Moby Dick; or The Whale by Herman Melville

Moby Dick; or The Whale by Herman Melville

The proofreaders of this version are indebted to The University of

Adelaide Library for preserving the Virginia Tech version. The

resulting etext was compared with a public domain hard copy version of

the text.

In chapters 24, 89, and 90, we substituted a capital L for the symbol

for the British pound, a unit of currency.

MOBY DICK; OR THE WHALE

by Herman Melville

ETYMOLOGY.

(Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School)

The pale Usher--threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him

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now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer

handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the

known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it

somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.

"While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what

name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue leaving out, through

ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh the signification

of the word, you deliver that which is not true." --HACKLUYT

"WHALE. ... Sw. and Dan. HVAL. This animal is named from roundness

or rolling; for in Dan. HVALT is arched or vaulted." --WEBSTER'S

DICTIONARY

"WHALE. ... It is more immediately from the Dut. and Ger. WALLEN;

A.S. WALW-IAN, to roll, to wallow." --RICHARDSON'S DICTIONARY

KETOS, GREEK.

CETUS, LATIN.

WHOEL, ANGLO-SAXON.

HVALT, DANISH.

WAL, DUTCH.

HWAL, SWEDISH.

WHALE, ICELANDIC.

WHALE, ENGLISH.

BALEINE, FRENCH.

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BALLENA, SPANISH.

PEKEE-NUEE-NUEE, FEGEE.

PEKEE-NUEE-NUEE, ERROMANGOAN.

EXTRACTS (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian).

It will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of

a poor devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long

Vaticans and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random

allusions to whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever,

sacred or profane. Therefore you must not, in every case at least,

take the higgledy-piggledy whale statements, however authentic, in

these extracts, for veritable gospel cetology. Far from it. As

touching the ancient authors generally, as well as the poets here

appearing, these extracts are solely valuable or entertaining, as

affording a glancing bird's eye view of what has been promiscuously

said, thought, fancied, and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and

generations, including our own.

So fare thee well, poor devil of a Sub-Sub, whose commentator I am.

Thou belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this

world will ever warm; and for whom even Pale Sherry would be too

rosy-strong; but with whom one sometimes loves to sit, and feel

poor-devilish, too; and grow convivial upon tears; and say to them

bluntly, with full eyes and empty glasses, and in not altogether

unpleasant sadness--Give it up, Sub-Subs! For by how much the more

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pains ye take to please the world, by so much the more shall ye for

ever go thankless! Would that I could clear out Hampton Court and

the Tuileries for ye! But gulp down your tears and hie aloft to the

royal-mast with your hearts; for your friends who have gone before

are clearing out the seven-storied heavens, and making refugees of

long-pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, against your coming.

Here ye strike but splintered hearts together--there, ye shall strike

unsplinterable glasses!

EXTRACTS.

"And God created great whales." --GENESIS.

"Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him; One would think the deep

to be hoary." --JOB.

"Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah."

--JONAH.

"There go the ships; there is that Leviathan whom thou hast made to

play therein." --PSALMS.

"In that day, the Lord with his sore, and great, and strong sword,

shall punish Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that

crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea."

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--ISAIAH

"And what thing soever besides cometh within the chaos of this

monster's mouth, be it beast, boat, or stone, down it goes all

incontinently that foul great swallow of his, and perisheth in the

bottomless gulf of his paunch." --HOLLAND'S PLUTARCH'S MORALS.

"The Indian Sea breedeth the most and the biggest fishes that are:

among which the Whales and Whirlpooles called Balaene, take up as

much in length as four acres or arpens of land." --HOLLAND'S PLINY.

"Scarcely had we proceeded two days on the sea, when about sunrise a

great many Whales and other monsters of the sea, appeared. Among the

former, one was of a most monstrous size. ... This came towards us,

open-mouthed, raising the waves on all sides, and beating the sea

before him into a foam." --TOOKE'S LUCIAN. "THE TRUE HISTORY."

"He visited this country also with a view of catching horse-whales,

which had bones of very great value for their teeth, of which he

brought some to the king. ... The best whales were catched in his

own country, of which some were forty-eight, some fifty yards long.

He said that he was one of six who had killed sixty in two days."

--OTHER OR OCTHER'S VERBAL NARRATIVE TAKEN DOWN FROM HIS MOUTH BY

KING ALFRED, A.D. 890.

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"And whereas all the other things, whether beast or vessel, that

enter into the dreadful gulf of this monster's (whale's) mouth, are

immediately lost and swallowed up, the sea-gudgeon retires into it in

great security, and there sleeps." --MONTAIGNE. --APOLOGY FOR

RAIMOND SEBOND.

"Let us fly, let us fly! Old Nick take me if is not Leviathan

described by the noble prophet Moses in the life of patient Job."

--RABELAIS.

"This whale's liver was two cartloads." --STOWE'S ANNALS.

"The great Leviathan that maketh the seas to seethe like boiling

pan." --LORD BACON'S VERSION OF THE PSALMS.

"Touching that monstrous bulk of the whale or ork we have received

nothing certain. They grow exceeding fat, insomuch that an

incredible quantity of oil will be extracted out of one whale."

--IBID. "HISTORY OF LIFE AND DEATH."

"The sovereignest thing on earth is parmacetti for an inward bruise."

--KING HENRY.

"Very like a whale." --HAMLET.

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"Which to secure, no skill of leach's art

Mote him availle, but to returne againe

To his wound's worker, that with lowly dart,

Dinting his breast, had bred his restless paine,

Like as the wounded whale to shore flies thro' the maine."

--THE FAERIE QUEEN.

"Immense as whales, the motion of whose vast bodies can in a peaceful

calm trouble the ocean til it boil." --SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. PREFACE

TO GONDIBERT.

"What spermacetti is, men might justly doubt, since the learned

Hosmannus in his work of thirty years, saith plainly, Nescio quid

sit." --SIR T. BROWNE. OF SPERMA CETI AND THE SPERMA CETI WHALE.

