1  [Moby Dick by Herman Melville 1851]
   2  
   3  
   4  ETYMOLOGY.
   5  
   6  (Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School)
   7  
   8  The pale Usher--threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him
   9  now.  He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer
  10  handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the
  11  known nations of the world.  He loved to dust his old grammars; it
  12  somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.
  13  
  14  "While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what
  15  name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue leaving out, through
  16  ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh the signification
  17  of the word, you deliver that which is not true." --HACKLUYT
  18  
  19  "WHALE. ... Sw. and Dan. HVAL.  This animal is named from roundness
  20  or rolling; for in Dan. HVALT is arched or vaulted." --WEBSTER'S
  21  DICTIONARY
  22  
  23  "WHALE. ... It is more immediately from the Dut. and Ger. WALLEN;
  24  A.S. WALW-IAN, to roll, to wallow." --RICHARDSON'S DICTIONARY
  25  
  26  KETOS,               GREEK.
  27  CETUS,               LATIN.
  28  WHOEL,               ANGLO-SAXON.
  29  HVALT,               DANISH.
  30  WAL,                 DUTCH.
  31  HWAL,                SWEDISH.
  32  WHALE,               ICELANDIC.
  33  WHALE,               ENGLISH.
  34  BALEINE,             FRENCH.
  35  BALLENA,             SPANISH.
  36  PEKEE-NUEE-NUEE,     FEGEE.
  37  PEKEE-NUEE-NUEE,     ERROMANGOAN.
  38  
  39  
  40  
  41  
  42  EXTRACTS (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian).
  43  
  44  It will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of
  45  a poor devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long
  46  Vaticans and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random
  47  allusions to whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever,
  48  sacred or profane.  Therefore you must not, in every case at least,
  49  take the higgledy-piggledy whale statements, however authentic, in
  50  these extracts, for veritable gospel cetology.  Far from it.  As
  51  touching the ancient authors generally, as well as the poets here
  52  appearing, these extracts are solely valuable or entertaining, as
  53  affording a glancing bird's eye view of what has been promiscuously
  54  said, thought, fancied, and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and
  55  generations, including our own.
  56  
  57  So fare thee well, poor devil of a Sub-Sub, whose commentator I am.
  58  Thou belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this
  59  world will ever warm; and for whom even Pale Sherry would be too
  60  rosy-strong; but with whom one sometimes loves to sit, and feel
  61  poor-devilish, too; and grow convivial upon tears; and say to them
  62  bluntly, with full eyes and empty glasses, and in not altogether
  63  unpleasant sadness--Give it up, Sub-Subs!  For by how much the more
  64  pains ye take to please the world, by so much the more shall ye for
  65  ever go thankless!  Would that I could clear out Hampton Court and
  66  the Tuileries for ye!  But gulp down your tears and hie aloft to the
  67  royal-mast with your hearts; for your friends who have gone before
  68  are clearing out the seven-storied heavens, and making refugees of
  69  long-pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, against your coming.
  70  Here ye strike but splintered hearts together--there, ye shall strike
  71  unsplinterable glasses!
  72  
  73  
  74  EXTRACTS.
  75  
  76  "And God created great whales." --GENESIS.
  77  
  78  "Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him; One would think the deep
  79  to be hoary." --JOB.
  80  
  81  "Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah."
  82  --JONAH.
  83  
  84  "There go the ships; there is that Leviathan whom thou hast made to
  85  play therein." --PSALMS.
  86  
  87  "In that day, the Lord with his sore, and great, and strong sword,
  88  shall punish Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that
  89  crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea."
  90  --ISAIAH
  91  
  92  "And what thing soever besides cometh within the chaos of this
  93  monster's mouth, be it beast, boat, or stone, down it goes all
  94  incontinently that foul great swallow of his, and perisheth in the
  95  bottomless gulf of his paunch." --HOLLAND'S PLUTARCH'S MORALS.
  96  
  97  "The Indian Sea breedeth the most and the biggest fishes that are:
  98  among which the Whales and Whirlpooles called Balaene, take up as
  99  much in length as four acres or arpens of land." --HOLLAND'S PLINY.
 100  
 101  "Scarcely had we proceeded two days on the sea, when about sunrise a
 102  great many Whales and other monsters of the sea, appeared.  Among the
 103  former, one was of a most monstrous size. ...  This came towards us,
 104  open-mouthed, raising the waves on all sides, and beating the sea
 105  before him into a foam." --TOOKE'S LUCIAN.  "THE TRUE HISTORY."
 106  
 107  "He visited this country also with a view of catching horse-whales,
 108  which had bones of very great value for their teeth, of which he
 109  brought some to the king. ...  The best whales were catched in his
 110  own country, of which some were forty-eight, some fifty yards long.
 111  He said that he was one of six who had killed sixty in two days."
 112  --OTHER OR OCTHER'S VERBAL NARRATIVE TAKEN DOWN FROM HIS MOUTH BY
 113  KING ALFRED, A.D. 890.
 114  
 115  "And whereas all the other things, whether beast or vessel, that
 116  enter into the dreadful gulf of this monster's (whale's) mouth, are
 117  immediately lost and swallowed up, the sea-gudgeon retires into it in
 118  great security, and there sleeps." --MONTAIGNE.  --APOLOGY FOR
 119  RAIMOND SEBOND.
 120  
 121  "Let us fly, let us fly!  Old Nick take me if is not Leviathan
 122  described by the noble prophet Moses in the life of patient Job."
 123  --RABELAIS.
 124  
 125  "This whale's liver was two cartloads." --STOWE'S ANNALS.
 126  
 127  "The great Leviathan that maketh the seas to seethe like boiling
 128  pan." --LORD BACON'S VERSION OF THE PSALMS.
 129  
 130  "Touching that monstrous bulk of the whale or ork we have received
 131  nothing certain.  They grow exceeding fat, insomuch that an
 132  incredible quantity of oil will be extracted out of one whale."
 133  --IBID.  "HISTORY OF LIFE AND DEATH."
 134  
 135  "The sovereignest thing on earth is parmacetti for an inward bruise."
 136  --KING HENRY.
 137  
 138  "Very like a whale." --HAMLET.
 139  
 140  "Which to secure, no skill of leach's art
 141  Mote him availle, but to returne againe
 142  To his wound's worker, that with lowly dart,
 143  Dinting his breast, had bred his restless paine,
 144  Like as the wounded whale to shore flies thro' the maine."
 145  --THE FAERIE QUEEN.
 146  
 147  "Immense as whales, the motion of whose vast bodies can in a peaceful
 148  calm trouble the ocean til it boil." --SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT.  PREFACE
 149  TO GONDIBERT.
 150  
 151  "What spermacetti is, men might justly doubt, since the learned
 152  Hosmannus in his work of thirty years, saith plainly, Nescio quid
 153  sit." --SIR T. BROWNE.  OF SPERMA CETI AND THE SPERMA CETI WHALE.
 154  VIDE HIS V. E.
 155  
 156  "Like Spencer's Talus with his modern flail
 157  He threatens ruin with his ponderous tail.
 158  ...
 159  Their fixed jav'lins in his side he wears,
 160  And on his back a grove of pikes appears." --WALLER'S BATTLE OF THE
 161  SUMMER ISLANDS.
 162  
 163  "By art is created that great Leviathan, called a Commonwealth or
 164  State--(in Latin, Civitas) which is but an artificial man." --OPENING
 165  SENTENCE OF HOBBES'S LEVIATHAN.
 166  
 167  "Silly Mansoul swallowed it without chewing, as if it had been a
 168  sprat in the mouth of a whale." --PILGRIM'S PROGRESS.
 169  
 170  "That sea beast
 171  Leviathan, which God of all his works
 172  Created hugest that swim the ocean stream." --PARADISE LOST.
 173  
 174  ---"There Leviathan,
 175  Hugest of living creatures, in the deep
 176  Stretched like a promontory sleeps or swims,
 177  And seems a moving land; and at his gills
 178  Draws in, and at his breath spouts out a sea." --IBID.
 179  
 180  "The mighty whales which swim in a sea of water, and have a sea of
 181  oil swimming in them." --FULLLER'S PROFANE AND HOLY STATE.
 182  
 183  "So close behind some promontory lie
 184  The huge Leviathan to attend their prey,
 185  And give no chance, but swallow in the fry,
 186  Which through their gaping jaws mistake the way."
 187  --DRYDEN'S ANNUS MIRABILIS.
 188  
 189  "While the whale is floating at the stern of the ship, they cut off
 190  his head, and tow it with a boat as near the shore as it will come;
 191  but it will be aground in twelve or thirteen feet water." --THOMAS
 192  EDGE'S TEN VOYAGES TO SPITZBERGEN, IN PURCHAS.
 193  
 194  "In their way they saw many whales sporting in the ocean, and in
 195  wantonness fuzzing up the water through their pipes and vents, which
 196  nature has placed on their shoulders." --SIR T. HERBERT'S VOYAGES
 197  INTO ASIA AND AFRICA.  HARRIS COLL.
 198  
 199  "Here they saw such huge troops of whales, that they were forced to
 200  proceed with a great deal of caution for fear they should run their
 201  ship upon them." --SCHOUTEN'S SIXTH CIRCUMNAVIGATION.
 202  
 203  "We set sail from the Elbe, wind N.E. in the ship called The
 204  Jonas-in-the-Whale. ...  Some say the whale can't open his mouth, but
 205  that is a fable. ...  They frequently climb up the masts to see
 206  whether they can see a whale, for the first discoverer has a ducat
 207  for his pains. ...  I was told of a whale taken near Shetland, that
 208  had above a barrel of herrings in his belly. ...  One of our
 209  harpooneers told me that he caught once a whale in Spitzbergen that
 210  was white all over." --A VOYAGE TO GREENLAND, A.D. 1671 HARRIS COLL.
 211  
 212  "Several whales have come in upon this coast (Fife) Anno 1652, one
 213  eighty feet in length of the whale-bone kind came in, which (as I was
 214  informed), besides a vast quantity of oil, did afford 500 weight of
 215  baleen.  The jaws of it stand for a gate in the garden of Pitferren."
 216  --SIBBALD'S FIFE AND KINROSS.
 217  
 218  "Myself have agreed to try whether I can master and kill this
 219  Sperma-ceti whale, for I could never hear of any of that sort that
 220  was killed by any man, such is his fierceness and swiftness."
 221  --RICHARD STRAFFORD'S LETTER FROM THE BERMUDAS.  PHIL. TRANS.  A.D.
 222  1668.
 223  
 224  "Whales in the sea God's voice obey." --N. E. PRIMER.
 225  
 226  "We saw also abundance of large whales, there being more in those
 227  southern seas, as I may say, by a hundred to one; than we have to the
 228  northward of us." --CAPTAIN COWLEY'S VOYAGE ROUND THE GLOBE, A.D.
 229  1729.
 230  
 231  "... and the breath of the whale is frequendy attended with such an
 232  insupportable smell, as to bring on a disorder of the brain."
 233  --ULLOA'S SOUTH AMERICA.
 234  
 235  "To fifty chosen sylphs of special note,
 236  We trust the important charge, the petticoat.
 237  Oft have we known that seven-fold fence to fail,
 238  Tho' stuffed with hoops and armed with ribs of whale." --RAPE
 239  OF THE LOCK.
 240  
 241  "If we compare land animals in respect to magnitude, with those that
 242  take up their abode in the deep, we shall find they will appear
 243  contemptible in the comparison.  The whale is doubtless the largest
 244  animal in creation." --GOLDSMITH, NAT. HIST.
 245  
 246  "If you should write a fable for little fishes, you would make them
 247  speak like great wales." --GOLDSMITH TO JOHNSON.
 248  
 249  "In the afternoon we saw what was supposed to be a rock, but it was
 250  found to be a dead whale, which some Asiatics had killed, and were
 251  then towing ashore.  They seemed to endeavor to conceal themselves
 252  behind the whale, in order to avoid being seen by us." --COOK'S
 253  VOYAGES.
 254  
 255  "The larger whales, they seldom venture to attack.  They stand in so
 256  great dread of some of them, that when out at sea they are afraid to
 257  mention even their names, and carry dung, lime-stone, juniper-wood,
 258  and some other articles of the same nature in their boats, in order
 259  to terrify and prevent their too near approach." --UNO VON TROIL'S
 260  LETTERS ON BANKS'S AND SOLANDER'S VOYAGE TO ICELAND IN 1772.
 261  
 262  "The Spermacetti Whale found by the Nantuckois, is an active, fierce
 263  animal, and requires vast address and boldness in the fishermen."
 264  --THOMAS JEFFERSON'S WHALE MEMORIAL TO THE FRENCH MINISTER IN 1778.
 265  
 266  "And pray, sir, what in the world is equal to it?" --EDMUND BURKE'S
 267  REFERENCE IN PARLIAMENT TO THE NANTUCKET WHALE-FISHERY.
 268  
 269  "Spain--a great whale stranded on the shores of Europe." --EDMUND
 270  BURKE. (SOMEWHERE.)
 271  
 272  "A tenth branch of the king's ordinary revenue, said to be grounded
 273  on the consideration of his guarding and protecting the seas from
 274  pirates and robbers, is the right to royal fish, which are whale and
 275  sturgeon.  And these, when either thrown ashore or caught near the
 276  coast, are the property of the king." --BLACKSTONE.
 277  
 278  "Soon to the sport of death the crews repair:
 279  Rodmond unerring o'er his head suspends
 280  The barbed steel, and every turn attends."
 281  --FALCONER'S SHIPWRECK.
 282  
 283  "Bright shone the roofs, the domes, the spires,
 284  And rockets blew self driven,
 285  To hang their momentary fire
 286  Around the vault of heaven.
 287  
 288  "So fire with water to compare,
 289  The ocean serves on high,
 290  Up-spouted by a whale in air,
 291  To express unwieldy joy." --COWPER, ON THE QUEEN'S
 292  VISIT TO LONDON.
 293  
 294  "Ten or fifteen gallons of blood are thrown out of the heart at a
 295  stroke, with immense velocity." --JOHN HUNTER'S ACCOUNT OF THE
 296  DISSECTION OF A WHALE.  (A SMALL SIZED ONE.)
 297  
 298  "The aorta of a whale is larger in the bore than the main pipe of the
 299  water-works at London Bridge, and the water roaring in its passage
 300  through that pipe is inferior in impetus and velocity to the blood
 301  gushing from the whale's heart." --PALEY'S THEOLOGY.
 302  
 303  "The whale is a mammiferous animal without hind feet." --BARON
 304  CUVIER.
 305  
 306  "In 40 degrees south, we saw Spermacetti Whales, but did not take any
 307  till the first of May, the sea being then covered with them."
 308  --COLNETT'S VOYAGE FOR THE PURPOSE OF EXTENDING THE SPERMACETI WHALE
 309  FISHERY.
 310  
 311  "In the free element beneath me swam,
 312  Floundered and dived, in play, in chace, in battle,
 313  Fishes of every colour, form, and kind;
 314  Which language cannot paint, and mariner
 315  Had never seen; from dread Leviathan
 316  To insect millions peopling every wave:
 317  Gather'd in shoals immense, like floating islands,
 318  Led by mysterious instincts through that waste
 319  And trackless region, though on every side
 320  Assaulted by voracious enemies,
 321  Whales, sharks, and monsters, arm'd in front or jaw,
 322  With swords, saws, spiral horns, or hooked fangs."
 323  --MONTGOMERY'S WORLD BEFORE THE FLOOD.
 324  
 325  "Io!  Paean!  Io! sing.
 326  To the finny people's king.
 327  Not a mightier whale than this
 328  In the vast Atlantic is;
 329  Not a fatter fish than he,
 330  Flounders round the Polar Sea." --CHARLES LAMB'S TRIUMPH OF THE
 331  WHALE.
 332  
 333  "In the year 1690 some persons were on a high hill observing the
 334  whales spouting and sporting with each other, when one observed:
 335  there--pointing to the sea--is a green pasture where our children's
 336  grand-children will go for bread." --OBED MACY'S HISTORY OF
 337  NANTUCKET.
 338  
 339  "I built a cottage for Susan and myself and made a gateway in the
 340  form of a Gothic Arch, by setting up a whale's jaw bones."
 341  --HAWTHORNE'S TWICE TOLD TALES.
 342  
 343  "She came to bespeak a monument for her first love, who had been
 344  killed by a whale in the Pacific ocean, no less than forty years
 345  ago." --IBID.
 346  
 347  "No, Sir, 'tis a Right Whale," answered Tom; "I saw his sprout; he
 348  threw up a pair of as pretty rainbows as a Christian would wish to
 349  look at.  He's a raal oil-butt, that fellow!" --COOPER'S PILOT.
 350  
 351  "The papers were brought in, and we saw in the Berlin Gazette that
 352  whales had been introduced on the stage there." --ECKERMANN'S
 353  CONVERSATIONS WITH GOETHE.
 354  
 355  "My God!  Mr. Chace, what is the matter?"  I answered, "we have been
 356  stove by a whale." --"NARRATIVE OF THE SHIPWRECK OF THE WHALE SHIP
 357  ESSEX OF NANTUCKET, WHICH WAS ATTACKED AND FINALLY DESTROYED BY A
 358  LARGE SPERM WHALE IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN."  BY OWEN CHACE OF NANTUCKET,
 359  FIRST MATE OF SAID VESSEL.  NEW YORK, 1821.
 360  
 361  "A mariner sat in the shrouds one night,
 362  The wind was piping free;
 363  Now bright, now dimmed, was the moonlight pale,
 364  And the phospher gleamed in the wake of the whale,
 365  As it floundered in the sea." --ELIZABETH OAKES SMITH.
 366  
 367  "The quantity of line withdrawn from the boats engaged in the capture
 368  of this one whale, amounted altogether to 10,440 yards or nearly six
 369  English miles. ...
 370  
 371  "Sometimes the whale shakes its tremendous tail in the air, which,
 372  cracking like a whip, resounds to the distance of three or four
 373  miles." --SCORESBY.
 374  
 375  "Mad with the agonies he endures from these fresh attacks, the
 376  infuriated Sperm Whale rolls over and over; he rears his enormous
 377  head, and with wide expanded jaws snaps at everything around him; he
 378  rushes at the boats with his head; they are propelled before him with
 379  vast swiftness, and sometimes utterly destroyed. ...  It is a matter
 380  of great astonishment that the consideration of the habits of so
 381  interesting, and, in a commercial point of view, so important an
 382  animal (as the Sperm Whale) should have been so entirely neglected,
 383  or should have excited so little curiosity among the numerous, and
 384  many of them competent observers, that of late years, must have
 385  possessed the most abundant and the most convenient opportunities of
 386  witnessing their habitudes." --THOMAS BEALE'S HISTORY OF THE SPERM
 387  WHALE, 1839.
 388  
 389  "The Cachalot" (Sperm Whale) "is not only better armed than the True
 390  Whale" (Greenland or Right Whale) "in possessing a formidable weapon
 391  at either extremity of its body, but also more frequently displays a
 392  disposition to employ these weapons offensively and in manner at once
 393  so artful, bold, and mischievous, as to lead to its being regarded as
 394  the most dangerous to attack of all the known species of the whale
 395  tribe." --FREDERICK DEBELL BENNETT'S WHALING VOYAGE ROUND THE GLOBE,
 396  1840.
 397  
 398  October 13.  "There she blows," was sung out from the mast-head.
 399  "Where away?" demanded the captain.
 400  "Three points off the lee bow, sir."
 401  "Raise up your wheel.  Steady!"  "Steady, sir."
 402  "Mast-head ahoy!  Do you see that whale now?"
 403  "Ay ay, sir!  A shoal of Sperm Whales!  There she blows!  There she
 404  breaches!"
 405  "Sing out! sing out every time!"
 406  "Ay Ay, sir!  There she blows! there--there--THAR she
 407  blows--bowes--bo-o-os!"
 408  "How far off?"
 409  "Two miles and a half."
 410  "Thunder and lightning! so near!  Call all hands." --J. ROSS BROWNE'S
 411  ETCHINGS OF A WHALING CRUIZE.  1846.
 412  
 413  "The Whale-ship Globe, on board of which vessel occurred the horrid
 414  transactions we are about to relate, belonged to the island of
 415  Nantucket." --"NARRATIVE OF THE GLOBE," BY LAY AND HUSSEY SURVIVORS.
 416  A.D. 1828.
 417  
 418  Being once pursued by a whale which he had wounded, he parried the
 419  assault for some time with a lance; but the furious monster at length
 420  rushed on the boat; himself and comrades only being preserved by
 421  leaping into the water when they saw the onset was inevitable."
 422  --MISSIONARY JOURNAL OF TYERMAN AND BENNETT.
 423  
 424  "Nantucket itself," said Mr. Webster, "is a very striking and
 425  peculiar portion of the National interest.  There is a population of
 426  eight or nine thousand persons living here in the sea, adding largely
 427  every year to the National wealth by the boldest and most persevering
 428  industry." --REPORT OF DANIEL WEBSTER'S SPEECH IN THE U.  S.  SENATE,
 429  ON THE APPLICATION FOR THE ERECTION OF A BREAKWATER AT NANTUCKET.
 430  1828.
 431  
 432  "The whale fell directly over him, and probably killed him in a
 433  moment." --"THE WHALE AND HIS CAPTORS, OR THE WHALEMAN'S ADVENTURES
 434  AND THE WHALE'S BIOGRAPHY, GATHERED ON THE HOMEWARD CRUISE OF THE
 435  COMMODORE PREBLE."  BY REV. HENRY T. CHEEVER.
 436  
 437  "If you make the least damn bit of noise," replied Samuel, "I will
 438  send you to hell." --LIFE OF SAMUEL COMSTOCK (THE MUTINEER), BY HIS
 439  BROTHER, WILLIAM COMSTOCK.  ANOTHER VERSION OF THE WHALE-SHIP GLOBE
 440  NARRATIVE.
 441  
 442  "The voyages of the Dutch and English to the Northern Ocean, in
 443  order, if possible, to discover a passage through it to India, though
 444  they failed of their main object, laid-open the haunts of the whale."
 445  --MCCULLOCH'S COMMERCIAL DICTIONARY.
 446  
 447  "These things are reciprocal; the ball rebounds, only to bound
 448  forward again; for now in laying open the haunts of the whale, the
 449  whalemen seem to have indirectly hit upon new clews to that same
 450  mystic North-West Passage." --FROM "SOMETHING" UNPUBLISHED.
 451  
 452  "It is impossible to meet a whale-ship on the ocean without being
 453  struck by her near appearance.  The vessel under short sail, with
 454  look-outs at the mast-heads, eagerly scanning the wide expanse around
 455  them, has a totally different air from those engaged in regular
 456  voyage." --CURRENTS AND WHALING.  U.S. EX. EX.
 457  
 458  "Pedestrians in the vicinity of London and elsewhere may recollect
 459  having seen large curved bones set upright in the earth, either to
 460  form arches over gateways, or entrances to alcoves, and they may
 461  perhaps have been told that these were the ribs of whales." --TALES
 462  OF A WHALE VOYAGER TO THE ARCTIC OCEAN.
 463  
 464  "It was not till the boats returned from the pursuit of these whales,
 465  that the whites saw their ship in bloody possession of the savages
 466  enrolled among the crew." --NEWSPAPER ACCOUNT OF THE TAKING AND
 467  RETAKING OF THE WHALE-SHIP HOBOMACK.
 468  
 469  "It is generally well known that out of the crews of Whaling vessels
 470  (American) few ever return in the ships on board of which they
 471  departed." --CRUISE IN A WHALE BOAT.
 472  
 473  "Suddenly a mighty mass emerged from the water, and shot up
 474  perpendicularly into the air.  It was the while." --MIRIAM COFFIN OR
 475  THE WHALE FISHERMAN.
 476  
 477  "The Whale is harpooned to be sure; but bethink you, how you would
 478  manage a powerful unbroken colt, with the mere appliance of a rope
 479  tied to the root of his tail." --A CHAPTER ON WHALING IN RIBS AND
 480  TRUCKS.
 481  
 482  "On one occasion I saw two of these monsters (whales) probably male
 483  and female, slowly swimming, one after the other, within less than a
 484  stone's throw of the shore" (Terra Del Fuego), "over which the beech
 485  tree extended its branches." --DARWIN'S VOYAGE OF A NATURALIST.
 486  
 487  "'Stern all!' exclaimed the mate, as upon turning his head, he saw
 488  the distended jaws of a large Sperm Whale close to the head of the
 489  boat, threatening it with instant destruction;--'Stern all, for your
 490  lives!'" --WHARTON THE WHALE KILLER.
 491  
 492  "So be cheery, my lads, let your hearts never fail,
 493  While the bold harpooneer is striking the whale!" --NANTUCKET SONG.
 494  
 495  "Oh, the rare old Whale, mid storm and gale
 496  In his ocean home will be
 497  A giant in might, where might is right,
 498  And King of the boundless sea." --WHALE SONG.
 499  
 500  
 501  
 502  CHAPTER 1
 503  
 504  Loomings.
 505  
 506  
 507  Call me Ishmael.  Some years ago--never mind how long
 508  precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing
 509  particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a
 510  little and see the watery part of the world.  It is a way I have of
 511  driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation.  Whenever I
 512  find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp,
 513  drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily
 514  pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every
 515  funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper
 516  hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me
 517  from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking
 518  people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon
 519  as I can.  This is my substitute for pistol and ball.  With a
 520  philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly
 521  take to the ship.  There is nothing surprising in this.  If they but
 522  knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish
 523  very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.
 524  
 525  There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by
 526  wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs--commerce surrounds it with
 527  her surf.  Right and left, the streets take you waterward.  Its
 528  extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by
 529  waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of
 530  sight of land.  Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.
 531  
 532  Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon.  Go from
 533  Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall,
 534  northward.  What do you see?--Posted like silent sentinels all around
 535  the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean
 536  reveries.  Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the
 537  pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some
 538  high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better
 539  seaward peep.  But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in
 540  lath and plaster--tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to
 541  desks.  How then is this?  Are the green fields gone?  What do they
 542  here?
 543  
 544  But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and
 545  seemingly bound for a dive.  Strange!  Nothing will content them but
 546  the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of
 547  yonder warehouses will not suffice.  No.  They must get just as nigh
 548  the water as they possibly can without falling in.  And there they
 549  stand--miles of them--leagues.  Inlanders all, they come from lanes
 550  and alleys, streets and avenues--north, east, south, and west.  Yet
 551  here they all unite.  Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the
 552  needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?
 553  
 554  Once more.  Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes.
 555  Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down
 556  in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream.  There is
 557  magic in it.  Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his
 558  deepest reveries--stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going,
 559  and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all
 560  that region.  Should you ever be athirst in the great American
 561  desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied
 562  with a metaphysical professor.  Yes, as every one knows, meditation
 563  and water are wedded for ever.
 564  
 565  But here is an artist.  He desires to paint you the dreamiest,
 566  shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all
 567  the valley of the Saco.  What is the chief element he employs?  There
 568  stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a
 569  crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his
 570  cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke.  Deep into
 571  distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of
 572  mountains bathed in their hill-side blue.  But though the picture
 573  lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs
 574  like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were vain, unless the
 575  shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him.  Go visit
 576  the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade
 577  knee-deep among Tiger-lilies--what is the one charm
 578  wanting?--Water--there is not a drop of water there!  Were Niagara
 579  but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see
 580  it?  Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two
 581  handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he
 582  sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway
 583  Beach?  Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy
 584  soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea?  Why upon your
 585  first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical
 586  vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of
 587  sight of land?  Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy?  Why did
 588  the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove?  Surely
 589  all this is not without meaning.  And still deeper the meaning of
 590  that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the
 591  tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and
 592  was drowned.  But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and
 593  oceans.  It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this
 594  is the key to it all.
 595  
 596  Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I
 597  begin to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of
 598  my lungs, I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as
 599  a passenger.  For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse,
 600  and a purse is but a rag unless you have something in it.  Besides,
 601  passengers get sea-sick--grow quarrelsome--don't sleep of nights--do
 602  not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing;--no, I never go as a
 603  passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea
 604  as a Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook.  I abandon the glory and
 605  distinction of such offices to those who like them.  For my part, I
 606  abominate all honourable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations
 607  of every kind whatsoever.  It is quite as much as I can do to take
 608  care of myself, without taking care of ships, barques, brigs,
 609  schooners, and what not.  And as for going as cook,--though I confess
 610  there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of officer
 611  on ship-board--yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls;--though
 612  once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and
 613  peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to
 614  say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will.  It is out of the
 615  idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted
 616  river horse, that you see the mummies of those creatures in their
 617  huge bake-houses the pyramids.
 618  
 619  No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast,
 620  plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head.
 621  True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to
 622  spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow.  And at first, this sort of
 623  thing is unpleasant enough.  It touches one's sense of honour,
 624  particularly if you come of an old established family in the land,
 625  the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes.  And more than
 626  all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have
 627  been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys
 628  stand in awe of you.  The transition is a keen one, I assure you,
 629  from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of
 630  Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it.  But even
 631  this wears off in time.
 632  
 633  What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a
 634  broom and sweep down the decks?  What does that indignity amount to,
 635  weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament?  Do you think
 636  the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I
 637  promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular
 638  instance?  Who ain't a slave?  Tell me that.  Well, then, however the
 639  old sea-captains may order me about--however they may thump and punch
 640  me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right;
 641  that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same
 642  way--either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and
 643  so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each
 644  other's shoulder-blades, and be content.
 645  
 646  Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of
 647  paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single
 648  penny that I ever heard of.  On the contrary, passengers themselves
 649  must pay.  And there is all the difference in the world between
 650  paying and being paid.  The act of paying is perhaps the most
 651  uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon
 652  us.  But BEING PAID,--what will compare with it?  The urbane activity
 653  with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering
 654  that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly
 655  ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven.  Ah! how
 656  cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!
 657  
 658  Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome
 659  exercise and pure air of the fore-castle deck.  For as in this world,
 660  head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if
 661  you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the
 662  Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from
 663  the sailors on the forecastle.  He thinks he breathes it first; but
 664  not so.  In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in
 665  many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect
 666  it.  But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea
 667  as a merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a
 668  whaling voyage; this the invisible police officer of the Fates, who
 669  has the constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and
 670  influences me in some unaccountable way--he can better answer than
 671  any one else.  And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage,
 672  formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a
 673  long time ago.  It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo
 674  between more extensive performances.  I take it that this part of the
 675  bill must have run something like this:
 676  
 677  
 678  "GRAND CONTESTED ELECTION FOR THE PRESIDENCY OF THE UNITED STATES.
 679  "WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL.
 680  "BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN."
 681  
 682  
 683  Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers,
 684  the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when
 685  others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and
 686  short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in
 687  farces--though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I
 688  recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the
 689  springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under
 690  various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did,
 691  besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting
 692  from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.
 693  
 694  Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great
 695  whale himself.  Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all
 696  my curiosity.  Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his
 697  island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these,
 698  with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and
 699  sounds, helped to sway me to my wish.  With other men, perhaps, such
 700  things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented
 701  with an everlasting itch for things remote.  I love to sail forbidden
 702  seas, and land on barbarous coasts.  Not ignoring what is good, I am
 703  quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it--would
 704  they let me--since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all
 705  the inmates of the place one lodges in.
 706  
 707  By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the
 708  great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild
 709  conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into
 710  my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of
 711  them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.
 712  
 713  
 714  
 715  CHAPTER 2
 716  
 717  The Carpet-Bag.
 718  
 719  
 720  I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my
 721  arm, and started for Cape Horn and the Pacific.  Quitting the good
 722  city of old Manhatto, I duly arrived in New Bedford.  It was a
 723  Saturday night in December.  Much was I disappointed upon learning
 724  that the little packet for Nantucket had already sailed, and that no
 725  way of reaching that place would offer, till the following Monday.
 726  
 727  As most young candidates for the pains and penalties of whaling stop
 728  at this same New Bedford, thence to embark on their voyage, it may as
 729  well be related that I, for one, had no idea of so doing.  For my
 730  mind was made up to sail in no other than a Nantucket craft, because
 731  there was a fine, boisterous something about everything connected
 732  with that famous old island, which amazingly pleased me.  Besides
 733  though New Bedford has of late been gradually monopolising the
 734  business of whaling, and though in this matter poor old Nantucket is
 735  now much behind her, yet Nantucket was her great original--the Tyre
 736  of this Carthage;--the place where the first dead American whale was
 737  stranded.  Where else but from Nantucket did those aboriginal
 738  whalemen, the Red-Men, first sally out in canoes to give chase to the
 739  Leviathan?  And where but from Nantucket, too, did that first
 740  adventurous little sloop put forth, partly laden with imported
 741  cobblestones--so goes the story--to throw at the whales, in order to
 742  discover when they were nigh enough to risk a harpoon from the
 743  bowsprit?
 744  
 745  Now having a night, a day, and still another night following before
 746  me in New Bedford, ere I could embark for my destined port, it
 747  became a matter of concernment where I was to eat and sleep
 748  meanwhile.  It was a very dubious-looking, nay, a very dark and
 749  dismal night, bitingly cold and cheerless.  I knew no one in the
 750  place.  With anxious grapnels I had sounded my pocket, and only
 751  brought up a few pieces of silver,--So, wherever you go, Ishmael,
 752  said I to myself, as I stood in the middle of a dreary street
 753  shouldering my bag, and comparing the gloom towards the north with
 754  the darkness towards the south--wherever in your wisdom you may
 755  conclude to lodge for the night, my dear Ishmael, be sure to inquire
 756  the price, and don't be too particular.
 757  
 758  With halting steps I paced the streets, and passed the sign of "The
 759  Crossed Harpoons"--but it looked too expensive and jolly there.
 760  Further on, from the bright red windows of the "Sword-Fish Inn,"
 761  there came such fervent rays, that it seemed to have melted the
 762  packed snow and ice from before the house, for everywhere else the
 763  congealed frost lay ten inches thick in a hard, asphaltic
 764  pavement,--rather weary for me, when I struck my foot against the
 765  flinty projections, because from hard, remorseless service the soles
 766  of my boots were in a most miserable plight.  Too expensive and
 767  jolly, again thought I, pausing one moment to watch the broad glare
 768  in the street, and hear the sounds of the tinkling glasses within.
 769  But go on, Ishmael, said I at last; don't you hear? get away from
 770  before the door; your patched boots are stopping the way.  So on I
 771  went.  I now by instinct followed the streets that took me waterward,
 772  for there, doubtless, were the cheapest, if not the cheeriest inns.
 773  
 774  Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either
 775  hand, and here and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a
 776  tomb.  At this hour of the night, of the last day of the week, that
 777  quarter of the town proved all but deserted.  But presently I came to
 778  a smoky light proceeding from a low, wide building, the door of which
 779  stood invitingly open.  It had a careless look, as if it were meant
 780  for the uses of the public; so, entering, the first thing I did was
 781  to stumble over an ash-box in the porch.  Ha! thought I, ha, as the
 782  flying particles almost choked me, are these ashes from that
 783  destroyed city, Gomorrah?  But "The Crossed Harpoons," and "The
 784  Sword-Fish?"--this, then must needs be the sign of "The Trap."
 785  However, I picked myself up and hearing a loud voice within, pushed
 786  on and opened a second, interior door.
 787  
 788  It seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet.  A hundred
 789  black faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a black
 790  Angel of Doom was beating a book in a pulpit.  It was a negro church;
 791  and the preacher's text was about the blackness of darkness, and the
 792  weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there.  Ha, Ishmael, muttered
 793  I, backing out, Wretched entertainment at the sign of 'The Trap!'
 794  
 795  Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of light not far from the
 796  docks, and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a
 797  swinging sign over the door with a white painting upon it, faintly
 798  representing a tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words
 799  underneath--"The Spouter Inn:--Peter Coffin."
