+certainly to hit aright the remote, unseen headland, eventually to be
+visited: so does the fisherman, at his compass, with the whale; for
+after being chased, and diligently marked, through several hours of
+daylight, then, when night obscures the fish, the creature’s future
+wake through the darkness is almost as established to the sagacious
+mind of the hunter, as the pilot’s coast is to him. So that to this
+hunter’s wondrous skill, the proverbial evanescence of a thing writ in
+water, a wake, is to all desired purposes well nigh as reliable as the
+steadfast land. And as the mighty iron Leviathan of the modern railway
+is so familiarly known in its every pace, that, with watches in their
+hands, men time his rate as doctors that of a baby’s pulse; and lightly
+say of it, the up train or the down train will reach such or such a
+spot, at such or such an hour; even so, almost, there are occasions
+when these Nantucketers time that other Leviathan of the deep,
+according to the observed humor of his speed; and say to themselves, so
+many hours hence this whale will have gone two hundred miles, will have
+about reached this or that degree of latitude or longitude. But to
+render this acuteness at all successful in the end, the wind and the
+sea must be the whaleman’s allies; for of what present avail to the
+becalmed or windbound mariner is the skill that assures him he is
+exactly ninety-three leagues and a quarter from his port? Inferable
+from these statements, are many collateral subtile matters touching the
+chase of whales.
+
+The ship tore on; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a
+cannon-ball, missent, becomes a plough-share and turns up the level
+field.
+
+“By salt and hemp!” cried Stubb, “but this swift motion of the deck
+creeps up one’s legs and tingles at the heart. This ship and I are two
+brave fellows!—Ha, ha! Some one take me up, and launch me, spine-wise,
+on the sea,—for by live-oaks! my spine’s a keel. Ha, ha! we go the gait
+that leaves no dust behind!”
+
+“There she blows—she blows!—she blows!—right ahead!” was now the
+mast-head cry.
+
+“Aye, aye!” cried Stubb, “I knew it—ye can’t escape—blow on and split
+your spout, O whale! the mad fiend himself is after ye! blow your
+trump—blister your lungs!—Ahab will dam off your blood, as a miller
+shuts his watergate upon the stream!”
+
+And Stubb did but speak out for well nigh all that crew. The frenzies
+of the chase had by this time worked them bubblingly up, like old wine
+worked anew. Whatever pale fears and forebodings some of them might
+have felt before; these were not only now kept out of sight through the
+growing awe of Ahab, but they were broken up, and on all sides routed,
+as timid prairie hares that scatter before the bounding bison. The hand
+of Fate had snatched all their souls; and by the stirring perils of the
+previous day; the rack of the past night’s suspense; the fixed,
+unfearing, blind, reckless way in which their wild craft went plunging
+towards its flying mark; by all these things, their hearts were bowled
+along. The wind that made great bellies of their sails, and rushed the
+vessel on by arms invisible as irresistible; this seemed the symbol of
+that unseen agency which so enslaved them to the race.
+
+They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all;
+though it was put together of all contrasting things—oak, and maple,
+and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp—yet all these ran into each
+other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced
+and directed by the long central keel; even so, all the individualities
+of the crew, this man’s valor, that man’s fear; guilt and guiltiness,
+all varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that
+fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to.
+
+The rigging lived. The mast-heads, like the tops of tall palms, were
+outspreadingly tufted with arms and legs. Clinging to a spar with one
+hand, some reached forth the other with impatient wavings; others,
+shading their eyes from the vivid sunlight, sat far out on the rocking
+yards; all the spars in full bearing of mortals, ready and ripe for
+their fate. Ah! how they still strove through that infinite blueness to
+seek out the thing that might destroy them!
+
+“Why sing ye not out for him, if ye see him?” cried Ahab, when, after
+the lapse of some minutes since the first cry, no more had been heard.
+“Sway me up, men; ye have been deceived; not Moby Dick casts one odd
+jet that way, and then disappears.”
+
+It was even so; in their headlong eagerness, the men had mistaken some
+other thing for the whale-spout, as the event itself soon proved; for
+hardly had Ahab reached his perch; hardly was the rope belayed to its
+pin on deck, when he struck the key-note to an orchestra, that made the
+air vibrate as with the combined discharges of rifles. The triumphant
+halloo of thirty buckskin lungs was heard, as—much nearer to the ship
+than the place of the imaginary jet, less than a mile ahead—Moby Dick
+bodily burst into view! For not by any calm and indolent spoutings; not
+by the peaceable gush of that mystic fountain in his head, did the
+White Whale now reveal his vicinity; but by the far more wondrous
+phenomenon of breaching. Rising with his utmost velocity from the
+furthest depths, the Sperm Whale thus booms his entire bulk into the
+pure element of air, and piling up a mountain of dazzling foam, shows
+his place to the distance of seven miles and more. In those moments,
+the torn, enraged waves he shakes off, seem his mane; in some cases,
+this breaching is his act of defiance.
+
+“There she breaches! there she breaches!” was the cry, as in his
+immeasurable bravadoes the White Whale tossed himself salmon-like to
+Heaven. So suddenly seen in the blue plain of the sea, and relieved
+against the still bluer margin of the sky, the spray that he raised,
+for the moment, intolerably glittered and glared like a glacier; and
+stood there gradually fading and fading away from its first sparkling
+intensity, to the dim mistiness of an advancing shower in a vale.