VIDE HIS V. E.

"Like Spencer's Talus with his modern flail

He threatens ruin with his ponderous tail.

...

Their fixed jav'lins in his side he wears,

And on his back a grove of pikes appears." --WALLER'S BATTLE OF THE

SUMMER ISLANDS.

"By art is created that great Leviathan, called a Commonwealth or

State--(in Latin, Civitas) which is but an artificial man." --OPENING

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SENTENCE OF HOBBES'S LEVIATHAN.

"Silly Mansoul swallowed it without chewing, as if it had been a

sprat in the mouth of a whale." --PILGRIM'S PROGRESS.

"That sea beast

Leviathan, which God of all his works

Created hugest that swim the ocean stream." --PARADISE LOST.

---"There Leviathan,

Hugest of living creatures, in the deep

Stretched like a promontory sleeps or swims,

And seems a moving land; and at his gills

Draws in, and at his breath spouts out a sea." --IBID.

"The mighty whales which swim in a sea of water, and have a sea of

oil swimming in them." --FULLLER'S PROFANE AND HOLY STATE.

"So close behind some promontory lie

The huge Leviathan to attend their prey,

And give no chance, but swallow in the fry,

Which through their gaping jaws mistake the way."

--DRYDEN'S ANNUS MIRABILIS.

"While the whale is floating at the stern of the ship, they cut off

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his head, and tow it with a boat as near the shore as it will come;

but it will be aground in twelve or thirteen feet water." --THOMAS

EDGE'S TEN VOYAGES TO SPITZBERGEN, IN PURCHAS.

"In their way they saw many whales sporting in the ocean, and in

wantonness fuzzing up the water through their pipes and vents, which

nature has placed on their shoulders." --SIR T. HERBERT'S VOYAGES

INTO ASIA AND AFRICA. HARRIS COLL.

"Here they saw such huge troops of whales, that they were forced to

proceed with a great deal of caution for fear they should run their

ship upon them." --SCHOUTEN'S SIXTH CIRCUMNAVIGATION.

"We set sail from the Elbe, wind N.E. in the ship called The

Jonas-in-the-Whale. ... Some say the whale can't open his mouth, but

that is a fable. ... They frequently climb up the masts to see

whether they can see a whale, for the first discoverer has a ducat

for his pains. ... I was told of a whale taken near Shetland, that

had above a barrel of herrings in his belly. ... One of our

harpooneers told me that he caught once a whale in Spitzbergen that

was white all over." --A VOYAGE TO GREENLAND, A.D. 1671 HARRIS COLL.

"Several whales have come in upon this coast (Fife) Anno 1652, one

eighty feet in length of the whale-bone kind came in, which (as I was

informed), besides a vast quantity of oil, did afford 500 weight of

baleen. The jaws of it stand for a gate in the garden of Pitferren."

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--SIBBALD'S FIFE AND KINROSS.

"Myself have agreed to try whether I can master and kill this

Sperma-ceti whale, for I could never hear of any of that sort that

was killed by any man, such is his fierceness and swiftness."

--RICHARD STRAFFORD'S LETTER FROM THE BERMUDAS. PHIL. TRANS. A.D.

1668.

"Whales in the sea God's voice obey." --N. E. PRIMER.

"We saw also abundance of large whales, there being more in those

southern seas, as I may say, by a hundred to one; than we have to the

northward of us." --CAPTAIN COWLEY'S VOYAGE ROUND THE GLOBE, A.D.

1729.

"... and the breath of the whale is frequendy attended with such an

insupportable smell, as to bring on a disorder of the brain."

--ULLOA'S SOUTH AMERICA.

"To fifty chosen sylphs of special note,

We trust the important charge, the petticoat.

Oft have we known that seven-fold fence to fail,

Tho' stuffed with hoops and armed with ribs of whale." --RAPE

OF THE LOCK.

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"If we compare land animals in respect to magnitude, with those that

take up their abode in the deep, we shall find they will appear

contemptible in the comparison. The whale is doubtless the largest

animal in creation." --GOLDSMITH, NAT. HIST.

"If you should write a fable for little fishes, you would make them

speak like great wales." --GOLDSMITH TO JOHNSON.

"In the afternoon we saw what was supposed to be a rock, but it was

found to be a dead whale, which some Asiatics had killed, and were

then towing ashore. They seemed to endeavor to conceal themselves

behind the whale, in order to avoid being seen by us." --COOK'S

VOYAGES.

"The larger whales, they seldom venture to attack. They stand in so

great dread of some of them, that when out at sea they are afraid to

mention even their names, and carry dung, lime-stone, juniper-wood,

and some other articles of the same nature in their boats, in order

to terrify and prevent their too near approach." --UNO VON TROIL'S

LETTERS ON BANKS'S AND SOLANDER'S VOYAGE TO ICELAND IN 1772.

"The Spermacetti Whale found by the Nantuckois, is an active, fierce

animal, and requires vast address and boldness in the fishermen."

--THOMAS JEFFERSON'S WHALE MEMORIAL TO THE FRENCH MINISTER IN 1778.

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"And pray, sir, what in the world is equal to it?" --EDMUND BURKE'S

REFERENCE IN PARLIAMENT TO THE NANTUCKET WHALE-FISHERY.

"Spain--a great whale stranded on the shores of Europe." --EDMUND

BURKE. (SOMEWHERE.)

"A tenth branch of the king's ordinary revenue, said to be grounded

on the consideration of his guarding and protecting the seas from

pirates and robbers, is the right to royal fish, which are whale and

sturgeon. And these, when either thrown ashore or caught near the

coast, are the property of the king." --BLACKSTONE.

"Soon to the sport of death the crews repair:

Rodmond unerring o'er his head suspends

The barbed steel, and every turn attends."

--FALCONER'S SHIPWRECK.