 800  
 801  Coffin?--Spouter?--Rather ominous in that particular connexion,
 802  thought I.  But it is a common name in Nantucket, they say, and I
 803  suppose this Peter here is an emigrant from there.  As the light
 804  looked so dim, and the place, for the time, looked quiet enough, and
 805  the dilapidated little wooden house itself looked as if it might have
 806  been carted here from the ruins of some burnt district, and as the
 807  swinging sign had a poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, I thought
 808  that here was the very spot for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea
 809  coffee.
 810  
 811  It was a queer sort of place--a gable-ended old house, one side
 812  palsied as it were, and leaning over sadly.  It stood on a sharp
 813  bleak corner, where that tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up a worse
 814  howling than ever it did about poor Paul's tossed craft.  Euroclydon,
 815  nevertheless, is a mighty pleasant zephyr to any one in-doors, with
 816  his feet on the hob quietly toasting for bed.  "In judging of that
 817  tempestuous wind called Euroclydon," says an old writer--of whose
 818  works I possess the only copy extant--"it maketh a marvellous
 819  difference, whether thou lookest out at it from a glass window where
 820  the frost is all on the outside, or whether thou observest it from
 821  that sashless window, where the frost is on both sides, and of which
 822  the wight Death is the only glazier."  True enough, thought I, as
 823  this passage occurred to my mind--old black-letter, thou reasonest
 824  well.  Yes, these eyes are windows, and this body of mine is the
 825  house.  What a pity they didn't stop up the chinks and the crannies
 826  though, and thrust in a little lint here and there.  But it's too
 827  late to make any improvements now.  The universe is finished; the
 828  copestone is on, and the chips were carted off a million years ago.
 829  Poor Lazarus there, chattering his teeth against the curbstone for
 830  his pillow, and shaking off his tatters with his shiverings, he might
 831  plug up both ears with rags, and put a corn-cob into his mouth, and
 832  yet that would not keep out the tempestuous Euroclydon.  Euroclydon!
 833  says old Dives, in his red silken wrapper--(he had a redder one
 834  afterwards) pooh, pooh!  What a fine frosty night; how Orion
 835  glitters; what northern lights!  Let them talk of their oriental
 836  summer climes of everlasting conservatories; give me the privilege of
 837  making my own summer with my own coals.
 838  
 839  But what thinks Lazarus?  Can he warm his blue hands by holding them
 840  up to the grand northern lights?  Would not Lazarus rather be in
 841  Sumatra than here?  Would he not far rather lay him down lengthwise
 842  along the line of the equator; yea, ye gods! go down to the fiery pit
 843  itself, in order to keep out this frost?
 844  
 845  Now, that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before
 846  the door of Dives, this is more wonderful than that an iceberg should
 847  be moored to one of the Moluccas.  Yet Dives himself, he too lives
 848  like a Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs, and being a
 849  president of a temperance society, he only drinks the tepid tears of
 850  orphans.
 851  
 852  But no more of this blubbering now, we are going a-whaling, and there
 853  is plenty of that yet to come.  Let us scrape the ice from our
 854  frosted feet, and see what sort of a place this "Spouter" may be.
 855  
 856  
 857  
 858  CHAPTER 3
 859  
 860  The Spouter-Inn.
 861  
 862  
 863  Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide,
 864  low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of
 865  the bulwarks of some condemned old craft.  On one side hung a very
 866  large oilpainting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced,
 867  that in the unequal crosslights by which you viewed it, it was only
 868  by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and
 869  careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an
 870  understanding of its purpose.  Such unaccountable masses of shades
 871  and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young
 872  artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to
 873  delineate chaos bewitched.  But by dint of much and earnest
 874  contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by
 875  throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you at
 876  last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might
 877  not be altogether unwarranted.
 878  
 879  But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber,
 880  portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the
 881  picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a
 882  nameless yeast.  A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to
 883  drive a nervous man distracted.  Yet was there a sort of indefinite,
 884  half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you
 885  to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out
 886  what that marvellous painting meant.  Ever and anon a bright, but,
 887  alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.--It's the Black Sea in a
 888  midnight gale.--It's the unnatural combat of the four primal
 889  elements.--It's a blasted heath.--It's a Hyperborean winter
 890  scene.--It's the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time.  But at
 891  last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in
 892  the picture's midst.  THAT once found out, and all the rest were
 893  plain.  But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic
 894  fish? even the great leviathan himself?
 895  
 896  In fact, the artist's design seemed this: a final theory of my own,
 897  partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with
 898  whom I conversed upon the subject.  The picture represents a
 899  Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering
 900  there with its three dismantled masts alone visible; and an
 901  exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in
 902  the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads.
 903  
 904  The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish
 905  array of monstrous clubs and spears.  Some were thickly set with
 906  glittering teeth resembling ivory saws; others were tufted with knots
 907  of human hair; and one was sickle-shaped, with a vast handle sweeping
 908  round like the segment made in the new-mown grass by a long-armed
 909  mower.  You shuddered as you gazed, and wondered what monstrous
 910  cannibal and savage could ever have gone a death-harvesting with such
 911  a hacking, horrifying implement.  Mixed with these were rusty old
 912  whaling lances and harpoons all broken and deformed.  Some were
 913  storied weapons.  With this once long lance, now wildly elbowed,
 914  fifty years ago did Nathan Swain kill fifteen whales between a
 915  sunrise and a sunset.  And that harpoon--so like a corkscrew now--was
 916  flung in Javan seas, and run away with by a whale, years afterwards
 917  slain off the Cape of Blanco.  The original iron entered nigh the
 918  tail, and, like a restless needle sojourning in the body of a man,
 919  travelled full forty feet, and at last was found imbedded in the
 920  hump.
 921  
 922  Crossing this dusky entry, and on through yon low-arched way--cut
 923  through what in old times must have been a great central chimney with
 924  fireplaces all round--you enter the public room.  A still duskier
 925  place is this, with such low ponderous beams above, and such old
 926  wrinkled planks beneath, that you would almost fancy you trod some
 927  old craft's cockpits, especially of such a howling night, when this
 928  corner-anchored old ark rocked so furiously.  On one side stood a
 929  long, low, shelf-like table covered with cracked glass cases, filled
 930  with dusty rarities gathered from this wide world's remotest nooks.
 931  Projecting from the further angle of the room stands a dark-looking
 932  den--the bar--a rude attempt at a right whale's head.  Be that how it
 933  may, there stands the vast arched bone of the whale's jaw, so wide, a
 934  coach might almost drive beneath it.  Within are shabby shelves,
 935  ranged round with old decanters, bottles, flasks; and in those jaws
 936  of swift destruction, like another cursed Jonah (by which name indeed
 937  they called him), bustles a little withered old man, who, for their
 938  money, dearly sells the sailors deliriums and death.
 939  
 940  Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison.  Though
 941  true cylinders without--within, the villanous green goggling glasses
 942  deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom.  Parallel
 943  meridians rudely pecked into the glass, surround these footpads'
 944  goblets.  Fill to THIS mark, and your charge is but a penny; to THIS
 945  a penny more; and so on to the full glass--the Cape Horn measure,
 946  which you may gulp down for a shilling.
 947  
 948  Upon entering the place I found a number of young seamen gathered
 949  about a table, examining by a dim light divers specimens of
 950  SKRIMSHANDER.  I sought the landlord, and telling him I desired to be
 951  accommodated with a room, received for answer that his house was
 952  full--not a bed unoccupied.  "But avast," he added, tapping his
 953  forehead, "you haint no objections to sharing a harpooneer's blanket,
 954  have ye?  I s'pose you are goin' a-whalin', so you'd better get used
 955  to that sort of thing."
 956  
 957  I told him that I never liked to sleep two in a bed; that if I should
 958  ever do so, it would depend upon who the harpooneer might be, and
 959  that if he (the landlord) really had no other place for me, and the
 960  harpooneer was not decidedly objectionable, why rather than wander
 961  further about a strange town on so bitter a night, I would put up
 962  with the half of any decent man's blanket.
 963  
 964  "I thought so.  All right; take a seat.  Supper?--you want supper?
 965  Supper'll be ready directly."
 966  
 967  I sat down on an old wooden settle, carved all over like a bench on
 968  the Battery.  At one end a ruminating tar was still further adorning
 969  it with his jack-knife, stooping over and diligently working away at
 970  the space between his legs.  He was trying his hand at a ship under
 971  full sail, but he didn't make much headway, I thought.
 972  
 973  At last some four or five of us were summoned to our meal in an
 974  adjoining room.  It was cold as Iceland--no fire at all--the landlord
 975  said he couldn't afford it.  Nothing but two dismal tallow candles,
 976  each in a winding sheet.  We were fain to button up our monkey
 977  jackets, and hold to our lips cups of scalding tea with our half
 978  frozen fingers.  But the fare was of the most substantial kind--not
 979  only meat and potatoes, but dumplings; good heavens! dumplings for
 980  supper!  One young fellow in a green box coat, addressed himself to
 981  these dumplings in a most direful manner.
 982  
 983  "My boy," said the landlord, "you'll have the nightmare to a dead
 984  sartainty."
 985  
 986  "Landlord," I whispered, "that aint the harpooneer is it?"
 987  
 988  "Oh, no," said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny, "the
 989  harpooneer is a dark complexioned chap.  He never eats dumplings, he
 990  don't--he eats nothing but steaks, and he likes 'em rare."
 991  
 992  "The devil he does," says I.  "Where is that harpooneer?  Is he
 993  here?"
 994  
 995  "He'll be here afore long," was the answer.
 996  
 997  I could not help it, but I began to feel suspicious of this "dark
 998  complexioned" harpooneer.  At any rate, I made up my mind that if it
 999  so turned out that we should sleep together, he must undress and get
1000  into bed before I did.
1001  
1002  Supper over, the company went back to the bar-room, when, knowing not
1003  what else to do with myself, I resolved to spend the rest of the
1004  evening as a looker on.
1005  
1006  Presently a rioting noise was heard without.  Starting up, the
1007  landlord cried, "That's the Grampus's crew.  I seed her reported in
1008  the offing this morning; a three years' voyage, and a full ship.
1009  Hurrah, boys; now we'll have the latest news from the Feegees."
1010  
1011  A tramping of sea boots was heard in the entry; the door was flung
1012  open, and in rolled a wild set of mariners enough.  Enveloped in
1013  their shaggy watch coats, and with their heads muffled in woollen
1014  comforters, all bedarned and ragged, and their beards stiff with
1015  icicles, they seemed an eruption of bears from Labrador.  They had
1016  just landed from their boat, and this was the first house they
1017  entered.  No wonder, then, that they made a straight wake for the
1018  whale's mouth--the bar--when the wrinkled little old Jonah, there
1019  officiating, soon poured them out brimmers all round.  One complained
1020  of a bad cold in his head, upon which Jonah mixed him a pitch-like
1021  potion of gin and molasses, which he swore was a sovereign cure for
1022  all colds and catarrhs whatsoever, never mind of how long standing,
1023  or whether caught off the coast of Labrador, or on the weather side
1024  of an ice-island.
1025  
1026  The liquor soon mounted into their heads, as it generally does even
1027  with the arrantest topers newly landed from sea, and they began
1028  capering about most obstreperously.
1029  
1030  I observed, however, that one of them held somewhat aloof, and though
1031  he seemed desirous not to spoil the hilarity of his shipmates by his
1032  own sober face, yet upon the whole he refrained from making as much
1033  noise as the rest.  This man interested me at once; and since the
1034  sea-gods had ordained that he should soon become my shipmate (though
1035  but a sleeping-partner one, so far as this narrative is concerned),
1036  I will here venture upon a little description of him.  He stood full
1037  six feet in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a
1038  coffer-dam.  I have seldom seen such brawn in a man.  His face was
1039  deeply brown and burnt, making his white teeth dazzling by the
1040  contrast; while in the deep shadows of his eyes floated some
1041  reminiscences that did not seem to give him much joy.  His voice at
1042  once announced that he was a Southerner, and from his fine stature, I
1043  thought he must be one of those tall mountaineers from the
1044  Alleghanian Ridge in Virginia.  When the revelry of his companions
1045  had mounted to its height, this man slipped away unobserved, and I
1046  saw no more of him till he became my comrade on the sea.  In a few
1047  minutes, however, he was missed by his shipmates, and being, it
1048  seems, for some reason a huge favourite with them, they raised a cry
1049  of "Bulkington!  Bulkington! where's Bulkington?" and darted out of
1050  the house in pursuit of him.
1051  
1052  It was now about nine o'clock, and the room seeming almost
1053  supernaturally quiet after these orgies, I began to congratulate
1054  myself upon a little plan that had occurred to me just previous to
1055  the entrance of the seamen.
1056  
1057  No man prefers to sleep two in a bed.  In fact, you would a good deal
1058  rather not sleep with your own brother.  I don't know how it is, but
1059  people like to be private when they are sleeping.  And when it comes
1060  to sleeping with an unknown stranger, in a strange inn, in a strange
1061  town, and that stranger a harpooneer, then your objections
1062  indefinitely multiply.  Nor was there any earthly reason why I as a
1063  sailor should sleep two in a bed, more than anybody else; for sailors
1064  no more sleep two in a bed at sea, than bachelor Kings do ashore.  To
1065  be sure they all sleep together in one apartment, but you have your
1066  own hammock, and cover yourself with your own blanket, and sleep in
1067  your own skin.
1068  
1069  The more I pondered over this harpooneer, the more I abominated the
1070  thought of sleeping with him.  It was fair to presume that being a
1071  harpooneer, his linen or woollen, as the case might be, would not be
1072  of the tidiest, certainly none of the finest.  I began to twitch all
1073  over.  Besides, it was getting late, and my decent harpooneer ought
1074  to be home and going bedwards.  Suppose now, he should tumble in upon
1075  me at midnight--how could I tell from what vile hole he had been
1076  coming?
1077  
1078  "Landlord!  I've changed my mind about that harpooneer.--I shan't
1079  sleep with him.  I'll try the bench here."
1080  
1081  "Just as you please; I'm sorry I cant spare ye a tablecloth for a
1082  mattress, and it's a plaguy rough board here"--feeling of the knots
1083  and notches.  "But wait a bit, Skrimshander; I've got a carpenter's
1084  plane there in the bar--wait, I say, and I'll make ye snug enough."
1085  So saying he procured the plane; and with his old silk handkerchief
1086  first dusting the bench, vigorously set to planing away at my bed,
1087  the while grinning like an ape.  The shavings flew right and left;
1088  till at last the plane-iron came bump against an indestructible knot.
1089  The landlord was near spraining his wrist, and I told him for
1090  heaven's sake to quit--the bed was soft enough to suit me, and I did
1091  not know how all the planing in the world could make eider down of a
1092  pine plank.  So gathering up the shavings with another grin, and
1093  throwing them into the great stove in the middle of the room, he went
1094  about his business, and left me in a brown study.
1095  
1096  I now took the measure of the bench, and found that it was a foot too
1097  short; but that could be mended with a chair.  But it was a foot too
1098  narrow, and the other bench in the room was about four inches higher
1099  than the planed one--so there was no yoking them.  I then placed the
1100  first bench lengthwise along the only clear space against the wall,
1101  leaving a little interval between, for my back to settle down in.
1102  But I soon found that there came such a draught of cold air over me
1103  from under the sill of the window, that this plan would never do at
1104  all, especially as another current from the rickety door met the one
1105  from the window, and both together formed a series of small
1106  whirlwinds in the immediate vicinity of the spot where I had thought
1107  to spend the night.
1108  
1109  The devil fetch that harpooneer, thought I, but stop, couldn't I
1110  steal a march on him--bolt his door inside, and jump into his bed,
1111  not to be wakened by the most violent knockings?  It seemed no bad
1112  idea; but upon second thoughts I dismissed it.  For who could tell
1113  but what the next morning, so soon as I popped out of the room, the
1114  harpooneer might be standing in the entry, all ready to knock me
1115  down!
1116  
1117  Still, looking round me again, and seeing no possible chance of
1118  spending a sufferable night unless in some other person's bed, I
1119  began to think that after all I might be cherishing unwarrantable
1120  prejudices against this unknown harpooneer.  Thinks I, I'll wait
1121  awhile; he must be dropping in before long.  I'll have a good look at
1122  him then, and perhaps we may become jolly good bedfellows after
1123  all--there's no telling.
1124  
1125  But though the other boarders kept coming in by ones, twos, and
1126  threes, and going to bed, yet no sign of my harpooneer.
1127  
1128  "Landlord! said I, "what sort of a chap is he--does he always keep
1129  such late hours?"  It was now hard upon twelve o'clock.
1130  
1131  The landlord chuckled again with his lean chuckle, and seemed to be
1132  mightily tickled at something beyond my comprehension.  "No," he
1133  answered, "generally he's an early bird--airley to bed and airley to
1134  rise--yes, he's the bird what catches the worm.  But to-night he
1135  went out a peddling, you see, and I don't see what on airth keeps him
1136  so late, unless, may be, he can't sell his head."
1137  
1138  "Can't sell his head?--What sort of a bamboozingly story is this you
1139  are telling me?" getting into a towering rage.  "Do you pretend to
1140  say, landlord, that this harpooneer is actually engaged this blessed
1141  Saturday night, or rather Sunday morning, in peddling his head around
1142  this town?"
1143  
1144  "That's precisely it," said the landlord, "and I told him he couldn't
1145  sell it here, the market's overstocked."
1146  
1147  "With what?" shouted I.
1148  
1149  "With heads to be sure; ain't there too many heads in the world?"
1150  
1151  "I tell you what it is, landlord," said I quite calmly, "you'd better
1152  stop spinning that yarn to me--I'm not green."
1153  
1154  "May be not," taking out a stick and whittling a toothpick, "but I
1155  rayther guess you'll be done BROWN if that ere harpooneer hears you a
1156  slanderin' his head."
1157  
1158  "I'll break it for him," said I, now flying into a passion again at
1159  this unaccountable farrago of the landlord's.
1160  
1161  "It's broke a'ready," said he.
1162  
1163  "Broke," said I--"BROKE, do you mean?"
1164  
1165  "Sartain, and that's the very reason he can't sell it, I guess."
1166  
1167  "Landlord," said I, going up to him as cool as Mt. Hecla in a
1168  snow-storm--"landlord, stop whittling.  You and I must understand one
1169  another, and that too without delay.  I come to your house and want a
1170  bed; you tell me you can only give me half a one; that the other half
1171  belongs to a certain harpooneer.  And about this harpooneer, whom I
1172  have not yet seen, you persist in telling me the most mystifying and
1173  exasperating stories tending to beget in me an uncomfortable feeling
1174  towards the man whom you design for my bedfellow--a sort of
1175  connexion, landlord, which is an intimate and confidential one in the
1176  highest degree.  I now demand of you to speak out and tell me who and
1177  what this harpooneer is, and whether I shall be in all respects safe
1178  to spend the night with him.  And in the first place, you will be so
1179  good as to unsay that story about selling his head, which if true I
1180  take to be good evidence that this harpooneer is stark mad, and I've
1181  no idea of sleeping with a madman; and you, sir, YOU I mean,
1182  landlord, YOU, sir, by trying to induce me to do so knowingly, would
1183  thereby render yourself liable to a criminal prosecution."
1184  
1185  "Wall," said the landlord, fetching a long breath, "that's a purty
1186  long sarmon for a chap that rips a little now and then.  But be easy,
1187  be easy, this here harpooneer I have been tellin' you of has just
1188  arrived from the south seas, where he bought up a lot of 'balmed New
1189  Zealand heads (great curios, you know), and he's sold all on 'em but
1190  one, and that one he's trying to sell to-night, cause to-morrow's
1191  Sunday, and it would not do to be sellin' human heads about the
1192  streets when folks is goin' to churches.  He wanted to, last Sunday,
1193  but I stopped him just as he was goin' out of the door with four
1194  heads strung on a string, for all the airth like a string of inions."
1195  
1196  This account cleared up the otherwise unaccountable mystery, and
1197  showed that the landlord, after all, had had no idea of fooling
1198  me--but at the same time what could I think of a harpooneer who
1199  stayed out of a Saturday night clean into the holy Sabbath, engaged
1200  in such a cannibal business as selling the heads of dead idolators?
1201  
1202  "Depend upon it, landlord, that harpooneer is a dangerous man."
1203  
1204  "He pays reg'lar," was the rejoinder.  "But come, it's getting
1205  dreadful late, you had better be turning flukes--it's a nice bed;
1206  Sal and me slept in that ere bed the night we were spliced.  There's
1207  plenty of room for two to kick about in that bed; it's an almighty
1208  big bed that.  Why, afore we give it up, Sal used to put our Sam and
1209  little Johnny in the foot of it.  But I got a dreaming and sprawling
1210  about one night, and somehow, Sam got pitched on the floor, and came
1211  near breaking his arm.  Arter that, Sal said it wouldn't do.  Come
1212  along here, I'll give ye a glim in a jiffy;" and so saying he lighted
1213  a candle and held it towards me, offering to lead the way.  But I
1214  stood irresolute; when looking at a clock in the corner, he exclaimed
1215  "I vum it's Sunday--you won't see that harpooneer to-night; he's come
1216  to anchor somewhere--come along then; DO come; WON'T ye come?"
1217  
1218  I considered the matter a moment, and then up stairs we went, and I
1219  was ushered into a small room, cold as a clam, and furnished, sure
1220  enough, with a prodigious bed, almost big enough indeed for any four
1221  harpooneers to sleep abreast.
1222  
1223  "There," said the landlord, placing the candle on a crazy old sea
1224  chest that did double duty as a wash-stand and centre table; "there,
1225  make yourself comfortable now, and good night to ye."  I turned
1226  round from eyeing the bed, but he had disappeared.
1227  
1228  Folding back the counterpane, I stooped over the bed.  Though none of
1229  the most elegant, it yet stood the scrutiny tolerably well.  I then
1230  glanced round the room; and besides the bedstead and centre table,
1231  could see no other furniture belonging to the place, but a rude
1232  shelf, the four walls, and a papered fireboard representing a man
1233  striking a whale.  Of things not properly belonging to the room,
1234  there was a hammock lashed up, and thrown upon the floor in one
1235  corner; also a large seaman's bag, containing the harpooneer's
1236  wardrobe, no doubt in lieu of a land trunk.  Likewise, there was a
1237  parcel of outlandish bone fish hooks on the shelf over the
1238  fire-place, and a tall harpoon standing at the head of the bed.
1239  
1240  But what is this on the chest?  I took it up, and held it close to
1241  the light, and felt it, and smelt it, and tried every way possible to
1242  arrive at some satisfactory conclusion concerning it.  I can compare
1243  it to nothing but a large door mat, ornamented at the edges with
1244  little tinkling tags something like the stained porcupine quills
1245  round an Indian moccasin.  There was a hole or slit in the middle of
1246  this mat, as you see the same in South American ponchos.  But could
1247  it be possible that any sober harpooneer would get into a door mat,
1248  and parade the streets of any Christian town in that sort of guise?
1249  I put it on, to try it, and it weighed me down like a hamper, being
1250  uncommonly shaggy and thick, and I thought a little damp, as though
1251  this mysterious harpooneer had been wearing it of a rainy day.  I
1252  went up in it to a bit of glass stuck against the wall, and I never
1253  saw such a sight in my life.  I tore myself out of it in such a hurry
1254  that I gave myself a kink in the neck.
1255  
1256  I sat down on the side of the bed, and commenced thinking about this
1257  head-peddling harpooneer, and his door mat.  After thinking some time
1258  on the bed-side, I got up and took off my monkey jacket, and then
1259  stood in the middle of the room thinking.  I then took off my coat,
1260  and thought a little more in my shirt sleeves.  But beginning to feel
1261  very cold now, half undressed as I was, and remembering what the
1262  landlord said about the harpooneer's not coming home at all that
1263  night, it being so very late, I made no more ado, but jumped out of
1264  my pantaloons and boots, and then blowing out the light tumbled into
1265  bed, and commended myself to the care of heaven.
1266  
1267  Whether that mattress was stuffed with corn-cobs or broken crockery,
1268  there is no telling, but I rolled about a good deal, and could not
1269  sleep for a long time.  At last I slid off into a light doze, and had
1270  pretty nearly made a good offing towards the land of Nod, when I
1271  heard a heavy footfall in the passage, and saw a glimmer of light
1272  come into the room from under the door.
1273  
1274  Lord save me, thinks I, that must be the harpooneer, the infernal
1275  head-peddler.  But I lay perfectly still, and resolved not to say a
1276  word till spoken to.  Holding a light in one hand, and that identical
1277  New Zealand head in the other, the stranger entered the room, and
1278  without looking towards the bed, placed his candle a good way off
1279  from me on the floor in one corner, and then began working away at
1280  the knotted cords of the large bag I before spoke of as being in the
1281  room.  I was all eagerness to see his face, but he kept it averted
1282  for some time while employed in unlacing the bag's mouth.  This
1283  accomplished, however, he turned round--when, good heavens! what a
1284  sight!  Such a face!  It was of a dark, purplish, yellow colour, here
1285  and there stuck over with large blackish looking squares.  Yes, it's
1286  just as I thought, he's a terrible bedfellow; he's been in a fight,
1287  got dreadfully cut, and here he is, just from the surgeon.  But at
1288  that moment he chanced to turn his face so towards the light, that I
1289  plainly saw they could not be sticking-plasters at all, those black
1290  squares on his cheeks.  They were stains of some sort or other.  At
1291  first I knew not what to make of this; but soon an inkling of the
1292  truth occurred to me.  I remembered a story of a white man--a
1293  whaleman too--who, falling among the cannibals, had been tattooed by
1294  them.  I concluded that this harpooneer, in the course of his distant
1295  voyages, must have met with a similar adventure.  And what is it,
1296  thought I, after all!  It's only his outside; a man can be honest in
1297  any sort of skin.  But then, what to make of his unearthly
1298  complexion, that part of it, I mean, lying round about, and
1299  completely independent of the squares of tattooing.  To be sure, it
1300  might be nothing but a good coat of tropical tanning; but I never
1301  heard of a hot sun's tanning a white man into a purplish yellow one.
1302  However, I had never been in the South Seas; and perhaps the sun
1303  there produced these extraordinary effects upon the skin.  Now, while
1304  all these ideas were passing through me like lightning, this
1305  harpooneer never noticed me at all.  But, after some difficulty
1306  having opened his bag, he commenced fumbling in it, and presently
1307  pulled out a sort of tomahawk, and a seal-skin wallet with the hair
1308  on.  Placing these on the old chest in the middle of the room, he
1309  then took the New Zealand head--a ghastly thing enough--and crammed
1310  it down into the bag.  He now took off his hat--a new beaver
1311  hat--when I came nigh singing out with fresh surprise.  There was no
1312  hair on his head--none to speak of at least--nothing but a small
1313  scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead.  His bald purplish head now
1314  looked for all the world like a mildewed skull.  Had not the stranger
1315  stood between me and the door, I would have bolted out of it quicker
1316  than ever I bolted a dinner.
1317  
1318  Even as it was, I thought something of slipping out of the window,
1319  but it was the second floor back.  I am no coward, but what to make
1320  of this head-peddling purple rascal altogether passed my
1321  comprehension.  Ignorance is the parent of fear, and being completely
1322  nonplussed and confounded about the stranger, I confess I was now as
1323  much afraid of him as if it was the devil himself who had thus broken
1324  into my room at the dead of night.  In fact, I was so afraid of him
1325  that I was not game enough just then to address him, and demand a
1326  satisfactory answer concerning what seemed inexplicable in him.
1327  
1328  Meanwhile, he continued the business of undressing, and at last
1329  showed his chest and arms.  As I live, these covered parts of him
1330  were checkered with the same squares as his face; his back, too, was
1331  all over the same dark squares; he seemed to have been in a Thirty
1332  Years' War, and just escaped from it with a sticking-plaster shirt.
1333  Still more, his very legs were marked, as if a parcel of dark green
1334  frogs were running up the trunks of young palms.  It was now quite
1335  plain that he must be some abominable savage or other shipped aboard
1336  of a whaleman in the South Seas, and so landed in this Christian
1337  country.  I quaked to think of it.  A peddler of heads too--perhaps
1338  the heads of his own brothers.  He might take a fancy to
1339  mine--heavens! look at that tomahawk!
1340  
1341  But there was no time for shuddering, for now the savage went about
1342  something that completely fascinated my attention, and convinced me
1343  that he must indeed be a heathen.  Going to his heavy grego, or
1344  wrapall, or dreadnaught, which he had previously hung on a chair, he
1345  fumbled in the pockets, and produced at length a curious little
1346  deformed image with a hunch on its back, and exactly the colour of a
1347  three days' old Congo baby.  Remembering the embalmed head, at first
1348  I almost thought that this black manikin was a real baby preserved
1349  in some similar manner.  But seeing that it was not at all limber,
1350  and that it glistened a good deal like polished ebony, I concluded
1351  that it must be nothing but a wooden idol, which indeed it proved to
1352  be.  For now the savage goes up to the empty fire-place, and removing
1353  the papered fire-board, sets up this little hunch-backed image, like
1354  a tenpin, between the andirons.  The chimney jambs and all the bricks
1355  inside were very sooty, so that I thought this fire-place made a very
1356  appropriate little shrine or chapel for his Congo idol.
1357  
1358  I now screwed my eyes hard towards the half hidden image, feeling but
1359  ill at ease meantime--to see what was next to follow.  First he takes
1360  about a double handful of shavings out of his grego pocket, and
1361  places them carefully before the idol; then laying a bit of ship
1362  biscuit on top and applying the flame from the lamp, he kindled the
1363  shavings into a sacrificial blaze.  Presently, after many hasty
1364  snatches into the fire, and still hastier withdrawals of his fingers
1365  (whereby he seemed to be scorching them badly), he at last succeeded
1366  in drawing out the biscuit; then blowing off the heat and ashes a
1367  little, he made a polite offer of it to the little negro.  But the
1368  little devil did not seem to fancy such dry sort of fare at all; he
1369  never moved his lips.  All these strange antics were accompanied by
1370  still stranger guttural noises from the devotee, who seemed to be
1371  praying in a sing-song or else singing some pagan psalmody or other,
1372  during which his face twitched about in the most unnatural manner.
1373  At last extinguishing the fire, he took the idol up very
1374  unceremoniously, and bagged it again in his grego pocket as
1375  carelessly as if he were a sportsman bagging a dead woodcock.
1376  
1377  All these queer proceedings increased my uncomfortableness, and
1378  seeing him now exhibiting strong symptoms of concluding his business
1379  operations, and jumping into bed with me, I thought it was high time,
1380  now or never, before the light was put out, to break the spell in
1381  which I had so long been bound.
1382  
1383  But the interval I spent in deliberating what to say, was a fatal
1384  one.  Taking up his tomahawk from the table, he examined the head of
1385  it for an instant, and then holding it to the light, with his mouth
1386  at the handle, he puffed out great clouds of tobacco smoke.  The next
1387  moment the light was extinguished, and this wild cannibal, tomahawk
1388  between his teeth, sprang into bed with me.  I sang out, I could not
1389  help it now; and giving a sudden grunt of astonishment he began
1390  feeling me.
1391  
1392  Stammering out something, I knew not what, I rolled away from him
1393  against the wall, and then conjured him, whoever or whatever he might
1394  be, to keep quiet, and let me get up and light the lamp again.  But
1395  his guttural responses satisfied me at once that he but ill
1396  comprehended my meaning.
1397  
1398  "Who-e debel you?"--he at last said--"you no speak-e, dam-me, I
1399  kill-e."  And so saying the lighted tomahawk began flourishing about
1400  me in the dark.
1401  
1402  "Landlord, for God's sake, Peter Coffin!" shouted I.  "Landlord!
1403  Watch!  Coffin!  Angels! save me!"
1404  
1405  "Speak-e! tell-ee me who-ee be, or dam-me, I kill-e!" again growled
1406  the cannibal, while his horrid flourishings of the tomahawk scattered
1407  the hot tobacco ashes about me till I thought my linen would get on
1408  fire.  But thank heaven, at that moment the landlord came into the
1409  room light in hand, and leaping from the bed I ran up to him.
1410  
1411  "Don't be afraid now," said he, grinning again, "Queequeg here
1412  wouldn't harm a hair of your head."
1413  
1414  "Stop your grinning," shouted I, "and why didn't you tell me that
1415  that infernal harpooneer was a cannibal?"
1416  
1417  "I thought ye know'd it;--didn't I tell ye, he was a peddlin' heads
1418  around town?--but turn flukes again and go to sleep.  Queequeg, look
1419  here--you sabbee me, I sabbee--you this man sleepe you--you sabbee?"
1420  
1421  "Me sabbee plenty"--grunted Queequeg, puffing away at his pipe and
1422  sitting up in bed.
1423  
1424  "You gettee in," he added, motioning to me with his tomahawk, and
1425  throwing the clothes to one side.  He really did this in not only a
1426  civil but a really kind and charitable way.  I stood looking at him a
1427  moment.  For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely
1428  looking cannibal.  What's all this fuss I have been making about,
1429  thought I to myself--the man's a human being just as I am: he has
1430  just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him.
1431  Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
1432  
1433  "Landlord," said I, "tell him to stash his tomahawk there, or pipe,
1434  or whatever you call it; tell him to stop smoking, in short, and I
1435  will turn in with him.  But I don't fancy having a man smoking in bed
1436  with me.  It's dangerous.  Besides, I ain't insured."
1437  
1438  This being told to Queequeg, he at once complied, and again politely
1439  motioned me to get into bed--rolling over to one side as much as to
1440  say--I won't touch a leg of ye."
1441  
1442  "Good night, landlord," said I, "you may go."
1443  
1444  I turned in, and never slept better in my life.
1445  
1446  
1447  
1448  CHAPTER 4
1449  
1450  The Counterpane.
1451  
1452  
1453  Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg's arm
1454  thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner.  You had
1455  almost thought I had been his wife.  The counterpane was of
1456  patchwork, full of odd little parti-coloured squares and triangles;
1457  and this arm of his tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan
1458  labyrinth of a figure, no two parts of which were of one precise
1459  shade--owing I suppose to his keeping his arm at sea unmethodically
1460  in sun and shade, his shirt sleeves irregularly rolled up at various
1461  times--this same arm of his, I say, looked for all the world like a
1462  strip of that same patchwork quilt.  Indeed, partly lying on it as
1463  the arm did when I first awoke, I could hardly tell it from the
1464  quilt, they so blended their hues together; and it was only by the
1465  sense of weight and pressure that I could tell that Queequeg was
1466  hugging me.
1467  
1468  My sensations were strange.  Let me try to explain them.  When I was
1469  a child, I well remember a somewhat similar circumstance that befell
1470  me; whether it was a reality or a dream, I never could entirely
1471  settle.  The circumstance was this.  I had been cutting up some caper
1472  or other--I think it was trying to crawl up the chimney, as I had
1473  seen a little sweep do a few days previous; and my stepmother who,
1474  somehow or other, was all the time whipping me, or sending me to bed
1475  supperless,--my mother dragged me by the legs out of the chimney and
1476  packed me off to bed, though it was only two o'clock in the afternoon
1477  of the 21st June, the longest day in the year in our hemisphere.  I
1478  felt dreadfully.  But there was no help for it, so up stairs I went
1479  to my little room in the third floor, undressed myself as slowly as
1480  possible so as to kill time, and with a bitter sigh got between the
1481  sheets.
1482  
1483  I lay there dismally calculating that sixteen entire hours must
1484  elapse before I could hope for a resurrection.  Sixteen hours in bed!