+
+“Aye, breach your last to the sun, Moby Dick!” cried Ahab, “thy hour
+and thy harpoon are at hand!—Down! down all of ye, but one man at the
+fore. The boats!—stand by!”
+
+Unmindful of the tedious rope-ladders of the shrouds, the men, like
+shooting stars, slid to the deck, by the isolated backstays and
+halyards; while Ahab, less dartingly, but still rapidly was dropped
+from his perch.
+
+“Lower away,” he cried, so soon as he had reached his boat—a spare one,
+rigged the afternoon previous. “Mr. Starbuck, the ship is thine—keep
+away from the boats, but keep near them. Lower, all!”
+
+As if to strike a quick terror into them, by this time being the first
+assailant himself, Moby Dick had turned, and was now coming for the
+three crews. Ahab’s boat was central; and cheering his men, he told
+them he would take the whale head-and-head,—that is, pull straight up
+to his forehead,—a not uncommon thing; for when within a certain limit,
+such a course excludes the coming onset from the whale’s sidelong
+vision. But ere that close limit was gained, and while yet all three
+boats were plain as the ship’s three masts to his eye; the White Whale
+churning himself into furious speed, almost in an instant as it were,
+rushing among the boats with open jaws, and a lashing tail, offered
+appalling battle on every side; and heedless of the irons darted at him
+from every boat, seemed only intent on annihilating each separate plank
+of which those boats were made. But skilfully manœuvred, incessantly
+wheeling like trained chargers in the field; the boats for a while
+eluded him; though, at times, but by a plank’s breadth; while all the
+time, Ahab’s unearthly slogan tore every other cry but his to shreds.
+
+But at last in his untraceable evolutions, the White Whale so crossed
+and recrossed, and in a thousand ways entangled the slack of the three
+lines now fast to him, that they foreshortened, and, of themselves,
+warped the devoted boats towards the planted irons in him; though now
+for a moment the whale drew aside a little, as if to rally for a more
+tremendous charge. Seizing that opportunity, Ahab first paid out more
+line: and then was rapidly hauling and jerking in upon it again—hoping
+that way to disencumber it of some snarls—when lo!—a sight more savage
+than the embattled teeth of sharks!
+
+Caught and twisted—corkscrewed in the mazes of the line, loose harpoons
+and lances, with all their bristling barbs and points, came flashing
+and dripping up to the chocks in the bows of Ahab’s boat. Only one
+thing could be done. Seizing the boat-knife, he critically reached
+within—through—and then, without—the rays of steel; dragged in the line
+beyond, passed it, inboard, to the bowsman, and then, twice sundering
+the rope near the chocks—dropped the intercepted fagot of steel into
+the sea; and was all fast again. That instant, the White Whale made a
+sudden rush among the remaining tangles of the other lines; by so
+doing, irresistibly dragged the more involved boats of Stubb and Flask
+towards his flukes; dashed them together like two rolling husks on a
+surf-beaten beach, and then, diving down into the sea, disappeared in a
+boiling maelstrom, in which, for a space, the odorous cedar chips of
+the wrecks danced round and round, like the grated nutmeg in a swiftly
+stirred bowl of punch.
+
+While the two crews were yet circling in the waters, reaching out after
+the revolving line-tubs, oars, and other floating furniture, while
+aslope little Flask bobbed up and down like an empty vial, twitching
+his legs upwards to escape the dreaded jaws of sharks; and Stubb was
+lustily singing out for some one to ladle him up; and while the old
+man’s line—now parting—admitted of his pulling into the creamy pool to
+rescue whom he could;—in that wild simultaneousness of a thousand
+concreted perils,—Ahab’s yet unstricken boat seemed drawn up towards
+Heaven by invisible wires,—as, arrow-like, shooting perpendicularly
+from the sea, the White Whale dashed his broad forehead against its
+bottom, and sent it, turning over and over, into the air; till it fell
+again—gunwale downwards—and Ahab and his men struggled out from under
+it, like seals from a sea-side cave.
+
+The first uprising momentum of the whale—modifying its direction as he
+struck the surface—involuntarily launched him along it, to a little
+distance from the centre of the destruction he had made; and with his
+back to it, he now lay for a moment slowly feeling with his flukes from
+side to side; and whenever a stray oar, bit of plank, the least chip or
+crumb of the boats touched his skin, his tail swiftly drew back, and
+came sideways smiting the sea. But soon, as if satisfied that his work
+for that time was done, he pushed his pleated forehead through the
+ocean, and trailing after him the intertangled lines, continued his
+leeward way at a traveller’s methodic pace.
+
+As before, the attentive ship having descried the whole fight, again
+came bearing down to the rescue, and dropping a boat, picked up the
+floating mariners, tubs, oars, and whatever else could be caught at,
+and safely landed them on her decks. Some sprained shoulders, wrists,
+and ankles; livid contusions; wrenched harpoons and lances;
+inextricable intricacies of rope; shattered oars and planks; all these
+were there; but no fatal or even serious ill seemed to have befallen
+any one. As with Fedallah the day before, so Ahab was now found grimly
+clinging to his boat’s broken half, which afforded a comparatively easy
+float; nor did it so exhaust him as the previous day’s mishap.