"Bright shone the roofs, the domes, the spires,

And rockets blew self driven,

To hang their momentary fire

Around the vault of heaven.

"So fire with water to compare,

The ocean serves on high,

Up-spouted by a whale in air,

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To express unwieldy joy." --COWPER, ON THE QUEEN'S

VISIT TO LONDON.

"Ten or fifteen gallons of blood are thrown out of the heart at a

stroke, with immense velocity." --JOHN HUNTER'S ACCOUNT OF THE

DISSECTION OF A WHALE. (A SMALL SIZED ONE.)

"The aorta of a whale is larger in the bore than the main pipe of the

water-works at London Bridge, and the water roaring in its passage

through that pipe is inferior in impetus and velocity to the blood

gushing from the whale's heart." --PALEY'S THEOLOGY.

"The whale is a mammiferous animal without hind feet." --BARON

CUVIER.

"In 40 degrees south, we saw Spermacetti Whales, but did not take any

till the first of May, the sea being then covered with them."

--COLNETT'S VOYAGE FOR THE PURPOSE OF EXTENDING THE SPERMACETI WHALE

FISHERY.

"In the free element beneath me swam,

Floundered and dived, in play, in chace, in battle,

Fishes of every colour, form, and kind;

Which language cannot paint, and mariner

Had never seen; from dread Leviathan

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To insect millions peopling every wave:

Gather'd in shoals immense, like floating islands,

Led by mysterious instincts through that waste

And trackless region, though on every side

Assaulted by voracious enemies,

Whales, sharks, and monsters, arm'd in front or jaw,

With swords, saws, spiral horns, or hooked fangs."

--MONTGOMERY'S WORLD BEFORE THE FLOOD.

"Io! Paean! Io! sing.

To the finny people's king.

Not a mightier whale than this

In the vast Atlantic is;

Not a fatter fish than he,

Flounders round the Polar Sea." --CHARLES LAMB'S TRIUMPH OF THE

WHALE.

"In the year 1690 some persons were on a high hill observing the

whales spouting and sporting with each other, when one observed:

there--pointing to the sea--is a green pasture where our children's

grand-children will go for bread." --OBED MACY'S HISTORY OF

NANTUCKET.

"I built a cottage for Susan and myself and made a gateway in the

form of a Gothic Arch, by setting up a whale's jaw bones."

--HAWTHORNE'S TWICE TOLD TALES.

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"She came to bespeak a monument for her first love, who had been

killed by a whale in the Pacific ocean, no less than forty years

ago." --IBID.

"No, Sir, 'tis a Right Whale," answered Tom; "I saw his sprout; he

threw up a pair of as pretty rainbows as a Christian would wish to

look at. He's a raal oil-butt, that fellow!" --COOPER'S PILOT.

"The papers were brought in, and we saw in the Berlin Gazette that

whales had been introduced on the stage there." --ECKERMANN'S

CONVERSATIONS WITH GOETHE.

"My God! Mr. Chace, what is the matter?" I answered, "we have been

stove by a whale." --"NARRATIVE OF THE SHIPWRECK OF THE WHALE SHIP

ESSEX OF NANTUCKET, WHICH WAS ATTACKED AND FINALLY DESTROYED BY A

LARGE SPERM WHALE IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN." BY OWEN CHACE OF NANTUCKET,

FIRST MATE OF SAID VESSEL. NEW YORK, 1821.

"A mariner sat in the shrouds one night,

The wind was piping free;

Now bright, now dimmed, was the moonlight pale,

And the phospher gleamed in the wake of the whale,

As it floundered in the sea." --ELIZABETH OAKES SMITH.

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"The quantity of line withdrawn from the boats engaged in the capture

of this one whale, amounted altogether to 10,440 yards or nearly six

English miles. ...

"Sometimes the whale shakes its tremendous tail in the air, which,

cracking like a whip, resounds to the distance of three or four

miles." --SCORESBY.

"Mad with the agonies he endures from these fresh attacks, the

infuriated Sperm Whale rolls over and over; he rears his enormous

head, and with wide expanded jaws snaps at everything around him; he

rushes at the boats with his head; they are propelled before him with

vast swiftness, and sometimes utterly destroyed. ... It is a matter

of great astonishment that the consideration of the habits of so

interesting, and, in a commercial point of view, so important an

animal (as the Sperm Whale) should have been so entirely neglected,

or should have excited so little curiosity among the numerous, and

many of them competent observers, that of late years, must have

possessed the most abundant and the most convenient opportunities of

witnessing their habitudes." --THOMAS BEALE'S HISTORY OF THE SPERM

WHALE, 1839.

"The Cachalot" (Sperm Whale) "is not only better armed than the True

Whale" (Greenland or Right Whale) "in possessing a formidable weapon

at either extremity of its body, but also more frequently displays a

disposition to employ these weapons offensively and in manner at once

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so artful, bold, and mischievous, as to lead to its being regarded as

the most dangerous to attack of all the known species of the whale

tribe." --FREDERICK DEBELL BENNETT'S WHALING VOYAGE ROUND THE GLOBE,

1840.

October 13. "There she blows," was sung out from the mast-head.

"Where away?" demanded the captain.

"Three points off the lee bow, sir."

"Raise up your wheel. Steady!" "Steady, sir."

"Mast-head ahoy! Do you see that whale now?"

"Ay ay, sir! A shoal of Sperm Whales! There she blows! There she

breaches!"

"Sing out! sing out every time!"

"Ay Ay, sir! There she blows! there--there--THAR she

blows--bowes--bo-o-os!"

"How far off?"

"Two miles and a half."

"Thunder and lightning! so near! Call all hands." --J. ROSS BROWNE'S

ETCHINGS OF A WHALING CRUIZE. 1846.

"The Whale-ship Globe, on board of which vessel occurred the horrid

transactions we are about to relate, belonged to the island of

Nantucket." --"NARRATIVE OF THE GLOBE," BY LAY AND HUSSEY SURVIVORS.