1485  the small of my back ached to think of it.  And it was so light too;
1486  the sun shining in at the window, and a great rattling of coaches in
1487  the streets, and the sound of gay voices all over the house.  I felt
1488  worse and worse--at last I got up, dressed, and softly going down in
1489  my stockinged feet, sought out my stepmother, and suddenly threw
1490  myself at her feet, beseeching her as a particular favour to give me a
1491  good slippering for my misbehaviour; anything indeed but condemning
1492  me to lie abed such an unendurable length of time.  But she was the
1493  best and most conscientious of stepmothers, and back I had to go to
1494  my room.  For several hours I lay there broad awake, feeling a great
1495  deal worse than I have ever done since, even from the greatest
1496  subsequent misfortunes.  At last I must have fallen into a troubled
1497  nightmare of a doze; and slowly waking from it--half steeped in
1498  dreams--I opened my eyes, and the before sun-lit room was now wrapped
1499  in outer darkness.  Instantly I felt a shock running through all my
1500  frame; nothing was to be seen, and nothing was to be heard; but a
1501  supernatural hand seemed placed in mine.  My arm hung over the
1502  counterpane, and the nameless, unimaginable, silent form or phantom,
1503  to which the hand belonged, seemed closely seated by my bed-side.
1504  For what seemed ages piled on ages, I lay there, frozen with the most
1505  awful fears, not daring to drag away my hand; yet ever thinking that
1506  if I could but stir it one single inch, the horrid spell would be
1507  broken.  I knew not how this consciousness at last glided away from
1508  me; but waking in the morning, I shudderingly remembered it all, and
1509  for days and weeks and months afterwards I lost myself in confounding
1510  attempts to explain the mystery.  Nay, to this very hour, I often
1511  puzzle myself with it.
1512  
1513  Now, take away the awful fear, and my sensations at feeling the
1514  supernatural hand in mine were very similar, in their strangeness,
1515  to those which I experienced on waking up and seeing Queequeg's pagan
1516  arm thrown round me.  But at length all the past night's events
1517  soberly recurred, one by one, in fixed reality, and then I lay only
1518  alive to the comical predicament.  For though I tried to move his
1519  arm--unlock his bridegroom clasp--yet, sleeping as he was, he still
1520  hugged me tightly, as though naught but death should part us twain.
1521  I now strove to rouse him--"Queequeg!"--but his only answer was a
1522  snore.  I then rolled over, my neck feeling as if it were in a
1523  horse-collar; and suddenly felt a slight scratch.  Throwing aside the
1524  counterpane, there lay the tomahawk sleeping by the savage's side, as
1525  if it were a hatchet-faced baby.  A pretty pickle, truly, thought I;
1526  abed here in a strange house in the broad day, with a cannibal and a
1527  tomahawk!  "Queequeg!--in the name of goodness, Queequeg, wake!"  At
1528  length, by dint of much wriggling, and loud and incessant
1529  expostulations upon the unbecomingness of his hugging a fellow male
1530  in that matrimonial sort of style, I succeeded in extracting a grunt;
1531  and presently, he drew back his arm, shook himself all over like a
1532  Newfoundland dog just from the water, and sat up in bed, stiff as a
1533  pike-staff, looking at me, and rubbing his eyes as if he did not
1534  altogether remember how I came to be there, though a dim
1535  consciousness of knowing something about me seemed slowly dawning
1536  over him.  Meanwhile, I lay quietly eyeing him, having no serious
1537  misgivings now, and bent upon narrowly observing so curious a
1538  creature.  When, at last, his mind seemed made up touching the
1539  character of his bedfellow, and he became, as it were, reconciled to
1540  the fact; he jumped out upon the floor, and by certain signs and
1541  sounds gave me to understand that, if it pleased me, he would dress
1542  first and then leave me to dress afterwards, leaving the whole
1543  apartment to myself.  Thinks I, Queequeg, under the circumstances,
1544  this is a very civilized overture; but, the truth is, these savages
1545  have an innate sense of delicacy, say what you will; it is marvellous
1546  how essentially polite they are.  I pay this particular compliment to
1547  Queequeg, because he treated me with so much civility and
1548  consideration, while I was guilty of great rudeness; staring at him
1549  from the bed, and watching all his toilette motions; for the time my
1550  curiosity getting the better of my breeding.  Nevertheless, a man
1551  like Queequeg you don't see every day, he and his ways were well
1552  worth unusual regarding.
1553  
1554  He commenced dressing at top by donning his beaver hat, a very tall
1555  one, by the by, and then--still minus his trowsers--he hunted up his
1556  boots.  What under the heavens he did it for, I cannot tell, but his
1557  next movement was to crush himself--boots in hand, and hat on--under
1558  the bed; when, from sundry violent gaspings and strainings, I
1559  inferred he was hard at work booting himself; though by no law of
1560  propriety that I ever heard of, is any man required to be private
1561  when putting on his boots.  But Queequeg, do you see, was a creature
1562  in the transition stage--neither caterpillar nor butterfly.  He was
1563  just enough civilized to show off his outlandishness in the strangest
1564  possible manners.  His education was not yet completed.  He was an
1565  undergraduate.  If he had not been a small degree civilized, he very
1566  probably would not have troubled himself with boots at all; but then,
1567  if he had not been still a savage, he never would have dreamt of
1568  getting under the bed to put them on.  At last, he emerged with his
1569  hat very much dented and crushed down over his eyes, and began
1570  creaking and limping about the room, as if, not being much accustomed
1571  to boots, his pair of damp, wrinkled cowhide ones--probably not made
1572  to order either--rather pinched and tormented him at the first go off
1573  of a bitter cold morning.
1574  
1575  Seeing, now, that there were no curtains to the window, and that the
1576  street being very narrow, the house opposite commanded a plain view
1577  into the room, and observing more and more the indecorous figure that
1578  Queequeg made, staving about with little else but his hat and boots
1579  on; I begged him as well as I could, to accelerate his toilet
1580  somewhat, and particularly to get into his pantaloons as soon as
1581  possible.  He complied, and then proceeded to wash himself.  At that
1582  time in the morning any Christian would have washed his face; but
1583  Queequeg, to my amazement, contented himself with restricting his
1584  ablutions to his chest, arms, and hands.  He then donned his
1585  waistcoat, and taking up a piece of hard soap on the wash-stand
1586  centre table, dipped it into water and commenced lathering his face.
1587  I was watching to see where he kept his razor, when lo and behold, he
1588  takes the harpoon from the bed corner, slips out the long wooden
1589  stock, unsheathes the head, whets it a little on his boot, and
1590  striding up to the bit of mirror against the wall, begins a vigorous
1591  scraping, or rather harpooning of his cheeks.  Thinks I, Queequeg,
1592  this is using Rogers's best cutlery with a vengeance.  Afterwards I
1593  wondered the less at this operation when I came to know of what fine
1594  steel the head of a harpoon is made, and how exceedingly sharp the
1595  long straight edges are always kept.
1596  
1597  The rest of his toilet was soon achieved, and he proudly marched out
1598  of the room, wrapped up in his great pilot monkey jacket, and
1599  sporting his harpoon like a marshal's baton.
1600  
1601  
1602  
1603  CHAPTER 5
1604  
1605  Breakfast.
1606  
1607  
1608  I quickly followed suit, and descending into the bar-room accosted
1609  the grinning landlord very pleasantly.  I cherished no malice towards
1610  him, though he had been skylarking with me not a little in the matter
1611  of my bedfellow.
1612  
1613  However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a
1614  good thing; the more's the pity.  So, if any one man, in his own
1615  proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not
1616  be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be
1617  spent in that way.  And the man that has anything bountifully
1618  laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you
1619  perhaps think for.
1620  
1621  The bar-room was now full of the boarders who had been dropping in
1622  the night previous, and whom I had not as yet had a good look at.
1623  They were nearly all whalemen; chief mates, and second mates, and
1624  third mates, and sea carpenters, and sea coopers, and sea
1625  blacksmiths, and harpooneers, and ship keepers; a brown and brawny
1626  company, with bosky beards; an unshorn, shaggy set, all wearing
1627  monkey jackets for morning gowns.
1628  
1629  You could pretty plainly tell how long each one had been ashore.
1630  This young fellow's healthy cheek is like a sun-toasted pear in hue,
1631  and would seem to smell almost as musky; he cannot have been three
1632  days landed from his Indian voyage.  That man next him looks a few
1633  shades lighter; you might say a touch of satin wood is in him.  In
1634  the complexion of a third still lingers a tropic tawn, but slightly
1635  bleached withal; HE doubtless has tarried whole weeks ashore.  But
1636  who could show a cheek like Queequeg? which, barred with various
1637  tints, seemed like the Andes' western slope, to show forth in one
1638  array, contrasting climates, zone by zone.
1639  
1640  "Grub, ho!" now cried the landlord, flinging open a door, and in we
1641  went to breakfast.
1642  
1643  They say that men who have seen the world, thereby become quite at
1644  ease in manner, quite self-possessed in company.  Not always, though:
1645  Ledyard, the great New England traveller, and Mungo Park, the Scotch
1646  one; of all men, they possessed the least assurance in the parlor.
1647  But perhaps the mere crossing of Siberia in a sledge drawn by dogs as
1648  Ledyard did, or the taking a long solitary walk on an empty stomach,
1649  in the negro heart of Africa, which was the sum of poor Mungo's
1650  performances--this kind of travel, I say, may not be the very best
1651  mode of attaining a high social polish.  Still, for the most part,
1652  that sort of thing is to be had anywhere.
1653  
1654  These reflections just here are occasioned by the circumstance that
1655  after we were all seated at the table, and I was preparing to hear
1656  some good stories about whaling; to my no small surprise, nearly
1657  every man maintained a profound silence.  And not only that, but they
1658  looked embarrassed.  Yes, here were a set of sea-dogs, many of whom
1659  without the slightest bashfulness had boarded great whales on the
1660  high seas--entire strangers to them--and duelled them dead without
1661  winking; and yet, here they sat at a social breakfast table--all of
1662  the same calling, all of kindred tastes--looking round as sheepishly
1663  at each other as though they had never been out of sight of some
1664  sheepfold among the Green Mountains.  A curious sight; these bashful
1665  bears, these timid warrior whalemen!
1666  
1667  But as for Queequeg--why, Queequeg sat there among them--at the head
1668  of the table, too, it so chanced; as cool as an icicle.  To be sure I
1669  cannot say much for his breeding.  His greatest admirer could not
1670  have cordially justified his bringing his harpoon into breakfast with
1671  him, and using it there without ceremony; reaching over the table
1672  with it, to the imminent jeopardy of many heads, and grappling the
1673  beefsteaks towards him.  But THAT was certainly very coolly done by
1674  him, and every one knows that in most people's estimation, to do
1675  anything coolly is to do it genteelly.
1676  
1677  We will not speak of all Queequeg's peculiarities here; how he
1678  eschewed coffee and hot rolls, and applied his undivided attention to
1679  beefsteaks, done rare.  Enough, that when breakfast was over he
1680  withdrew like the rest into the public room, lighted his
1681  tomahawk-pipe, and was sitting there quietly digesting and smoking
1682  with his inseparable hat on, when I sallied out for a stroll.
1683  
1684  
1685  
1686  CHAPTER 6
1687  
1688  The Street.
1689  
1690  
1691  If I had been astonished at first catching a glimpse of so outlandish
1692  an individual as Queequeg circulating among the polite society of a
1693  civilized town, that astonishment soon departed upon taking my first
1694  daylight stroll through the streets of New Bedford.
1695  
1696  In thoroughfares nigh the docks, any considerable seaport will
1697  frequently offer to view the queerest looking nondescripts from
1698  foreign parts.  Even in Broadway and Chestnut streets, Mediterranean
1699  mariners will sometimes jostle the affrighted ladies.  Regent Street
1700  is not unknown to Lascars and Malays; and at Bombay, in the Apollo
1701  Green, live Yankees have often scared the natives.  But New Bedford
1702  beats all Water Street and Wapping.  In these last-mentioned haunts
1703  you see only sailors; but in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand
1704  chatting at street corners; savages outright; many of whom yet carry
1705  on their bones unholy flesh.  It makes a stranger stare.
1706  
1707  But, besides the Feegeeans, Tongatobooarrs, Erromanggoans,
1708  Pannangians, and Brighggians, and, besides the wild specimens of the
1709  whaling-craft which unheeded reel about the streets, you will see
1710  other sights still more curious, certainly more comical.  There
1711  weekly arrive in this town scores of green Vermonters and New
1712  Hampshire men, all athirst for gain and glory in the fishery.  They
1713  are mostly young, of stalwart frames; fellows who have felled
1714  forests, and now seek to drop the axe and snatch the whale-lance.
1715  Many are as green as the Green Mountains whence they came.  In some
1716  things you would think them but a few hours old.  Look there! that
1717  chap strutting round the corner.  He wears a beaver hat and
1718  swallow-tailed coat, girdled with a sailor-belt and sheath-knife.
1719  Here comes another with a sou'-wester and a bombazine cloak.
1720  
1721  No town-bred dandy will compare with a country-bred one--I mean a
1722  downright bumpkin dandy--a fellow that, in the dog-days, will mow his
1723  two acres in buckskin gloves for fear of tanning his hands.  Now when
1724  a country dandy like this takes it into his head to make a
1725  distinguished reputation, and joins the great whale-fishery, you
1726  should see the comical things he does upon reaching the seaport.  In
1727  bespeaking his sea-outfit, he orders bell-buttons to his waistcoats;
1728  straps to his canvas trowsers.  Ah, poor Hay-Seed! how bitterly will
1729  burst those straps in the first howling gale, when thou art driven,
1730  straps, buttons, and all, down the throat of the tempest.
1731  
1732  But think not that this famous town has only harpooneers, cannibals,
1733  and bumpkins to show her visitors.  Not at all.  Still New Bedford is
1734  a queer place.  Had it not been for us whalemen, that tract of land
1735  would this day perhaps have been in as howling condition as the coast
1736  of Labrador.  As it is, parts of her back country are enough to
1737  frighten one, they look so bony.  The town itself is perhaps the
1738  dearest place to live in, in all New England.  It is a land of oil,
1739  true enough: but not like Canaan; a land, also, of corn and wine.
1740  The streets do not run with milk; nor in the spring-time do they pave
1741  them with fresh eggs.  Yet, in spite of this, nowhere in all America
1742  will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more
1743  opulent, than in New Bedford.  Whence came they? how planted upon
1744  this once scraggy scoria of a country?
1745  
1746  Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty
1747  mansion, and your question will be answered.  Yes; all these brave
1748  houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and
1749  Indian oceans.  One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up
1750  hither from the bottom of the sea.  Can Herr Alexander perform a feat
1751  like that?
1752  
1753  In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their
1754  daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises a-piece.
1755  You must go to New Bedford to see a brilliant wedding; for, they
1756  say, they have reservoirs of oil in every house, and every night
1757  recklessly burn their lengths in spermaceti candles.
1758  
1759  In summer time, the town is sweet to see; full of fine maples--long
1760  avenues of green and gold.  And in August, high in air, the beautiful
1761  and bountiful horse-chestnuts, candelabra-wise, proffer the passer-by
1762  their tapering upright cones of congregated blossoms.  So omnipotent
1763  is art; which in many a district of New Bedford has superinduced
1764  bright terraces of flowers upon the barren refuse rocks thrown aside
1765  at creation's final day.
1766  
1767  And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses.
1768  But roses only bloom in summer; whereas the fine carnation of their
1769  cheeks is perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens.  Elsewhere
1770  match that bloom of theirs, ye cannot, save in Salem, where they tell
1771  me the young girls breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell
1772  them miles off shore, as though they were drawing nigh the odorous
1773  Moluccas instead of the Puritanic sands.
1774  
1775  
1776  
1777  CHAPTER 7
1778  
1779  The Chapel.
1780  
1781  
1782  In this same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman's Chapel, and few
1783  are the moody fishermen, shortly bound for the Indian Ocean or
1784  Pacific, who fail to make a Sunday visit to the spot.  I am sure that
1785  I did not.
1786  
1787  Returning from my first morning stroll, I again sallied out upon this
1788  special errand.  The sky had changed from clear, sunny cold, to
1789  driving sleet and mist.  Wrapping myself in my shaggy jacket of the
1790  cloth called bearskin, I fought my way against the stubborn storm.
1791  Entering, I found a small scattered congregation of sailors, and
1792  sailors' wives and widows.  A muffled silence reigned, only broken at
1793  times by the shrieks of the storm.  Each silent worshipper seemed
1794  purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were
1795  insular and incommunicable.  The chaplain had not yet arrived; and
1796  there these silent islands of men and women sat steadfastly eyeing
1797  several marble tablets, with black borders, masoned into the wall on
1798  either side the pulpit.  Three of them ran something like the
1799  following, but I do not pretend to quote:--
1800  
1801  SACRED
1802  TO THE MEMORY
1803  OF
1804  JOHN TALBOT,
1805  Who, at the age of eighteen, was lost overboard,
1806  Near the Isle of Desolation, off Patagonia,
1807  November 1st, 1836.
1808  THIS TABLET
1809  Is erected to his Memory
1810  BY HIS
1811  SISTER.
1812  _____________
1813  
1814  SACRED
1815  TO THE MEMORY
1816  OF
1817  ROBERT LONG, WILLIS ELLERY,
1818  NATHAN COLEMAN, WALTER CANNY, SETH MACY,
1819  AND SAMUEL GLEIG,
1820  Forming one of the boats' crews
1821  OF
1822  THE SHIP ELIZA
1823  Who were towed out of sight by a Whale,
1824  On the Off-shore Ground in the
1825  PACIFIC,
1826  December 31st, 1839.
1827  THIS MARBLE
1828  Is here placed by their surviving
1829  SHIPMATES.
1830  _____________
1831  
1832  SACRED
1833  TO THE MEMORY
1834  OF
1835  The late
1836  CAPTAIN EZEKIEL HARDY,
1837  Who in the bows of his boat was killed by a
1838  Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan,
1839  AUGUST 3d, 1833.
1840  THIS TABLET
1841  Is erected to his Memory
1842  BY
1843  HIS WIDOW.
1844  
1845  Shaking off the sleet from my ice-glazed hat and jacket, I seated
1846  myself near the door, and turning sideways was surprised to see
1847  Queequeg near me.  Affected by the solemnity of the scene, there was
1848  a wondering gaze of incredulous curiosity in his countenance.  This
1849  savage was the only person present who seemed to notice my entrance;
1850  because he was the only one who could not read, and, therefore, was
1851  not reading those frigid inscriptions on the wall.  Whether any of
1852  the relatives of the seamen whose names appeared there were now among
1853  the congregation, I knew not; but so many are the unrecorded
1854  accidents in the fishery, and so plainly did several women present
1855  wear the countenance if not the trappings of some unceasing grief,
1856  that I feel sure that here before me were assembled those, in whose
1857  unhealing hearts the sight of those bleak tablets sympathetically
1858  caused the old wounds to bleed afresh.
1859  
1860  Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing
1861  among flowers can say--here, HERE lies my beloved; ye know not the
1862  desolation that broods in bosoms like these.  What bitter blanks in
1863  those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes!  What despair in
1864  those immovable inscriptions!  What deadly voids and unbidden
1865  infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and
1866  refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished
1867  without a grave.  As well might those tablets stand in the cave of
1868  Elephanta as here.
1869  
1870  In what census of living creatures, the dead of mankind are included;
1871  why it is that a universal proverb says of them, that they tell no
1872  tales, though containing more secrets than the Goodwin Sands; how it
1873  is that to his name who yesterday departed for the other world, we
1874  prefix so significant and infidel a word, and yet do not thus entitle
1875  him, if he but embarks for the remotest Indies of this living earth;
1876  why the Life Insurance Companies pay death-forfeitures upon
1877  immortals; in what eternal, unstirring paralysis, and deadly,
1878  hopeless trance, yet lies antique Adam who died sixty round centuries
1879  ago; how it is that we still refuse to be comforted for those who we
1880  nevertheless maintain are dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why all the
1881  living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a
1882  knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city.  All these things are
1883  not without their meanings.
1884  
1885  But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these
1886  dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.
1887  
1888  It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a
1889  Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky
1890  light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who
1891  had gone before me.  Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine.  But
1892  somehow I grew merry again.  Delightful inducements to embark, fine
1893  chance for promotion, it seems--aye, a stove boat will make me an
1894  immortal by brevet.  Yes, there is death in this business of
1895  whaling--a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into
1896  Eternity.  But what then?  Methinks we have hugely mistaken this
1897  matter of Life and Death.  Methinks that what they call my shadow
1898  here on earth is my true substance.  Methinks that in looking at
1899  things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun
1900  through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.
1901  Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.  In fact take
1902  my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.  And therefore three
1903  cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they
1904  will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.
1905  
1906  
1907  
1908  CHAPTER 8
1909  
1910  The Pulpit.
1911  
1912  
1913  I had not been seated very long ere a man of a certain venerable
1914  robustness entered; immediately as the storm-pelted door flew back
1915  upon admitting him, a quick regardful eyeing of him by all the
1916  congregation, sufficiently attested that this fine old man was the
1917  chaplain.  Yes, it was the famous Father Mapple, so called by the
1918  whalemen, among whom he was a very great favourite.  He had been a
1919  sailor and a harpooneer in his youth, but for many years past had
1920  dedicated his life to the ministry.  At the time I now write of,
1921  Father Mapple was in the hardy winter of a healthy old age; that sort
1922  of old age which seems merging into a second flowering youth, for
1923  among all the fissures of his wrinkles, there shone certain mild
1924  gleams of a newly developing bloom--the spring verdure peeping forth
1925  even beneath February's snow.  No one having previously heard his
1926  history, could for the first time behold Father Mapple without the
1927  utmost interest, because there were certain engrafted clerical
1928  peculiarities about him, imputable to that adventurous maritime life
1929  he had led.  When he entered I observed that he carried no umbrella,
1930  and certainly had not come in his carriage, for his tarpaulin hat ran
1931  down with melting sleet, and his great pilot cloth jacket seemed
1932  almost to drag him to the floor with the weight of the water it had
1933  absorbed.  However, hat and coat and overshoes were one by one
1934  removed, and hung up in a little space in an adjacent corner; when,
1935  arrayed in a decent suit, he quietly approached the pulpit.
1936  
1937  Like most old fashioned pulpits, it was a very lofty one, and since a
1938  regular stairs to such a height would, by its long angle with the
1939  floor, seriously contract the already small area of the chapel, the
1940  architect, it seemed, had acted upon the hint of Father Mapple, and
1941  finished the pulpit without a stairs, substituting a perpendicular
1942  side ladder, like those used in mounting a ship from a boat at sea.
1943  The wife of a whaling captain had provided the chapel with a handsome
1944  pair of red worsted man-ropes for this ladder, which, being itself
1945  nicely headed, and stained with a mahogany colour, the whole
1946  contrivance, considering what manner of chapel it was, seemed by no
1947  means in bad taste.  Halting for an instant at the foot of the
1948  ladder, and with both hands grasping the ornamental knobs of the
1949  man-ropes, Father Mapple cast a look upwards, and then with a truly
1950  sailor-like but still reverential dexterity, hand over hand, mounted
1951  the steps as if ascending the main-top of his vessel.
1952  
1953  The perpendicular parts of this side ladder, as is usually the case
1954  with swinging ones, were of cloth-covered rope, only the rounds were
1955  of wood, so that at every step there was a joint.  At my first
1956  glimpse of the pulpit, it had not escaped me that however convenient
1957  for a ship, these joints in the present instance seemed unnecessary.
1958  For I was not prepared to see Father Mapple after gaining the height,
1959  slowly turn round, and stooping over the pulpit, deliberately drag up
1960  the ladder step by step, till the whole was deposited within, leaving
1961  him impregnable in his little Quebec.
1962  
1963  I pondered some time without fully comprehending the reason for this.
1964  Father Mapple enjoyed such a wide reputation for sincerity and
1965  sanctity, that I could not suspect him of courting notoriety by any
1966  mere tricks of the stage.  No, thought I, there must be some sober
1967  reason for this thing; furthermore, it must symbolize something
1968  unseen.  Can it be, then, that by that act of physical isolation, he
1969  signifies his spiritual withdrawal for the time, from all outward
1970  worldly ties and connexions?  Yes, for replenished with the meat and
1971  wine of the word, to the faithful man of God, this pulpit, I see, is
1972  a self-containing stronghold--a lofty Ehrenbreitstein, with a
1973  perennial well of water within the walls.
1974  
1975  But the side ladder was not the only strange feature of the place,
1976  borrowed from the chaplain's former sea-farings.  Between the marble
1977  cenotaphs on either hand of the pulpit, the wall which formed its
1978  back was adorned with a large painting representing a gallant ship
1979  beating against a terrible storm off a lee coast of black rocks and
1980  snowy breakers.  But high above the flying scud and dark-rolling
1981  clouds, there floated a little isle of sunlight, from which beamed
1982  forth an angel's face; and this bright face shed a distinct spot of
1983  radiance upon the ship's tossed deck, something like that silver
1984  plate now inserted into the Victory's plank where Nelson fell.  "Ah,
1985  noble ship," the angel seemed to say, "beat on, beat on, thou noble
1986  ship, and bear a hardy helm; for lo! the sun is breaking through; the
1987  clouds are rolling off--serenest azure is at hand."
1988  
1989  Nor was the pulpit itself without a trace of the same sea-taste that
1990  had achieved the ladder and the picture.  Its panelled front was in
1991  the likeness of a ship's bluff bows, and the Holy Bible rested on a
1992  projecting piece of scroll work, fashioned after a ship's
1993  fiddle-headed beak.
1994  
1995  What could be more full of meaning?--for the pulpit is ever this
1996  earth's foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit
1997  leads the world.  From thence it is the storm of God's quick wrath is
1998  first descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt.  From
1999  thence it is the God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for
2000  favourable winds.  Yes, the world's a ship on its passage out, and not
2001  a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.
2002  
2003  
2004  
2005  CHAPTER 9
2006  
2007  The Sermon.
2008  
2009  
2010  Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of unassuming authority
2011  ordered the scattered people to condense.  "Starboard gangway,
2012  there! side away to larboard--larboard gangway to starboard!
2013  Midships! midships!"
2014  
2015  There was a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots among the benches, and a
2016  still slighter shuffling of women's shoes, and all was quiet again,
2017  and every eye on the preacher.
2018  
2019  He paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit's bows, folded his
2020  large brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and
2021  offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying
2022  at the bottom of the sea.
2023  
2024  This ended, in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of
2025  a bell in a ship that is foundering at sea in a fog--in such tones he
2026  commenced reading the following hymn; but changing his manner towards
2027  the concluding stanzas, burst forth with a pealing exultation and
2028  joy--
2029  
2030  "The ribs and terrors in the whale,
2031  Arched over me a dismal gloom,
2032  While all God's sun-lit waves rolled by,
2033  And lift me deepening down to doom.
2034  
2035  "I saw the opening maw of hell,
2036  With endless pains and sorrows there;
2037  Which none but they that feel can tell--
2038  Oh, I was plunging to despair.
2039  
2040  "In black distress, I called my God,
2041  When I could scarce believe him mine,
2042  He bowed his ear to my complaints--
2043  No more the whale did me confine.
2044  
2045  "With speed he flew to my relief,
2046  As on a radiant dolphin borne;
2047  Awful, yet bright, as lightning shone
2048  The face of my Deliverer God.
2049  
2050  "My song for ever shall record
2051  That terrible, that joyful hour;
2052  I give the glory to my God,
2053  His all the mercy and the power.
2054  
2055  
2056  Nearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled high above the
2057  howling of the storm.  A brief pause ensued; the preacher slowly
2058  turned over the leaves of the Bible, and at last, folding his hand
2059  down upon the proper page, said: "Beloved shipmates, clinch the last
2060  verse of the first chapter of Jonah--'And God had prepared a great
2061  fish to swallow up Jonah.'"
2062  
2063  "Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters--four yarns--is
2064  one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures.
2065  Yet what depths of the soul does Jonah's deep sealine sound! what a
2066  pregnant lesson to us is this prophet!  What a noble thing is that
2067  canticle in the fish's belly!  How billow-like and boisterously
2068  grand!  We feel the floods surging over us; we sound with him to the
2069  kelpy bottom of the waters; sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is
2070  about us!  But WHAT is this lesson that the book of Jonah teaches?
2071  Shipmates, it is a two-stranded lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful
2072  men, and a lesson to me as a pilot of the living God.  As sinful men,
2073  it is a lesson to us all, because it is a story of the sin,
2074  hard-heartedness, suddenly awakened fears, the swift punishment,
2075  repentance, prayers, and finally the deliverance and joy of Jonah.
2076  As with all sinners among men, the sin of this son of Amittai was in
2077  his wilful disobedience of the command of God--never mind now what
2078  that command was, or how conveyed--which he found a hard command.
2079  But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to
2080  do--remember that--and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors
2081  to persuade.  And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it
2082  is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God
2083  consists.
2084  
2085  "With this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah still further flouts at
2086  God, by seeking to flee from Him.  He thinks that a ship made by men
2087  will carry him into countries where God does not reign, but only the
2088  Captains of this earth.  He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and
2089  seeks a ship that's bound for Tarshish.  There lurks, perhaps, a
2090  hitherto unheeded meaning here.  By all accounts Tarshish could have
2091  been no other city than the modern Cadiz.  That's the opinion of
2092  learned men.  And where is Cadiz, shipmates?  Cadiz is in Spain; as
2093  far by water, from Joppa, as Jonah could possibly have sailed in
2094  those ancient days, when the Atlantic was an almost unknown sea.
2095  Because Joppa, the modern Jaffa, shipmates, is on the most easterly
2096  coast of the Mediterranean, the Syrian; and Tarshish or Cadiz more
2097  than two thousand miles to the westward from that, just outside the
2098  Straits of Gibraltar.  See ye not then, shipmates, that Jonah sought
2099  to flee world-wide from God?  Miserable man!  Oh! most contemptible
2100  and worthy of all scorn; with slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking
2101  from his God; prowling among the shipping like a vile burglar
2102  hastening to cross the seas.  So disordered, self-condemning is his
2103  look, that had there been policemen in those days, Jonah, on the mere
2104  suspicion of something wrong, had been arrested ere he touched a
2105  deck.  How plainly he's a fugitive! no baggage, not a hat-box,
2106  valise, or carpet-bag,--no friends accompany him to the wharf with
2107  their adieux.  At last, after much dodging search, he finds the
2108  Tarshish ship receiving the last items of her cargo; and as he steps
2109  on board to see its Captain in the cabin, all the sailors for the
2110  moment desist from hoisting in the goods, to mark the stranger's evil
2111  eye.  Jonah sees this; but in vain he tries to look all ease and
2112  confidence; in vain essays his wretched smile.  Strong intuitions of
2113  the man assure the mariners he can be no innocent.  In their gamesome
2114  but still serious way, one whispers to the other--"Jack, he's robbed
2115  a widow;" or, "Joe, do you mark him; he's a bigamist;" or, "Harry
2116  lad, I guess he's the adulterer that broke jail in old Gomorrah, or
2117  belike, one of the missing murderers from Sodom."  Another runs to
2118  read the bill that's stuck against the spile upon the wharf to which
2119  the ship is moored, offering five hundred gold coins for the
2120  apprehension of a parricide, and containing a description of his
2121  person.  He reads, and looks from Jonah to the bill; while all his
2122  sympathetic shipmates now crowd round Jonah, prepared to lay their
2123  hands upon him.  Frighted Jonah trembles, and summoning all his
2124  boldness to his face, only looks so much the more a coward.  He will
2125  not confess himself suspected; but that itself is strong suspicion.
2126  So he makes the best of it; and when the sailors find him not to be
2127  the man that is advertised, they let him pass, and he descends into
2128  the cabin.
2129  
2130  "'Who's there?' cries the Captain at his busy desk, hurriedly making
2131  out his papers for the Customs--'Who's there?'  Oh! how that harmless
2132  question mangles Jonah!  For the instant he almost turns to flee
2133  again.  But he rallies.  'I seek a passage in this ship to Tarshish;
2134  how soon sail ye, sir?'  Thus far the busy Captain had not looked up
2135  to Jonah, though the man now stands before him; but no sooner does he
2136  hear that hollow voice, than he darts a scrutinizing glance.  'We
2137  sail with the next coming tide,' at last he slowly answered, still
2138  intently eyeing him.  'No sooner, sir?'--'Soon enough for any honest
2139  man that goes a passenger.'  Ha!  Jonah, that's another stab.  But he
2140  swiftly calls away the Captain from that scent.  'I'll sail with
2141  ye,'--he says,--'the passage money how much is that?--I'll pay now.'
2142  For it is particularly written, shipmates, as if it were a thing not
2143  to be overlooked in this history, 'that he paid the fare thereof' ere
2144  the craft did sail.  And taken with the context, this is full of
2145  meaning.
2146  
2147  "Now Jonah's Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects
2148  crime in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless.
2149  In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely,
2150  and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at
2151  all frontiers.  So Jonah's Captain prepares to test the length of
2152  Jonah's purse, ere he judge him openly.  He charges him thrice the
2153  usual sum; and it's assented to.  Then the Captain knows that Jonah
2154  is a fugitive; but at the same time resolves to help a flight that
2155  paves its rear with gold.  Yet when Jonah fairly takes out his purse,
2156  prudent suspicions still molest the Captain.  He rings every coin to
2157  find a counterfeit.  Not a forger, any way, he mutters; and Jonah is
2158  put down for his passage.  'Point out my state-room, Sir,' says Jonah
2159  now, 'I'm travel-weary; I need sleep.'  'Thou lookest like it,' says
2160  the Captain, 'there's thy room.'  Jonah enters, and would lock the
2161  door, but the lock contains no key.  Hearing him foolishly fumbling
2162  there, the Captain laughs lowly to himself, and mutters something
2163  about the doors of convicts' cells being never allowed to be locked
2164  within.  All dressed and dusty as he is, Jonah throws himself into
2165  his berth, and finds the little state-room ceiling almost resting on
2166  his forehead.  The air is close, and Jonah gasps.  Then, in that
2167  contracted hole, sunk, too, beneath the ship's water-line, Jonah
2168  feels the heralding presentiment of that stifling hour, when the
2169  whale shall hold him in the smallest of his bowels' wards.
2170  
2171  "Screwed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly
2172  oscillates in Jonah's room; and the ship, heeling over towards the
2173  wharf with the weight of the last bales received, the lamp, flame and
2174  all, though in slight motion, still maintains a permanent obliquity
2175  with reference to the room; though, in truth, infallibly straight
2176  itself, it but made obvious the false, lying levels among which it
2177  hung.  The lamp alarms and frightens Jonah; as lying in his berth his
2178  tormented eyes roll round the place, and this thus far successful
2179  fugitive finds no refuge for his restless glance.  But that
2180  contradiction in the lamp more and more appals him.  The floor, the
2181  ceiling, and the side, are all awry.  'Oh! so my conscience hangs in
2182  me!' he groans, 'straight upwards, so it burns; but the chambers of
2183  my soul are all in crookedness!'
2184  
2185  "Like one who after a night of drunken revelry hies to his bed, still
2186  reeling, but with conscience yet pricking him, as the plungings of
2187  the Roman race-horse but so much the more strike his steel tags into
2188  him; as one who in that miserable plight still turns and turns in
2189  giddy anguish, praying God for annihilation until the fit be passed;
2190  and at last amid the whirl of woe he feels, a deep stupor steals over
2191  him, as over the man who bleeds to death, for conscience is the
2192  wound, and there's naught to staunch it; so, after sore wrestlings in
2193  his berth, Jonah's prodigy of ponderous misery drags him drowning
2194  down to sleep.
2195  
2196  "And now the time of tide has come; the ship casts off her cables;
2197  and from the deserted wharf the uncheered ship for Tarshish, all
2198  careening, glides to sea.  That ship, my friends, was the first of
2199  recorded smugglers! the contraband was Jonah.  But the sea rebels; he
2200  will not bear the wicked burden.  A dreadful storm comes on, the
2201  ship is like to break.  But now when the boatswain calls all hands to
2202  lighten her; when boxes, bales, and jars are clattering overboard;
2203  when the wind is shrieking, and the men are yelling, and every plank
2204  thunders with trampling feet right over Jonah's head; in all this
2205  raging tumult, Jonah sleeps his hideous sleep.  He sees no black sky
2206  and raging sea, feels not the reeling timbers, and little hears he or
2207  heeds he the far rush of the mighty whale, which even now with open
2208  mouth is cleaving the seas after him.  Aye, shipmates, Jonah was gone
2209  down into the sides of the ship--a berth in the cabin as I have taken
2210  it, and was fast asleep.  But the frightened master comes to him, and
2211  shrieks in his dead ear, 'What meanest thou, O, sleeper! arise!'