+
+But when he was helped to the deck, all eyes were fastened upon him; as
+instead of standing by himself he still half-hung upon the shoulder of
+Starbuck, who had thus far been the foremost to assist him. His ivory
+leg had been snapped off, leaving but one short sharp splinter.
+
+“Aye, aye, Starbuck, ’tis sweet to lean sometimes, be the leaner who he
+will; and would old Ahab had leaned oftener than he has.”
+
+“The ferrule has not stood, sir,” said the carpenter, now coming up; “I
+put good work into that leg.”
+
+“But no bones broken, sir, I hope,” said Stubb with true concern.
+
+“Aye! and all splintered to pieces, Stubb!—d’ye see it.—But even with a
+broken bone, old Ahab is untouched; and I account no living bone of
+mine one jot more me, than this dead one that’s lost. Nor white whale,
+nor man, nor fiend, can so much as graze old Ahab in his own proper and
+inaccessible being. Can any lead touch yonder floor, any mast scrape
+yonder roof?—Aloft there! which way?”
+
+“Dead to leeward, sir.”
+
+“Up helm, then; pile on the sail again, ship keepers! down the rest of
+the spare boats and rig them—Mr. Starbuck away, and muster the boat’s
+crews.”
+
+“Let me first help thee towards the bulwarks, sir.”
+
+“Oh, oh, oh! how this splinter gores me now! Accursed fate! that the
+unconquerable captain in the soul should have such a craven mate!”
+
+“Sir?”
+
+“My body, man, not thee. Give me something for a cane—there, that
+shivered lance will do. Muster the men. Surely I have not seen him yet.
+By heaven it cannot be!—missing?—quick! call them all.”
+
+The old man’s hinted thought was true. Upon mustering the company, the
+Parsee was not there.
+
+“The Parsee!” cried Stubb—“he must have been caught in——”
+
+“The black vomit wrench thee!—run all of ye above, alow, cabin,
+forecastle—find him—not gone—not gone!”
+
+But quickly they returned to him with the tidings that the Parsee was
+nowhere to be found.
+
+“Aye, sir,” said Stubb—“caught among the tangles of your line—I thought
+I saw him dragging under.”
+
+“_My_ line! _my_ line? Gone?—gone? What means that little word?—What
+death-knell rings in it, that old Ahab shakes as if he were the belfry.
+The harpoon, too!—toss over the litter there,—d’ye see it?—the forged
+iron, men, the white whale’s—no, no, no,—blistered fool! this hand did
+dart it!—’tis in the fish!—Aloft there! Keep him nailed—Quick!—all
+hands to the rigging of the boats—collect the oars—harpooneers! the
+irons, the irons!—hoist the royals higher—a pull on all the
+sheets!—helm there! steady, steady for your life! I’ll ten times girdle
+the unmeasured globe; yea and dive straight through it, but I’ll slay
+him yet!”
+
+“Great God! but for one single instant show thyself,” cried Starbuck;
+“never, never wilt thou capture him, old man—In Jesus’ name no more of
+this, that’s worse than devil’s madness. Two days chased; twice stove
+to splinters; thy very leg once more snatched from under thee; thy evil
+shadow gone—all good angels mobbing thee with warnings:—what more
+wouldst thou have?—Shall we keep chasing this murderous fish till he
+swamps the last man? Shall we be dragged by him to the bottom of the
+sea? Shall we be towed by him to the infernal world? Oh, oh,—Impiety
+and blasphemy to hunt him more!”
+
+“Starbuck, of late I’ve felt strangely moved to thee; ever since that
+hour we both saw—thou know’st what, in one another’s eyes. But in this
+matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the palm of this
+hand—a lipless, unfeatured blank. Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This
+whole act’s immutably decreed. ’Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion
+years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates’ lieutenant; I act
+under orders. Look thou, underling! that thou obeyest mine.—Stand round
+me, men. Ye see an old man cut down to the stump; leaning on a shivered
+lance; propped up on a lonely foot. ’Tis Ahab—his body’s part; but
+Ahab’s soul’s a centipede, that moves upon a hundred legs. I feel
+strained, half stranded, as ropes that tow dismasted frigates in a
+gale; and I may look so. But ere I break, ye’ll hear me crack; and till
+ye hear _that_, know that Ahab’s hawser tows his purpose yet. Believe
+ye, men, in the things called omens? Then laugh aloud, and cry encore!
+For ere they drown, drowning things will twice rise to the surface;
+then rise again, to sink for evermore. So with Moby Dick—two days he’s
+floated—tomorrow will be the third. Aye, men, he’ll rise once more,—but
+only to spout his last! D’ye feel brave men, brave?”
+
+“As fearless fire,” cried Stubb.
+
+“And as mechanical,” muttered Ahab. Then as the men went forward, he
+muttered on: “The things called omens! And yesterday I talked the same
+to Starbuck there, concerning my broken boat. Oh! how valiantly I seek
+to drive out of others’ hearts what’s clinched so fast in mine!—The
+Parsee—the Parsee!—gone, gone? and he was to go before:—but still was
+to be seen again ere I could perish—How’s that?—There’s a riddle now
+might baffle all the lawyers backed by the ghosts of the whole line of
+judges:—like a hawk’s beak it pecks my brain. _I’ll_, _I’ll_ solve it,
+though!”