A.D. 1828.

Being once pursued by a whale which he had wounded, he parried the

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assault for some time with a lance; but the furious monster at length

rushed on the boat; himself and comrades only being preserved by

leaping into the water when they saw the onset was inevitable."

--MISSIONARY JOURNAL OF TYERMAN AND BENNETT.

"Nantucket itself," said Mr. Webster, "is a very striking and

peculiar portion of the National interest. There is a population of

eight or nine thousand persons living here in the sea, adding largely

every year to the National wealth by the boldest and most persevering

industry." --REPORT OF DANIEL WEBSTER'S SPEECH IN THE U. S. SENATE,

ON THE APPLICATION FOR THE ERECTION OF A BREAKWATER AT NANTUCKET.

1828.

"The whale fell directly over him, and probably killed him in a

moment." --"THE WHALE AND HIS CAPTORS, OR THE WHALEMAN'S ADVENTURES

AND THE WHALE'S BIOGRAPHY, GATHERED ON THE HOMEWARD CRUISE OF THE

COMMODORE PREBLE." BY REV. HENRY T. CHEEVER.

"If you make the least damn bit of noise," replied Samuel, "I will

send you to hell." --LIFE OF SAMUEL COMSTOCK (THE MUTINEER), BY HIS

BROTHER, WILLIAM COMSTOCK. ANOTHER VERSION OF THE WHALE-SHIP GLOBE

NARRATIVE.

"The voyages of the Dutch and English to the Northern Ocean, in

order, if possible, to discover a passage through it to India, though

they failed of their main object, laid-open the haunts of the whale."

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--MCCULLOCH'S COMMERCIAL DICTIONARY.

"These things are reciprocal; the ball rebounds, only to bound

forward again; for now in laying open the haunts of the whale, the

whalemen seem to have indirectly hit upon new clews to that same

mystic North-West Passage." --FROM "SOMETHING" UNPUBLISHED.

"It is impossible to meet a whale-ship on the ocean without being

struck by her near appearance. The vessel under short sail, with

look-outs at the mast-heads, eagerly scanning the wide expanse around

them, has a totally different air from those engaged in regular

voyage." --CURRENTS AND WHALING. U.S. EX. EX.

"Pedestrians in the vicinity of London and elsewhere may recollect

having seen large curved bones set upright in the earth, either to

form arches over gateways, or entrances to alcoves, and they may

perhaps have been told that these were the ribs of whales." --TALES

OF A WHALE VOYAGER TO THE ARCTIC OCEAN.

"It was not till the boats returned from the pursuit of these whales,

that the whites saw their ship in bloody possession of the savages

enrolled among the crew." --NEWSPAPER ACCOUNT OF THE TAKING AND

RETAKING OF THE WHALE-SHIP HOBOMACK.

"It is generally well known that out of the crews of Whaling vessels

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(American) few ever return in the ships on board of which they

departed." --CRUISE IN A WHALE BOAT.

"Suddenly a mighty mass emerged from the water, and shot up

perpendicularly into the air. It was the while." --MIRIAM COFFIN OR

THE WHALE FISHERMAN.

"The Whale is harpooned to be sure; but bethink you, how you would

manage a powerful unbroken colt, with the mere appliance of a rope

tied to the root of his tail." --A CHAPTER ON WHALING IN RIBS AND

TRUCKS.

"On one occasion I saw two of these monsters (whales) probably male

and female, slowly swimming, one after the other, within less than a

stone's throw of the shore" (Terra Del Fuego), "over which the beech

tree extended its branches." --DARWIN'S VOYAGE OF A NATURALIST.

"'Stern all!' exclaimed the mate, as upon turning his head, he saw

the distended jaws of a large Sperm Whale close to the head of the

boat, threatening it with instant destruction;--'Stern all, for your

lives!'" --WHARTON THE WHALE KILLER.

"So be cheery, my lads, let your hearts never fail,

While the bold harpooneer is striking the whale!" --NANTUCKET SONG.

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"Oh, the rare old Whale, mid storm and gale

In his ocean home will be

A giant in might, where might is right,

And King of the boundless sea." --WHALE SONG.

CHAPTER 1

Loomings.

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago--never mind how long

precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing

particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a

little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of

driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I

find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp,

drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily

pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every

funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper

hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me

from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking

people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon

as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a

philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly

take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but

knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish

very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

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There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by

wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs--commerce surrounds it with

her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its

extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by

waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of

sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.

Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from

Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall,

northward. What do you see?--Posted like silent sentinels all around

the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean

reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the

pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some

high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better

seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in

lath and plaster--tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to

desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they

here?

But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and

seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but

the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of

yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh

the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they

stand--miles of them--leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes

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and alleys, streets and avenues--north, east, south, and west. Yet

here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the

needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?

Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes.

Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down

in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is

magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his

deepest reveries--stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going,

and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all

that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American

desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied

with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation

and water are wedded for ever.

But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest,

shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all

the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There

stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a

crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his

cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into

distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of

mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture

lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs

like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were vain, unless the

shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit

the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade

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knee-deep among Tiger-lilies--what is the one charm

wanting?--Water--there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara

but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see

it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two

handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he

sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway

Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy

soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your

first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical

vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of

sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did

the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely

all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of

that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the

tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and

was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and

oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this

is the key to it all.

Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I

begin to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of

my lungs, I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as

a passenger. For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse,

and a purse is but a rag unless you have something in it. Besides,

passengers get sea-sick--grow quarrelsome--don't sleep of nights--do

not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing;--no, I never go as a

passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea

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as a Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and

distinction of such offices to those who like them. For my part, I

abominate all honourable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations

of every kind whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to take

care of myself, without taking care of ships, barques, brigs,

schooners, and what not. And as for going as cook,--though I confess

there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of officer

on ship-board--yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls;--though

once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and

peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to

say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will. It is out of the

idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted

river horse, that you see the mummies of those creatures in their

huge bake-houses the pyramids.