2212  Startled from his lethargy by that direful cry, Jonah staggers to his
2213  feet, and stumbling to the deck, grasps a shroud, to look out upon
2214  the sea.  But at that moment he is sprung upon by a panther billow
2215  leaping over the bulwarks.  Wave after wave thus leaps into the ship,
2216  and finding no speedy vent runs roaring fore and aft, till the
2217  mariners come nigh to drowning while yet afloat.  And ever, as the
2218  white moon shows her affrighted face from the steep gullies in the
2219  blackness overhead, aghast Jonah sees the rearing bowsprit pointing
2220  high upward, but soon beat downward again towards the tormented deep.
2221  
2222  "Terrors upon terrors run shouting through his soul.  In all his
2223  cringing attitudes, the God-fugitive is now too plainly known.  The
2224  sailors mark him; more and more certain grow their suspicions of him,
2225  and at last, fully to test the truth, by referring the whole matter
2226  to high Heaven, they fall to casting lots, to see for whose
2227  cause this great tempest was upon them.  The lot is Jonah's; that
2228  discovered, then how furiously they mob him with their questions.
2229  'What is thine occupation?  Whence comest thou?  Thy country?  What
2230  people?  But mark now, my shipmates, the behavior of poor Jonah.  The
2231  eager mariners but ask him who he is, and where from; whereas, they
2232  not only receive an answer to those questions, but likewise another
2233  answer to a question not put by them, but the unsolicited answer is
2234  forced from Jonah by the hard hand of God that is upon him.
2235  
2236  "'I am a Hebrew,' he cries--and then--'I fear the Lord the God of
2237  Heaven who hath made the sea and the dry land!'  Fear him, O Jonah?
2238  Aye, well mightest thou fear the Lord God THEN!  Straightway, he now
2239  goes on to make a full confession; whereupon the mariners became more
2240  and more appalled, but still are pitiful.  For when Jonah, not yet
2241  supplicating God for mercy, since he but too well knew the darkness
2242  of his deserts,--when wretched Jonah cries out to them to take him
2243  and cast him forth into the sea, for he knew that for HIS sake this
2244  great tempest was upon them; they mercifully turn from him, and seek
2245  by other means to save the ship.  But all in vain; the indignant gale
2246  howls louder; then, with one hand raised invokingly to God, with the
2247  other they not unreluctantly lay hold of Jonah.
2248  
2249  "And now behold Jonah taken up as an anchor and dropped into the sea;
2250  when instantly an oily calmness floats out from the east, and the sea
2251  is still, as Jonah carries down the gale with him, leaving smooth
2252  water behind.  He goes down in the whirling heart of such a
2253  masterless commotion that he scarce heeds the moment when he drops
2254  seething into the yawning jaws awaiting him; and the whale shoots-to
2255  all his ivory teeth, like so many white bolts, upon his prison.  Then
2256  Jonah prayed unto the Lord out of the fish's belly.  But observe his
2257  prayer, and learn a weighty lesson.  For sinful as he is, Jonah does
2258  not weep and wail for direct deliverance.  He feels that his dreadful
2259  punishment is just.  He leaves all his deliverance to God, contenting
2260  himself with this, that spite of all his pains and pangs, he will
2261  still look towards His holy temple.  And here, shipmates, is true and
2262  faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for
2263  punishment.  And how pleasing to God was this conduct in Jonah, is
2264  shown in the eventual deliverance of him from the sea and the whale.
2265  Shipmates, I do not place Jonah before you to be copied for his sin
2266  but I do place him before you as a model for repentance.  Sin not;
2267  but if you do, take heed to repent of it like Jonah."
2268  
2269  While he was speaking these words, the howling of the shrieking,
2270  slanting storm without seemed to add new power to the preacher, who,
2271  when describing Jonah's sea-storm, seemed tossed by a storm himself.
2272  His deep chest heaved as with a ground-swell; his tossed arms seemed
2273  the warring elements at work; and the thunders that rolled away from
2274  off his swarthy brow, and the light leaping from his eye, made all
2275  his simple hearers look on him with a quick fear that was strange to
2276  them.
2277  
2278  There now came a lull in his look, as he silently turned over the
2279  leaves of the Book once more; and, at last, standing motionless, with
2280  closed eyes, for the moment, seemed communing with God and himself.
2281  
2282  But again he leaned over towards the people, and bowing his head
2283  lowly, with an aspect of the deepest yet manliest humility, he spake
2284  these words:
2285  
2286  "Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon you; both his hands press
2287  upon me.  I have read ye by what murky light may be mine the lesson
2288  that Jonah teaches to all sinners; and therefore to ye, and still
2289  more to me, for I am a greater sinner than ye.  And now how gladly
2290  would I come down from this mast-head and sit on the hatches there
2291  where you sit, and listen as you listen, while some one of you reads
2292  ME that other and more awful lesson which Jonah teaches to ME, as a
2293  pilot of the living God.  How being an anointed pilot-prophet, or
2294  speaker of true things, and bidden by the Lord to sound those
2295  unwelcome truths in the ears of a wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at
2296  the hostility he should raise, fled from his mission, and sought to
2297  escape his duty and his God by taking ship at Joppa.  But God is
2298  everywhere; Tarshish he never reached.  As we have seen, God came
2299  upon him in the whale, and swallowed him down to living gulfs of
2300  doom, and with swift slantings tore him along 'into the midst of the
2301  seas,' where the eddying depths sucked him ten thousand fathoms down,
2302  and 'the weeds were wrapped about his head,' and all the watery world
2303  of woe bowled over him.  Yet even then beyond the reach of any
2304  plummet--'out of the belly of hell'--when the whale grounded upon the
2305  ocean's utmost bones, even then, God heard the engulphed, repenting
2306  prophet when he cried.  Then God spake unto the fish; and from the
2307  shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the whale came breeching up
2308  towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air and
2309  earth; and 'vomited out Jonah upon the dry land;' when the word of
2310  the Lord came a second time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten--his ears,
2311  like two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the
2312  ocean--Jonah did the Almighty's bidding.  And what was that,
2313  shipmates?  To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood!  That was
2314  it!
2315  
2316  "This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to that pilot of
2317  the living God who slights it.  Woe to him whom this world charms
2318  from Gospel duty!  Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters
2319  when God has brewed them into a gale!  Woe to him who seeks to please
2320  rather than to appal!  Woe to him whose good name is more to him than
2321  goodness!  Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonour!  Woe
2322  to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation!
2323  Yea, woe to him who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching
2324  to others is himself a castaway!"
2325  
2326  He dropped and fell away from himself for a moment; then lifting his
2327  face to them again, showed a deep joy in his eyes, as he cried out
2328  with a heavenly enthusiasm,--"But oh! shipmates! on the starboard
2329  hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of
2330  that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep.  Is not the
2331  main-truck higher than the kelson is low?  Delight is to him--a far,
2332  far upward, and inward delight--who against the proud gods and
2333  commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self.
2334  Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of
2335  this base treacherous world has gone down beneath him.  Delight is to
2336  him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and
2337  destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of
2338  Senators and Judges.  Delight,--top-gallant delight is to him, who
2339  acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a
2340  patriot to heaven.  Delight is to him, whom all the waves of the
2341  billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake from this
2342  sure Keel of the Ages.  And eternal delight and deliciousness will be
2343  his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath--O
2344  Father!--chiefly known to me by Thy rod--mortal or immortal, here I
2345  die.  I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world's, or
2346  mine own.  Yet this is nothing: I leave eternity to Thee; for what
2347  is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?"
2348  
2349  He said no more, but slowly waving a benediction, covered his face
2350  with his hands, and so remained kneeling, till all the people had
2351  departed, and he was left alone in the place.
2352  
2353  
2354  
2355  CHAPTER 10
2356  
2357  A Bosom Friend.
2358  
2359  
2360  Returning to the Spouter-Inn from the Chapel, I found Queequeg there
2361  quite alone; he having left the Chapel before the benediction some
2362  time.  He was sitting on a bench before the fire, with his feet on
2363  the stove hearth, and in one hand was holding close up to his face
2364  that little negro idol of his; peering hard into its face, and with a
2365  jack-knife gently whittling away at its nose, meanwhile humming to
2366  himself in his heathenish way.
2367  
2368  But being now interrupted, he put up the image; and pretty soon,
2369  going to the table, took up a large book there, and placing it on his
2370  lap began counting the pages with deliberate regularity; at every
2371  fiftieth page--as I fancied--stopping a moment, looking vacantly
2372  around him, and giving utterance to a long-drawn gurgling whistle of
2373  astonishment.  He would then begin again at the next fifty; seeming
2374  to commence at number one each time, as though he could not count
2375  more than fifty, and it was only by such a large number of fifties
2376  being found together, that his astonishment at the multitude of pages
2377  was excited.
2378  
2379  With much interest I sat watching him.  Savage though he was, and
2380  hideously marred about the face--at least to my taste--his
2381  countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means
2382  disagreeable.  You cannot hide the soul.  Through all his unearthly
2383  tattooings, I thought I saw the traces of a simple honest heart; and
2384  in his large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of
2385  a spirit that would dare a thousand devils.  And besides all this,
2386  there was a certain lofty bearing about the Pagan, which even his
2387  uncouthness could not altogether maim.  He looked like a man who had
2388  never cringed and never had had a creditor.  Whether it was, too,
2389  that his head being shaved, his forehead was drawn out in freer and
2390  brighter relief, and looked more expansive than it otherwise would,
2391  this I will not venture to decide; but certain it was his head was
2392  phrenologically an excellent one.  It may seem ridiculous, but it
2393  reminded me of General Washington's head, as seen in the popular
2394  busts of him.  It had the same long regularly graded retreating slope
2395  from above the brows, which were likewise very projecting, like two
2396  long promontories thickly wooded on top.  Queequeg was George
2397  Washington cannibalistically developed.
2398  
2399  Whilst I was thus closely scanning him, half-pretending meanwhile to
2400  be looking out at the storm from the casement, he never heeded my
2401  presence, never troubled himself with so much as a single glance; but
2402  appeared wholly occupied with counting the pages of the marvellous
2403  book.  Considering how sociably we had been sleeping together the
2404  night previous, and especially considering the affectionate arm I had
2405  found thrown over me upon waking in the morning, I thought this
2406  indifference of his very strange.  But savages are strange beings; at
2407  times you do not know exactly how to take them.  At first they are
2408  overawing; their calm self-collectedness of simplicity seems a
2409  Socratic wisdom.  I had noticed also that Queequeg never consorted at
2410  all, or but very little, with the other seamen in the inn.  He made
2411  no advances whatever; appeared to have no desire to enlarge the
2412  circle of his acquaintances.  All this struck me as mighty singular;
2413  yet, upon second thoughts, there was something almost sublime in it.
2414  Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of
2415  Cape Horn, that is--which was the only way he could get there--thrown
2416  among people as strange to him as though he were in the planet
2417  Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the
2418  utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to
2419  himself.  Surely this was a touch of fine philosophy; though no doubt
2420  he had never heard there was such a thing as that.  But, perhaps, to
2421  be true philosophers, we mortals should not be conscious of so living
2422  or so striving.  So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives
2423  himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic
2424  old woman, he must have "broken his digester."
2425  
2426  As I sat there in that now lonely room; the fire burning low, in that
2427  mild stage when, after its first intensity has warmed the air, it
2428  then only glows to be looked at; the evening shades and phantoms
2429  gathering round the casements, and peering in upon us silent,
2430  solitary twain; the storm booming without in solemn swells; I began
2431  to be sensible of strange feelings.  I felt a melting in me.  No more
2432  my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish
2433  world.  This soothing savage had redeemed it.  There he sat, his very
2434  indifference speaking a nature in which there lurked no civilized
2435  hypocrisies and bland deceits.  Wild he was; a very sight of sights
2436  to see; yet I began to feel myself mysteriously drawn towards him.
2437  And those same things that would have repelled most others, they were
2438  the very magnets that thus drew me.  I'll try a pagan friend, thought
2439  I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy.  I drew
2440  my bench near him, and made some friendly signs and hints, doing my
2441  best to talk with him meanwhile.  At first he little noticed these
2442  advances; but presently, upon my referring to his last night's
2443  hospitalities, he made out to ask me whether we were again to be
2444  bedfellows.  I told him yes; whereat I thought he looked pleased,
2445  perhaps a little complimented.
2446  
2447  We then turned over the book together, and I endeavored to explain to
2448  him the purpose of the printing, and the meaning of the few pictures
2449  that were in it.  Thus I soon engaged his interest; and from that we
2450  went to jabbering the best we could about the various outer sights to
2451  be seen in this famous town.  Soon I proposed a social smoke; and,
2452  producing his pouch and tomahawk, he quietly offered me a puff.  And
2453  then we sat exchanging puffs from that wild pipe of his, and keeping
2454  it regularly passing between us.
2455  
2456  If there yet lurked any ice of indifference towards me in the Pagan's
2457  breast, this pleasant, genial smoke we had, soon thawed it out, and
2458  left us cronies.  He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and
2459  unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his
2460  forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that
2461  henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country's phrase, that we
2462  were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be.
2463  In a countryman, this sudden flame of friendship would have seemed
2464  far too premature, a thing to be much distrusted; but in this simple
2465  savage those old rules would not apply.
2466  
2467  After supper, and another social chat and smoke, we went to our room
2468  together.  He made me a present of his embalmed head; took out his
2469  enormous tobacco wallet, and groping under the tobacco, drew out some
2470  thirty dollars in silver; then spreading them on the table, and
2471  mechanically dividing them into two equal portions, pushed one of
2472  them towards me, and said it was mine.  I was going to remonstrate;
2473  but he silenced me by pouring them into my trowsers' pockets.  I let
2474  them stay.  He then went about his evening prayers, took out his
2475  idol, and removed the paper fireboard.  By certain signs and
2476  symptoms, I thought he seemed anxious for me to join him; but well
2477  knowing what was to follow, I deliberated a moment whether, in case
2478  he invited me, I would comply or otherwise.
2479  
2480  I was a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible
2481  Presbyterian Church.  How then could I unite with this wild idolator
2482  in worshipping his piece of wood?  But what is worship? thought I.
2483  Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and
2484  earth--pagans and all included--can possibly be jealous of an
2485  insignificant bit of black wood?  Impossible!  But what is
2486  worship?--to do the will of God--THAT is worship.  And what is the
2487  will of God?--to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man
2488  to do to me--THAT is the will of God.  Now, Queequeg is my fellow
2489  man.  And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me?  Why,
2490  unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship.
2491  Consequently, I must then unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn
2492  idolator.  So I kindled the shavings; helped prop up the innocent
2493  little idol; offered him burnt biscuit with Queequeg; salamed before
2494  him twice or thrice; kissed his nose; and that done, we undressed and
2495  went to bed, at peace with our own consciences and all the world.
2496  But we did not go to sleep without some little chat.
2497  
2498  How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for
2499  confidential disclosures between friends.  Man and wife, they say,
2500  there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old
2501  couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning.  Thus,
2502  then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg--a cosy, loving
2503  pair.
2504  
2505  
2506  
2507  CHAPTER 11
2508  
2509  Nightgown.
2510  
2511  
2512  We had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and
2513  Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs
2514  over mine, and then drawing them back; so entirely sociable and free
2515  and easy were we; when, at last, by reason of our confabulations,
2516  what little nappishness remained in us altogether departed, and we
2517  felt like getting up again, though day-break was yet some way down
2518  the future.
2519  
2520  Yes, we became very wakeful; so much so that our recumbent position
2521  began to grow wearisome, and by little and little we found ourselves
2522  sitting up; the clothes well tucked around us, leaning against the
2523  head-board with our four knees drawn up close together, and our two
2524  noses bending over them, as if our kneepans were warming-pans.  We
2525  felt very nice and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of
2526  doors; indeed out of bed-clothes too, seeing that there was no fire
2527  in the room.  The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily
2528  warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality
2529  in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast.  Nothing
2530  exists in itself.  If you flatter yourself that you are all over
2531  comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to
2532  be comfortable any more.  But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed,
2533  the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled,
2534  why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most
2535  delightfully and unmistakably warm.  For this reason a sleeping
2536  apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the
2537  luxurious discomforts of the rich.  For the height of this sort of
2538  deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and
2539  your snugness and the cold of the outer air.  Then there you lie like
2540  the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.
2541  
2542  We had been sitting in this crouching manner for some time, when all
2543  at once I thought I would open my eyes; for when between sheets,
2544  whether by day or by night, and whether asleep or awake, I have a way
2545  of always keeping my eyes shut, in order the more to concentrate the
2546  snugness of being in bed.  Because no man can ever feel his own
2547  identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were
2548  indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more
2549  congenial to our clayey part.  Upon opening my eyes then, and coming
2550  out of my own pleasant and self-created darkness into the imposed and
2551  coarse outer gloom of the unilluminated twelve-o'clock-at-night, I
2552  experienced a disagreeable revulsion.  Nor did I at all object to the
2553  hint from Queequeg that perhaps it were best to strike a light,
2554  seeing that we were so wide awake; and besides he felt a strong
2555  desire to have a few quiet puffs from his Tomahawk.  Be it said, that
2556  though I had felt such a strong repugnance to his smoking in the bed
2557  the night before, yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when
2558  love once comes to bend them.  For now I liked nothing better than
2559  to have Queequeg smoking by me, even in bed, because he seemed to be
2560  full of such serene household joy then.  I no more felt unduly
2561  concerned for the landlord's policy of insurance.  I was only alive
2562  to the condensed confidential comfortableness of sharing a pipe and a
2563  blanket with a real friend.  With our shaggy jackets drawn about our
2564  shoulders, we now passed the Tomahawk from one to the other, till
2565  slowly there grew over us a blue hanging tester of smoke, illuminated
2566  by the flame of the new-lit lamp.
2567  
2568  Whether it was that this undulating tester rolled the savage away to
2569  far distant scenes, I know not, but he now spoke of his native
2570  island; and, eager to hear his history, I begged him to go on and
2571  tell it.  He gladly complied.  Though at the time I but ill
2572  comprehended not a few of his words, yet subsequent disclosures, when
2573  I had become more familiar with his broken phraseology, now enable me
2574  to present the whole story such as it may prove in the mere skeleton
2575  I give.
2576  
2577  
2578  
2579  CHAPTER 12
2580  
2581  Biographical.
2582  
2583  
2584  Queequeg was a native of Rokovoko, an island far away to the West
2585  and South.  It is not down in any map; true places never are.
2586  
2587  When a new-hatched savage running wild about his native woodlands in
2588  a grass clout, followed by the nibbling goats, as if he were a green
2589  sapling; even then, in Queequeg's ambitious soul, lurked a strong
2590  desire to see something more of Christendom than a specimen whaler or
2591  two.  His father was a High Chief, a King; his uncle a High Priest;
2592  and on the maternal side he boasted aunts who were the wives of
2593  unconquerable warriors.  There was excellent blood in his
2594  veins--royal stuff; though sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal
2595  propensity he nourished in his untutored youth.
2596  
2597  A Sag Harbor ship visited his father's bay, and Queequeg sought a
2598  passage to Christian lands.  But the ship, having her full complement
2599  of seamen, spurned his suit; and not all the King his father's
2600  influence could prevail.  But Queequeg vowed a vow.  Alone in his
2601  canoe, he paddled off to a distant strait, which he knew the ship
2602  must pass through when she quitted the island.  On one side was a
2603  coral reef; on the other a low tongue of land, covered with mangrove
2604  thickets that grew out into the water.  Hiding his canoe, still
2605  afloat, among these thickets, with its prow seaward, he sat down in
2606  the stern, paddle low in hand; and when the ship was gliding by, like
2607  a flash he darted out; gained her side; with one backward dash of his
2608  foot capsized and sank his canoe; climbed up the chains; and throwing
2609  himself at full length upon the deck, grappled a ring-bolt there, and
2610  swore not to let it go, though hacked in pieces.
2611  
2612  In vain the captain threatened to throw him overboard; suspended a
2613  cutlass over his naked wrists; Queequeg was the son of a King, and
2614  Queequeg budged not.  Struck by his desperate dauntlessness, and his
2615  wild desire to visit Christendom, the captain at last relented, and
2616  told him he might make himself at home.  But this fine young
2617  savage--this sea Prince of Wales, never saw the Captain's cabin.
2618  They put him down among the sailors, and made a whaleman of him.  But
2619  like Czar Peter content to toil in the shipyards of foreign cities,
2620  Queequeg disdained no seeming ignominy, if thereby he might happily
2621  gain the power of enlightening his untutored countrymen.  For at
2622  bottom--so he told me--he was actuated by a profound desire to learn
2623  among the Christians, the arts whereby to make his people still
2624  happier than they were; and more than that, still better than they
2625  were.  But, alas! the practices of whalemen soon convinced him that
2626  even Christians could be both miserable and wicked; infinitely more
2627  so, than all his father's heathens.  Arrived at last in old Sag
2628  Harbor; and seeing what the sailors did there; and then going on to
2629  Nantucket, and seeing how they spent their wages in that place also,
2630  poor Queequeg gave it up for lost.  Thought he, it's a wicked world
2631  in all meridians; I'll die a pagan.
2632  
2633  And thus an old idolator at heart, he yet lived among these
2634  Christians, wore their clothes, and tried to talk their gibberish.
2635  Hence the queer ways about him, though now some time from home.
2636  
2637  By hints, I asked him whether he did not propose going back, and
2638  having a coronation; since he might now consider his father dead and
2639  gone, he being very old and feeble at the last accounts.  He answered
2640  no, not yet; and added that he was fearful Christianity, or rather
2641  Christians, had unfitted him for ascending the pure and undefiled
2642  throne of thirty pagan Kings before him.  But by and by, he said, he
2643  would return,--as soon as he felt himself baptized again.  For the
2644  nonce, however, he proposed to sail about, and sow his wild oats in
2645  all four oceans.  They had made a harpooneer of him, and that barbed
2646  iron was in lieu of a sceptre now.
2647  
2648  I asked him what might be his immediate purpose, touching his future
2649  movements.  He answered, to go to sea again, in his old vocation.
2650  Upon this, I told him that whaling was my own design, and informed
2651  him of my intention to sail out of Nantucket, as being the most
2652  promising port for an adventurous whaleman to embark from.  He at
2653  once resolved to accompany me to that island, ship aboard the same
2654  vessel, get into the same watch, the same boat, the same mess with
2655  me, in short to share my every hap; with both my hands in his, boldly
2656  dip into the Potluck of both worlds.  To all this I joyously
2657  assented; for besides the affection I now felt for Queequeg, he was
2658  an experienced harpooneer, and as such, could not fail to be of great
2659  usefulness to one, who, like me, was wholly ignorant of the mysteries
2660  of whaling, though well acquainted with the sea, as known to merchant
2661  seamen.
2662  
2663  His story being ended with his pipe's last dying puff, Queequeg
2664  embraced me, pressed his forehead against mine, and blowing out the
2665  light, we rolled over from each other, this way and that, and very
2666  soon were sleeping.
2667  
2668  
2669  CHAPTER 13
2670  
2671  Wheelbarrow.
2672  
2673  
2674  Next morning, Monday, after disposing of the embalmed head to a
2675  barber, for a block, I settled my own and comrade's bill; using,
2676  however, my comrade's money.  The grinning landlord, as well as the
2677  boarders, seemed amazingly tickled at the sudden friendship which had
2678  sprung up between me and Queequeg--especially as Peter Coffin's cock
2679  and bull stories about him had previously so much alarmed me
2680  concerning the very person whom I now companied with.
2681  
2682  We borrowed a wheelbarrow, and embarking our things, including my own
2683  poor carpet-bag, and Queequeg's canvas sack and hammock, away we went
2684  down to "the Moss," the little Nantucket packet schooner moored at
2685  the wharf.  As we were going along the people stared; not at Queequeg
2686  so much--for they were used to seeing cannibals like him in their
2687  streets,--but at seeing him and me upon such confidential terms.  But
2688  we heeded them not, going along wheeling the barrow by turns, and
2689  Queequeg now and then stopping to adjust the sheath on his harpoon
2690  barbs.  I asked him why he carried such a troublesome thing with him
2691  ashore, and whether all whaling ships did not find their own
2692  harpoons.  To this, in substance, he replied, that though what I
2693  hinted was true enough, yet he had a particular affection for his own
2694  harpoon, because it was of assured stuff, well tried in many a mortal
2695  combat, and deeply intimate with the hearts of whales.  In short,
2696  like many inland reapers and mowers, who go into the farmers' meadows
2697  armed with their own scythes--though in no wise obliged to furnish
2698  them--even so, Queequeg, for his own private reasons, preferred his
2699  own harpoon.
2700  
2701  Shifting the barrow from my hand to his, he told me a funny story
2702  about the first wheelbarrow he had ever seen.  It was in Sag Harbor.
2703  The owners of his ship, it seems, had lent him one, in which to carry
2704  his heavy chest to his boarding house.  Not to seem ignorant about
2705  the thing--though in truth he was entirely so, concerning the precise
2706  way in which to manage the barrow--Queequeg puts his chest upon it;
2707  lashes it fast; and then shoulders the barrow and marches up the
2708  wharf.  "Why," said I, "Queequeg, you might have known better than
2709  that, one would think.  Didn't the people laugh?"
2710  
2711  Upon this, he told me another story.  The people of his island of
2712  Rokovoko, it seems, at their wedding feasts express the fragrant
2713  water of young cocoanuts into a large stained calabash like a
2714  punchbowl; and this punchbowl always forms the great central ornament
2715  on the braided mat where the feast is held.  Now a certain grand
2716  merchant ship once touched at Rokovoko, and its commander--from all
2717  accounts, a very stately punctilious gentleman, at least for a sea
2718  captain--this commander was invited to the wedding feast of
2719  Queequeg's sister, a pretty young princess just turned of ten.  Well;
2720  when all the wedding guests were assembled at the bride's bamboo
2721  cottage, this Captain marches in, and being assigned the post of
2722  honour, placed himself over against the punchbowl, and between the
2723  High Priest and his majesty the King, Queequeg's father.  Grace being
2724  said,--for those people have their grace as well as we--though
2725  Queequeg told me that unlike us, who at such times look downwards to
2726  our platters, they, on the contrary, copying the ducks, glance
2727  upwards to the great Giver of all feasts--Grace, I say, being said,
2728  the High Priest opens the banquet by the immemorial ceremony of the
2729  island; that is, dipping his consecrated and consecrating fingers
2730  into the bowl before the blessed beverage circulates.  Seeing himself
2731  placed next the Priest, and noting the ceremony, and thinking
2732  himself--being Captain of a ship--as having plain precedence over a
2733  mere island King, especially in the King's own house--the Captain
2734  coolly proceeds to wash his hands in the punchbowl;--taking it I
2735  suppose for a huge finger-glass.  "Now," said Queequeg, "what you
2736  tink now?--Didn't our people laugh?"
2737  
2738  At last, passage paid, and luggage safe, we stood on board the
2739  schooner.  Hoisting sail, it glided down the Acushnet river.  On one
2740  side, New Bedford rose in terraces of streets, their ice-covered
2741  trees all glittering in the clear, cold air.  Huge hills and
2742  mountains of casks on casks were piled upon her wharves, and side by
2743  side the world-wandering whale ships lay silent and safely moored at
2744  last; while from others came a sound of carpenters and coopers, with
2745  blended noises of fires and forges to melt the pitch, all betokening
2746  that new cruises were on the start; that one most perilous and long
2747  voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a
2748  third, and so on, for ever and for aye.  Such is the endlessness,
2749  yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.
2750  
2751  Gaining the more open water, the bracing breeze waxed fresh; the
2752  little Moss tossed the quick foam from her bows, as a young colt his
2753  snortings.  How I snuffed that Tartar air!--how I spurned that
2754  turnpike earth!--that common highway all over dented with the marks
2755  of slavish heels and hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity
2756  of the sea which will permit no records.
2757  
2758  At the same foam-fountain, Queequeg seemed to drink and reel with me.
2759  His dusky nostrils swelled apart; he showed his filed and pointed
2760  teeth.  On, on we flew; and our offing gained, the Moss did homage to
2761  the blast; ducked and dived her bows as a slave before the Sultan.
2762  Sideways leaning, we sideways darted; every ropeyarn tingling like a
2763  wire; the two tall masts buckling like Indian canes in land
2764  tornadoes.  So full of this reeling scene were we, as we stood by the
2765  plunging bowsprit, that for some time we did not notice the jeering
2766  glances of the passengers, a lubber-like assembly, who marvelled that
2767  two fellow beings should be so companionable; as though a white man
2768  were anything more dignified than a whitewashed negro.  But there
2769  were some boobies and bumpkins there, who, by their intense
2770  greenness, must have come from the heart and centre of all verdure.
2771  Queequeg caught one of these young saplings mimicking him behind his
2772  back.  I thought the bumpkin's hour of doom was come.  Dropping his
2773  harpoon, the brawny savage caught him in his arms, and by an almost
2774  miraculous dexterity and strength, sent him high up bodily into the
2775  air; then slightly tapping his stern in mid-somerset, the fellow
2776  landed with bursting lungs upon his feet, while Queequeg, turning his
2777  back upon him, lighted his tomahawk pipe and passed it to me for a
2778  puff.
2779  
2780  "Capting!  Capting! yelled the bumpkin, running towards that officer;
2781  "Capting, Capting, here's the devil."
2782  
2783  "Hallo, YOU sir," cried the Captain, a gaunt rib of the sea, stalking
2784  up to Queequeg, "what in thunder do you mean by that?  Don't you know
2785  you might have killed that chap?"
2786  
2787  "What him say?" said Queequeg, as he mildly turned to me.
2788  
2789  "He say," said I, "that you came near kill-e that man there,"
2790  pointing to the still shivering greenhorn.
2791  
2792  "Kill-e," cried Queequeg, twisting his tattooed face into an
2793  unearthly expression of disdain, "ah! him bevy small-e fish-e;
2794  Queequeg no kill-e so small-e fish-e; Queequeg kill-e big whale!"
2795  
2796  "Look you," roared the Captain, "I'll kill-e YOU, you cannibal, if
2797  you try any more of your tricks aboard here; so mind your eye."
2798  
2799  But it so happened just then, that it was high time for the Captain
2800  to mind his own eye.  The prodigious strain upon the main-sail had
2801  parted the weather-sheet, and the tremendous boom was now flying from
2802  side to side, completely sweeping the entire after part of the deck.
2803  The poor fellow whom Queequeg had handled so roughly, was swept
2804  overboard; all hands were in a panic; and to attempt snatching at the
2805  boom to stay it, seemed madness.  It flew from right to left, and
2806  back again, almost in one ticking of a watch, and every instant
2807  seemed on the point of snapping into splinters.  Nothing was done,
2808  and nothing seemed capable of being done; those on deck rushed
2809  towards the bows, and stood eyeing the boom as if it were the lower
2810  jaw of an exasperated whale.  In the midst of this consternation,
2811  Queequeg dropped deftly to his knees, and crawling under the path of
2812  the boom, whipped hold of a rope, secured one end to the bulwarks,
2813  and then flinging the other like a lasso, caught it round the boom as
2814  it swept over his head, and at the next jerk, the spar was that way
2815  trapped, and all was safe.  The schooner was run into the wind, and
2816  while the hands were clearing away the stern boat, Queequeg, stripped
2817  to the waist, darted from the side with a long living arc of a leap.
2818  For three minutes or more he was seen swimming like a dog, throwing
2819  his long arms straight out before him, and by turns revealing his
2820  brawny shoulders through the freezing foam.  I looked at the grand
2821  and glorious fellow, but saw no one to be saved.  The greenhorn had
2822  gone down.  Shooting himself perpendicularly from the water,
2823  Queequeg, now took an instant's glance around him, and seeming to see
2824  just how matters were, dived down and disappeared.  A few minutes
2825  more, and he rose again, one arm still striking out, and with the
2826  other dragging a lifeless form.  The boat soon picked them up.  The
2827  poor bumpkin was restored.  All hands voted Queequeg a noble trump;
2828  the captain begged his pardon.  From that hour I clove to Queequeg
2829  like a barnacle; yea, till poor Queequeg took his last long dive.
2830  
2831  Was there ever such unconsciousness?  He did not seem to think that
2832  he at all deserved a medal from the Humane and Magnanimous Societies.
2833  He only asked for water--fresh water--something to wipe the brine
2834  off; that done, he put on dry clothes, lighted his pipe, and leaning
2835  against the bulwarks, and mildly eyeing those around him, seemed to
2836  be saying to himself--"It's a mutual, joint-stock world, in all
2837  meridians.  We cannibals must help these Christians."
2838  
2839  
2840  
2841  CHAPTER 14
2842  
2843  Nantucket.
2844  
2845  
2846  Nothing more happened on the passage worthy the mentioning; so, after
2847  a fine run, we safely arrived in Nantucket.
2848  
2849  Nantucket!  Take out your map and look at it.  See what a real corner
2850  of the world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more
2851  lonely than the Eddystone lighthouse.  Look at it--a mere hillock,
2852  and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background.  There is more
2853  sand there than you would use in twenty years as a substitute for
2854  blotting paper.  Some gamesome wights will tell you that they have to
2855  plant weeds there, they don't grow naturally; that they import Canada
2856  thistles; that they have to send beyond seas for a spile to stop a
2857  leak in an oil cask; that pieces of wood in Nantucket are carried
2858  about like bits of the true cross in Rome; that people there plant
2859  toadstools before their houses, to get under the shade in summer
2860  time; that one blade of grass makes an oasis, three blades in a day's
2861  walk a prairie; that they wear quicksand shoes, something like
2862  Laplander snow-shoes; that they are so shut up, belted about, every
2863  way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island of by the ocean,
2864  that to their very chairs and tables small clams will sometimes be
2865  found adhering, as to the backs of sea turtles.  But these
2866  extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no Illinois.
2867  
2868  Look now at the wondrous traditional story of how this island was
2869  settled by the red-men.  Thus goes the legend.  In olden times an
2870  eagle swooped down upon the New England coast, and carried off an
2871  infant Indian in his talons.  With loud lament the parents saw their
2872  child borne out of sight over the wide waters.  They resolved to
2873  follow in the same direction.  Setting out in their canoes, after a
2874  perilous passage they discovered the island, and there they found an
2875  empty ivory casket,--the poor little Indian's skeleton.
2876  
2877  What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should
2878  take to the sea for a livelihood!  They first caught crabs and
2879  quohogs in the sand; grown bolder, they waded out with nets for
2880  mackerel; more experienced, they pushed off in boats and captured
2881  cod; and at last, launching a navy of great ships on the sea,
2882  explored this watery world; put an incessant belt of
2883  circumnavigations round it; peeped in at Behring's Straits; and in
2884  all seasons and all oceans declared everlasting war with the
2885  mightiest animated mass that has survived the flood; most monstrous
2886  and most mountainous!  That Himmalehan, salt-sea Mastodon, clothed
2887  with such portentousness of unconscious power, that his very panics
2888  are more to be dreaded than his most fearless and malicious assaults!