+
+When dusk descended, the whale was still in sight to leeward.
+
+So once more the sail was shortened, and everything passed nearly as on
+the previous night; only, the sound of hammers, and the hum of the
+grindstone was heard till nearly daylight, as the men toiled by
+lanterns in the complete and careful rigging of the spare boats and
+sharpening their fresh weapons for the morrow. Meantime, of the broken
+keel of Ahab’s wrecked craft the carpenter made him another leg; while
+still as on the night before, slouched Ahab stood fixed within his
+scuttle; his hid, heliotrope glance anticipatingly gone backward on its
+dial; sat due eastward for the earliest sun.
+
+
+CHAPTER 135. The Chase.—Third Day.
+
+The morning of the third day dawned fair and fresh, and once more the
+solitary night-man at the fore-mast-head was relieved by crowds of the
+daylight look-outs, who dotted every mast and almost every spar.
+
+“D’ye see him?” cried Ahab; but the whale was not yet in sight.
+
+“In his infallible wake, though; but follow that wake, that’s all. Helm
+there; steady, as thou goest, and hast been going. What a lovely day
+again! were it a new-made world, and made for a summer-house to the
+angels, and this morning the first of its throwing open to them, a
+fairer day could not dawn upon that world. Here’s food for thought, had
+Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels;
+_that’s_ tingling enough for mortal man! to think’s audacity. God only
+has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness
+and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too
+much for that. And yet, I’ve sometimes thought my brain was very
+calm—frozen calm, this old skull cracks so, like a glass in which the
+contents turned to ice, and shiver it. And still this hair is growing
+now; this moment growing, and heat must breed it; but no, it’s like
+that sort of common grass that will grow anywhere, between the earthy
+clefts of Greenland ice or in Vesuvius lava. How the wild winds blow
+it; they whip it about me as the torn shreds of split sails lash the
+tossed ship they cling to. A vile wind that has no doubt blown ere this
+through prison corridors and cells, and wards of hospitals, and
+ventilated them, and now comes blowing hither as innocent as fleeces.
+Out upon it!—it’s tainted. Were I the wind, I’d blow no more on such a
+wicked, miserable world. I’d crawl somewhere to a cave, and slink
+there. And yet, ’tis a noble and heroic thing, the wind! who ever
+conquered it? In every fight it has the last and bitterest blow. Run
+tilting at it, and you but run through it. Ha! a coward wind that
+strikes stark naked men, but will not stand to receive a single blow.
+Even Ahab is a braver thing—a nobler thing than _that_. Would now the
+wind but had a body; but all the things that most exasperate and
+outrage mortal man, all these things are bodiless, but only bodiless as
+objects, not as agents. There’s a most special, a most cunning, oh, a
+most malicious difference! And yet, I say again, and swear it now, that
+there’s something all glorious and gracious in the wind. These warm
+Trade Winds, at least, that in the clear heavens blow straight on, in
+strong and steadfast, vigorous mildness; and veer not from their mark,
+however the baser currents of the sea may turn and tack, and mightiest
+Mississippies of the land swift and swerve about, uncertain where to go
+at last. And by the eternal Poles! these same Trades that so directly
+blow my good ship on; these Trades, or something like them—something so
+unchangeable, and full as strong, blow my keeled soul along! To it!
+Aloft there! What d’ye see?”
+
+“Nothing, sir.”
+
+“Nothing! and noon at hand! The doubloon goes a-begging! See the sun!
+Aye, aye, it must be so. I’ve oversailed him. How, got the start? Aye,
+he’s chasing _me_ now; not I, _him_—that’s bad; I might have known it,
+too. Fool! the lines—the harpoons he’s towing. Aye, aye, I have run him
+by last night. About! about! Come down, all of ye, but the regular look
+outs! Man the braces!”
+
+Steering as she had done, the wind had been somewhat on the Pequod’s
+quarter, so that now being pointed in the reverse direction, the braced
+ship sailed hard upon the breeze as she rechurned the cream in her own
+white wake.
+
+“Against the wind he now steers for the open jaw,” murmured Starbuck to
+himself, as he coiled the new-hauled main-brace upon the rail. “God
+keep us, but already my bones feel damp within me, and from the inside
+wet my flesh. I misdoubt me that I disobey my God in obeying him!”
+
+“Stand by to sway me up!” cried Ahab, advancing to the hempen basket.
+“We should meet him soon.”
+
+“Aye, aye, sir,” and straightway Starbuck did Ahab’s bidding, and once
+more Ahab swung on high.
+
+A whole hour now passed; gold-beaten out to ages. Time itself now held
+long breaths with keen suspense. But at last, some three points off the
+weather bow, Ahab descried the spout again, and instantly from the
+three mast-heads three shrieks went up as if the tongues of fire had
+voiced it.