No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast,

plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head.

True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to

spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of

thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one's sense of honour,

particularly if you come of an old established family in the land,

the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than

all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have

been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys

stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you,

from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of

Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even

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this wears off in time.

What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a

broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to,

weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think

the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I

promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular

instance? Who ain't a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the

old sea-captains may order me about--however they may thump and punch

me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right;

that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same

way--either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and

so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each

other's shoulder-blades, and be content.

Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of

paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single

penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves

must pay. And there is all the difference in the world between

paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most

uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon

us. But BEING PAID,--what will compare with it? The urbane activity

with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering

that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly

ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how

cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!

page 26 / 861

Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome

exercise and pure air of the fore-castle deck. For as in this world,

head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if

you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the

Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from

the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but

not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in

many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect

it. But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea

as a merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a

whaling voyage; this the invisible police officer of the Fates, who

has the constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and

influences me in some unaccountable way--he can better answer than

any one else. And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage,

formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a

long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo

between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the

bill must have run something like this:

"GRAND CONTESTED ELECTION FOR THE PRESIDENCY OF THE UNITED STATES.

"WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL.

"BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN."

Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers,

the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when

others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and

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short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in

farces--though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I

recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the

springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under

various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did,

besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting

from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.

Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great

whale himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all

my curiosity. Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his

island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these,

with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and

sounds, helped to sway me to my wish. With other men, perhaps, such

things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented

with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden

seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am

quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it--would

they let me--since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all

the inmates of the place one lodges in.

By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the

great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild

conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into

my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of

them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.

page 28 / 861

CHAPTER 2

The Carpet-Bag.

I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my

arm, and started for Cape Horn and the Pacific. Quitting the good

city of old Manhatto, I duly arrived in New Bedford. It was a

Saturday night in December. Much was I disappointed upon learning

that the little packet for Nantucket had already sailed, and that no

way of reaching that place would offer, till the following Monday.

As most young candidates for the pains and penalties of whaling stop

at this same New Bedford, thence to embark on their voyage, it may as

well be related that I, for one, had no idea of so doing. For my

mind was made up to sail in no other than a Nantucket craft, because

there was a fine, boisterous something about everything connected

with that famous old island, which amazingly pleased me. Besides

though New Bedford has of late been gradually monopolising the

business of whaling, and though in this matter poor old Nantucket is

now much behind her, yet Nantucket was her great original--the Tyre

of this Carthage;--the place where the first dead American whale was

stranded. Where else but from Nantucket did those aboriginal

whalemen, the Red-Men, first sally out in canoes to give chase to the

Leviathan? And where but from Nantucket, too, did that first

adventurous little sloop put forth, partly laden with imported

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cobblestones--so goes the story--to throw at the whales, in order to

discover when they were nigh enough to risk a harpoon from the

bowsprit?

Now having a night, a day, and still another night following before

me in New Bedford, ere I could embark for my destined port, it

became a matter of concernment where I was to eat and sleep

meanwhile. It was a very dubious-looking, nay, a very dark and

dismal night, bitingly cold and cheerless. I knew no one in the

place. With anxious grapnels I had sounded my pocket, and only

brought up a few pieces of silver,--So, wherever you go, Ishmael,

said I to myself, as I stood in the middle of a dreary street

shouldering my bag, and comparing the gloom towards the north with

the darkness towards the south--wherever in your wisdom you may

conclude to lodge for the night, my dear Ishmael, be sure to inquire

the price, and don't be too particular.

With halting steps I paced the streets, and passed the sign of "The

Crossed Harpoons"--but it looked too expensive and jolly there.

Further on, from the bright red windows of the "Sword-Fish Inn,"

there came such fervent rays, that it seemed to have melted the

packed snow and ice from before the house, for everywhere else the

congealed frost lay ten inches thick in a hard, asphaltic

pavement,--rather weary for me, when I struck my foot against the

flinty projections, because from hard, remorseless service the soles

of my boots were in a most miserable plight. Too expensive and

jolly, again thought I, pausing one moment to watch the broad glare

page 30 / 861

in the street, and hear the sounds of the tinkling glasses within.

But go on, Ishmael, said I at last; don't you hear? get away from

before the door; your patched boots are stopping the way. So on I

went. I now by instinct followed the streets that took me waterward,

for there, doubtless, were the cheapest, if not the cheeriest inns.

Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either

hand, and here and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a

tomb. At this hour of the night, of the last day of the week, that

quarter of the town proved all but deserted. But presently I came to

a smoky light proceeding from a low, wide building, the door of which

stood invitingly open. It had a careless look, as if it were meant

for the uses of the public; so, entering, the first thing I did was

to stumble over an ash-box in the porch. Ha! thought I, ha, as the

flying particles almost choked me, are these ashes from that

destroyed city, Gomorrah? But "The Crossed Harpoons," and "The

Sword-Fish?"--this, then must needs be the sign of "The Trap."

However, I picked myself up and hearing a loud voice within, pushed

on and opened a second, interior door.

It seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred

black faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a black

Angel of Doom was beating a book in a pulpit. It was a negro church;

and the preacher's text was about the blackness of darkness, and the

weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there. Ha, Ishmael, muttered

I, backing out, Wretched entertainment at the sign of 'The Trap!'

page 31 / 861

Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of light not far from the

docks, and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a

swinging sign over the door with a white painting upon it, faintly

representing a tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words

underneath--"The Spouter Inn:--Peter Coffin."

Coffin?--Spouter?--Rather ominous in that particular connexion,

thought I. But it is a common name in Nantucket, they say, and I

suppose this Peter here is an emigrant from there. As the light

looked so dim, and the place, for the time, looked quiet enough, and

the dilapidated little wooden house itself looked as if it might have

been carted here from the ruins of some burnt district, and as the

swinging sign had a poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, I thought

that here was the very spot for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea

coffee.