2889  
2890  And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing
2891  from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery
2892  world like so many Alexanders; parcelling out among them the
2893  Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, as the three pirate powers did
2894  Poland.  Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada;
2895  let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing
2896  banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the
2897  Nantucketer's.  For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own
2898  empires; other seamen having but a right of way through it.  Merchant
2899  ships are but extension bridges; armed ones but floating forts; even
2900  pirates and privateers, though following the sea as highwaymen the
2901  road, they but plunder other ships, other fragments of the land like
2902  themselves, without seeking to draw their living from the bottomless
2903  deep itself.  The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea;
2904  he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro
2905  ploughing it as his own special plantation.  THERE is his home; THERE
2906  lies his business, which a Noah's flood would not interrupt, though
2907  it overwhelmed all the millions in China.  He lives on the sea, as
2908  prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs
2909  them as chamois hunters climb the Alps.  For years he knows not the
2910  land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another
2911  world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman.  With the
2912  landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep
2913  between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of
2914  land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very
2915  pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.
2916  
2917  
2918  
2919  CHAPTER 15
2920  
2921  Chowder.
2922  
2923  
2924  It was quite late in the evening when the little Moss came snugly to
2925  anchor, and Queequeg and I went ashore; so we could attend to no
2926  business that day, at least none but a supper and a bed.  The
2927  landlord of the Spouter-Inn had recommended us to his cousin Hosea
2928  Hussey of the Try Pots, whom he asserted to be the proprietor of one
2929  of the best kept hotels in all Nantucket, and moreover he had assured
2930  us that Cousin Hosea, as he called him, was famous for his chowders.
2931  In short, he plainly hinted that we could not possibly do better than
2932  try pot-luck at the Try Pots.  But the directions he had given us
2933  about keeping a yellow warehouse on our starboard hand till we opened
2934  a white church to the larboard, and then keeping that on the larboard
2935  hand till we made a corner three points to the starboard, and that
2936  done, then ask the first man we met where the place was: these
2937  crooked directions of his very much puzzled us at first, especially
2938  as, at the outset, Queequeg insisted that the yellow warehouse--our
2939  first point of departure--must be left on the larboard hand, whereas
2940  I had understood Peter Coffin to say it was on the starboard.
2941  However, by dint of beating about a little in the dark, and now and
2942  then knocking up a peaceable inhabitant to inquire the way, we at
2943  last came to something which there was no mistaking.
2944  
2945  Two enormous wooden pots painted black, and suspended by asses' ears,
2946  swung from the cross-trees of an old top-mast, planted in front of an
2947  old doorway.  The horns of the cross-trees were sawed off on the
2948  other side, so that this old top-mast looked not a little like a
2949  gallows.  Perhaps I was over sensitive to such impressions at the
2950  time, but I could not help staring at this gallows with a vague
2951  misgiving.  A sort of crick was in my neck as I gazed up to the two
2952  remaining horns; yes, TWO of them, one for Queequeg, and one for me.
2953  It's ominous, thinks I.  A Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my
2954  first whaling port; tombstones staring at me in the whalemen's
2955  chapel; and here a gallows! and a pair of prodigious black pots too!
2956  Are these last throwing out oblique hints touching Tophet?
2957  
2958  I was called from these reflections by the sight of a freckled woman
2959  with yellow hair and a yellow gown, standing in the porch of the inn,
2960  under a dull red lamp swinging there, that looked much like an
2961  injured eye, and carrying on a brisk scolding with a man in a purple
2962  woollen shirt.
2963  
2964  "Get along with ye," said she to the man, "or I'll be combing ye!"
2965  
2966  "Come on, Queequeg," said I, "all right.  There's Mrs. Hussey."
2967  
2968  And so it turned out; Mr. Hosea Hussey being from home, but leaving
2969  Mrs. Hussey entirely competent to attend to all his affairs.  Upon
2970  making known our desires for a supper and a bed, Mrs. Hussey,
2971  postponing further scolding for the present, ushered us into a little
2972  room, and seating us at a table spread with the relics of a recently
2973  concluded repast, turned round to us and said--"Clam or Cod?"
2974  
2975  "What's that about Cods, ma'am?" said I, with much politeness.
2976  
2977  "Clam or Cod?" she repeated.
2978  
2979  "A clam for supper? a cold clam; is THAT what you mean, Mrs. Hussey?"
2980  says I, "but that's a rather cold and clammy reception in the winter
2981  time, ain't it, Mrs. Hussey?"
2982  
2983  But being in a great hurry to resume scolding the man in the purple
2984  Shirt, who was waiting for it in the entry, and seeming to hear
2985  nothing but the word "clam," Mrs. Hussey hurried towards an open door
2986  leading to the kitchen, and bawling out "clam for two," disappeared.
2987  
2988  "Queequeg," said I, "do you think that we can make out a supper for
2989  us both on one clam?"
2990  
2991  However, a warm savory steam from the kitchen served to belie the
2992  apparently cheerless prospect before us.  But when that smoking
2993  chowder came in, the mystery was delightfully explained.  Oh, sweet
2994  friends! hearken to me.  It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely
2995  bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted
2996  pork cut up into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and
2997  plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt.  Our appetites being
2998  sharpened by the frosty voyage, and in particular, Queequeg seeing
2999  his favourite fishing food before him, and the chowder being
3000  surpassingly excellent, we despatched it with great expedition: when
3001  leaning back a moment and bethinking me of Mrs. Hussey's clam and cod
3002  announcement, I thought I would try a little experiment.  Stepping to
3003  the kitchen door, I uttered the word "cod" with great emphasis, and
3004  resumed my seat.  In a few moments the savoury steam came forth
3005  again, but with a different flavor, and in good time a fine
3006  cod-chowder was placed before us.
3007  
3008  We resumed business; and while plying our spoons in the bowl, thinks
3009  I to myself, I wonder now if this here has any effect on the head?
3010  What's that stultifying saying about chowder-headed people?  "But
3011  look, Queequeg, ain't that a live eel in your bowl?  Where's your
3012  harpoon?"
3013  
3014  Fishiest of all fishy places was the Try Pots, which well deserved
3015  its name; for the pots there were always boiling chowders.  Chowder
3016  for breakfast, and chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper, till
3017  you began to look for fish-bones coming through your clothes.  The
3018  area before the house was paved with clam-shells.  Mrs. Hussey wore a
3019  polished necklace of codfish vertebra; and Hosea Hussey had his
3020  account books bound in superior old shark-skin.  There was a fishy
3021  flavor to the milk, too, which I could not at all account for, till
3022  one morning happening to take a stroll along the beach among some
3023  fishermen's boats, I saw Hosea's brindled cow feeding on fish
3024  remnants, and marching along the sand with each foot in a cod's
3025  decapitated head, looking very slip-shod, I assure ye.
3026  
3027  Supper concluded, we received a lamp, and directions from Mrs. Hussey
3028  concerning the nearest way to bed; but, as Queequeg was about to
3029  precede me up the stairs, the lady reached forth her arm, and
3030  demanded his harpoon; she allowed no harpoon in her chambers.  "Why
3031  not? said I; "every true whaleman sleeps with his harpoon--but why
3032  not?"  "Because it's dangerous," says she.  "Ever since young Stiggs
3033  coming from that unfort'nt v'y'ge of his, when he was gone four years
3034  and a half, with only three barrels of ILE, was found dead in my
3035  first floor back, with his harpoon in his side; ever since then I
3036  allow no boarders to take sich dangerous weepons in their rooms at
3037  night.  So, Mr. Queequeg" (for she had learned his name), "I will
3038  just take this here iron, and keep it for you till morning.  But the
3039  chowder; clam or cod to-morrow for breakfast, men?"
3040  
3041  "Both," says I; "and let's have a couple of smoked herring by way of
3042  variety."
3043  
3044  
3045  
3046  CHAPTER 16
3047  
3048  The Ship.
3049  
3050  
3051  In bed we concocted our plans for the morrow.  But to my surprise and
3052  no small concern, Queequeg now gave me to understand, that he had
3053  been diligently consulting Yojo--the name of his black little
3054  god--and Yojo had told him two or three times over, and strongly
3055  insisted upon it everyway, that instead of our going together among
3056  the whaling-fleet in harbor, and in concert selecting our craft;
3057  instead of this, I say, Yojo earnestly enjoined that the selection of
3058  the ship should rest wholly with me, inasmuch as Yojo purposed
3059  befriending us; and, in order to do so, had already pitched upon a
3060  vessel, which, if left to myself, I, Ishmael, should infallibly light
3061  upon, for all the world as though it had turned out by chance; and in
3062  that vessel I must immediately ship myself, for the present
3063  irrespective of Queequeg.
3064  
3065  I have forgotten to mention that, in many things, Queequeg placed
3066  great confidence in the excellence of Yojo's judgment and surprising
3067  forecast of things; and cherished Yojo with considerable esteem, as a
3068  rather good sort of god, who perhaps meant well enough upon the
3069  whole, but in all cases did not succeed in his benevolent designs.
3070  
3071  Now, this plan of Queequeg's, or rather Yojo's, touching the
3072  selection of our craft; I did not like that plan at all.  I had not a
3073  little relied upon Queequeg's sagacity to point out the whaler best
3074  fitted to carry us and our fortunes securely.  But as all my
3075  remonstrances produced no effect upon Queequeg, I was obliged to
3076  acquiesce; and accordingly prepared to set about this business with a
3077  determined rushing sort of energy and vigor, that should quickly
3078  settle that trifling little affair.  Next morning early, leaving
3079  Queequeg shut up with Yojo in our little bedroom--for it seemed that
3080  it was some sort of Lent or Ramadan, or day of fasting, humiliation,
3081  and prayer with Queequeg and Yojo that day; HOW it was I never could
3082  find out, for, though I applied myself to it several times, I never
3083  could master his liturgies and XXXIX Articles--leaving Queequeg,
3084  then, fasting on his tomahawk pipe, and Yojo warming himself at his
3085  sacrificial fire of shavings, I sallied out among the shipping.
3086  After much prolonged sauntering and many random inquiries, I learnt
3087  that there were three ships up for three-years' voyages--The
3088  Devil-dam, the Tit-bit, and the Pequod.  DEVIL-DAM, I do not know
3089  the origin of; TIT-BIT is obvious; PEQUOD, you will no doubt
3090  remember, was the name of a celebrated tribe of Massachusetts
3091  Indians; now extinct as the ancient Medes.  I peered and pryed about
3092  the Devil-dam; from her, hopped over to the Tit-bit; and finally,
3093  going on board the Pequod, looked around her for a moment, and then
3094  decided that this was the very ship for us.
3095  
3096  You may have seen many a quaint craft in your day, for aught I
3097  know;--square-toed luggers; mountainous Japanese junks; butter-box
3098  galliots, and what not; but take my word for it, you never saw such a
3099  rare old craft as this same rare old Pequod.  She was a ship of the
3100  old school, rather small if anything; with an old-fashioned
3101  claw-footed look about her.  Long seasoned and weather-stained in the
3102  typhoons and calms of all four oceans, her old hull's complexion was
3103  darkened like a French grenadier's, who has alike fought in Egypt and
3104  Siberia.  Her venerable bows looked bearded.  Her masts--cut
3105  somewhere on the coast of Japan, where her original ones were lost
3106  overboard in a gale--her masts stood stiffly up like the spines of
3107  the three old kings of Cologne.  Her ancient decks were worn and
3108  wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped flag-stone in Canterbury
3109  Cathedral where Becket bled.  But to all these her old antiquities,
3110  were added new and marvellous features, pertaining to the wild
3111  business that for more than half a century she had followed.  Old
3112  Captain Peleg, many years her chief-mate, before he commanded another
3113  vessel of his own, and now a retired seaman, and one of the principal
3114  owners of the Pequod,--this old Peleg, during the term of his
3115  chief-mateship, had built upon her original grotesqueness, and inlaid
3116  it, all over, with a quaintness both of material and device,
3117  unmatched by anything except it be Thorkill-Hake's carved buckler or
3118  bedstead.  She was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor,
3119  his neck heavy with pendants of polished ivory.  She was a thing of
3120  trophies.  A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the
3121  chased bones of her enemies.  All round, her unpanelled, open
3122  bulwarks were garnished like one continuous jaw, with the long sharp
3123  teeth of the sperm whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her old
3124  hempen thews and tendons to.  Those thews ran not through base blocks
3125  of land wood, but deftly travelled over sheaves of sea-ivory.
3126  Scorning a turnstile wheel at her reverend helm, she sported there a
3127  tiller; and that tiller was in one mass, curiously carved from the
3128  long narrow lower jaw of her hereditary foe.  The helmsman who
3129  steered by that tiller in a tempest, felt like the Tartar, when he
3130  holds back his fiery steed by clutching its jaw.  A noble craft, but
3131  somehow a most melancholy!  All noble things are touched with that.
3132  
3133  Now when I looked about the quarter-deck, for some one having
3134  authority, in order to propose myself as a candidate for the voyage,
3135  at first I saw nobody; but I could not well overlook a strange sort
3136  of tent, or rather wigwam, pitched a little behind the main-mast.  It
3137  seemed only a temporary erection used in port.  It was of a conical
3138  shape, some ten feet high; consisting of the long, huge slabs of
3139  limber black bone taken from the middle and highest part of the jaws
3140  of the right-whale.  Planted with their broad ends on the deck, a
3141  circle of these slabs laced together, mutually sloped towards each
3142  other, and at the apex united in a tufted point, where the loose
3143  hairy fibres waved to and fro like the top-knot on some old
3144  Pottowottamie Sachem's head.  A triangular opening faced towards the
3145  bows of the ship, so that the insider commanded a complete view
3146  forward.
3147  
3148  And half concealed in this queer tenement, I at length found one who
3149  by his aspect seemed to have authority; and who, it being noon, and
3150  the ship's work suspended, was now enjoying respite from the burden
3151  of command.  He was seated on an old-fashioned oaken chair, wriggling
3152  all over with curious carving; and the bottom of which was formed of
3153  a stout interlacing of the same elastic stuff of which the wigwam was
3154  constructed.
3155  
3156  There was nothing so very particular, perhaps, about the appearance
3157  of the elderly man I saw; he was brown and brawny, like most old
3158  seamen, and heavily rolled up in blue pilot-cloth, cut in the Quaker
3159  style; only there was a fine and almost microscopic net-work of the
3160  minutest wrinkles interlacing round his eyes, which must have arisen
3161  from his continual sailings in many hard gales, and always looking to
3162  windward;--for this causes the muscles about the eyes to become
3163  pursed together.  Such eye-wrinkles are very effectual in a scowl.
3164  
3165  "Is this the Captain of the Pequod?" said I, advancing to the door of
3166  the tent.
3167  
3168  "Supposing it be the captain of the Pequod, what dost thou want of
3169  him?" he demanded.
3170  
3171  "I was thinking of shipping."
3172  
3173  "Thou wast, wast thou?  I see thou art no Nantucketer--ever been in
3174  a stove boat?"
3175  
3176  "No, Sir, I never have."
3177  
3178  "Dost know nothing at all about whaling, I dare say--eh?
3179  
3180  "Nothing, Sir; but I have no doubt I shall soon learn.  I've been
3181  several voyages in the merchant service, and I think that--"
3182  
3183  "Merchant service be damned.  Talk not that lingo to me.  Dost see
3184  that leg?--I'll take that leg away from thy stern, if ever thou
3185  talkest of the marchant service to me again.  Marchant service
3186  indeed!  I suppose now ye feel considerable proud of having served in
3187  those marchant ships.  But flukes! man, what makes thee want to go a
3188  whaling, eh?--it looks a little suspicious, don't it, eh?--Hast not
3189  been a pirate, hast thou?--Didst not rob thy last Captain, didst
3190  thou?--Dost not think of murdering the officers when thou gettest to
3191  sea?"
3192  
3193  I protested my innocence of these things.  I saw that under the mask
3194  of these half humorous innuendoes, this old seaman, as an insulated
3195  Quakerish Nantucketer, was full of his insular prejudices, and rather
3196  distrustful of all aliens, unless they hailed from Cape Cod or the
3197  Vineyard.
3198  
3199  "But what takes thee a-whaling?  I want to know that before I think
3200  of shipping ye."
3201  
3202  "Well, sir, I want to see what whaling is.  I want to see the world."
3203  
3204  "Want to see what whaling is, eh?  Have ye clapped eye on Captain
3205  Ahab?"
3206  
3207  "Who is Captain Ahab, sir?"
3208  
3209  "Aye, aye, I thought so.  Captain Ahab is the Captain of this ship."
3210  
3211  "I am mistaken then.  I thought I was speaking to the Captain
3212  himself."
3213  
3214  "Thou art speaking to Captain Peleg--that's who ye are speaking to,
3215  young man.  It belongs to me and Captain Bildad to see the Pequod
3216  fitted out for the voyage, and supplied with all her needs, including
3217  crew.  We are part owners and agents.  But as I was going to say, if
3218  thou wantest to know what whaling is, as thou tellest ye do, I can
3219  put ye in a way of finding it out before ye bind yourself to it, past
3220  backing out.  Clap eye on Captain Ahab, young man, and thou wilt find
3221  that he has only one leg."
3222  
3223  "What do you mean, sir?  Was the other one lost by a whale?"
3224  
3225  "Lost by a whale!  Young man, come nearer to me: it was devoured,
3226  chewed up, crunched by the monstrousest parmacetty that ever chipped
3227  a boat!--ah, ah!"
3228  
3229  I was a little alarmed by his energy, perhaps also a little touched
3230  at the hearty grief in his concluding exclamation, but said as calmly
3231  as I could, "What you say is no doubt true enough, sir; but how could
3232  I know there was any peculiar ferocity in that particular whale,
3233  though indeed I might have inferred as much from the simple fact of
3234  the accident."
3235  
3236  "Look ye now, young man, thy lungs are a sort of soft, d'ye see; thou
3237  dost not talk shark a bit.  SURE, ye've been to sea before now; sure
3238  of that?"
3239  
3240  "Sir," said I, "I thought I told you that I had been four voyages in
3241  the merchant--"
3242  
3243  "Hard down out of that!  Mind what I said about the marchant
3244  service--don't aggravate me--I won't have it.  But let us understand
3245  each other.  I have given thee a hint about what whaling is; do ye
3246  yet feel inclined for it?"
3247  
3248  "I do, sir."
3249  
3250  "Very good.  Now, art thou the man to pitch a harpoon down a live
3251  whale's throat, and then jump after it?  Answer, quick!"
3252  
3253  "I am, sir, if it should be positively indispensable to do so; not to
3254  be got rid of, that is; which I don't take to be the fact."
3255  
3256  "Good again.  Now then, thou not only wantest to go a-whaling, to
3257  find out by experience what whaling is, but ye also want to go in
3258  order to see the world?  Was not that what ye said?  I thought so.
3259  Well then, just step forward there, and take a peep over the
3260  weather-bow, and then back to me and tell me what ye see there."
3261  
3262  For a moment I stood a little puzzled by this curious request, not
3263  knowing exactly how to take it, whether humorously or in earnest.
3264  But concentrating all his crow's feet into one scowl, Captain Peleg
3265  started me on the errand.
3266  
3267  Going forward and glancing over the weather bow, I perceived that the
3268  ship swinging to her anchor with the flood-tide, was now obliquely
3269  pointing towards the open ocean.  The prospect was unlimited, but
3270  exceedingly monotonous and forbidding; not the slightest variety that
3271  I could see.
3272  
3273  "Well, what's the report?" said Peleg when I came back; "what did ye
3274  see?"
3275  
3276  "Not much," I replied--"nothing but water; considerable horizon
3277  though, and there's a squall coming up, I think."
3278  
3279  "Well, what does thou think then of seeing the world?  Do ye wish to
3280  go round Cape Horn to see any more of it, eh?  Can't ye see the world
3281  where you stand?"
3282  
3283  I was a little staggered, but go a-whaling I must, and I would; and
3284  the Pequod was as good a ship as any--I thought the best--and all
3285  this I now repeated to Peleg.  Seeing me so determined, he expressed
3286  his willingness to ship me.
3287  
3288  "And thou mayest as well sign the papers right off," he added--"come
3289  along with ye."  And so saying, he led the way below deck into the
3290  cabin.
3291  
3292  Seated on the transom was what seemed to me a most uncommon and
3293  surprising figure.  It turned out to be Captain Bildad, who along
3294  with Captain Peleg was one of the largest owners of the vessel; the
3295  other shares, as is sometimes the case in these ports, being held by
3296  a crowd of old annuitants; widows, fatherless children, and chancery
3297  wards; each owning about the value of a timber head, or a foot of
3298  plank, or a nail or two in the ship.  People in Nantucket invest
3299  their money in whaling vessels, the same way that you do yours in
3300  approved state stocks bringing in good interest.
3301  
3302  Now, Bildad, like Peleg, and indeed many other Nantucketers, was a
3303  Quaker, the island having been originally settled by that sect; and
3304  to this day its inhabitants in general retain in an uncommon measure
3305  the peculiarities of the Quaker, only variously and anomalously
3306  modified by things altogether alien and heterogeneous.  For some of
3307  these same Quakers are the most sanguinary of all sailors and
3308  whale-hunters.  They are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a
3309  vengeance.
3310  
3311  So that there are instances among them of men, who, named with
3312  Scripture names--a singularly common fashion on the island--and in
3313  childhood naturally imbibing the stately dramatic thee and thou of
3314  the Quaker idiom; still, from the audacious, daring, and boundless
3315  adventure of their subsequent lives, strangely blend with these
3316  unoutgrown peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes of character, not
3317  unworthy a Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman.  And
3318  when these things unite in a man of greatly superior natural force,
3319  with a globular brain and a ponderous heart; who has also by the
3320  stillness and seclusion of many long night-watches in the remotest
3321  waters, and beneath constellations never seen here at the north, been
3322  led to think untraditionally and independently; receiving all
3323  nature's sweet or savage impressions fresh from her own virgin
3324  voluntary and confiding breast, and thereby chiefly, but with some
3325  help from accidental advantages, to learn a bold and nervous lofty
3326  language--that man makes one in a whole nation's census--a mighty
3327  pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies.  Nor will it at all
3328  detract from him, dramatically regarded, if either by birth or other
3329  circumstances, he have what seems a half wilful overruling morbidness
3330  at the bottom of his nature.  For all men tragically great are made
3331  so through a certain morbidness.  Be sure of this, O young ambition,
3332  all mortal greatness is but disease.  But, as yet we have not to do
3333  with such an one, but with quite another; and still a man, who, if
3334  indeed peculiar, it only results again from another phase of the
3335  Quaker, modified by individual circumstances.
3336  
3337  Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a well-to-do, retired
3338  whaleman.  But unlike Captain Peleg--who cared not a rush for what
3339  are called serious things, and indeed deemed those self-same serious
3340  things the veriest of all trifles--Captain Bildad had not only been
3341  originally educated according to the strictest sect of Nantucket
3342  Quakerism, but all his subsequent ocean life, and the sight of many
3343  unclad, lovely island creatures, round the Horn--all that had not
3344  moved this native born Quaker one single jot, had not so much as
3345  altered one angle of his vest.  Still, for all this immutableness,
3346  was there some lack of common consistency about worthy Captain
3347  Peleg.  Though refusing, from conscientious scruples, to bear arms
3348  against land invaders, yet himself had illimitably invaded the
3349  Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn foe to human bloodshed, yet
3350  had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns upon tuns of
3351  leviathan gore.  How now in the contemplative evening of his days,
3352  the pious Bildad reconciled these things in the reminiscence, I do
3353  not know; but it did not seem to concern him much, and very probably
3354  he had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a
3355  man's religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another.
3356  This world pays dividends.  Rising from a little cabin-boy in short
3357  clothes of the drabbest drab, to a harpooneer in a broad shad-bellied
3358  waistcoat; from that becoming boat-header, chief-mate, and captain,
3359  and finally a ship owner; Bildad, as I hinted before, had concluded
3360  his adventurous career by wholly retiring from active life at the
3361  goodly age of sixty, and dedicating his remaining days to the quiet
3362  receiving of his well-earned income.
3363  
3364  Now, Bildad, I am sorry to say, had the reputation of being an
3365  incorrigible old hunks, and in his sea-going days, a bitter, hard
3366  task-master.  They told me in Nantucket, though it certainly seems a
3367  curious story, that when he sailed the old Categut whaleman, his
3368  crew, upon arriving home, were mostly all carried ashore to the
3369  hospital, sore exhausted and worn out.  For a pious man, especially
3370  for a Quaker, he was certainly rather hard-hearted, to say the
3371  least.  He never used to swear, though, at his men, they said; but
3372  somehow he got an inordinate quantity of cruel, unmitigated hard work
3373  out of them.  When Bildad was a chief-mate, to have his drab-coloured
3374  eye intently looking at you, made you feel completely nervous, till
3375  you could clutch something--a hammer or a marling-spike, and go to
3376  work like mad, at something or other, never mind what.  Indolence and
3377  idleness perished before him.  His own person was the exact
3378  embodiment of his utilitarian character.  On his long, gaunt body, he
3379  carried no spare flesh, no superfluous beard, his chin having a soft,
3380  economical nap to it, like the worn nap of his broad-brimmed hat.
3381  
3382  Such, then, was the person that I saw seated on the transom when I
3383  followed Captain Peleg down into the cabin.  The space between the
3384  decks was small; and there, bolt-upright, sat old Bildad, who always
3385  sat so, and never leaned, and this to save his coat tails.  His
3386  broad-brim was placed beside him; his legs were stiffly crossed; his
3387  drab vesture was buttoned up to his chin; and spectacles on nose, he
3388  seemed absorbed in reading from a ponderous volume.
3389  
3390  "Bildad," cried Captain Peleg, "at it again, Bildad, eh?  Ye have
3391  been studying those Scriptures, now, for the last thirty years, to my
3392  certain knowledge.  How far ye got, Bildad?"
3393  
3394  As if long habituated to such profane talk from his old shipmate,
3395  Bildad, without noticing his present irreverence, quietly looked up,
3396  and seeing me, glanced again inquiringly towards Peleg.
3397  
3398  "He says he's our man, Bildad," said Peleg, "he wants to ship."
3399  
3400  "Dost thee?" said Bildad, in a hollow tone, and turning round to me.
3401  
3402  "I dost," said I unconsciously, he was so intense a Quaker.
3403  
3404  "What do ye think of him, Bildad?" said Peleg.
3405  
3406  "He'll do," said Bildad, eyeing me, and then went on spelling away at
3407  his book in a mumbling tone quite audible.
3408  
3409  I thought him the queerest old Quaker I ever saw, especially as
3410  Peleg, his friend and old shipmate, seemed such a blusterer.  But I
3411  said nothing, only looking round me sharply.  Peleg now threw open a
3412  chest, and drawing forth the ship's articles, placed pen and ink
3413  before him, and seated himself at a little table.  I began to think
3414  it was high time to settle with myself at what terms I would be
3415  willing to engage for the voyage.  I was already aware that in the
3416  whaling business they paid no wages; but all hands, including the
3417  captain, received certain shares of the profits called lays, and that
3418  these lays were proportioned to the degree of importance pertaining
3419  to the respective duties of the ship's company.  I was also aware
3420  that being a green hand at whaling, my own lay would not be very
3421  large; but considering that I was used to the sea, could steer a
3422  ship, splice a rope, and all that, I made no doubt that from all I
3423  had heard I should be offered at least the 275th lay--that is, the
3424  275th part of the clear net proceeds of the voyage, whatever that
3425  might eventually amount to.  And though the 275th lay was what they
3426  call a rather LONG LAY, yet it was better than nothing; and if we had
3427  a lucky voyage, might pretty nearly pay for the clothing I would wear
3428  out on it, not to speak of my three years' beef and board, for which
3429  I would not have to pay one stiver.
3430  
3431  It might be thought that this was a poor way to accumulate a princely
3432  fortune--and so it was, a very poor way indeed.  But I am one of
3433  those that never take on about princely fortunes, and am quite
3434  content if the world is ready to board and lodge me, while I am
3435  putting up at this grim sign of the Thunder Cloud.  Upon the whole, I
3436  thought that the 275th lay would be about the fair thing, but would not
3437  have been surprised had I been offered the 200th, considering I was
3438  of a broad-shouldered make.
3439  
3440  But one thing, nevertheless, that made me a little distrustful about
3441  receiving a generous share of the profits was this: Ashore, I had
3442  heard something of both Captain Peleg and his unaccountable old crony
3443  Bildad; how that they being the principal proprietors of the Pequod,
3444  therefore the other and more inconsiderable and scattered owners,
3445  left nearly the whole management of the ship's affairs to these two.
3446  And I did not know but what the stingy old Bildad might have a mighty
3447  deal to say about shipping hands, especially as I now found him on
3448  board the Pequod, quite at home there in the cabin, and reading his
3449  Bible as if at his own fireside.  Now while Peleg was vainly trying
3450  to mend a pen with his jack-knife, old Bildad, to my no small
3451  surprise, considering that he was such an interested party in these
3452  proceedings; Bildad never heeded us, but went on mumbling to himself
3453  out of his book, "LAY not up for yourselves treasures upon earth,
3454  where moth--"
3455  
3456  "Well, Captain Bildad," interrupted Peleg, "what d'ye say, what lay
3457  shall we give this young man?"
3458  
3459  "Thou knowest best," was the sepulchral reply, "the seven hundred and
3460  seventy-seventh wouldn't be too much, would it?--'where moth and rust
3461  do corrupt, but LAY--'"
3462  
3463  LAY, indeed, thought I, and such a lay! the seven hundred and
3464  seventy-seventh!  Well, old Bildad, you are determined that I, for
3465  one, shall not LAY up many LAYS here below, where moth and rust do
3466  corrupt.  It was an exceedingly LONG LAY that, indeed; and though
3467  from the magnitude of the figure it might at first deceive a
3468  landsman, yet the slightest consideration will show that though seven
3469  hundred and seventy-seven is a pretty large number, yet, when you
3470  come to make a TEENTH of it, you will then see, I say, that the seven
3471  hundred and seventy-seventh part of a farthing is a good deal less
3472  than seven hundred and seventy-seven gold doubloons; and so I thought
3473  at the time.
3474  
3475  "Why, blast your eyes, Bildad," cried Peleg, "thou dost not want to
3476  swindle this young man! he must have more than that."
3477  
3478  "Seven hundred and seventy-seventh," again said Bildad, without
3479  lifting his eyes; and then went on mumbling--"for where your treasure
3480  is, there will your heart be also."
3481  
3482  "I am going to put him down for the three hundredth," said Peleg, "do
3483  ye hear that, Bildad!  The three hundredth lay, I say."
3484  
3485  Bildad laid down his book, and turning solemnly towards him said,
3486  "Captain Peleg, thou hast a generous heart; but thou must consider
3487  the duty thou owest to the other owners of this ship--widows and
3488  orphans, many of them--and that if we too abundantly reward the
3489  labors of this young man, we may be taking the bread from those
3490  widows and those orphans.  The seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay,
3491  Captain Peleg."
3492  
3493  "Thou Bildad!" roared Peleg, starting up and clattering about the
3494  cabin.  "Blast ye, Captain Bildad, if I had followed thy advice in
3495  these matters, I would afore now had a conscience to lug about that
3496  would be heavy enough to founder the largest ship that ever sailed
3497  round Cape Horn."
3498  
3499  "Captain Peleg," said Bildad steadily, "thy conscience may be drawing
3500  ten inches of water, or ten fathoms, I can't tell; but as thou art
3501  still an impenitent man, Captain Peleg, I greatly fear lest thy
3502  conscience be but a leaky one; and will in the end sink thee
3503  foundering down to the fiery pit, Captain Peleg."
3504  
3505  "Fiery pit! fiery pit! ye insult me, man; past all natural bearing,
3506  ye insult me.  It's an all-fired outrage to tell any human creature
3507  that he's bound to hell.  Flukes and flames!  Bildad, say that again
3508  to me, and start my soul-bolts, but I'll--I'll--yes, I'll swallow a
3509  live goat with all his hair and horns on.  Out of the cabin, ye
3510  canting, drab-coloured son of a wooden gun--a straight wake with ye!"
3511  
3512  As he thundered out this he made a rush at Bildad, but with a
3513  marvellous oblique, sliding celerity, Bildad for that time eluded
3514  him.
3515  
3516  Alarmed at this terrible outburst between the two principal and
3517  responsible owners of the ship, and feeling half a mind to give up
3518  all idea of sailing in a vessel so questionably owned and temporarily
3519  commanded, I stepped aside from the door to give egress to Bildad,
3520  who, I made no doubt, was all eagerness to vanish from before the
3521  awakened wrath of Peleg.  But to my astonishment, he sat down again
3522  on the transom very quietly, and seemed to have not the slightest
3523  intention of withdrawing.  He seemed quite used to impenitent Peleg
3524  and his ways.  As for Peleg, after letting off his rage as he had,
3525  there seemed no more left in him, and he, too, sat down like a lamb,
3526  though he twitched a little as if still nervously agitated.  "Whew!"
3527  he whistled at last--"the squall's gone off to leeward, I think.
3528  Bildad, thou used to be good at sharpening a lance, mend that pen,
3529  will ye.  My jack-knife here needs the grindstone.  That's he; thank
3530  ye, Bildad.  Now then, my young man, Ishmael's thy name, didn't ye
3531  say?  Well then, down ye go here, Ishmael, for the three hundredth
3532  lay."
3533  
3534  "Captain Peleg," said I, "I have a friend with me who wants to ship
3535  too--shall I bring him down to-morrow?"
3536  
3537  "To be sure," said Peleg.  "Fetch him along, and we'll look at him."
3538  
3539  "What lay does he want?" groaned Bildad, glancing up from the book
3540  in which he had again been burying himself.
3541  
3542  "Oh! never thee mind about that, Bildad," said Peleg.  "Has he ever
3543  whaled it any?" turning to me.
3544  
3545  "Killed more whales than I can count, Captain Peleg."
3546  
3547  "Well, bring him along then."
3548  
3549  And, after signing the papers, off I went; nothing doubting but that
3550  I had done a good morning's work, and that the Pequod was the
3551  identical ship that Yojo had provided to carry Queequeg and me round
3552  the Cape.
3553  
3554  But I had not proceeded far, when I began to bethink me that the
3555  Captain with whom I was to sail yet remained unseen by me; though,
3556  indeed, in many cases, a whale-ship will be completely fitted out,
3557  and receive all her crew on board, ere the captain makes himself
3558  visible by arriving to take command; for sometimes these voyages are
3559  so prolonged, and the shore intervals at home so exceedingly brief,
3560  that if the captain have a family, or any absorbing concernment of
3561  that sort, he does not trouble himself much about his ship in port,
3562  but leaves her to the owners till all is ready for sea.  However, it
3563  is always as well to have a look at him before irrevocably committing
3564  yourself into his hands.  Turning back I accosted Captain Peleg,
3565  inquiring where Captain Ahab was to be found.
3566  
3567  "And what dost thou want of Captain Ahab?  It's all right enough;
3568  thou art shipped."
3569  
3570  "Yes, but I should like to see him."
3571  
3572  "But I don't think thou wilt be able to at present.  I don't know
3573  exactly what's the matter with him; but he keeps close inside the
3574  house; a sort of sick, and yet he don't look so.  In fact, he ain't
3575  sick; but no, he isn't well either.  Any how, young man, he won't
3576  always see me, so I don't suppose he will thee.  He's a queer man,
3577  Captain Ahab--so some think--but a good one.  Oh, thou'lt like him
3578  well enough; no fear, no fear.  He's a grand, ungodly, god-like man,
3579  Captain Ahab; doesn't speak much; but, when he does speak, then you
3580  may well listen.  Mark ye, be forewarned; Ahab's above the common;
3581  Ahab's been in colleges, as well as 'mong the cannibals; been used to
3582  deeper wonders than the waves; fixed his fiery lance in mightier,
3583  stranger foes than whales.  His lance! aye, the keenest and the surest
3584  that out of all our isle!  Oh! he ain't Captain Bildad; no, and he
3585  ain't Captain Peleg; HE'S AHAB, boy; and Ahab of old, thou knowest,
3586  was a crowned king!"
3587  
3588  "And a very vile one.  When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did
3589  they not lick his blood?"