+
+“Forehead to forehead I meet thee, this third time, Moby Dick! On deck
+there!—brace sharper up; crowd her into the wind’s eye. He’s too far
+off to lower yet, Mr. Starbuck. The sails shake! Stand over that
+helmsman with a top-maul! So, so; he travels fast, and I must down. But
+let me have one more good round look aloft here at the sea; there’s
+time for that. An old, old sight, and yet somehow so young; aye, and
+not changed a wink since I first saw it, a boy, from the sand-hills of
+Nantucket! The same!—the same!—the same to Noah as to me. There’s a
+soft shower to leeward. Such lovely leewardings! They must lead
+somewhere—to something else than common land, more palmy than the
+palms. Leeward! the white whale goes that way; look to windward, then;
+the better if the bitterer quarter. But good bye, good bye, old
+mast-head! What’s this?—green? aye, tiny mosses in these warped cracks.
+No such green weather stains on Ahab’s head! There’s the difference now
+between man’s old age and matter’s. But aye, old mast, we both grow old
+together; sound in our hulls, though, are we not, my ship? Aye, minus a
+leg, that’s all. By heaven this dead wood has the better of my live
+flesh every way. I can’t compare with it; and I’ve known some ships
+made of dead trees outlast the lives of men made of the most vital
+stuff of vital fathers. What’s that he said? he should still go before
+me, my pilot; and yet to be seen again? But where? Will I have eyes at
+the bottom of the sea, supposing I descend those endless stairs? and
+all night I’ve been sailing from him, wherever he did sink to. Aye,
+aye, like many more thou told’st direful truth as touching thyself, O
+Parsee; but, Ahab, there thy shot fell short. Good-bye, mast-head—keep
+a good eye upon the whale, the while I’m gone. We’ll talk to-morrow,
+nay, to-night, when the white whale lies down there, tied by head and
+tail.”
+
+He gave the word; and still gazing round him, was steadily lowered
+through the cloven blue air to the deck.
+
+In due time the boats were lowered; but as standing in his shallop’s
+stern, Ahab just hovered upon the point of the descent, he waved to the
+mate,—who held one of the tackle-ropes on deck—and bade him pause.
+
+“Starbuck!”
+
+“Sir?”
+
+“For the third time my soul’s ship starts upon this voyage, Starbuck.”
+
+“Aye, sir, thou wilt have it so.”
+
+“Some ships sail from their ports, and ever afterwards are missing,
+Starbuck!”
+
+“Truth, sir: saddest truth.”
+
+“Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of the
+flood;—and I feel now like a billow that’s all one crested comb,
+Starbuck. I am old;—shake hands with me, man.”
+
+Their hands met; their eyes fastened; Starbuck’s tears the glue.
+
+“Oh, my captain, my captain!—noble heart—go not—go not!—see, it’s a
+brave man that weeps; how great the agony of the persuasion then!”
+
+“Lower away!”—cried Ahab, tossing the mate’s arm from him. “Stand by
+the crew!”
+
+In an instant the boat was pulling round close under the stern.
+
+“The sharks! the sharks!” cried a voice from the low cabin-window
+there; “O master, my master, come back!”
+
+But Ahab heard nothing; for his own voice was high-lifted then; and the
+boat leaped on.
+
+Yet the voice spake true; for scarce had he pushed from the ship, when
+numbers of sharks, seemingly rising from out the dark waters beneath
+the hull, maliciously snapped at the blades of the oars, every time
+they dipped in the water; and in this way accompanied the boat with
+their bites. It is a thing not uncommonly happening to the whale-boats
+in those swarming seas; the sharks at times apparently following them
+in the same prescient way that vultures hover over the banners of
+marching regiments in the east. But these were the first sharks that
+had been observed by the Pequod since the White Whale had been first
+descried; and whether it was that Ahab’s crew were all such
+tiger-yellow barbarians, and therefore their flesh more musky to the
+senses of the sharks—a matter sometimes well known to affect
+them,—however it was, they seemed to follow that one boat without
+molesting the others.
+
+“Heart of wrought steel!” murmured Starbuck gazing over the side, and
+following with his eyes the receding boat—“canst thou yet ring boldly
+to that sight?—lowering thy keel among ravening sharks, and followed by
+them, open-mouthed to the chase; and this the critical third day?—For
+when three days flow together in one continuous intense pursuit; be
+sure the first is the morning, the second the noon, and the third the
+evening and the end of that thing—be that end what it may. Oh! my God!
+what is this that shoots through me, and leaves me so deadly calm, yet
+expectant,—fixed at the top of a shudder! Future things swim before me,
+as in empty outlines and skeletons; all the past is somehow grown dim.
+Mary, girl! thou fadest in pale glories behind me; boy! I seem to see
+but thy eyes grown wondrous blue. Strangest problems of life seem
+clearing; but clouds sweep between—Is my journey’s end coming? My legs
+feel faint; like his who has footed it all day. Feel thy heart,—beats
+it yet? Stir thyself, Starbuck!—stave it off—move, move! speak
+aloud!—Mast-head there! See ye my boy’s hand on the hill?—Crazed;—aloft
+there!—keep thy keenest eye upon the boats:—mark well the whale!—Ho!
+again!—drive off that hawk! see! he pecks—he tears the vane”—pointing
+to the red flag flying at the main-truck—“Ha! he soars away with
+it!—Where’s the old man now? see’st thou that sight, oh Ahab!—shudder,
+shudder!”