It was a queer sort of place--a gable-ended old house, one side

palsied as it were, and leaning over sadly. It stood on a sharp

bleak corner, where that tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up a worse

howling than ever it did about poor Paul's tossed craft. Euroclydon,

nevertheless, is a mighty pleasant zephyr to any one in-doors, with

his feet on the hob quietly toasting for bed. "In judging of that

tempestuous wind called Euroclydon," says an old writer--of whose

works I possess the only copy extant--"it maketh a marvellous

difference, whether thou lookest out at it from a glass window where

the frost is all on the outside, or whether thou observest it from

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that sashless window, where the frost is on both sides, and of which

the wight Death is the only glazier." True enough, thought I, as

this passage occurred to my mind--old black-letter, thou reasonest

well. Yes, these eyes are windows, and this body of mine is the

house. What a pity they didn't stop up the chinks and the crannies

though, and thrust in a little lint here and there. But it's too

late to make any improvements now. The universe is finished; the

copestone is on, and the chips were carted off a million years ago.

Poor Lazarus there, chattering his teeth against the curbstone for

his pillow, and shaking off his tatters with his shiverings, he might

plug up both ears with rags, and put a corn-cob into his mouth, and

yet that would not keep out the tempestuous Euroclydon. Euroclydon!

says old Dives, in his red silken wrapper--(he had a redder one

afterwards) pooh, pooh! What a fine frosty night; how Orion

glitters; what northern lights! Let them talk of their oriental

summer climes of everlasting conservatories; give me the privilege of

making my own summer with my own coals.

But what thinks Lazarus? Can he warm his blue hands by holding them

up to the grand northern lights? Would not Lazarus rather be in

Sumatra than here? Would he not far rather lay him down lengthwise

along the line of the equator; yea, ye gods! go down to the fiery pit

itself, in order to keep out this frost?

Now, that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before

the door of Dives, this is more wonderful than that an iceberg should

be moored to one of the Moluccas. Yet Dives himself, he too lives

page 33 / 861

like a Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs, and being a

president of a temperance society, he only drinks the tepid tears of

orphans.

But no more of this blubbering now, we are going a-whaling, and there

is plenty of that yet to come. Let us scrape the ice from our

frosted feet, and see what sort of a place this "Spouter" may be.

CHAPTER 3

The Spouter-Inn.

Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide,

low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of

the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one side hung a very

large oilpainting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced,

that in the unequal crosslights by which you viewed it, it was only

by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and

careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an

understanding of its purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades

and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young

artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to

delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint of much and earnest

contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by

throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you at

last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might

page 34 / 861

not be altogether unwarranted.

But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber,

portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the

picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a

nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to

drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite,

half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you

to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out

what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but,

alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.--It's the Black Sea in a

midnight gale.--It's the unnatural combat of the four primal

elements.--It's a blasted heath.--It's a Hyperborean winter

scene.--It's the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. But at

last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in

the picture's midst. THAT once found out, and all the rest were

plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic

fish? even the great leviathan himself?

In fact, the artist's design seemed this: a final theory of my own,

partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with

whom I conversed upon the subject. The picture represents a

Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering

there with its three dismantled masts alone visible; and an

exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in

the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads.

page 35 / 861

The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish

array of monstrous clubs and spears. Some were thickly set with

glittering teeth resembling ivory saws; others were tufted with knots

of human hair; and one was sickle-shaped, with a vast handle sweeping

round like the segment made in the new-mown grass by a long-armed

mower. You shuddered as you gazed, and wondered what monstrous

cannibal and savage could ever have gone a death-harvesting with such

a hacking, horrifying implement. Mixed with these were rusty old

whaling lances and harpoons all broken and deformed. Some were

storied weapons. With this once long lance, now wildly elbowed,

fifty years ago did Nathan Swain kill fifteen whales between a

sunrise and a sunset. And that harpoon--so like a corkscrew now--was

flung in Javan seas, and run away with by a whale, years afterwards

slain off the Cape of Blanco. The original iron entered nigh the

tail, and, like a restless needle sojourning in the body of a man,

travelled full forty feet, and at last was found imbedded in the

hump.

Crossing this dusky entry, and on through yon low-arched way--cut

through what in old times must have been a great central chimney with

fireplaces all round--you enter the public room. A still duskier

place is this, with such low ponderous beams above, and such old

wrinkled planks beneath, that you would almost fancy you trod some

old craft's cockpits, especially of such a howling night, when this

corner-anchored old ark rocked so furiously. On one side stood a

long, low, shelf-like table covered with cracked glass cases, filled

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with dusty rarities gathered from this wide world's remotest nooks.

Projecting from the further angle of the room stands a dark-looking

den--the bar--a rude attempt at a right whale's head. Be that how it

may, there stands the vast arched bone of the whale's jaw, so wide, a

coach might almost drive beneath it. Within are shabby shelves,

ranged round with old decanters, bottles, flasks; and in those jaws

of swift destruction, like another cursed Jonah (by which name indeed

they called him), bustles a little withered old man, who, for their

money, dearly sells the sailors deliriums and death.

Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. Though

true cylinders without--within, the villanous green goggling glasses

deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom. Parallel

meridians rudely pecked into the glass, surround these footpads'

goblets. Fill to THIS mark, and your charge is but a penny; to THIS

a penny more; and so on to the full glass--the Cape Horn measure,

which you may gulp down for a shilling.

Upon entering the place I found a number of young seamen gathered

about a table, examining by a dim light divers specimens of

SKRIMSHANDER. I sought the landlord, and telling him I desired to be

accommodated with a room, received for answer that his house was

full--not a bed unoccupied. "But avast," he added, tapping his

forehead, "you haint no objections to sharing a harpooneer's blanket,

have ye? I s'pose you are goin' a-whalin', so you'd better get used

to that sort of thing."

page 37 / 861

I told him that I never liked to sleep two in a bed; that if I should

ever do so, it would depend upon who the harpooneer might be, and

that if he (the landlord) really had no other place for me, and the

harpooneer was not decidedly objectionable, why rather than wander

further about a strange town on so bitter a night, I would put up

with the half of any decent man's blanket.