3590  
3591  "Come hither to me--hither, hither," said Peleg, with a significance
3592  in his eye that almost startled me.  "Look ye, lad; never say that on
3593  board the Pequod.  Never say it anywhere.  Captain Ahab did not name
3594  himself.  'Twas a foolish, ignorant whim of his crazy, widowed
3595  mother, who died when he was only a twelvemonth old.  And yet the old
3596  squaw Tistig, at Gayhead, said that the name would somehow prove
3597  prophetic.  And, perhaps, other fools like her may tell thee the
3598  same.  I wish to warn thee.  It's a lie.  I know Captain Ahab well;
3599  I've sailed with him as mate years ago; I know what he is--a good
3600  man--not a pious, good man, like Bildad, but a swearing good
3601  man--something like me--only there's a good deal more of him.  Aye,
3602  aye, I know that he was never very jolly; and I know that on the
3603  passage home, he was a little out of his mind for a spell; but it was
3604  the sharp shooting pains in his bleeding stump that brought that
3605  about, as any one might see.  I know, too, that ever since he lost
3606  his leg last voyage by that accursed whale, he's been a kind of
3607  moody--desperate moody, and savage sometimes; but that will all pass
3608  off.  And once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee, young man,
3609  it's better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad
3610  one.  So good-bye to thee--and wrong not Captain Ahab, because he
3611  happens to have a wicked name.  Besides, my boy, he has a wife--not
3612  three voyages wedded--a sweet, resigned girl.  Think of that; by that
3613  sweet girl that old man has a child: hold ye then there can be any
3614  utter, hopeless harm in Ahab?  No, no, my lad; stricken, blasted, if
3615  he be, Ahab has his humanities!"
3616  
3617  As I walked away, I was full of thoughtfulness; what had been
3618  incidentally revealed to me of Captain Ahab, filled me with a certain
3619  wild vagueness of painfulness concerning him.  And somehow, at the
3620  time, I felt a sympathy and a sorrow for him, but for I don't know
3621  what, unless it was the cruel loss of his leg.  And yet I also felt a
3622  strange awe of him; but that sort of awe, which I cannot at all
3623  describe, was not exactly awe; I do not know what it was.  But I felt
3624  it; and it did not disincline me towards him; though I felt
3625  impatience at what seemed like mystery in him, so imperfectly as he
3626  was known to me then.  However, my thoughts were at length carried in
3627  other directions, so that for the present dark Ahab slipped my mind.
3628  
3629  
3630  
3631  CHAPTER 17
3632  
3633  The Ramadan.
3634  
3635  
3636  As Queequeg's Ramadan, or Fasting and Humiliation, was to continue
3637  all day, I did not choose to disturb him till towards night-fall; for
3638  I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody's religious
3639  obligations, never mind how comical, and could not find it in my
3640  heart to undervalue even a congregation of ants worshipping a
3641  toad-stool; or those other creatures in certain parts of our earth,
3642  who with a degree of footmanism quite unprecedented in other planets,
3643  bow down before the torso of a deceased landed proprietor merely on
3644  account of the inordinate possessions yet owned and rented in his
3645  name.
3646  
3647  I say, we good Presbyterian Christians should be charitable in these
3648  things, and not fancy ourselves so vastly superior to other mortals,
3649  pagans and what not, because of their half-crazy conceits on these
3650  subjects.  There was Queequeg, now, certainly entertaining the most
3651  absurd notions about Yojo and his Ramadan;--but what of that?
3652  Queequeg thought he knew what he was about, I suppose; he seemed to
3653  be content; and there let him rest.  All our arguing with him would
3654  not avail; let him be, I say: and Heaven have mercy on us
3655  all--Presbyterians and Pagans alike--for we are all somehow
3656  dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.
3657  
3658  Towards evening, when I felt assured that all his performances and
3659  rituals must be over, I went up to his room and knocked at the door;
3660  but no answer.  I tried to open it, but it was fastened inside.
3661  "Queequeg," said I softly through the key-hole:--all silent.  "I say,
3662  Queequeg! why don't you speak?  It's I--Ishmael."  But all remained
3663  still as before.  I began to grow alarmed.  I had allowed him such
3664  abundant time; I thought he might have had an apoplectic fit.  I
3665  looked through the key-hole; but the door opening into an odd corner
3666  of the room, the key-hole prospect was but a crooked and sinister
3667  one.  I could only see part of the foot-board of the bed and a line
3668  of the wall, but nothing more.  I was surprised to behold resting
3669  against the wall the wooden shaft of Queequeg's harpoon, which the
3670  landlady the evening previous had taken from him, before our mounting
3671  to the chamber.  That's strange, thought I; but at any rate, since
3672  the harpoon stands yonder, and he seldom or never goes abroad without
3673  it, therefore he must be inside here, and no possible mistake.
3674  
3675  "Queequeg!--Queequeg!"--all still.  Something must have happened.
3676  Apoplexy!  I tried to burst open the door; but it stubbornly
3677  resisted.  Running down stairs, I quickly stated my suspicions to the
3678  first person I met--the chamber-maid.  "La! la!" she cried, "I
3679  thought something must be the matter.  I went to make the bed after
3680  breakfast, and the door was locked; and not a mouse to be heard; and
3681  it's been just so silent ever since.  But I thought, may be, you had
3682  both gone off and locked your baggage in for safe keeping.  La! la,
3683  ma'am!--Mistress! murder!  Mrs. Hussey! apoplexy!"--and with these
3684  cries, she ran towards the kitchen, I following.
3685  
3686  Mrs. Hussey soon appeared, with a mustard-pot in one hand and a
3687  vinegar-cruet in the other, having just broken away from the
3688  occupation of attending to the castors, and scolding her little black
3689  boy meantime.
3690  
3691  "Wood-house!" cried I, "which way to it?  Run for God's sake, and
3692  fetch something to pry open the door--the axe!--the axe! he's had a
3693  stroke; depend upon it!"--and so saying I was unmethodically rushing
3694  up stairs again empty-handed, when Mrs. Hussey interposed the
3695  mustard-pot and vinegar-cruet, and the entire castor of her
3696  countenance.
3697  
3698  "What's the matter with you, young man?"
3699  
3700  "Get the axe!  For God's sake, run for the doctor, some one, while I
3701  pry it open!"
3702  
3703  "Look here," said the landlady, quickly putting down the
3704  vinegar-cruet, so as to have one hand free; "look here; are you
3705  talking about prying open any of my doors?"--and with that she seized
3706  my arm.  "What's the matter with you?  What's the matter with you,
3707  shipmate?"
3708  
3709  In as calm, but rapid a manner as possible, I gave her to understand
3710  the whole case.  Unconsciously clapping the vinegar-cruet to one side
3711  of her nose, she ruminated for an instant; then exclaimed--"No!  I
3712  haven't seen it since I put it there."  Running to a little closet
3713  under the landing of the stairs, she glanced in, and returning, told
3714  me that Queequeg's harpoon was missing.  "He's killed himself," she
3715  cried.  "It's unfort'nate Stiggs done over again there goes another
3716  counterpane--God pity his poor mother!--it will be the ruin of my
3717  house.  Has the poor lad a sister?  Where's that girl?--there, Betty,
3718  go to Snarles the Painter, and tell him to paint me a sign, with--"no
3719  suicides permitted here, and no smoking in the parlor;"--might as
3720  well kill both birds at once.  Kill?  The Lord be merciful to his
3721  ghost!  What's that noise there?  You, young man, avast there!"
3722  
3723  And running up after me, she caught me as I was again trying to force
3724  open the door.
3725  
3726  "I don't allow it; I won't have my premises spoiled.  Go for the
3727  locksmith, there's one about a mile from here.  But avast!" putting
3728  her hand in her side-pocket, "here's a key that'll fit, I guess;
3729  let's see."  And with that, she turned it in the lock; but, alas!
3730  Queequeg's supplemental bolt remained unwithdrawn within.
3731  
3732  "Have to burst it open," said I, and was running down the entry a
3733  little, for a good start, when the landlady caught at me, again
3734  vowing I should not break down her premises; but I tore from her, and
3735  with a sudden bodily rush dashed myself full against the mark.
3736  
3737  With a prodigious noise the door flew open, and the knob slamming
3738  against the wall, sent the plaster to the ceiling; and there, good
3739  heavens! there sat Queequeg, altogether cool and self-collected;
3740  right in the middle of the room; squatting on his hams, and holding
3741  Yojo on top of his head.  He looked neither one way nor the other
3742  way, but sat like a carved image with scarce a sign of active life.
3743  
3744  "Queequeg," said I, going up to him, "Queequeg, what's the matter
3745  with you?"
3746  
3747  "He hain't been a sittin' so all day, has he?" said the landlady.
3748  
3749  But all we said, not a word could we drag out of him; I almost felt
3750  like pushing him over, so as to change his position, for it was
3751  almost intolerable, it seemed so painfully and unnaturally
3752  constrained; especially, as in all probability he had been sitting so
3753  for upwards of eight or ten hours, going too without his regular
3754  meals.
3755  
3756  "Mrs. Hussey," said I, "he's ALIVE at all events; so leave us, if you
3757  please, and I will see to this strange affair myself."
3758  
3759  Closing the door upon the landlady, I endeavored to prevail upon
3760  Queequeg to take a chair; but in vain.  There he sat; and all he
3761  could do--for all my polite arts and blandishments--he would not move
3762  a peg, nor say a single word, nor even look at me, nor notice my
3763  presence in the slightest way.
3764  
3765  I wonder, thought I, if this can possibly be a part of his Ramadan;
3766  do they fast on their hams that way in his native island.  It must be
3767  so; yes, it's part of his creed, I suppose; well, then, let him
3768  rest; he'll get up sooner or later, no doubt.  It can't last for
3769  ever, thank God, and his Ramadan only comes once a year; and I don't
3770  believe it's very punctual then.
3771  
3772  I went down to supper.  After sitting a long time listening to the
3773  long stories of some sailors who had just come from a plum-pudding
3774  voyage, as they called it (that is, a short whaling-voyage in a
3775  schooner or brig, confined to the north of the line, in the Atlantic
3776  Ocean only); after listening to these plum-puddingers till nearly
3777  eleven o'clock, I went up stairs to go to bed, feeling quite sure by
3778  this time Queequeg must certainly have brought his Ramadan to a
3779  termination.  But no; there he was just where I had left him; he had
3780  not stirred an inch.  I began to grow vexed with him; it seemed so
3781  downright senseless and insane to be sitting there all day and half
3782  the night on his hams in a cold room, holding a piece of wood on his
3783  head.
3784  
3785  "For heaven's sake, Queequeg, get up and shake yourself; get up and
3786  have some supper.  You'll starve; you'll kill yourself, Queequeg."
3787  But not a word did he reply.
3788  
3789  Despairing of him, therefore, I determined to go to bed and to sleep;
3790  and no doubt, before a great while, he would follow me.  But previous
3791  to turning in, I took my heavy bearskin jacket, and threw it over
3792  him, as it promised to be a very cold night; and he had nothing but
3793  his ordinary round jacket on.  For some time, do all I would, I could
3794  not get into the faintest doze.  I had blown out the candle; and the
3795  mere thought of Queequeg--not four feet off--sitting there in that
3796  uneasy position, stark alone in the cold and dark; this made me
3797  really wretched.  Think of it; sleeping all night in the same room
3798  with a wide awake pagan on his hams in this dreary, unaccountable
3799  Ramadan!
3800  
3801  But somehow I dropped off at last, and knew nothing more till break
3802  of day; when, looking over the bedside, there squatted Queequeg, as
3803  if he had been screwed down to the floor.  But as soon as the first
3804  glimpse of sun entered the window, up he got, with stiff and grating
3805  joints, but with a cheerful look; limped towards me where I lay;
3806  pressed his forehead again against mine; and said his Ramadan was
3807  over.
3808  
3809  Now, as I before hinted, I have no objection to any person's
3810  religion, be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or
3811  insult any other person, because that other person don't believe it
3812  also.  But when a man's religion becomes really frantic; when it is a
3813  positive torment to him; and, in fine, makes this earth of ours an
3814  uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that
3815  individual aside and argue the point with him.
3816  
3817  And just so I now did with Queequeg.  "Queequeg," said I, "get into
3818  bed now, and lie and listen to me."  I then went on, beginning with
3819  the rise and progress of the primitive religions, and coming down to
3820  the various religions of the present time, during which time I
3821  labored to show Queequeg that all these Lents, Ramadans, and
3822  prolonged ham-squattings in cold, cheerless rooms were stark
3823  nonsense; bad for the health; useless for the soul; opposed, in
3824  short, to the obvious laws of Hygiene and common sense.  I told him,
3825  too, that he being in other things such an extremely sensible and
3826  sagacious savage, it pained me, very badly pained me, to see him now
3827  so deplorably foolish about this ridiculous Ramadan of his.  Besides,
3828  argued I, fasting makes the body cave in; hence the spirit caves in;
3829  and all thoughts born of a fast must necessarily be half-starved.
3830  This is the reason why most dyspeptic religionists cherish such
3831  melancholy notions about their hereafters.  In one word, Queequeg,
3832  said I, rather digressively; hell is an idea first born on an
3833  undigested apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the
3834  hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans.
3835  
3836  I then asked Queequeg whether he himself was ever troubled with
3837  dyspepsia; expressing the idea very plainly, so that he could take it
3838  in.  He said no; only upon one memorable occasion.  It was after a
3839  great feast given by his father the king, on the gaining of a great
3840  battle wherein fifty of the enemy had been killed by about two
3841  o'clock in the afternoon, and all cooked and eaten that very evening.
3842  
3843  "No more, Queequeg," said I, shuddering; "that will do;" for I knew
3844  the inferences without his further hinting them.  I had seen a sailor
3845  who had visited that very island, and he told me that it was the
3846  custom, when a great battle had been gained there, to barbecue all
3847  the slain in the yard or garden of the victor; and then, one by one,
3848  they were placed in great wooden trenchers, and garnished round like
3849  a pilau, with breadfruit and cocoanuts; and with some parsley in
3850  their mouths, were sent round with the victor's compliments to all
3851  his friends, just as though these presents were so many Christmas
3852  turkeys.
3853  
3854  After all, I do not think that my remarks about religion made much
3855  impression upon Queequeg.  Because, in the first place, he somehow
3856  seemed dull of hearing on that important subject, unless considered
3857  from his own point of view; and, in the second place, he did not more
3858  than one third understand me, couch my ideas simply as I would; and,
3859  finally, he no doubt thought he knew a good deal more about the true
3860  religion than I did.  He looked at me with a sort of condescending
3861  concern and compassion, as though he thought it a great pity that
3862  such a sensible young man should be so hopelessly lost to evangelical
3863  pagan piety.
3864  
3865  At last we rose and dressed; and Queequeg, taking a prodigiously
3866  hearty breakfast of chowders of all sorts, so that the landlady
3867  should not make much profit by reason of his Ramadan, we sallied out
3868  to board the Pequod, sauntering along, and picking our teeth with
3869  halibut bones.
3870  
3871  
3872  
3873  CHAPTER 18
3874  
3875  His Mark.
3876  
3877  
3878  As we were walking down the end of the wharf towards the ship,
3879  Queequeg carrying his harpoon, Captain Peleg in his gruff voice
3880  loudly hailed us from his wigwam, saying he had not suspected my
3881  friend was a cannibal, and furthermore announcing that he let no
3882  cannibals on board that craft, unless they previously produced their
3883  papers.
3884  
3885  "What do you mean by that, Captain Peleg?" said I, now jumping on the
3886  bulwarks, and leaving my comrade standing on the wharf.
3887  
3888  "I mean," he replied, "he must show his papers."
3889  
3890  "Yes," said Captain Bildad in his hollow voice, sticking his head
3891  from behind Peleg's, out of the wigwam.  "He must show that he's
3892  converted.  Son of darkness," he added, turning to Queequeg, "art
3893  thou at present in communion with any Christian church?"
3894  
3895  "Why," said I, "he's a member of the first Congregational Church."
3896  Here be it said, that many tattooed savages sailing in Nantucket
3897  ships at last come to be converted into the churches.
3898  
3899  "First Congregational Church," cried Bildad, "what! that worships in
3900  Deacon Deuteronomy Coleman's meeting-house?" and so saying, taking
3901  out his spectacles, he rubbed them with his great yellow bandana
3902  handkerchief, and putting them on very carefully, came out of the
3903  wigwam, and leaning stiffly over the bulwarks, took a good long look
3904  at Queequeg.
3905  
3906  "How long hath he been a member?" he then said, turning to me; "not
3907  very long, I rather guess, young man."
3908  
3909  "No," said Peleg, "and he hasn't been baptized right either, or it
3910  would have washed some of that devil's blue off his face."
3911  
3912  "Do tell, now," cried Bildad, "is this Philistine a regular member of
3913  Deacon Deuteronomy's meeting?  I never saw him going there, and I
3914  pass it every Lord's day."
3915  
3916  "I don't know anything about Deacon Deuteronomy or his meeting," said
3917  I; "all I know is, that Queequeg here is a born member of the First
3918  Congregational Church.  He is a deacon himself, Queequeg is."
3919  
3920  "Young man," said Bildad sternly, "thou art skylarking with
3921  me--explain thyself, thou young Hittite.  What church dost thee mean?
3922  answer me."
3923  
3924  Finding myself thus hard pushed, I replied.  "I mean, sir, the same
3925  ancient Catholic Church to which you and I, and Captain Peleg there,
3926  and Queequeg here, and all of us, and every mother's son and soul of
3927  us belong; the great and everlasting First Congregation of this whole
3928  worshipping world; we all belong to that; only some of us cherish
3929  some queer crotchets no ways touching the grand belief; in THAT we
3930  all join hands."
3931  
3932  "Splice, thou mean'st SPLICE hands," cried Peleg, drawing nearer.
3933  "Young man, you'd better ship for a missionary, instead of a
3934  fore-mast hand; I never heard a better sermon.  Deacon
3935  Deuteronomy--why Father Mapple himself couldn't beat it, and he's
3936  reckoned something.  Come aboard, come aboard; never mind about the
3937  papers.  I say, tell Quohog there--what's that you call him? tell
3938  Quohog to step along.  By the great anchor, what a harpoon he's got
3939  there! looks like good stuff that; and he handles it about right.  I
3940  say, Quohog, or whatever your name is, did you ever stand in the head
3941  of a whale-boat? did you ever strike a fish?"
3942  
3943  Without saying a word, Queequeg, in his wild sort of way, jumped upon
3944  the bulwarks, from thence into the bows of one of the whale-boats
3945  hanging to the side; and then bracing his left knee, and poising his
3946  harpoon, cried out in some such way as this:--
3947  
3948  "Cap'ain, you see him small drop tar on water dere?  You see him?
3949  well, spose him one whale eye, well, den!" and taking sharp aim at
3950  it, he darted the iron right over old Bildad's broad brim, clean
3951  across the ship's decks, and struck the glistening tar spot out of
3952  sight.
3953  
3954  "Now," said Queequeg, quietly hauling in the line, "spos-ee him
3955  whale-e eye; why, dad whale dead."
3956  
3957  "Quick, Bildad," said Peleg, his partner, who, aghast at the close
3958  vicinity of the flying harpoon, had retreated towards the cabin
3959  gangway.  "Quick, I say, you Bildad, and get the ship's papers.  We
3960  must have Hedgehog there, I mean Quohog, in one of our boats.  Look
3961  ye, Quohog, we'll give ye the ninetieth lay, and that's more than
3962  ever was given a harpooneer yet out of Nantucket."
3963  
3964  So down we went into the cabin, and to my great joy Queequeg was soon
3965  enrolled among the same ship's company to which I myself belonged.
3966  
3967  When all preliminaries were over and Peleg had got everything ready
3968  for signing, he turned to me and said, "I guess, Quohog there don't
3969  know how to write, does he?  I say, Quohog, blast ye! dost thou sign
3970  thy name or make thy mark?
3971  
3972  But at this question, Queequeg, who had twice or thrice before taken
3973  part in similar ceremonies, looked no ways abashed; but taking the
3974  offered pen, copied upon the paper, in the proper place, an exact
3975  counterpart of a queer round figure which was tattooed upon his arm;
3976  so that through Captain Peleg's obstinate mistake touching his
3977  appellative, it stood something like this:--
3978  
3979  Quohog.
3980  his X mark.
3981  
3982  Meanwhile Captain Bildad sat earnestly and steadfastly eyeing
3983  Queequeg, and at last rising solemnly and fumbling in the huge
3984  pockets of his broad-skirted drab coat, took out a bundle of tracts,
3985  and selecting one entitled "The Latter Day Coming; or No Time to
3986  Lose," placed it in Queequeg's hands, and then grasping them and the
3987  book with both his, looked earnestly into his eyes, and said, "Son of
3988  darkness, I must do my duty by thee; I am part owner of this ship,
3989  and feel concerned for the souls of all its crew; if thou still
3990  clingest to thy Pagan ways, which I sadly fear, I beseech thee,
3991  remain not for aye a Belial bondsman.  Spurn the idol Bell, and the
3992  hideous dragon; turn from the wrath to come; mind thine eye, I say;
3993  oh! goodness gracious! steer clear of the fiery pit!"
3994  
3995  Something of the salt sea yet lingered in old Bildad's language,
3996  heterogeneously mixed with Scriptural and domestic phrases.
3997  
3998  "Avast there, avast there, Bildad, avast now spoiling our
3999  harpooneer," Peleg.  "Pious harpooneers never make good voyagers--it
4000  takes the shark out of 'em; no harpooneer is worth a straw who aint
4001  pretty sharkish.  There was young Nat Swaine, once the bravest
4002  boat-header out of all Nantucket and the Vineyard; he joined the
4003  meeting, and never came to good.  He got so frightened about his
4004  plaguy soul, that he shrinked and sheered away from whales, for fear
4005  of after-claps, in case he got stove and went to Davy Jones."
4006  
4007  "Peleg!  Peleg!" said Bildad, lifting his eyes and hands, "thou
4008  thyself, as I myself, hast seen many a perilous time; thou knowest,
4009  Peleg, what it is to have the fear of death; how, then, can'st thou
4010  prate in this ungodly guise.  Thou beliest thine own heart, Peleg.
4011  Tell me, when this same Pequod here had her three masts overboard in
4012  that typhoon on Japan, that same voyage when thou went mate with
4013  Captain Ahab, did'st thou not think of Death and the Judgment then?"
4014  
4015  "Hear him, hear him now," cried Peleg, marching across the cabin, and
4016  thrusting his hands far down into his pockets,--"hear him, all of ye.
4017  Think of that!  When every moment we thought the ship would sink!
4018  Death and the Judgment then?  What?  With all three masts making such
4019  an everlasting thundering against the side; and every sea breaking
4020  over us, fore and aft.  Think of Death and the Judgment then?  No!
4021  no time to think about Death then.  Life was what Captain Ahab and I
4022  was thinking of; and how to save all hands--how to rig
4023  jury-masts--how to get into the nearest port; that was what I was
4024  thinking of."
4025  
4026  Bildad said no more, but buttoning up his coat, stalked on deck,
4027  where we followed him.  There he stood, very quietly overlooking some
4028  sailmakers who were mending a top-sail in the waist.  Now and then he
4029  stooped to pick up a patch, or save an end of tarred twine, which
4030  otherwise might have been wasted.
4031  
4032  
4033  
4034  CHAPTER 19
4035  
4036  The Prophet.
4037  
4038  
4039  "Shipmates, have ye shipped in that ship?"
4040  
4041  Queequeg and I had just left the Pequod, and were sauntering away from
4042  the water, for the moment each occupied with his own thoughts, when
4043  the above words were put to us by a stranger, who, pausing before us,
4044  levelled his massive forefinger at the vessel in question.  He was
4045  but shabbily apparelled in faded jacket and patched trowsers; a rag
4046  of a black handkerchief investing his neck.  A confluent small-pox
4047  had in all directions flowed over his face, and left it like the
4048  complicated ribbed bed of a torrent, when the rushing waters have
4049  been dried up.
4050  
4051  "Have ye shipped in her?" he repeated.
4052  
4053  "You mean the ship Pequod, I suppose," said I, trying to gain a
4054  little more time for an uninterrupted look at him.
4055  
4056  "Aye, the Pequod--that ship there," he said, drawing back his whole
4057  arm, and then rapidly shoving it straight out from him, with the
4058  fixed bayonet of his pointed finger darted full at the object.
4059  
4060  "Yes," said I, "we have just signed the articles."
4061  
4062  "Anything down there about your souls?"
4063  
4064  "About what?"
4065  
4066  "Oh, perhaps you hav'n't got any," he said quickly.  "No matter
4067  though, I know many chaps that hav'n't got any,--good luck to 'em;
4068  and they are all the better off for it.  A soul's a sort of a fifth
4069  wheel to a wagon."
4070  
4071  "What are you jabbering about, shipmate?" said I.
4072  
4073  "HE'S got enough, though, to make up for all deficiencies of that
4074  sort in other chaps," abruptly said the stranger, placing a nervous
4075  emphasis upon the word HE.
4076  
4077  "Queequeg," said I, "let's go; this fellow has broken loose from
4078  somewhere; he's talking about something and somebody we don't know."
4079  
4080  "Stop!" cried the stranger.  "Ye said true--ye hav'n't seen Old
4081  Thunder yet, have ye?"
4082  
4083  "Who's Old Thunder?" said I, again riveted with the insane
4084  earnestness of his manner.
4085  
4086  "Captain Ahab."
4087  
4088  "What! the captain of our ship, the Pequod?"
4089  
4090  "Aye, among some of us old sailor chaps, he goes by that name.  Ye
4091  hav'n't seen him yet, have ye?"
4092  
4093  "No, we hav'n't.  He's sick they say, but is getting better, and will
4094  be all right again before long."
4095  
4096  "All right again before long!" laughed the stranger, with a solemnly
4097  derisive sort of laugh.  "Look ye; when Captain Ahab is all right,
4098  then this left arm of mine will be all right; not before."
4099  
4100  "What do you know about him?"
4101  
4102  "What did they TELL you about him?  Say that!"
4103  
4104  "They didn't tell much of anything about him; only I've heard that
4105  he's a good whale-hunter, and a good captain to his crew."
4106  
4107  "That's true, that's true--yes, both true enough.  But you must jump
4108  when he gives an order.  Step and growl; growl and go--that's the
4109  word with Captain Ahab.  But nothing about that thing that happened
4110  to him off Cape Horn, long ago, when he lay like dead for three days
4111  and nights; nothing about that deadly skrimmage with the Spaniard
4112  afore the altar in Santa?--heard nothing about that, eh?  Nothing
4113  about the silver calabash he spat into?  And nothing about his losing
4114  his leg last voyage, according to the prophecy.  Didn't ye hear a
4115  word about them matters and something more, eh?  No, I don't think ye
4116  did; how could ye?  Who knows it?  Not all Nantucket, I guess.  But
4117  hows'ever, mayhap, ye've heard tell about the leg, and how he lost
4118  it; aye, ye have heard of that, I dare say.  Oh yes, THAT every one
4119  knows a'most--I mean they know he's only one leg; and that a
4120  parmacetti took the other off."
4121  
4122  "My friend," said I, "what all this gibberish of yours is about, I
4123  don't know, and I don't much care; for it seems to me that you must
4124  be a little damaged in the head.  But if you are speaking of Captain
4125  Ahab, of that ship there, the Pequod, then let me tell you, that I
4126  know all about the loss of his leg."
4127  
4128  "ALL about it, eh--sure you do?--all?"
4129  
4130  "Pretty sure."
4131  
4132  With finger pointed and eye levelled at the Pequod, the beggar-like
4133  stranger stood a moment, as if in a troubled reverie; then starting a
4134  little, turned and said:--"Ye've shipped, have ye?  Names down on the
4135  papers?  Well, well, what's signed, is signed; and what's to be, will
4136  be; and then again, perhaps it won't be, after all.  Anyhow, it's
4137  all fixed and arranged a'ready; and some sailors or other must go
4138  with him, I suppose; as well these as any other men, God pity 'em!
4139  Morning to ye, shipmates, morning; the ineffable heavens bless ye;
4140  I'm sorry I stopped ye."
4141  
4142  "Look here, friend," said I, "if you have anything important to tell
4143  us, out with it; but if you are only trying to bamboozle us, you are
4144  mistaken in your game; that's all I have to say."
4145  
4146  "And it's said very well, and I like to hear a chap talk up that way;
4147  you are just the man for him--the likes of ye.  Morning to ye,
4148  shipmates, morning!  Oh! when ye get there, tell 'em I've concluded
4149  not to make one of 'em."
4150  
4151  "Ah, my dear fellow, you can't fool us that way--you can't fool us.
4152  It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a
4153  great secret in him."
4154  
4155  "Morning to ye, shipmates, morning."
4156  
4157  "Morning it is," said I.  "Come along, Queequeg, let's leave this
4158  crazy man.  But stop, tell me your name, will you?"
4159  
4160  "Elijah."
4161  
4162  Elijah! thought I, and we walked away, both commenting, after each
4163  other's fashion, upon this ragged old sailor; and agreed that he was
4164  nothing but a humbug, trying to be a bugbear.  But we had not gone
4165  perhaps above a hundred yards, when chancing to turn a corner, and
4166  looking back as I did so, who should be seen but Elijah following us,
4167  though at a distance.  Somehow, the sight of him struck me so, that I
4168  said nothing to Queequeg of his being behind, but passed on with my
4169  comrade, anxious to see whether the stranger would turn the same
4170  corner that we did.  He did; and then it seemed to me that he was
4171  dogging us, but with what intent I could not for the life of me
4172  imagine.  This circumstance, coupled with his ambiguous,
4173  half-hinting, half-revealing, shrouded sort of talk, now begat in me
4174  all kinds of vague wonderments and half-apprehensions, and all
4175  connected with the Pequod; and Captain Ahab; and the leg he had lost;
4176  and the Cape Horn fit; and the silver calabash; and what Captain
4177  Peleg had said of him, when I left the ship the day previous; and the
4178  prediction of the squaw Tistig; and the voyage we had bound ourselves
4179  to sail; and a hundred other shadowy things.
4180  
4181  I was resolved to satisfy myself whether this ragged Elijah was
4182  really dogging us or not, and with that intent crossed the way with
4183  Queequeg, and on that side of it retraced our steps.  But Elijah
4184  passed on, without seeming to notice us.  This relieved me; and once
4185  more, and finally as it seemed to me, I pronounced him in my heart, a
4186  humbug.
4187  
4188  
4189  
4190  CHAPTER 20
4191  
4192  All Astir.
4193  
4194  
4195  A day or two passed, and there was great activity aboard the Pequod.
4196  Not only were the old sails being mended, but new sails were coming
4197  on board, and bolts of canvas, and coils of rigging; in short,
4198  everything betokened that the ship's preparations were hurrying to a
4199  close.  Captain Peleg seldom or never went ashore, but sat in his
4200  wigwam keeping a sharp look-out upon the hands: Bildad did all the
4201  purchasing and providing at the stores; and the men employed in the
4202  hold and on the rigging were working till long after night-fall.
4203  
4204  On the day following Queequeg's signing the articles, word was given
4205  at all the inns where the ship's company were stopping, that their
4206  chests must be on board before night, for there was no telling how
4207  soon the vessel might be sailing.  So Queequeg and I got down our
4208  traps, resolving, however, to sleep ashore till the last.  But it
4209  seems they always give very long notice in these cases, and the ship
4210  did not sail for several days.  But no wonder; there was a good deal
4211  to be done, and there is no telling how many things to be thought of,
4212  before the Pequod was fully equipped.
4213  
4214  Every one knows what a multitude of things--beds, sauce-pans, knives
4215  and forks, shovels and tongs, napkins, nut-crackers, and what not,
4216  are indispensable to the business of housekeeping.  Just so with
4217  whaling, which necessitates a three-years' housekeeping upon the wide
4218  ocean, far from all grocers, costermongers, doctors, bakers, and
4219  bankers.  And though this also holds true of merchant vessels, yet
4220  not by any means to the same extent as with whalemen.  For besides
4221  the great length of the whaling voyage, the numerous articles
4222  peculiar to the prosecution of the fishery, and the impossibility of
4223  replacing them at the remote harbors usually frequented, it must be
4224  remembered, that of all ships, whaling vessels are the most exposed
4225  to accidents of all kinds, and especially to the destruction and loss
4226  of the very things upon which the success of the voyage most depends.
4227  Hence, the spare boats, spare spars, and spare lines and harpoons,
4228  and spare everythings, almost, but a spare Captain and duplicate
4229  ship.
4230  
4231  At the period of our arrival at the Island, the heaviest storage of
4232  the Pequod had been almost completed; comprising her beef, bread,
4233  water, fuel, and iron hoops and staves.  But, as before hinted, for
4234  some time there was a continual fetching and carrying on board of
4235  divers odds and ends of things, both large and small.
4236  
4237  Chief among those who did this fetching and carrying was Captain
4238  Bildad's sister, a lean old lady of a most determined and
4239  indefatigable spirit, but withal very kindhearted, who seemed
4240  resolved that, if SHE could help it, nothing should be found wanting
4241  in the Pequod, after once fairly getting to sea.  At one time she
4242  would come on board with a jar of pickles for the steward's pantry;
4243  another time with a bunch of quills for the chief mate's desk, where
4244  he kept his log; a third time with a roll of flannel for the small of
4245  some one's rheumatic back.  Never did any woman better deserve her
4246  name, which was Charity--Aunt Charity, as everybody called her.  And
4247  like a sister of charity did this charitable Aunt Charity bustle
4248  about hither and thither, ready to turn her hand and heart to
4249  anything that promised to yield safety, comfort, and consolation to
4250  all on board a ship in which her beloved brother Bildad was
4251  concerned, and in which she herself owned a score or two of
4252  well-saved dollars.
4253  
4254  But it was startling to see this excellent hearted Quakeress coming
4255  on board, as she did the last day, with a long oil-ladle in one hand,
4256  and a still longer whaling lance in the other.  Nor was Bildad himself
4257  nor Captain Peleg at all backward.  As for Bildad, he carried about
4258  with him a long list of the articles needed, and at every fresh
4259  arrival, down went his mark opposite that article upon the paper.
4260  Every once in a while Peleg came hobbling out of his whalebone den,
4261  roaring at the men down the hatchways, roaring up to the riggers at
4262  the mast-head, and then concluded by roaring back into his wigwam.
4263  
4264  During these days of preparation, Queequeg and I often visited the
4265  craft, and as often I asked about Captain Ahab, and how he was, and
4266  when he was going to come on board his ship.  To these questions they
4267  would answer, that he was getting better and better, and was expected
4268  aboard every day; meantime, the two captains, Peleg and Bildad, could
4269  attend to everything necessary to fit the vessel for the voyage.  If
4270  I had been downright honest with myself, I would have seen very
4271  plainly in my heart that I did but half fancy being committed this
4272  way to so long a voyage, without once laying my eyes on the man who
4273  was to be the absolute dictator of it, so soon as the ship sailed out
4274  upon the open sea.  But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes
4275  happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly
4276  strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself.  And much this
4277  way it was with me.  I said nothing, and tried to think nothing.
4278  
4279  At last it was given out that some time next day the ship would
4280  certainly sail.  So next morning, Queequeg and I took a very early
4281  start.
4282  
4283  
4284  
4285  CHAPTER 21
4286  
4287  Going Aboard.
4288  
4289  
4290  It was nearly six o'clock, but only grey imperfect misty dawn, when
4291  we drew nigh the wharf.
4292  
4293  "There are some sailors running ahead there, if I see right," said I
4294  to Queequeg, "it can't be shadows; she's off by sunrise, I guess;
4295  come on!"
4296  
4297  "Avast!" cried a voice, whose owner at the same time coming close
4298  behind us, laid a hand upon both our shoulders, and then insinuating
4299  himself between us, stood stooping forward a little, in the uncertain
4300  twilight, strangely peering from Queequeg to me.  It was Elijah.
4301  
4302  "Going aboard?"