+
+The boats had not gone very far, when by a signal from the mast-heads—a
+downward pointed arm, Ahab knew that the whale had sounded; but
+intending to be near him at the next rising, he held on his way a
+little sideways from the vessel; the becharmed crew maintaining the
+profoundest silence, as the head-beat waves hammered and hammered
+against the opposing bow.
+
+“Drive, drive in your nails, oh ye waves! to their uttermost heads
+drive them in! ye but strike a thing without a lid; and no coffin and
+no hearse can be mine:—and hemp only can kill me! Ha! ha!”
+
+Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles; then
+quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged berg of ice,
+swiftly rising to the surface. A low rumbling sound was heard; a
+subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths; as bedraggled with
+trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a vast form shot lengthwise,
+but obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist,
+it hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping
+back into the deep. Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for
+an instant like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of
+flakes, leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the
+marble trunk of the whale.
+
+“Give way!” cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to
+the attack; but maddened by yesterday’s fresh irons that corroded in
+him, Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell
+from heaven. The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad
+white forehead, beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted together;
+as head on, he came churning his tail among the boats; and once more
+flailed them apart; spilling out the irons and lances from the two
+mates’ boats, and dashing in one side of the upper part of their bows,
+but leaving Ahab’s almost without a scar.
+
+While Daggoo and Queequeg were stopping the strained planks; and as the
+whale swimming out from them, turned, and showed one entire flank as he
+shot by them again; at that moment a quick cry went up. Lashed round
+and round to the fish’s back; pinioned in the turns upon turns in
+which, during the past night, the whale had reeled the involutions of
+the lines around him, the half torn body of the Parsee was seen; his
+sable raiment frayed to shreds; his distended eyes turned full upon old
+Ahab.
+
+The harpoon dropped from his hand.
+
+“Befooled, befooled!”—drawing in a long lean breath—“Aye, Parsee! I see
+thee again.—Aye, and thou goest before; and this, _this_ then is the
+hearse that thou didst promise. But I hold thee to the last letter of
+thy word. Where is the second hearse? Away, mates, to the ship! those
+boats are useless now; repair them if ye can in time, and return to me;
+if not, Ahab is enough to die—Down, men! the first thing that but
+offers to jump from this boat I stand in, that thing I harpoon. Ye are
+not other men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey me.—Where’s the
+whale? gone down again?”
+
+But he looked too nigh the boat; for as if bent upon escaping with the
+corpse he bore, and as if the particular place of the last encounter
+had been but a stage in his leeward voyage, Moby Dick was now again
+steadily swimming forward; and had almost passed the ship,—which thus
+far had been sailing in the contrary direction to him, though for the
+present her headway had been stopped. He seemed swimming with his
+utmost velocity, and now only intent upon pursuing his own straight
+path in the sea.
+
+“Oh! Ahab,” cried Starbuck, “not too late is it, even now, the third
+day, to desist. See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that
+madly seekest him!”
+
+Setting sail to the rising wind, the lonely boat was swiftly impelled
+to leeward, by both oars and canvas. And at last when Ahab was sliding
+by the vessel, so near as plainly to distinguish Starbuck’s face as he
+leaned over the rail, he hailed him to turn the vessel about, and
+follow him, not too swiftly, at a judicious interval. Glancing upwards,
+he saw Tashtego, Queequeg, and Daggoo, eagerly mounting to the three
+mast-heads; while the oarsmen were rocking in the two staved boats
+which had but just been hoisted to the side, and were busily at work in
+repairing them. One after the other, through the port-holes, as he
+sped, he also caught flying glimpses of Stubb and Flask, busying
+themselves on deck among bundles of new irons and lances. As he saw all
+this; as he heard the hammers in the broken boats; far other hammers
+seemed driving a nail into his heart. But he rallied. And now marking
+that the vane or flag was gone from the main-mast-head, he shouted to
+Tashtego, who had just gained that perch, to descend again for another
+flag, and a hammer and nails, and so nail it to the mast.
+
+Whether fagged by the three days’ running chase, and the resistance to
+his swimming in the knotted hamper he bore; or whether it was some
+latent deceitfulness and malice in him: whichever was true, the White
+Whale’s way now began to abate, as it seemed, from the boat so rapidly
+nearing him once more; though indeed the whale’s last start had not
+been so long a one as before. And still as Ahab glided over the waves
+the unpitying sharks accompanied him; and so pertinaciously stuck to
+the boat; and so continually bit at the plying oars, that the blades
+became jagged and crunched, and left small splinters in the sea, at
+almost every dip.
+
+“Heed them not! those teeth but give new rowlocks to your oars. Pull
+on! ’tis the better rest, the shark’s jaw than the yielding water.”
+
+“But at every bite, sir, the thin blades grow smaller and smaller!”
+
+“They will last long enough! pull on!—But who can tell”—he
+muttered—“whether these sharks swim to feast on the whale or on
+Ahab?—But pull on! Aye, all alive, now—we near him. The helm! take the
+helm! let me pass,”—and so saying two of the oarsmen helped him forward
+to the bows of the still flying boat.