"I thought so. All right; take a seat. Supper?--you want supper?

Supper'll be ready directly."

I sat down on an old wooden settle, carved all over like a bench on

the Battery. At one end a ruminating tar was still further adorning

it with his jack-knife, stooping over and diligently working away at

the space between his legs. He was trying his hand at a ship under

full sail, but he didn't make much headway, I thought.

At last some four or five of us were summoned to our meal in an

adjoining room. It was cold as Iceland--no fire at all--the landlord

said he couldn't afford it. Nothing but two dismal tallow candles,

each in a winding sheet. We were fain to button up our monkey

jackets, and hold to our lips cups of scalding tea with our half

frozen fingers. But the fare was of the most substantial kind--not

only meat and potatoes, but dumplings; good heavens! dumplings for

supper! One young fellow in a green box coat, addressed himself to

these dumplings in a most direful manner.

page 38 / 861

"My boy," said the landlord, "you'll have the nightmare to a dead

sartainty."

"Landlord," I whispered, "that aint the harpooneer is it?"

"Oh, no," said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny, "the

harpooneer is a dark complexioned chap. He never eats dumplings, he

don't--he eats nothing but steaks, and he likes 'em rare."

"The devil he does," says I. "Where is that harpooneer? Is he

here?"

"He'll be here afore long," was the answer.

I could not help it, but I began to feel suspicious of this "dark

complexioned" harpooneer. At any rate, I made up my mind that if it

so turned out that we should sleep together, he must undress and get

into bed before I did.

Supper over, the company went back to the bar-room, when, knowing not

what else to do with myself, I resolved to spend the rest of the

evening as a looker on.

page 39 / 861

Presently a rioting noise was heard without. Starting up, the

landlord cried, "That's the Grampus's crew. I seed her reported in

the offing this morning; a three years' voyage, and a full ship.

Hurrah, boys; now we'll have the latest news from the Feegees."

A tramping of sea boots was heard in the entry; the door was flung

open, and in rolled a wild set of mariners enough. Enveloped in

their shaggy watch coats, and with their heads muffled in woollen

comforters, all bedarned and ragged, and their beards stiff with

icicles, they seemed an eruption of bears from Labrador. They had

just landed from their boat, and this was the first house they

entered. No wonder, then, that they made a straight wake for the

whale's mouth--the bar--when the wrinkled little old Jonah, there

officiating, soon poured them out brimmers all round. One complained

of a bad cold in his head, upon which Jonah mixed him a pitch-like

potion of gin and molasses, which he swore was a sovereign cure for

all colds and catarrhs whatsoever, never mind of how long standing,

or whether caught off the coast of Labrador, or on the weather side

of an ice-island.

The liquor soon mounted into their heads, as it generally does even

with the arrantest topers newly landed from sea, and they began

capering about most obstreperously.

I observed, however, that one of them held somewhat aloof, and though

he seemed desirous not to spoil the hilarity of his shipmates by his

page 40 / 861

own sober face, yet upon the whole he refrained from making as much

noise as the rest. This man interested me at once; and since the

sea-gods had ordained that he should soon become my shipmate (though

but a sleeping-partner one, so far as this narrative is concerned),

I will here venture upon a little description of him. He stood full

six feet in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a

coffer-dam. I have seldom seen such brawn in a man. His face was

deeply brown and burnt, making his white teeth dazzling by the

contrast; while in the deep shadows of his eyes floated some

reminiscences that did not seem to give him much joy. His voice at

once announced that he was a Southerner, and from his fine stature, I

thought he must be one of those tall mountaineers from the

Alleghanian Ridge in Virginia. When the revelry of his companions

had mounted to its height, this man slipped away unobserved, and I

saw no more of him till he became my comrade on the sea. In a few

minutes, however, he was missed by his shipmates, and being, it

seems, for some reason a huge favourite with them, they raised a cry

of "Bulkington! Bulkington! where's Bulkington?" and darted out of

the house in pursuit of him.

It was now about nine o'clock, and the room seeming almost

supernaturally quiet after these orgies, I began to congratulate

myself upon a little plan that had occurred to me just previous to

the entrance of the seamen.

No man prefers to sleep two in a bed. In fact, you would a good deal

rather not sleep with your own brother. I don't know how it is, but

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people like to be private when they are sleeping. And when it comes

to sleeping with an unknown stranger, in a strange inn, in a strange

town, and that stranger a harpooneer, then your objections

indefinitely multiply. Nor was there any earthly reason why I as a

sailor should sleep two in a bed, more than anybody else; for sailors

no more sleep two in a bed at sea, than bachelor Kings do ashore. To

be sure they all sleep together in one apartment, but you have your

own hammock, and cover yourself with your own blanket, and sleep in

your own skin.

The more I pondered over this harpooneer, the more I abominated the

thought of sleeping with him. It was fair to presume that being a

harpooneer, his linen or woollen, as the case might be, would not be

of the tidiest, certainly none of the finest. I began to twitch all

over. Besides, it was getting late, and my decent harpooneer ought

to be home and going bedwards. Suppose now, he should tumble in upon

me at midnight--how could I tell from what vile hole he had been

coming?

"Landlord! I've changed my mind about that harpooneer.--I shan't

sleep with him. I'll try the bench here."

"Just as you please; I'm sorry I cant spare ye a tablecloth for a

mattress, and it's a plaguy rough board here"--feeling of the knots

and notches. "But wait a bit, Skrimshander; I've got a carpenter's

plane there in the bar--wait, I say, and I'll make ye snug enough."

page 42 / 861

So saying he procured the plane; and with his old silk handkerchief

first dusting the bench, vigorously set to planing away at my bed,

the while grinning like an ape. The shavings flew right and left;

till at last the plane-iron came bump against an indestructible knot.