4303  
4304  "Hands off, will you," said I.
4305  
4306  "Lookee here," said Queequeg, shaking himself, "go 'way!"
4307  
4308  "Ain't going aboard, then?"
4309  
4310  "Yes, we are," said I, "but what business is that of yours?  Do you
4311  know, Mr. Elijah, that I consider you a little impertinent?"
4312  
4313  "No, no, no; I wasn't aware of that," said Elijah, slowly and
4314  wonderingly looking from me to Queequeg, with the most unaccountable
4315  glances.
4316  
4317  "Elijah," said I, "you will oblige my friend and me by withdrawing.
4318  We are going to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and would prefer not
4319  to be detained."
4320  
4321  "Ye be, be ye?  Coming back afore breakfast?"
4322  
4323  "He's cracked, Queequeg," said I, "come on."
4324  
4325  "Holloa!" cried stationary Elijah, hailing us when we had removed a
4326  few paces.
4327  
4328  "Never mind him," said I, "Queequeg, come on."
4329  
4330  But he stole up to us again, and suddenly clapping his hand on my
4331  shoulder, said--"Did ye see anything looking like men going towards
4332  that ship a while ago?"
4333  
4334  Struck by this plain matter-of-fact question, I answered, saying,
4335  "Yes, I thought I did see four or five men; but it was too dim to be
4336  sure."
4337  
4338  "Very dim, very dim," said Elijah.  "Morning to ye."
4339  
4340  Once more we quitted him; but once more he came softly after us; and
4341  touching my shoulder again, said, "See if you can find 'em now, will
4342  ye?
4343  
4344  "Find who?"
4345  
4346  "Morning to ye! morning to ye!" he rejoined, again moving off.  "Oh!
4347  I was going to warn ye against--but never mind, never mind--it's all
4348  one, all in the family too;--sharp frost this morning, ain't it?
4349  Good-bye to ye.  Shan't see ye again very soon, I guess; unless it's
4350  before the Grand Jury."  And with these cracked words he finally
4351  departed, leaving me, for the moment, in no small wonderment at his
4352  frantic impudence.
4353  
4354  At last, stepping on board the Pequod, we found everything in
4355  profound quiet, not a soul moving.  The cabin entrance was locked
4356  within; the hatches were all on, and lumbered with coils of rigging.
4357  Going forward to the forecastle, we found the slide of the scuttle
4358  open.  Seeing a light, we went down, and found only an old rigger
4359  there, wrapped in a tattered pea-jacket.  He was thrown at whole
4360  length upon two chests, his face downwards and inclosed in his folded
4361  arms.  The profoundest slumber slept upon him.
4362  
4363  "Those sailors we saw, Queequeg, where can they have gone to?" said
4364  I, looking dubiously at the sleeper.  But it seemed that, when on the
4365  wharf, Queequeg had not at all noticed what I now alluded to; hence I
4366  would have thought myself to have been optically deceived in that
4367  matter, were it not for Elijah's otherwise inexplicable question.
4368  But I beat the thing down; and again marking the sleeper, jocularly
4369  hinted to Queequeg that perhaps we had best sit up with the body;
4370  telling him to establish himself accordingly.  He put his hand upon
4371  the sleeper's rear, as though feeling if it was soft enough; and
4372  then, without more ado, sat quietly down there.
4373  
4374  "Gracious!  Queequeg, don't sit there," said I.
4375  
4376  "Oh! perry dood seat," said Queequeg, "my country way; won't hurt
4377  him face."
4378  
4379  "Face!" said I, "call that his face? very benevolent countenance
4380  then; but how hard he breathes, he's heaving himself; get off,
4381  Queequeg, you are heavy, it's grinding the face of the poor.  Get
4382  off, Queequeg!  Look, he'll twitch you off soon.  I wonder he don't
4383  wake."
4384  
4385  Queequeg removed himself to just beyond the head of the sleeper, and
4386  lighted his tomahawk pipe.  I sat at the feet.  We kept the pipe
4387  passing over the sleeper, from one to the other.  Meanwhile, upon
4388  questioning him in his broken fashion, Queequeg gave me to understand
4389  that, in his land, owing to the absence of settees and sofas of all
4390  sorts, the king, chiefs, and great people generally, were in the
4391  custom of fattening some of the lower orders for ottomans; and to
4392  furnish a house comfortably in that respect, you had only to buy up
4393  eight or ten lazy fellows, and lay them round in the piers and
4394  alcoves.  Besides, it was very convenient on an excursion; much
4395  better than those garden-chairs which are convertible into
4396  walking-sticks; upon occasion, a chief calling his attendant, and
4397  desiring him to make a settee of himself under a spreading tree,
4398  perhaps in some damp marshy place.
4399  
4400  While narrating these things, every time Queequeg received the
4401  tomahawk from me, he flourished the hatchet-side of it over the
4402  sleeper's head.
4403  
4404  "What's that for, Queequeg?"
4405  
4406  "Perry easy, kill-e; oh! perry easy!
4407  
4408  He was going on with some wild reminiscences about his tomahawk-pipe,
4409  which, it seemed, had in its two uses both brained his foes and
4410  soothed his soul, when we were directly attracted to the sleeping
4411  rigger.  The strong vapour now completely filling the contracted hole,
4412  it began to tell upon him.  He breathed with a sort of muffledness;
4413  then seemed troubled in the nose; then revolved over once or twice;
4414  then sat up and rubbed his eyes.
4415  
4416  "Holloa!" he breathed at last, "who be ye smokers?"
4417  
4418  "Shipped men," answered I, "when does she sail?"
4419  
4420  "Aye, aye, ye are going in her, be ye?  She sails to-day.  The
4421  Captain came aboard last night."
4422  
4423  "What Captain?--Ahab?"
4424  
4425  "Who but him indeed?"
4426  
4427  I was going to ask him some further questions concerning Ahab, when
4428  we heard a noise on deck.
4429  
4430  "Holloa!  Starbuck's astir," said the rigger.  "He's a lively chief
4431  mate, that; good man, and a pious; but all alive now, I must turn
4432  to."  And so saying he went on deck, and we followed.
4433  
4434  It was now clear sunrise.  Soon the crew came on board in twos and
4435  threes; the riggers bestirred themselves; the mates were actively
4436  engaged; and several of the shore people were busy in bringing
4437  various last things on board.  Meanwhile Captain Ahab remained
4438  invisibly enshrined within his cabin.
4439  
4440  
4441  
4442  CHAPTER 22
4443  
4444  Merry Christmas.
4445  
4446  
4447  At length, towards noon, upon the final dismissal of the ship's
4448  riggers, and after the Pequod had been hauled out from the wharf, and
4449  after the ever-thoughtful Charity had come off in a whale-boat, with
4450  her last gift--a night-cap for Stubb, the second mate, her
4451  brother-in-law, and a spare Bible for the steward--after all this,
4452  the two Captains, Peleg and Bildad, issued from the cabin, and
4453  turning to the chief mate, Peleg said:
4454  
4455  "Now, Mr. Starbuck, are you sure everything is right?  Captain Ahab
4456  is all ready--just spoke to him--nothing more to be got from shore,
4457  eh?  Well, call all hands, then.  Muster 'em aft here--blast 'em!"
4458  
4459  "No need of profane words, however great the hurry, Peleg," said
4460  Bildad, "but away with thee, friend Starbuck, and do our bidding."
4461  
4462  How now!  Here upon the very point of starting for the voyage,
4463  Captain Peleg and Captain Bildad were going it with a high hand on
4464  the quarter-deck, just as if they were to be joint-commanders at sea,
4465  as well as to all appearances in port.  And, as for Captain Ahab, no
4466  sign of him was yet to be seen; only, they said he was in the cabin.
4467  But then, the idea was, that his presence was by no means necessary
4468  in getting the ship under weigh, and steering her well out to sea.
4469  Indeed, as that was not at all his proper business, but the pilot's;
4470  and as he was not yet completely recovered--so they said--therefore,
4471  Captain Ahab stayed below.  And all this seemed natural enough;
4472  especially as in the merchant service many captains never show
4473  themselves on deck for a considerable time after heaving up the
4474  anchor, but remain over the cabin table, having a farewell
4475  merry-making with their shore friends, before they quit the ship for
4476  good with the pilot.
4477  
4478  But there was not much chance to think over the matter, for Captain
4479  Peleg was now all alive.  He seemed to do most of the talking and
4480  commanding, and not Bildad.
4481  
4482  "Aft here, ye sons of bachelors," he cried, as the sailors lingered
4483  at the main-mast.  "Mr. Starbuck, drive'em aft."
4484  
4485  "Strike the tent there!"--was the next order.  As I hinted before,
4486  this whalebone marquee was never pitched except in port; and on board
4487  the Pequod, for thirty years, the order to strike the tent was well
4488  known to be the next thing to heaving up the anchor.
4489  
4490  "Man the capstan!  Blood and thunder!--jump!"--was the next command,
4491  and the crew sprang for the handspikes.
4492  
4493  Now in getting under weigh, the station generally occupied by the
4494  pilot is the forward part of the ship.  And here Bildad, who, with
4495  Peleg, be it known, in addition to his other officers, was one of the
4496  licensed pilots of the port--he being suspected to have got himself
4497  made a pilot in order to save the Nantucket pilot-fee to all the
4498  ships he was concerned in, for he never piloted any other
4499  craft--Bildad, I say, might now be seen actively engaged in looking
4500  over the bows for the approaching anchor, and at intervals singing
4501  what seemed a dismal stave of psalmody, to cheer the hands at the
4502  windlass, who roared forth some sort of a chorus about the girls in
4503  Booble Alley, with hearty good will.  Nevertheless, not three days
4504  previous, Bildad had told them that no profane songs would be allowed
4505  on board the Pequod, particularly in getting under weigh; and
4506  Charity, his sister, had placed a small choice copy of Watts in each
4507  seaman's berth.
4508  
4509  Meantime, overseeing the other part of the ship, Captain Peleg ripped
4510  and swore astern in the most frightful manner.  I almost thought he
4511  would sink the ship before the anchor could be got up; involuntarily
4512  I paused on my handspike, and told Queequeg to do the same, thinking
4513  of the perils we both ran, in starting on the voyage with such a
4514  devil for a pilot.  I was comforting myself, however, with the
4515  thought that in pious Bildad might be found some salvation, spite of
4516  his seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay; when I felt a sudden sharp
4517  poke in my rear, and turning round, was horrified at the apparition
4518  of Captain Peleg in the act of withdrawing his leg from my immediate
4519  vicinity.  That was my first kick.
4520  
4521  "Is that the way they heave in the marchant service?" he roared.
4522  "Spring, thou sheep-head; spring, and break thy backbone!  Why don't
4523  ye spring, I say, all of ye--spring!  Quohog! spring, thou chap with
4524  the red whiskers; spring there, Scotch-cap; spring, thou green
4525  pants.  Spring, I say, all of ye, and spring your eyes out!"  And so
4526  saying, he moved along the windlass, here and there using his leg
4527  very freely, while imperturbable Bildad kept leading off with his
4528  psalmody.  Thinks I, Captain Peleg must have been drinking something
4529  to-day.
4530  
4531  At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided.  It
4532  was a short, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged
4533  into night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean,
4534  whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor.  The long
4535  rows of teeth on the bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; and like
4536  the white ivory tusks of some huge elephant, vast curving icicles
4537  depended from the bows.
4538  
4539  Lank Bildad, as pilot, headed the first watch, and ever and anon, as
4540  the old craft deep dived into the green seas, and sent the shivering
4541  frost all over her, and the winds howled, and the cordage rang, his
4542  steady notes were heard,--
4543  
4544  "Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood,
4545  Stand dressed in living green.
4546  So to the Jews old Canaan stood,
4547  While Jordan rolled between."
4548  
4549  
4550  Never did those sweet words sound more sweetly to me than then.  They
4551  were full of hope and fruition.  Spite of this frigid winter night in
4552  the boisterous Atlantic, spite of my wet feet and wetter jacket,
4553  there was yet, it then seemed to me, many a pleasant haven in store;
4554  and meads and glades so eternally vernal, that the grass shot up by
4555  the spring, untrodden, unwilted, remains at midsummer.
4556  
4557  At last we gained such an offing, that the two pilots were needed no
4558  longer.  The stout sail-boat that had accompanied us began ranging
4559  alongside.
4560  
4561  It was curious and not unpleasing, how Peleg and Bildad were affected
4562  at this juncture, especially Captain Bildad.  For loath to depart,
4563  yet; very loath to leave, for good, a ship bound on so long and
4564  perilous a voyage--beyond both stormy Capes; a ship in which some
4565  thousands of his hard earned dollars were invested; a ship, in which
4566  an old shipmate sailed as captain; a man almost as old as he, once
4567  more starting to encounter all the terrors of the pitiless jaw; loath
4568  to say good-bye to a thing so every way brimful of every interest to
4569  him,--poor old Bildad lingered long; paced the deck with anxious
4570  strides; ran down into the cabin to speak another farewell word
4571  there; again came on deck, and looked to windward; looked towards the
4572  wide and endless waters, only bounded by the far-off unseen Eastern
4573  Continents; looked towards the land; looked aloft; looked right and
4574  left; looked everywhere and nowhere; and at last, mechanically
4575  coiling a rope upon its pin, convulsively grasped stout Peleg by the
4576  hand, and holding up a lantern, for a moment stood gazing heroically
4577  in his face, as much as to say, "Nevertheless, friend Peleg, I can
4578  stand it; yes, I can."
4579  
4580  As for Peleg himself, he took it more like a philosopher; but for all
4581  his philosophy, there was a tear twinkling in his eye, when the
4582  lantern came too near.  And he, too, did not a little run from cabin
4583  to deck--now a word below, and now a word with Starbuck, the chief
4584  mate.
4585  
4586  But, at last, he turned to his comrade, with a final sort of look
4587  about him,--"Captain Bildad--come, old shipmate, we must go.  Back
4588  the main-yard there!  Boat ahoy!  Stand by to come close alongside,
4589  now!  Careful, careful!--come, Bildad, boy--say your last.  Luck to
4590  ye, Starbuck--luck to ye, Mr. Stubb--luck to ye, Mr. Flask--good-bye
4591  and good luck to ye all--and this day three years I'll have a hot
4592  supper smoking for ye in old Nantucket.  Hurrah and away!"
4593  
4594  "God bless ye, and have ye in His holy keeping, men," murmured old
4595  Bildad, almost incoherently.  "I hope ye'll have fine weather now, so
4596  that Captain Ahab may soon be moving among ye--a pleasant sun is all
4597  he needs, and ye'll have plenty of them in the tropic voyage ye go.
4598  Be careful in the hunt, ye mates.  Don't stave the boats needlessly,
4599  ye harpooneers; good white cedar plank is raised full three per cent.
4600  within the year.  Don't forget your prayers, either.  Mr. Starbuck,
4601  mind that cooper don't waste the spare staves.  Oh! the sail-needles
4602  are in the green locker!  Don't whale it too much a' Lord's days,
4603  men; but don't miss a fair chance either, that's rejecting Heaven's
4604  good gifts.  Have an eye to the molasses tierce, Mr. Stubb; it was a
4605  little leaky, I thought.  If ye touch at the islands, Mr. Flask,
4606  beware of fornication.  Good-bye, good-bye!  Don't keep that cheese
4607  too long down in the hold, Mr. Starbuck; it'll spoil.  Be careful
4608  with the butter--twenty cents the pound it was, and mind ye, if--"
4609  
4610  "Come, come, Captain Bildad; stop palavering,--away!" and with that,
4611  Peleg hurried him over the side, and both dropt into the boat.
4612  
4613  Ship and boat diverged; the cold, damp night breeze blew between; a
4614  screaming gull flew overhead; the two hulls wildly rolled; we gave
4615  three heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the
4616  lone Atlantic.
4617  
4618  
4619  
4620  CHAPTER 23
4621  
4622  The Lee Shore.
4623  
4624  
4625  Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, newlanded
4626  mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn.
4627  
4628  When on that shivering winter's night, the Pequod thrust her
4629  vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see
4630  standing at her helm but Bulkington!  I looked with sympathetic awe
4631  and fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a
4632  four years' dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for
4633  still another tempestuous term.  The land seemed scorching to his
4634  feet.  Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories
4635  yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of
4636  Bulkington.  Let me only say that it fared with him as with the
4637  storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land.  The
4638  port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is
4639  safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all
4640  that's kind to our mortalities.  But in that gale, the port, the
4641  land, is that ship's direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality;
4642  one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her
4643  shudder through and through.  With all her might she crowds all sail
4644  off shore; in so doing, fights 'gainst the very winds that fain would
4645  blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea's landlessness again; for
4646  refuge's sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her
4647  bitterest foe!
4648  
4649  Know ye now, Bulkington?  Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally
4650  intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the
4651  intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea;
4652  while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on
4653  the treacherous, slavish shore?
4654  
4655  But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless,
4656  indefinite as God--so, better is it to perish in that howling
4657  infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were
4658  safety!  For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land!
4659  Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain?  Take heart, take
4660  heart, O Bulkington!  Bear thee grimly, demigod!  Up from the spray
4661  of thy ocean-perishing--straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!
4662  
4663  
4664  
4665  CHAPTER 24
4666  
4667  The Advocate.
4668  
4669  
4670  As Queequeg and I are now fairly embarked in this business of
4671  whaling; and as this business of whaling has somehow come to be
4672  regarded among landsmen as a rather unpoetical and disreputable
4673  pursuit; therefore, I am all anxiety to convince ye, ye landsmen, of
4674  the injustice hereby done to us hunters of whales.
4675  
4676  In the first place, it may be deemed almost superfluous to establish
4677  the fact, that among people at large, the business of whaling is not
4678  accounted on a level with what are called the liberal professions.
4679  If a stranger were introduced into any miscellaneous metropolitan
4680  society, it would but slightly advance the general opinion of his
4681  merits, were he presented to the company as a harpooneer, say; and if
4682  in emulation of the naval officers he should append the initials
4683  S.W.F. (Sperm Whale Fishery) to his visiting card, such a procedure
4684  would be deemed pre-eminently presuming and ridiculous.
4685  
4686  Doubtless one leading reason why the world declines honouring us
4687  whalemen, is this: they think that, at best, our vocation amounts to
4688  a butchering sort of business; and that when actively engaged
4689  therein, we are surrounded by all manner of defilements.  Butchers we
4690  are, that is true.  But butchers, also, and butchers of the bloodiest
4691  badge have been all Martial Commanders whom the world invariably
4692  delights to honour.  And as for the matter of the alleged
4693  uncleanliness of our business, ye shall soon be initiated into
4694  certain facts hitherto pretty generally unknown, and which, upon the
4695  whole, will triumphantly plant the sperm whale-ship at least among
4696  the cleanliest things of this tidy earth.  But even granting the
4697  charge in question to be true; what disordered slippery decks of a
4698  whale-ship are comparable to the unspeakable carrion of those
4699  battle-fields from which so many soldiers return to drink in all
4700  ladies' plaudits?  And if the idea of peril so much enhances the
4701  popular conceit of the soldier's profession; let me assure ye that
4702  many a veteran who has freely marched up to a battery, would quickly
4703  recoil at the apparition of the sperm whale's vast tail, fanning into
4704  eddies the air over his head.  For what are the comprehensible
4705  terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of
4706  God!
4707  
4708  But, though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it
4709  unwittingly pay us the profoundest homage; yea, an all-abounding
4710  adoration! for almost all the tapers, lamps, and candles that burn
4711  round the globe, burn, as before so many shrines, to our glory!
4712  
4713  But look at this matter in other lights; weigh it in all sorts of
4714  scales; see what we whalemen are, and have been.
4715  
4716  Why did the Dutch in De Witt's time have admirals of their whaling
4717  fleets?  Why did Louis XVI. of France, at his own personal expense,
4718  fit out whaling ships from Dunkirk, and politely invite to that town
4719  some score or two of families from our own island of Nantucket?  Why
4720  did Britain between the years 1750 and 1788 pay to her whalemen in
4721  bounties upwards of L1,000,000?  And lastly, how comes it that we
4722  whalemen of America now outnumber all the rest of the banded whalemen
4723  in the world; sail a navy of upwards of seven hundred vessels; manned
4724  by eighteen thousand men; yearly consuming 4,000,000 of dollars; the
4725  ships worth, at the time of sailing, $20,000,000! and every year
4726  importing into our harbors a well reaped harvest of $7,000,000.  How
4727  comes all this, if there be not something puissant in whaling?
4728  
4729  But this is not the half; look again.
4730  
4731  I freely assert, that the cosmopolite philosopher cannot, for his
4732  life, point out one single peaceful influence, which within the last
4733  sixty years has operated more potentially upon the whole broad world,
4734  taken in one aggregate, than the high and mighty business of whaling.
4735  One way and another, it has begotten events so remarkable in
4736  themselves, and so continuously momentous in their sequential issues,
4737  that whaling may well be regarded as that Egyptian mother, who bore
4738  offspring themselves pregnant from her womb.  It would be a hopeless,
4739  endless task to catalogue all these things.  Let a handful suffice.
4740  For many years past the whale-ship has been the pioneer in ferreting
4741  out the remotest and least known parts of the earth.  She has
4742  explored seas and archipelagoes which had no chart, where no Cook or
4743  Vancouver had ever sailed.  If American and European men-of-war
4744  now peacefully ride in once savage harbors, let them fire salutes to
4745  the honour and glory of the whale-ship, which originally showed them
4746  the way, and first interpreted between them and the savages.  They
4747  may celebrate as they will the heroes of Exploring Expeditions, your
4748  Cooks, your Krusensterns; but I say that scores of anonymous
4749  Captains have sailed out of Nantucket, that were as great, and
4750  greater than your Cook and your Krusenstern.  For in their
4751  succourless empty-handedness, they, in the heathenish sharked waters,
4752  and by the beaches of unrecorded, javelin islands, battled with
4753  virgin wonders and terrors that Cook with all his marines and
4754  muskets would not willingly have dared.  All that is made such a
4755  flourish of in the old South Sea Voyages, those things were but the
4756  life-time commonplaces of our heroic Nantucketers.  Often,
4757  adventures which Vancouver dedicates three chapters to, these men
4758  accounted unworthy of being set down in the ship's common log.  Ah,
4759  the world!  Oh, the world!
4760  
4761  Until the whale fishery rounded Cape Horn, no commerce but colonial,
4762  scarcely any intercourse but colonial, was carried on between Europe
4763  and the long line of the opulent Spanish provinces on the Pacific
4764  coast.  It was the whaleman who first broke through the jealous
4765  policy of the Spanish crown, touching those colonies; and, if space
4766  permitted, it might be distinctly shown how from those whalemen at
4767  last eventuated the liberation of Peru, Chili, and Bolivia from the
4768  yoke of Old Spain, and the establishment of the eternal democracy in
4769  those parts.
4770  
4771  That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia, was
4772  given to the enlightened world by the whaleman.  After its first
4773  blunder-born discovery by a Dutchman, all other ships long shunned
4774  those shores as pestiferously barbarous; but the whale-ship touched
4775  there.  The whale-ship is the true mother of that now mighty colony.
4776  Moreover, in the infancy of the first Australian settlement, the
4777  emigrants were several times saved from starvation by the benevolent
4778  biscuit of the whale-ship luckily dropping an anchor in their waters.
4779  The uncounted isles of all Polynesia confess the same truth, and do
4780  commercial homage to the whale-ship, that cleared the way for the
4781  missionary and the merchant, and in many cases carried the primitive
4782  missionaries to their first destinations.  If that double-bolted
4783  land, Japan, is ever to become hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone
4784  to whom the credit will be due; for already she is on the threshold.
4785  
4786  But if, in the face of all this, you still declare that whaling has
4787  no aesthetically noble associations connected with it, then am I
4788  ready to shiver fifty lances with you there, and unhorse you with a
4789  split helmet every time.
4790  
4791  The whale has no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler, you
4792  will say.
4793  
4794  THE WHALE NO FAMOUS AUTHOR, AND WHALING NO FAMOUS CHRONICLER?  Who
4795  wrote the first account of our Leviathan?  Who but mighty Job!  And
4796  who composed the first narrative of a whaling-voyage?  Who, but no
4797  less a prince than Alfred the Great, who, with his own royal pen,
4798  took down the words from Other, the Norwegian whale-hunter of those
4799  times!  And who pronounced our glowing eulogy in Parliament?  Who,
4800  but Edmund Burke!
4801  
4802  True enough, but then whalemen themselves are poor devils; they have
4803  no good blood in their veins.
4804  
4805  NO GOOD BLOOD IN THEIR VEINS?  They have something better than royal
4806  blood there.  The grandmother of Benjamin Franklin was Mary Morrel;
4807  afterwards, by marriage, Mary Folger, one of the old settlers of
4808  Nantucket, and the ancestress to a long line of Folgers and
4809  harpooneers--all kith and kin to noble Benjamin--this day darting the
4810  barbed iron from one side of the world to the other.
4811  
4812  Good again; but then all confess that somehow whaling is not
4813  respectable.
4814  
4815  WHALING NOT RESPECTABLE?  Whaling is imperial!  By old English
4816  statutory law, the whale is declared "a royal fish."*
4817  
4818  Oh, that's only nominal!  The whale himself has never figured in any
4819  grand imposing way.
4820  
4821  THE WHALE NEVER FIGURED IN ANY GRAND IMPOSING WAY?  In one of the
4822  mighty triumphs given to a Roman general upon his entering the
4823  world's capital, the bones of a whale, brought all the way from the
4824  Syrian coast, were the most conspicuous object in the cymballed
4825  procession.*
4826  
4827  
4828  *See subsequent chapters for something more on this head.
4829  
4830  
4831  Grant it, since you cite it; but, say what you will, there is no real
4832  dignity in whaling.
4833  
4834  NO DIGNITY IN WHALING?  The dignity of our calling the very heavens
4835  attest.  Cetus is a constellation in the South!  No more!  Drive
4836  down your hat in presence of the Czar, and take it off to Queequeg!
4837  No more!  I know a man that, in his lifetime, has taken three hundred
4838  and fifty whales.  I account that man more honourable than that great
4839  captain of antiquity who boasted of taking as many walled towns.
4840  
4841  And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet
4842  undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real
4843  repute in that small but high hushed world which I might not be
4844  unreasonably ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do anything that, upon
4845  the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left undone; if,
4846  at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any
4847  precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the
4848  honour and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College
4849  and my Harvard.
4850  
4851  
4852  
4853  CHAPTER 25
4854  
4855  Postscript.
4856  
4857  
4858  In behalf of the dignity of whaling, I would fain advance naught but
4859  substantiated facts.  But after embattling his facts, an advocate who
4860  should wholly suppress a not unreasonable surmise, which might tell
4861  eloquently upon his cause--such an advocate, would he not be
4862  blameworthy?
4863  
4864  It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, even
4865  modern ones, a certain curious process of seasoning them for their
4866  functions is gone through.  There is a saltcellar of state, so
4867  called, and there may be a castor of state.  How they use the salt,
4868  precisely--who knows?  Certain I am, however, that a king's head is
4869  solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad.  Can it
4870  be, though, that they anoint it with a view of making its interior
4871  run well, as they anoint machinery?  Much might be ruminated here,
4872  concerning the essential dignity of this regal process, because in
4873  common life we esteem but meanly and contemptibly a fellow who
4874  anoints his hair, and palpably smells of that anointing.  In truth, a
4875  mature man who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that man has
4876  probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere.  As a general rule, he
4877  can't amount to much in his totality.
4878  
4879  But the only thing to be considered here, is this--what kind of oil
4880  is used at coronations?  Certainly it cannot be olive oil, nor
4881  macassar oil, nor castor oil, nor bear's oil, nor train oil, nor
4882  cod-liver oil.  What then can it possibly be, but sperm oil in
4883  its unmanufactured, unpolluted state, the sweetest of all oils?
4884  
4885  Think of that, ye loyal Britons! we whalemen supply your kings and
4886  queens with coronation stuff!
4887  
4888  
4889  
4890  CHAPTER 26
4891  
4892  Knights and Squires.
4893  
4894  
4895  The chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and
4896  a Quaker by descent.  He was a long, earnest man, and though born on
4897  an icy coast, seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his flesh
4898  being hard as twice-baked biscuit.  Transported to the Indies, his
4899  live blood would not spoil like bottled ale.  He must have been born
4900  in some time of general drought and famine, or upon one of those fast
4901  days for which his state is famous.  Only some thirty arid summers
4902  had he seen; those summers had dried up all his physical
4903  superfluousness.  But this, his thinness, so to speak, seemed no more
4904  the token of wasting anxieties and cares, than it seemed the
4905  indication of any bodily blight.  It was merely the condensation of
4906  the man.  He was by no means ill-looking; quite the contrary.  His
4907  pure tight skin was an excellent fit; and closely wrapped up in it,
4908  and embalmed with inner health and strength, like a revivified
4909  Egyptian, this Starbuck seemed prepared to endure for long ages to
4910  come, and to endure always, as now; for be it Polar snow or torrid
4911  sun, like a patent chronometer, his interior vitality was warranted
4912  to do well in all climates.  Looking into his eyes, you seemed to
4913  see there the yet lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he
4914  had calmly confronted through life.  A staid, steadfast man, whose
4915  life for the most part was a telling pantomime of action, and not a
4916  tame chapter of sounds.  Yet, for all his hardy sobriety and
4917  fortitude, there were certain qualities in him which at times
4918  affected, and in some cases seemed well nigh to overbalance all the
4919  rest.  Uncommonly conscientious for a seaman, and endued with a deep
4920  natural reverence, the wild watery loneliness of his life did
4921  therefore strongly incline him to superstition; but to that sort of
4922  superstition, which in some organizations seems rather to spring,
4923  somehow, from intelligence than from ignorance.  Outward portents and
4924  inward presentiments were his.  And if at times these things bent the
4925  welded iron of his soul, much more did his far-away domestic memories
4926  of his young Cape wife and child, tend to bend him still more from
4927  the original ruggedness of his nature, and open him still further to
4928  those latent influences which, in some honest-hearted men, restrain
4929  the gush of dare-devil daring, so often evinced by others in the more
4930  perilous vicissitudes of the fishery.  "I will have no man in my
4931  boat," said Starbuck, "who is not afraid of a whale."  By this, he
4932  seemed to mean, not only that the most reliable and useful courage
4933  was that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered
4934  peril, but that an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous
4935  comrade than a coward.
4936  
4937  "Aye, aye," said Stubb, the second mate, "Starbuck, there, is as
4938  careful a man as you'll find anywhere in this fishery."  But we shall
4939  ere long see what that word "careful" precisely means when used by a
4940  man like Stubb, or almost any other whale hunter.
4941  
4942  Starbuck was no crusader after perils; in him courage was not a
4943  sentiment; but a thing simply useful to him, and always at hand upon
4944  all mortally practical occasions.  Besides, he thought, perhaps, that
4945  in this business of whaling, courage was one of the great staple
4946  outfits of the ship, like her beef and her bread, and not to be
4947  foolishly wasted.  Wherefore he had no fancy for lowering for whales
4948  after sun-down; nor for persisting in fighting a fish that too much
4949  persisted in fighting him.  For, thought Starbuck, I am here in this
4950  critical ocean to kill whales for my living, and not to be killed by
4951  them for theirs; and that hundreds of men had been so killed Starbuck
4952  well knew.  What doom was his own father's?  Where, in the bottomless
4953  deeps, could he find the torn limbs of his brother?
4954  
4955  With memories like these in him, and, moreover, given to a certain
4956  superstitiousness, as has been said; the courage of this Starbuck
4957  which could, nevertheless, still flourish, must indeed have been
4958  extreme.  But it was not in reasonable nature that a man so
4959  organized, and with such terrible experiences and remembrances as he
4960  had; it was not in nature that these things should fail in latently
4961  engendering an element in him, which, under suitable circumstances,
4962  would break out from its confinement, and burn all his courage up.
4963  And brave as he might be, it was that sort of bravery chiefly,
4964  visible in some intrepid men, which, while generally abiding firm in
4965  the conflict with seas, or winds, or whales, or any of the ordinary
4966  irrational horrors of the world, yet cannot withstand those more
4967  terrific, because more spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you
4968  from the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man.
4969  
4970  But were the coming narrative to reveal in any instance, the complete
4971  abasement of poor Starbuck's fortitude, scarce might I have the heart
4972  to write it; for it is a thing most sorrowful, nay shocking, to
4973  expose the fall of valour in the soul.  Men may seem detestable as
4974  joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there
4975  may be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal,
4976  is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that
4977  over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to
4978  throw their costliest robes.  That immaculate manliness we feel
4979  within ourselves, so far within us, that it remains intact though all
4980  the outer character seem gone; bleeds with keenest anguish at the
4981  undraped spectacle of a valor-ruined man.  Nor can piety itself, at
4982  such a shameful sight, completely stifle her upbraidings against the
4983  permitting stars.  But this august dignity I treat of, is not the
4984  dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which has no
4985  robed investiture.  Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields
4986  a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all
4987  hands, radiates without end from God; Himself!  The great God
4988  absolute!  The centre and circumference of all democracy!  His
4989  omnipresence, our divine equality!
4990  
4991  If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall
4992  hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them
4993  tragic graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased,
4994  among them all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if
4995  I shall touch that workman's arm with some ethereal light; if I shall
4996  spread a rainbow over his disastrous set of sun; then against all
4997  mortal critics bear me out in it, thou Just Spirit of Equality,
4998  which hast spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind!
4999  Bear me out in it, thou great democratic God! who didst not refuse to
5000  the swart convict, Bunyan, the pale, poetic pearl; Thou who didst
5001  clothe with doubly hammered leaves of finest gold, the stumped and
5002  paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson
5003  from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst
5004  thunder him higher than a throne!  Thou who, in all Thy mighty,
5005  earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from the
5006  kingly commons; bear me out in it, O God!
5007  
5008  
5009  
5010  CHAPTER 27
5011  
5012  Knights and Squires.
5013  
5014  
5015  Stubb was the second mate.  He was a native of Cape Cod; and hence,
5016  according to local usage, was called a Cape-Cod-man.  A
5017  happy-go-lucky; neither craven nor valiant; taking perils as they
5018  came with an indifferent air; and while engaged in the most imminent
5019  crisis of the chase, toiling away, calm and collected as a journeyman
5020  joiner engaged for the year.  Good-humored, easy, and careless, he
5021  presided over his whale-boat as if the most deadly encounter were but
5022  a dinner, and his crew all invited guests.  He was as particular
5023  about the comfortable arrangement of his part of the boat, as an
5024  old stage-driver is about the snugness of his box.  When close to the
5025  whale, in the very death-lock of the fight, he handled his unpitying
5026  lance coolly and off-handedly, as a whistling tinker his hammer.  He
5027  would hum over his old rigadig tunes while flank and flank with the
5028  most exasperated monster.  Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted
5029  the jaws of death into an easy chair.  What he thought of death
5030  itself, there is no telling.  Whether he ever thought of it at all,
5031  might be a question; but, if he ever did chance to cast his mind that
5032  way after a comfortable dinner, no doubt, like a good sailor, he took
5033  it to be a sort of call of the watch to tumble aloft, and bestir
5034  themselves there, about something which he would find out when he
5035  obeyed the order, and not sooner.
5036  
5037  What, perhaps, with other things, made Stubb such an easy-going,
5038  unfearing man, so cheerily trudging off with the burden of life in a
5039  world full of grave pedlars, all bowed to the ground with their
5040  packs; what helped to bring about that almost impious good-humor of
5041  his; that thing must have been his pipe.  For, like his nose, his
5042  short, black little pipe was one of the regular features of his face.
5043  You would almost as soon have expected him to turn out of his bunk
5044  without his nose as without his pipe.  He kept a whole row of pipes
5045  there ready loaded, stuck in a rack, within easy reach of his hand;
5046  and, whenever he turned in, he smoked them all out in succession,
5047  lighting one from the other to the end of the chapter; then loading
5048  them again to be in readiness anew.  For, when Stubb dressed, instead
5049  of first putting his legs into his trowsers, he put his pipe into his
5050  mouth.