+
+At length as the craft was cast to one side, and ran ranging along with
+the White Whale’s flank, he seemed strangely oblivious of its
+advance—as the whale sometimes will—and Ahab was fairly within the
+smoky mountain mist, which, thrown off from the whale’s spout, curled
+round his great, Monadnock hump; he was even thus close to him; when,
+with body arched back, and both arms lengthwise high-lifted to the
+poise, he darted his fierce iron, and his far fiercer curse into the
+hated whale. As both steel and curse sank to the socket, as if sucked
+into a morass, Moby Dick sideways writhed; spasmodically rolled his
+nigh flank against the bow, and, without staving a hole in it, so
+suddenly canted the boat over, that had it not been for the elevated
+part of the gunwale to which he then clung, Ahab would once more have
+been tossed into the sea. As it was, three of the oarsmen—who foreknew
+not the precise instant of the dart, and were therefore unprepared for
+its effects—these were flung out; but so fell, that, in an instant two
+of them clutched the gunwale again, and rising to its level on a
+combing wave, hurled themselves bodily inboard again; the third man
+helplessly dropping astern, but still afloat and swimming.
+
+Almost simultaneously, with a mighty volition of ungraduated,
+instantaneous swiftness, the White Whale darted through the weltering
+sea. But when Ahab cried out to the steersman to take new turns with
+the line, and hold it so; and commanded the crew to turn round on their
+seats, and tow the boat up to the mark; the moment the treacherous line
+felt that double strain and tug, it snapped in the empty air!
+
+“What breaks in me? Some sinew cracks!—’tis whole again; oars! oars!
+Burst in upon him!”
+
+Hearing the tremendous rush of the sea-crashing boat, the whale wheeled
+round to present his blank forehead at bay; but in that evolution,
+catching sight of the nearing black hull of the ship; seemingly seeing
+in it the source of all his persecutions; bethinking it—it may be—a
+larger and nobler foe; of a sudden, he bore down upon its advancing
+prow, smiting his jaws amid fiery showers of foam.
+
+Ahab staggered; his hand smote his forehead. “I grow blind; hands!
+stretch out before me that I may yet grope my way. Is’t night?”
+
+“The whale! The ship!” cried the cringing oarsmen.
+
+“Oars! oars! Slope downwards to thy depths, O sea, that ere it be for
+ever too late, Ahab may slide this last, last time upon his mark! I
+see: the ship! the ship! Dash on, my men! Will ye not save my ship?”
+
+But as the oarsmen violently forced their boat through the
+sledge-hammering seas, the before whale-smitten bow-ends of two planks
+burst through, and in an instant almost, the temporarily disabled boat
+lay nearly level with the waves; its half-wading, splashing crew,
+trying hard to stop the gap and bale out the pouring water.
+
+Meantime, for that one beholding instant, Tashtego’s mast-head hammer
+remained suspended in his hand; and the red flag, half-wrapping him as
+with a plaid, then streamed itself straight out from him, as his own
+forward-flowing heart; while Starbuck and Stubb, standing upon the
+bowsprit beneath, caught sight of the down-coming monster just as soon
+as he.
+
+“The whale, the whale! Up helm, up helm! Oh, all ye sweet powers of
+air, now hug me close! Let not Starbuck die, if die he must, in a
+woman’s fainting fit. Up helm, I say—ye fools, the jaw! the jaw! Is
+this the end of all my bursting prayers? all my life-long fidelities?
+Oh, Ahab, Ahab, lo, thy work. Steady! helmsman, steady. Nay, nay! Up
+helm again! He turns to meet us! Oh, his unappeasable brow drives on
+towards one, whose duty tells him he cannot depart. My God, stand by me
+now!”
+
+“Stand not by me, but stand under me, whoever you are that will now
+help Stubb; for Stubb, too, sticks here. I grin at thee, thou grinning
+whale! Who ever helped Stubb, or kept Stubb awake, but Stubb’s own
+unwinking eye? And now poor Stubb goes to bed upon a mattrass that is
+all too soft; would it were stuffed with brushwood! I grin at thee,
+thou grinning whale! Look ye, sun, moon, and stars! I call ye assassins
+of as good a fellow as ever spouted up his ghost. For all that, I would
+yet ring glasses with ye, would ye but hand the cup! Oh, oh! oh, oh!
+thou grinning whale, but there’ll be plenty of gulping soon! Why fly ye
+not, O Ahab! For me, off shoes and jacket to it; let Stubb die in his
+drawers! A most mouldy and over salted death, though;—cherries!
+cherries! cherries! Oh, Flask, for one red cherry ere we die!”
+
+“Cherries? I only wish that we were where they grow. Oh, Stubb, I hope
+my poor mother’s drawn my part-pay ere this; if not, few coppers will
+now come to her, for the voyage is up.”
+
+From the ship’s bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive; hammers,
+bits of plank, lances, and harpoons, mechanically retained in their
+hands, just as they had darted from their various employments; all
+their enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which from side to side
+strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad band of
+overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution,
+swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of
+all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead
+smote the ship’s starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled. Some fell
+flat upon their faces. Like dislodged trucks, the heads of the
+harpooneers aloft shook on their bull-like necks. Through the breach,
+they heard the waters pour, as mountain torrents down a flume.
+
+“The ship! The hearse!—the second hearse!” cried Ahab from the boat;
+“its wood could only be American!”