5051  
5052  I say this continual smoking must have been one cause, at least, of
5053  his peculiar disposition; for every one knows that this earthly air,
5054  whether ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless
5055  miseries of the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it; and as
5056  in time of the cholera, some people go about with a camphorated
5057  handkerchief to their mouths; so, likewise, against all mortal
5058  tribulations, Stubb's tobacco smoke might have operated as a sort of
5059  disinfecting agent.
5060  
5061  The third mate was Flask, a native of Tisbury, in Martha's Vineyard.
5062  A short, stout, ruddy young fellow, very pugnacious concerning
5063  whales, who somehow seemed to think that the great leviathans had
5064  personally and hereditarily affronted him; and therefore it was a
5065  sort of point of honour with him, to destroy them whenever
5066  encountered.  So utterly lost was he to all sense of reverence for
5067  the many marvels of their majestic bulk and mystic ways; and so dead
5068  to anything like an apprehension of any possible danger from
5069  encountering them; that in his poor opinion, the wondrous whale was
5070  but a species of magnified mouse, or at least water-rat, requiring
5071  only a little circumvention and some small application of time and
5072  trouble in order to kill and boil.  This ignorant, unconscious
5073  fearlessness of his made him a little waggish in the matter of
5074  whales; he followed these fish for the fun of it; and a three years'
5075  voyage round Cape Horn was only a jolly joke that lasted that length
5076  of time.  As a carpenter's nails are divided into wrought nails and
5077  cut nails; so mankind may be similarly divided.  Little Flask was one
5078  of the wrought ones; made to clinch tight and last long.  They called
5079  him King-Post on board of the Pequod; because, in form, he could be
5080  well likened to the short, square timber known by that name in Arctic
5081  whalers; and which by the means of many radiating side timbers
5082  inserted into it, serves to brace the ship against the icy
5083  concussions of those battering seas.
5084  
5085  Now these three mates--Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, were momentous
5086  men.  They it was who by universal prescription commanded three of the
5087  Pequod's boats as headsmen.  In that grand order of battle in which
5088  Captain Ahab would probably marshal his forces to descend on the
5089  whales, these three headsmen were as captains of companies.  Or,
5090  being armed with their long keen whaling spears, they were as a
5091  picked trio of lancers; even as the harpooneers were flingers of
5092  javelins.
5093  
5094  And since in this famous fishery, each mate or headsman, like a
5095  Gothic Knight of old, is always accompanied by his boat-steerer or
5096  harpooneer, who in certain conjunctures provides him with a fresh
5097  lance, when the former one has been badly twisted, or elbowed in the
5098  assault; and moreover, as there generally subsists between the two, a
5099  close intimacy and friendliness; it is therefore but meet, that in
5100  this place we set down who the Pequod's harpooneers were, and to what
5101  headsman each of them belonged.
5102  
5103  First of all was Queequeg, whom Starbuck, the chief mate, had
5104  selected for his squire.  But Queequeg is already known.
5105  
5106  Next was Tashtego, an unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most westerly
5107  promontory of Martha's Vineyard, where there still exists the last
5108  remnant of a village of red men, which has long supplied the
5109  neighboring island of Nantucket with many of her most daring
5110  harpooneers.  In the fishery, they usually go by the generic name of
5111  Gay-Headers.  Tashtego's long, lean, sable hair, his high cheek
5112  bones, and black rounding eyes--for an Indian, Oriental in their
5113  largeness, but Antarctic in their glittering expression--all this
5114  sufficiently proclaimed him an inheritor of the unvitiated blood of
5115  those proud warrior hunters, who, in quest of the great New England
5116  moose, had scoured, bow in hand, the aboriginal forests of the main.
5117  But no longer snuffing in the trail of the wild beasts of the
5118  woodland, Tashtego now hunted in the wake of the great whales of the
5119  sea; the unerring harpoon of the son fitly replacing the infallible
5120  arrow of the sires.  To look at the tawny brawn of his lithe snaky
5121  limbs, you would almost have credited the superstitions of some of
5122  the earlier Puritans, and half-believed this wild Indian to be a son
5123  of the Prince of the Powers of the Air.  Tashtego was Stubb the
5124  second mate's squire.
5125  
5126  Third among the harpooneers was Daggoo, a gigantic, coal-black
5127  negro-savage, with a lion-like tread--an Ahasuerus to behold.
5128  Suspended from his ears were two golden hoops, so large that the
5129  sailors called them ring-bolts, and would talk of securing the
5130  top-sail halyards to them.  In his youth Daggoo had voluntarily
5131  shipped on board of a whaler, lying in a lonely bay on his native
5132  coast.  And never having been anywhere in the world but in Africa,
5133  Nantucket, and the pagan harbors most frequented by whalemen; and
5134  having now led for many years the bold life of the fishery in the
5135  ships of owners uncommonly heedful of what manner of men they
5136  shipped; Daggoo retained all his barbaric virtues, and erect as a
5137  giraffe, moved about the decks in all the pomp of six feet five in
5138  his socks.  There was a corporeal humility in looking up at him; and
5139  a white man standing before him seemed a white flag come to beg truce
5140  of a fortress.  Curious to tell, this imperial negro, Ahasuerus
5141  Daggoo, was the Squire of little Flask, who looked like a chess-man
5142  beside him.  As for the residue of the Pequod's company, be it said,
5143  that at the present day not one in two of the many thousand men
5144  before the mast employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans
5145  born, though pretty nearly all the officers are.  Herein it is the
5146  same with the American whale fishery as with the American army and
5147  military and merchant navies, and the engineering forces employed in
5148  the construction of the American Canals and Railroads.  The same, I
5149  say, because in all these cases the native American liberally
5150  provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying
5151  the muscles.  No small number of these whaling seamen belong to the
5152  Azores, where the outward bound Nantucket whalers frequently touch to
5153  augment their crews from the hardy peasants of those rocky shores.
5154  In like manner, the Greenland whalers sailing out of Hull or London,
5155  put in at the Shetland Islands, to receive the full complement of
5156  their crew.  Upon the passage homewards, they drop them there again.
5157  How it is, there is no telling, but Islanders seem to make the best
5158  whalemen.  They were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod, ISOLATOES
5159  too, I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but
5160  each ISOLATO living on a separate continent of his own.  Yet now,
5161  federated along one keel, what a set these Isolatoes were!  An
5162  Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the isles of the sea, and all
5163  the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab in the Pequod to lay the
5164  world's grievances before that bar from which not very many of them
5165  ever come back.  Black Little Pip--he never did--oh, no! he went
5166  before.  Poor Alabama boy!  On the grim Pequod's forecastle, ye shall
5167  ere long see him, beating his tambourine; prelusive of the eternal
5168  time, when sent for, to the great quarter-deck on high, he was bid
5169  strike in with angels, and beat his tambourine in glory; called a
5170  coward here, hailed a hero there!
5171  
5172  
5173  
5174  CHAPTER 28
5175  
5176  Ahab.
5177  
5178  
5179  For several days after leaving Nantucket, nothing above hatches was
5180  seen of Captain Ahab.  The mates regularly relieved each other at the
5181  watches, and for aught that could be seen to the contrary, they
5182  seemed to be the only commanders of the ship; only they sometimes
5183  issued from the cabin with orders so sudden and peremptory, that
5184  after all it was plain they but commanded vicariously.  Yes, their
5185  supreme lord and dictator was there, though hitherto unseen by any
5186  eyes not permitted to penetrate into the now sacred retreat of the
5187  cabin.
5188  
5189  Every time I ascended to the deck from my watches below, I instantly
5190  gazed aft to mark if any strange face were visible; for my first
5191  vague disquietude touching the unknown captain, now in the seclusion
5192  of the sea, became almost a perturbation.  This was strangely
5193  heightened at times by the ragged Elijah's diabolical incoherences
5194  uninvitedly recurring to me, with a subtle energy I could not have
5195  before conceived of.  But poorly could I withstand them, much as in
5196  other moods I was almost ready to smile at the solemn whimsicalities
5197  of that outlandish prophet of the wharves.  But whatever it was of
5198  apprehensiveness or uneasiness--to call it so--which I felt, yet
5199  whenever I came to look about me in the ship, it seemed against all
5200  warrantry to cherish such emotions.  For though the harpooneers, with
5201  the great body of the crew, were a far more barbaric, heathenish, and
5202  motley set than any of the tame merchant-ship companies which my
5203  previous experiences had made me acquainted with, still I ascribed
5204  this--and rightly ascribed it--to the fierce uniqueness of the very
5205  nature of that wild Scandinavian vocation in which I had so
5206  abandonedly embarked.  But it was especially the aspect of the three
5207  chief officers of the ship, the mates, which was most forcibly
5208  calculated to allay these colourless misgivings, and induce confidence
5209  and cheerfulness in every presentment of the voyage.  Three better,
5210  more likely sea-officers and men, each in his own different way,
5211  could not readily be found, and they were every one of them
5212  Americans; a Nantucketer, a Vineyarder, a Cape man.  Now, it being
5213  Christmas when the ship shot from out her harbor, for a space we had
5214  biting Polar weather, though all the time running away from it to the
5215  southward; and by every degree and minute of latitude which we
5216  sailed, gradually leaving that merciless winter, and all its
5217  intolerable weather behind us.  It was one of those less lowering,
5218  but still grey and gloomy enough mornings of the transition, when
5219  with a fair wind the ship was rushing through the water with a
5220  vindictive sort of leaping and melancholy rapidity, that as I mounted
5221  to the deck at the call of the forenoon watch, so soon as I levelled
5222  my glance towards the taffrail, foreboding shivers ran over me.
5223  Reality outran apprehension; Captain Ahab stood upon his
5224  quarter-deck.
5225  
5226  There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the
5227  recovery from any.  He looked like a man cut away from the stake,
5228  when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without
5229  consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged
5230  robustness.  His whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze,
5231  and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini's cast Perseus.
5232  Threading its way out from among his grey hairs, and continuing right
5233  down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till it
5234  disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly
5235  whitish.  It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the
5236  straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning
5237  tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels
5238  and grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off into the
5239  soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded.  Whether
5240  that mark was born with him, or whether it was the scar left by some
5241  desperate wound, no one could certainly say.  By some tacit consent,
5242  throughout the voyage little or no allusion was made to it,
5243  especially by the mates.  But once Tashtego's senior, an old Gay-Head
5244  Indian among the crew, superstitiously asserted that not till he was
5245  full forty years old did Ahab become that way branded, and then it
5246  came upon him, not in the fury of any mortal fray, but in an
5247  elemental strife at sea.  Yet, this wild hint seemed inferentially
5248  negatived, by what a grey Manxman insinuated, an old sepulchral man,
5249  who, having never before sailed out of Nantucket, had never ere this
5250  laid eye upon wild Ahab.  Nevertheless, the old sea-traditions, the
5251  immemorial credulities, popularly invested this old Manxman with
5252  preternatural powers of discernment.  So that no white sailor
5253  seriously contradicted him when he said that if ever Captain Ahab
5254  should be tranquilly laid out--which might hardly come to pass, so he
5255  muttered--then, whoever should do that last office for the dead,
5256  would find a birth-mark on him from crown to sole.
5257  
5258  So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and the
5259  livid brand which streaked it, that for the first few moments I
5260  hardly noted that not a little of this overbearing grimness was owing
5261  to the barbaric white leg upon which he partly stood.  It had
5262  previously come to me that this ivory leg had at sea been fashioned
5263  from the polished bone of the sperm whale's jaw.  "Aye, he was
5264  dismasted off Japan," said the old Gay-Head Indian once; "but like
5265  his dismasted craft, he shipped another mast without coming home for
5266  it.  He has a quiver of 'em."
5267  
5268  I was struck with the singular posture he maintained.  Upon each side
5269  of the Pequod's quarter deck, and pretty close to the mizzen shrouds,
5270  there was an auger hole, bored about half an inch or so, into the
5271  plank.  His bone leg steadied in that hole; one arm elevated, and
5272  holding by a shroud; Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out
5273  beyond the ship's ever-pitching prow.  There was an infinity of
5274  firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the
5275  fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance.  Not a word he
5276  spoke; nor did his officers say aught to him; though by all their
5277  minutest gestures and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if
5278  not painful, consciousness of being under a troubled master-eye.  And
5279  not only that, but moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a
5280  crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing
5281  dignity of some mighty woe.
5282  
5283  Ere long, from his first visit in the air, he withdrew into his
5284  cabin.  But after that morning, he was every day visible to the crew;
5285  either standing in his pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory stool he
5286  had; or heavily walking the deck.  As the sky grew less gloomy;
5287  indeed, began to grow a little genial, he became still less and less
5288  a recluse; as if, when the ship had sailed from home, nothing but the
5289  dead wintry bleakness of the sea had then kept him so secluded.  And,
5290  by and by, it came to pass, that he was almost continually in the
5291  air; but, as yet, for all that he said, or perceptibly did, on the at
5292  last sunny deck, he seemed as unnecessary there as another mast.  But
5293  the Pequod was only making a passage now; not regularly cruising;
5294  nearly all whaling preparatives needing supervision the mates were
5295  fully competent to, so that there was little or nothing, out of
5296  himself, to employ or excite Ahab, now; and thus chase away, for that
5297  one interval, the clouds that layer upon layer were piled upon his
5298  brow, as ever all clouds choose the loftiest peaks to pile themselves
5299  upon.
5300  
5301  Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling persuasiveness of the
5302  pleasant, holiday weather we came to, seemed gradually to charm him
5303  from his mood.  For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April
5304  and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the
5305  barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send
5306  forth some few green sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants;
5307  so Ahab did, in the end, a little respond to the playful allurings of
5308  that girlish air.  More than once did he put forth the faint blossom
5309  of a look, which, in any other man, would have soon flowered out in a
5310  smile.
5311  
5312  
5313  
5314  CHAPTER 29
5315  
5316  Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb.
5317  
5318  
5319  Some days elapsed, and ice and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now
5320  went rolling through the bright Quito spring, which, at sea, almost
5321  perpetually reigns on the threshold of the eternal August of the
5322  Tropic.  The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing,
5323  redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped
5324  up--flaked up, with rose-water snow.  The starred and stately nights
5325  seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely
5326  pride, the memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden
5327  helmeted suns!  For sleeping man, 'twas hard to choose between such
5328  winsome days and such seducing nights.  But all the witcheries of
5329  that unwaning weather did not merely lend new spells and potencies to
5330  the outward world.  Inward they turned upon the soul, especially when
5331  the still mild hours of eve came on; then, memory shot her crystals
5332  as the clear ice most forms of noiseless twilights.  And all these
5333  subtle agencies, more and more they wrought on Ahab's texture.
5334  
5335  Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the
5336  less man has to do with aught that looks like death.  Among
5337  sea-commanders, the old greybeards will oftenest leave their berths
5338  to visit the night-cloaked deck.  It was so with Ahab; only that now,
5339  of late, he seemed so much to live in the open air, that truly
5340  speaking, his visits were more to the cabin, than from the cabin to
5341  the planks.  "It feels like going down into one's tomb,"--he would
5342  mutter to himself--"for an old captain like me to be descending this
5343  narrow scuttle, to go to my grave-dug berth."
5344  
5345  So, almost every twenty-four hours, when the watches of the night
5346  were set, and the band on deck sentinelled the slumbers of the band
5347  below; and when if a rope was to be hauled upon the forecastle, the
5348  sailors flung it not rudely down, as by day, but with some
5349  cautiousness dropt it to its place for fear of disturbing their
5350  slumbering shipmates; when this sort of steady quietude would begin
5351  to prevail, habitually, the silent steersman would watch the
5352  cabin-scuttle; and ere long the old man would emerge, gripping at the
5353  iron banister, to help his crippled way.  Some considering touch of
5354  humanity was in him; for at times like these, he usually abstained
5355  from patrolling the quarter-deck; because to his wearied mates,
5356  seeking repose within six inches of his ivory heel, such would have
5357  been the reverberating crack and din of that bony step, that their
5358  dreams would have been on the crunching teeth of sharks.  But once,
5359  the mood was on him too deep for common regardings; and as with
5360  heavy, lumber-like pace he was measuring the ship from taffrail to
5361  mainmast, Stubb, the old second mate, came up from below, with a
5362  certain unassured, deprecating humorousness, hinted that if Captain
5363  Ahab was pleased to walk the planks, then, no one could say nay; but
5364  there might be some way of muffling the noise; hinting something
5365  indistinctly and hesitatingly about a globe of tow, and the insertion
5366  into it, of the ivory heel.  Ah!  Stubb, thou didst not know Ahab
5367  then.
5368  
5369  "Am I a cannon-ball, Stubb," said Ahab, "that thou wouldst wad me
5370  that fashion?  But go thy ways; I had forgot.  Below to thy nightly
5371  grave; where such as ye sleep between shrouds, to use ye to the
5372  filling one at last.--Down, dog, and kennel!"
5373  
5374  Starting at the unforseen concluding exclamation of the so suddenly
5375  scornful old man, Stubb was speechless a moment; then said excitedly,
5376  "I am not used to be spoken to that way, sir; I do but less than half
5377  like it, sir."
5378  
5379  "Avast! gritted Ahab between his set teeth, and violently moving
5380  away, as if to avoid some passionate temptation.
5381  
5382  "No, sir; not yet," said Stubb, emboldened, "I will not tamely be
5383  called a dog, sir."
5384  
5385  "Then be called ten times a donkey, and a mule, and an ass, and
5386  begone, or I'll clear the world of thee!"
5387  
5388  As he said this, Ahab advanced upon him with such overbearing terrors
5389  in his aspect, that Stubb involuntarily retreated.
5390  
5391  "I was never served so before without giving a hard blow for it,"
5392  muttered Stubb, as he found himself descending the cabin-scuttle.
5393  "It's very queer.  Stop, Stubb; somehow, now, I don't well know
5394  whether to go back and strike him, or--what's that?--down here on my
5395  knees and pray for him?  Yes, that was the thought coming up in me;
5396  but it would be the first time I ever DID pray.  It's queer; very
5397  queer; and he's queer too; aye, take him fore and aft, he's about the
5398  queerest old man Stubb ever sailed with.  How he flashed at me!--his
5399  eyes like powder-pans! is he mad?  Anyway there's something on his
5400  mind, as sure as there must be something on a deck when it cracks.
5401  He aint in his bed now, either, more than three hours out of the
5402  twenty-four; and he don't sleep then.  Didn't that Dough-Boy, the
5403  steward, tell me that of a morning he always finds the old man's
5404  hammock clothes all rumpled and tumbled, and the sheets down at the
5405  foot, and the coverlid almost tied into knots, and the pillow a sort
5406  of frightful hot, as though a baked brick had been on it?  A hot old
5407  man!  I guess he's got what some folks ashore call a conscience; it's
5408  a kind of Tic-Dolly-row they say--worse nor a toothache.  Well, well;
5409  I don't know what it is, but the Lord keep me from catching it.  He's
5410  full of riddles; I wonder what he goes into the after hold for, every
5411  night, as Dough-Boy tells me he suspects; what's that for, I should
5412  like to know?  Who's made appointments with him in the hold?  Ain't
5413  that queer, now?  But there's no telling, it's the old game--Here
5414  goes for a snooze.  Damn me, it's worth a fellow's while to be born
5415  into the world, if only to fall right asleep.  And now that I think
5416  of it, that's about the first thing babies do, and that's a sort of
5417  queer, too.  Damn me, but all things are queer, come to think of 'em.
5418  But that's against my principles.  Think not, is my eleventh
5419  commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth--So here goes
5420  again.  But how's that? didn't he call me a dog? blazes! he called me
5421  ten times a donkey, and piled a lot of jackasses on top of THAT!  He
5422  might as well have kicked me, and done with it.  Maybe he DID kick
5423  me, and I didn't observe it, I was so taken all aback with his brow,
5424  somehow.  It flashed like a bleached bone.  What the devil's the
5425  matter with me?  I don't stand right on my legs.  Coming afoul of
5426  that old man has a sort of turned me wrong side out.  By the Lord, I
5427  must have been dreaming, though--How? how? how?--but the only way's
5428  to stash it; so here goes to hammock again; and in the morning, I'll
5429  see how this plaguey juggling thinks over by daylight."
5430  
5431  
5432  
5433  CHAPTER 30
5434  
5435  The Pipe.
5436  
5437  
5438  When Stubb had departed, Ahab stood for a while leaning over the
5439  bulwarks; and then, as had been usual with him of late, calling a
5440  sailor of the watch, he sent him below for his ivory stool, and also
5441  his pipe.  Lighting the pipe at the binnacle lamp and planting the
5442  stool on the weather side of the deck, he sat and smoked.
5443  
5444  In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were
5445  fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhale.  How could
5446  one look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod of bones, without
5447  bethinking him of the royalty it symbolized?  For a Khan of the
5448  plank, and a king of the sea, and a great lord of Leviathans was
5449  Ahab.
5450  
5451  Some moments passed, during which the thick vapour came from his mouth
5452  in quick and constant puffs, which blew back again into his face.
5453  "How now," he soliloquized at last, withdrawing the tube, "this
5454  smoking no longer soothes.  Oh, my pipe! hard must it go with me if
5455  thy charm be gone!  Here have I been unconsciously toiling, not
5456  pleasuring--aye, and ignorantly smoking to windward all the while; to
5457  windward, and with such nervous whiffs, as if, like the dying whale,
5458  my final jets were the strongest and fullest of trouble.  What
5459  business have I with this pipe?  This thing that is meant for
5460  sereneness, to send up mild white vapours among mild white hairs, not
5461  among torn iron-grey locks like mine.  I'll smoke no more--"
5462  
5463  He tossed the still lighted pipe into the sea.  The fire hissed in
5464  the waves; the same instant the ship shot by the bubble the sinking
5465  pipe made.  With slouched hat, Ahab lurchingly paced the planks.
5466  
5467  
5468  
5469  CHAPTER 31
5470  
5471  Queen Mab.
5472  
5473  
5474  Next morning Stubb accosted Flask.
5475  
5476  "Such a queer dream, King-Post, I never had.  You know the old man's
5477  ivory leg, well I dreamed he kicked me with it; and when I tried to
5478  kick back, upon my soul, my little man, I kicked my leg right off!
5479  And then, presto!  Ahab seemed a pyramid, and I, like a blazing fool,
5480  kept kicking at it.  But what was still more curious, Flask--you know
5481  how curious all dreams are--through all this rage that I was in, I
5482  somehow seemed to be thinking to myself, that after all, it was not
5483  much of an insult, that kick from Ahab.  'Why,' thinks I, 'what's the
5484  row?  It's not a real leg, only a false leg.'  And there's a mighty
5485  difference between a living thump and a dead thump.  That's what
5486  makes a blow from the hand, Flask, fifty times more savage to bear
5487  than a blow from a cane.  The living member--that makes the living
5488  insult, my little man.  And thinks I to myself all the while, mind,
5489  while I was stubbing my silly toes against that cursed pyramid--so
5490  confoundedly contradictory was it all, all the while, I say, I was
5491  thinking to myself, 'what's his leg now, but a cane--a whalebone
5492  cane.  Yes,' thinks I, 'it was only a playful cudgelling--in fact,
5493  only a whaleboning that he gave me--not a base kick.  Besides,'
5494  thinks I, 'look at it once; why, the end of it--the foot part--what a
5495  small sort of end it is; whereas, if a broad footed farmer kicked me,
5496  THERE'S a devilish broad insult.  But this insult is whittled down to
5497  a point only.'  But now comes the greatest joke of the dream, Flask.
5498  While I was battering away at the pyramid, a sort of badger-haired
5499  old merman, with a hump on his back, takes me by the shoulders, and
5500  slews me round.  'What are you 'bout?' says he.  Slid! man, but I was
5501  frightened.  Such a phiz!  But, somehow, next moment I was over the
5502  fright.  'What am I about?' says I at last.  'And what business is
5503  that of yours, I should like to know, Mr. Humpback?  Do YOU want a
5504  kick?'  By the lord, Flask, I had no sooner said that, than he turned
5505  round his stern to me, bent over, and dragging up a lot of seaweed he
5506  had for a clout--what do you think, I saw?--why thunder alive, man,
5507  his stern was stuck full of marlinspikes, with the points out.  Says
5508  I, on second thoughts, 'I guess I won't kick you, old fellow.'  'Wise
5509  Stubb,' said he, 'wise Stubb;' and kept muttering it all the time, a
5510  sort of eating of his own gums like a chimney hag.  Seeing he wasn't
5511  going to stop saying over his 'wise Stubb, wise Stubb,' I thought I
5512  might as well fall to kicking the pyramid again.  But I had only just
5513  lifted my foot for it, when he roared out, 'Stop that kicking!'
5514  'Halloa,' says I, 'what's the matter now, old fellow?'  'Look ye
5515  here,' says he; 'let's argue the insult.  Captain Ahab kicked ye,
5516  didn't he?'  'Yes, he did,' says I--'right HERE it was.'  'Very
5517  good,' says he--'he used his ivory leg, didn't he?'  'Yes, he did,'
5518  says I.  'Well then,' says he, 'wise Stubb, what have you to complain
5519  of?  Didn't he kick with right good will? it wasn't a common pitch
5520  pine leg he kicked with, was it?  No, you were kicked by a great man,
5521  and with a beautiful ivory leg, Stubb.  It's an honour; I consider it
5522  an honour.  Listen, wise Stubb.  In old England the greatest lords
5523  think it great glory to be slapped by a queen, and made
5524  garter-knights of; but, be YOUR boast, Stubb, that ye were kicked by
5525  old Ahab, and made a wise man of.  Remember what I say; BE kicked by
5526  him; account his kicks honours; and on no account kick back; for you
5527  can't help yourself, wise Stubb.  Don't you see that pyramid?'  With
5528  that, he all of a sudden seemed somehow, in some queer fashion, to
5529  swim off into the air.  I snored; rolled over; and there I was in my
5530  hammock!  Now, what do you think of that dream, Flask?"
5531  
5532  "I don't know; it seems a sort of foolish to me, tho.'"
5533  
5534  "May be; may be.  But it's made a wise man of me, Flask.  D'ye see
5535  Ahab standing there, sideways looking over the stern?  Well, the best
5536  thing you can do, Flask, is to let the old man alone; never speak to
5537  him, whatever he says.  Halloa!  What's that he shouts?  Hark!"
5538  
5539  "Mast-head, there!  Look sharp, all of ye!  There are whales
5540  hereabouts!
5541  
5542  If ye see a white one, split your lungs for him!
5543  
5544  "What do you think of that now, Flask? ain't there a small drop of
5545  something queer about that, eh?  A white whale--did ye mark that,
5546  man?  Look ye--there's something special in the wind.  Stand by for
5547  it, Flask.  Ahab has that that's bloody on his mind.  But, mum; he
5548  comes this way."
5549  
5550  
5551  
5552  CHAPTER 32
5553  
5554  Cetology.
5555  
5556  
5557  Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be
5558  lost in its unshored, harbourless immensities.  Ere that come to pass;
5559  ere the Pequod's weedy hull rolls side by side with the barnacled
5560  hulls of the leviathan; at the outset it is but well to attend to a
5561  matter almost indispensable to a thorough appreciative understanding
5562  of the more special leviathanic revelations and allusions of all
5563  sorts which are to follow.
5564  
5565  It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera,
5566  that I would now fain put before you.  Yet is it no easy task.  The
5567  classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here
5568  essayed.  Listen to what the best and latest authorities have laid
5569  down.
5570  
5571  "No branch of Zoology is so much involved as that which is entitled
5572  Cetology," says Captain Scoresby, A.D. 1820.
5573  
5574  "It is not my intention, were it in my power, to enter into the
5575  inquiry as to the true method of dividing the cetacea into groups and
5576  families....  Utter confusion exists among the historians of this
5577  animal" (sperm whale), says Surgeon Beale, A.D. 1839.
5578  
5579  "Unfitness to pursue our research in the unfathomable waters."
5580  "Impenetrable veil covering our knowledge of the cetacea."  "A field
5581  strewn with thorns."  "All these incomplete indications but serve to
5582  torture us naturalists."
5583  
5584  Thus speak of the whale, the great Cuvier, and John Hunter, and
5585  Lesson, those lights of zoology and anatomy.  Nevertheless, though of
5586  real knowledge there be little, yet of books there are a plenty; and
5587  so in some small degree, with cetology, or the science of whales.
5588  Many are the men, small and great, old and new, landsmen and seamen,
5589  who have at large or in little, written of the whale.  Run over a
5590  few:--The Authors of the Bible; Aristotle; Pliny; Aldrovandi; Sir
5591  Thomas Browne; Gesner; Ray; Linnaeus; Rondeletius; Willoughby; Green;
5592  Artedi; Sibbald; Brisson; Marten; Lacepede; Bonneterre; Desmarest;
5593  Baron Cuvier; Frederick Cuvier; John Hunter; Owen; Scoresby; Beale;
5594  Bennett; J.  Ross Browne; the Author of Miriam Coffin; Olmstead; and
5595  the Rev.  T.  Cheever.  But to what ultimate generalizing purpose all
5596  these have written, the above cited extracts will show.
5597  
5598  Of the names in this list of whale authors, only those following Owen
5599  ever saw living whales; and but one of them was a real professional
5600  harpooneer and whaleman.  I mean Captain Scoresby.  On the separate
5601  subject of the Greenland or right-whale, he is the best existing
5602  authority.  But Scoresby knew nothing and says nothing of the great
5603  sperm whale, compared with which the Greenland whale is almost
5604  unworthy mentioning.  And here be it said, that the Greenland whale
5605  is an usurper upon the throne of the seas.  He is not even by any
5606  means the largest of the whales.  Yet, owing to the long priority of
5607  his claims, and the profound ignorance which, till some seventy years
5608  back, invested the then fabulous or utterly unknown sperm-whale, and
5609  which ignorance to this present day still reigns in all but some few
5610  scientific retreats and whale-ports; this usurpation has been every
5611  way complete.  Reference to nearly all the leviathanic allusions in
5612  the great poets of past days, will satisfy you that the Greenland
5613  whale, without one rival, was to them the monarch of the seas.  But
5614  the time has at last come for a new proclamation.  This is Charing
5615  Cross; hear ye! good people all,--the Greenland whale is
5616  deposed,--the great sperm whale now reigneth!
5617  
5618  There are only two books in being which at all pretend to put the
5619  living sperm whale before you, and at the same time, in the remotest
5620  degree succeed in the attempt.  Those books are Beale's and
5621  Bennett's; both in their time surgeons to English South-Sea
5622  whale-ships, and both exact and reliable men.  The original matter
5623  touching the sperm whale to be found in their volumes is necessarily
5624  small; but so far as it goes, it is of excellent quality, though
5625  mostly confined to scientific description.  As yet, however, the
5626  sperm whale, scientific or poetic, lives not complete in any
5627  literature.  Far above all other hunted whales, his is an unwritten
5628  life.
5629  
5630  Now the various species of whales need some sort of popular
5631  comprehensive classification, if only an easy outline one for the
5632  present, hereafter to be filled in all its departments by subsequent
5633  laborers.  As no better man advances to take this matter in hand, I
5634  hereupon offer my own poor endeavors.  I promise nothing complete;
5635  because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very
5636  reason infallibly be faulty.  I shall not pretend to a minute
5637  anatomical description of the various species, or--in this place at
5638  least--to much of any description.  My object here is simply to
5639  project the draught of a systematization of cetology.  I am the
5640  architect, not the builder.
5641  
5642  But it is a ponderous task; no ordinary letter-sorter in the
5643  Post-Office is equal to it.  To grope down into the bottom of the sea
5644  after them; to have one's hands among the unspeakable foundations,
5645  ribs, and very pelvis of the world; this is a fearful thing.  What am
5646  I that I should essay to hook the nose of this leviathan!  The awful
5647  tauntings in Job might well appal me.  "Will he the (leviathan) make
5648  a covenant with thee?  Behold the hope of him is vain!  But I have
5649  swam through libraries and sailed through oceans; I have had to do
5650  with whales with these visible hands; I am in earnest; and I will
5651  try.  There are some preliminaries to settle.
5652  
5653  First: The uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Cetology
5654  is in the very vestibule attested by the fact, that in some quarters
5655  it still remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish.  In his
5656  System of Nature, A.D. 1776, Linnaeus declares, "I hereby separate
5657  the whales from the fish."  But of my own knowledge, I know that down
5658  to the year 1850, sharks and shad, alewives and herring, against
5659  Linnaeus's express edict, were still found dividing the possession of
5660  the same seas with the Leviathan.
5661  
5662  The grounds upon which Linnaeus would fain have banished the whales
5663  from the waters, he states as follows: "On account of their warm
5664  bilocular heart, their lungs, their movable eyelids, their hollow
5665  ears, penem intrantem feminam mammis lactantem," and finally, "ex
5666  lege naturae jure meritoque."  I submitted all this to my friends
5667  Simeon Macey and Charley Coffin, of Nantucket, both messmates of mine
5668  in a certain voyage, and they united in the opinion that the reasons
5669  set forth were altogether insufficient.  Charley profanely hinted
5670  they were humbug.
5671  
5672  Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned
5673  ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me.
5674  This fundamental thing settled, the next point is, in what internal
5675  respect does the whale differ from other fish.  Above, Linnaeus has
5676  given you those items.  But in brief, they are these: lungs and warm
5677  blood; whereas, all other fish are lungless and cold blooded.
5678  
5679  Next: how shall we define the whale, by his obvious externals, so as
5680  conspicuously to label him for all time to come?  To be short, then,
5681  a whale is A SPOUTING FISH WITH A HORIZONTAL TAIL.  There you have
5682  him.  However contracted, that definition is the result of expanded
5683  meditation.  A walrus spouts much like a whale, but the walrus is not
5684  a fish, because he is amphibious.  But the last term of the
5685  definition is still more cogent, as coupled with the first.  Almost
5686  any one must have noticed that all the fish familiar to landsmen have
5687  not a flat, but a vertical, or up-and-down tail.  Whereas, among
5688  spouting fish the tail, though it may be similarly shaped, invariably
5689  assumes a horizontal position.
5690  
5691  By the above definition of what a whale is, I do by no means exclude
5692  from the leviathanic brotherhood any sea creature hitherto identified
5693  with the whale by the best informed Nantucketers; nor, on the other
5694  hand, link with it any fish hitherto authoritatively regarded as
5695  alien.*  Hence, all the smaller, spouting, and horizontal tailed fish
5696  must be included in this ground-plan of Cetology.  Now, then, come
5697  the grand divisions of the entire whale host.
5698  
5699  
5700  *I am aware that down to the present time, the fish styled Lamatins
5701  and Dugongs (Pig-fish and Sow-fish of the Coffins of Nantucket) are
5702  included by many naturalists among the whales.  But as these pig-fish
5703  are a noisy, contemptible set, mostly lurking in the mouths of
5704  rivers, and feeding on wet hay, and especially as they do not spout,
5705  I deny their credentials as whales; and have presented them with
5706  their passports to quit the Kingdom of Cetology.
5707  
5708  
5709  First: According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary
5710  BOOKS (subdivisible into CHAPTERS), and these shall comprehend them
5711  all, both small and large.
5712  
5713  I. THE FOLIO WHALE; II. the OCTAVO WHALE; III. the DUODECIMO WHALE.
5714  
5715  As the type of the FOLIO I present the SPERM WHALE; of the OCTAVO,
5716  the GRAMPUS; of the DUODECIMO, the PORPOISE.
5717  
5718  FOLIOS.  Among these I here include the following chapters:--I. The
5719  SPERM WHALE; II. the RIGHT WHALE; III. the FIN-BACK WHALE; IV. the
5720  HUMP-BACKED WHALE; V. the RAZ