+
+Diving beneath the settling ship, the whale ran quivering along its
+keel; but turning under water, swiftly shot to the surface again, far
+off the other bow, but within a few yards of Ahab’s boat, where, for a
+time, he lay quiescent.
+
+“I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! let me hear thy
+hammer. Oh! ye three unsurrendered spires of mine; thou uncracked keel;
+and only god-bullied hull; thou firm deck, and haughty helm, and
+Pole-pointed prow,—death-glorious ship! must ye then perish, and
+without me? Am I cut off from the last fond pride of meanest
+shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel
+my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your
+furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone
+life, and top this one piled comber of my death! Towards thee I roll,
+thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with
+thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last
+breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool!
+and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still
+chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! _Thus_, I give up
+the spear!”
+
+The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting
+velocity the line ran through the grooves;—ran foul. Ahab stooped to
+clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the
+neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was
+shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the
+heavy eye-splice in the rope’s final end flew out of the stark-empty
+tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its
+depths.
+
+For an instant, the tranced boat’s crew stood still; then turned. “The
+ship? Great God, where is the ship?” Soon they through dim, bewildering
+mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous Fata
+Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed by
+infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the
+pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea.
+And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its
+crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning,
+animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the
+smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight.
+
+But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the
+sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of the
+erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of the flag,
+which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the destroying
+billows they almost touched;—at that instant, a red arm and a hammer
+hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the
+flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that
+tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home
+among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there;
+this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between
+the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial
+thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his
+hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic
+shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive
+form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like
+Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of
+heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.
+
+Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen
+white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the
+great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
+
+
+Epilogue
+
+“AND I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE” Job.
+
+The drama’s done. Why then here does any one step forth?—Because one
+did survive the wreck.
+
+It so chanced, that after the Parsee’s disappearance, I was he whom the
+Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab’s bowsman, when that bowsman
+assumed the vacant post; the same, who, when on the last day the three
+men were tossed from out of the rocking boat, was dropped astern. So,
+floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of it,
+when the halfspent suction of the sunk ship reached me, I was then, but
+slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex. When I reached it, it had
+subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round, then, and ever contracting
+towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly
+wheeling circle, like another Ixion I did revolve. Till, gaining that
+vital centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by
+reason of its cunning spring, and, owing to its great buoyancy, rising
+with great force, the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea,
+fell over, and floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost
+one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirgelike main. The
+unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths;
+the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a
+sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the
+devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing
+children, only found another orphan.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MOBY-DICK; OR THE WHALE ***
+
+***** This file should be named 2701-0.txt or 2701-0.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+    https://www.gutenberg.org/2/7/0/2701/
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will
+be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
+law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
+so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the
+United States without permission and without paying copyright
+royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
+of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
+and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
+the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
+of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
+copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
+easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
+of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
+Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away--you may
+do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
+by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
+license, especially commercial redistribution.
+
+START: FULL LICENSE
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
+Project Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
+www.gutenberg.org/license.
+
+Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+
+1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
+destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your
+possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
+Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
+by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the
+person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph
+1.E.8.
+
+1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
+paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this
+agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the
+Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
+of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual
+works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
+States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
+United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
+claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
+displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
+all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
+that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting
+free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm
+works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
+Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily
+comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
+same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when
+you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
+in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
+check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
+agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
+distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
+other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no
+representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
+country other than the United States.
+
+1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
+immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear
+prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work
+on which the phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed,
+performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
+
+  This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+  most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
+  restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
+  under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
+  eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
+  United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
+  you are located before using this eBook.
+
+1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is
+derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
+contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
+copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
+the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
+redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
+either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
+obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg-tm
+trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
+additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
+will be linked to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works
+posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
+beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
+any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
+to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format
+other than "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official
+version posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm website
+(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
+to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
+of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original "Plain
+Vanilla ASCII" or other form. Any alternate format must include the
+full Project Gutenberg-tm License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+provided that:
+
+* You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+  the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+  you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
+  to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he has
+  agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
+  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
+  within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
+  legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
+  payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
+  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
+  Section 4, "Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
+  Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+* You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+  you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+  does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+  License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
+  copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
+  all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg-tm
+  works.
+
+* You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
+  any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+  electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
+  receipt of the work.
+
+* You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+  distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work or group of works on different terms than
+are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
+from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
+the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
+forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
+Gutenberg-tm collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
+contain "Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
+or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
+other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
+cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
+with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
+with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
+lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
+or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
+opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
+the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
+without further opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO
+OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
+damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
+violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
+agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
+limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
+unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
+remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in
+accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
+production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
+including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
+the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
+or any Project Gutenberg-tm work, (b) alteration, modification, or
+additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any
+Defect you cause.
+
+Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
+computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
+exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
+from people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future
+generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
+Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at
+www.gutenberg.org
+
+Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
+U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
+Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
+to date contact information can be found at the Foundation's website
+and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
+
+Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without
+widespread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
+DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular
+state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
+donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm concept of a library of electronic works that could be
+freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
+distributed Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of
+volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
+the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
+necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
+edition.
+
+Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
+facility: www.gutenberg.org
+
+This website includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+