The landlord was near spraining his wrist, and I told him for

heaven's sake to quit--the bed was soft enough to suit me, and I did

not know how all the planing in the world could make eider down of a

pine plank. So gathering up the shavings with another grin, and

throwing them into the great stove in the middle of the room, he went

about his business, and left me in a brown study.

I now took the measure of the bench, and found that it was a foot too

short; but that could be mended with a chair. But it was a foot too

narrow, and the other bench in the room was about four inches higher

than the planed one--so there was no yoking them. I then placed the

first bench lengthwise along the only clear space against the wall,

leaving a little interval between, for my back to settle down in.

But I soon found that there came such a draught of cold air over me

from under the sill of the window, that this plan would never do at

all, especially as another current from the rickety door met the one

from the window, and both together formed a series of small

whirlwinds in the immediate vicinity of the spot where I had thought

to spend the night.

The devil fetch that harpooneer, thought I, but stop, couldn't I

steal a march on him--bolt his door inside, and jump into his bed,

not to be wakened by the most violent knockings? It seemed no bad

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idea; but upon second thoughts I dismissed it. For who could tell

but what the next morning, so soon as I popped out of the room, the

harpooneer might be standing in the entry, all ready to knock me

down!

Still, looking round me again, and seeing no possible chance of

spending a sufferable night unless in some other person's bed, I

began to think that after all I might be cherishing unwarrantable

prejudices against this unknown harpooneer. Thinks I, I'll wait

awhile; he must be dropping in before long. I'll have a good look at

him then, and perhaps we may become jolly good bedfellows after

all--there's no telling.

But though the other boarders kept coming in by ones, twos, and

threes, and going to bed, yet no sign of my harpooneer.

"Landlord! said I, "what sort of a chap is he--does he always keep

such late hours?" It was now hard upon twelve o'clock.

The landlord chuckled again with his lean chuckle, and seemed to be

mightily tickled at something beyond my comprehension. "No," he

answered, "generally he's an early bird--airley to bed and airley to

rise--yes, he's the bird what catches the worm. But to-night he

went out a peddling, you see, and I don't see what on airth keeps him

so late, unless, may be, he can't sell his head."

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"Can't sell his head?--What sort of a bamboozingly story is this you

are telling me?" getting into a towering rage. "Do you pretend to

say, landlord, that this harpooneer is actually engaged this blessed

Saturday night, or rather Sunday morning, in peddling his head around

this town?"

"That's precisely it," said the landlord, "and I told him he couldn't

sell it here, the market's overstocked."

"With what?" shouted I.

"With heads to be sure; ain't there too many heads in the world?"

"I tell you what it is, landlord," said I quite calmly, "you'd better

stop spinning that yarn to me--I'm not green."

"May be not," taking out a stick and whittling a toothpick, "but I

rayther guess you'll be done BROWN if that ere harpooneer hears you a

slanderin' his head."

"I'll break it for him," said I, now flying into a passion again at

this unaccountable farrago of the landlord's.

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"It's broke a'ready," said he.

"Broke," said I--"BROKE, do you mean?"

"Sartain, and that's the very reason he can't sell it, I guess."

"Landlord," said I, going up to him as cool as Mt. Hecla in a

snow-storm--"landlord, stop whittling. You and I must understand one

another, and that too without delay. I come to your house and want a

bed; you tell me you can only give me half a one; that the other half

belongs to a certain harpooneer. And about this harpooneer, whom I

have not yet seen, you persist in telling me the most mystifying and

exasperating stories tending to beget in me an uncomfortable feeling

towards the man whom you design for my bedfellow--a sort of

connexion, landlord, which is an intimate and confidential one in the

highest degree. I now demand of you to speak out and tell me who and

what this harpooneer is, and whether I shall be in all respects safe

to spend the night with him. And in the first place, you will be so

good as to unsay that story about selling his head, which if true I

take to be good evidence that this harpooneer is stark mad, and I've

no idea of sleeping with a madman; and you, sir, YOU I mean,

landlord, YOU, sir, by trying to induce me to do so knowingly, would

thereby render yourself liable to a criminal prosecution."

"Wall," said the landlord, fetching a long breath, "that's a purty

long sarmon for a chap that rips a little now and then. But be easy,

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be easy, this here harpooneer I have been tellin' you of has just

arrived from the south seas, where he bought up a lot of 'balmed New

Zealand heads (great curios, you know), and he's sold all on 'em but

one, and that one he's trying to sell to-night, cause to-morrow's

Sunday, and it would not do to be sellin' human heads about the

streets when folks is goin' to churches. He wanted to, last Sunday,

but I stopped him just as he was goin' out of the door with four

heads strung on a string, for all the airth like a string of inions."

This account cleared up the otherwise unaccountable mystery, and

showed that the landlord, after all, had had no idea of fooling

me--but at the same time what could I think of a harpooneer who

stayed out of a Saturday night clean into the holy Sabbath, engaged

in such a cannibal business as selling the heads of dead idolators?

"Depend upon it, landlord, that harpooneer is a dangerous man."

"He pays reg'lar," was the rejoinder. "But come, it's getting

dreadful late, you had better be turning flukes--it's a nice bed;

Sal and me slept in that ere bed the night we were spliced. There's

plenty of room for two to kick about in that bed; it's an almighty

big bed that. Why, afore we give it up, Sal used to put our Sam and

little Johnny in the foot of it. But I got a dreaming and sprawling

about one night, and somehow, Sam got pitched on the floor, and came

near breaking his arm. Arter that, Sal said it wouldn't do. Come

along here, I'll give ye a glim in a jiffy;" and so saying he lighted

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a candle and held it towards me, offering to lead the way. But I

stood irresolute; when looking at a clock in the corner, he exclaimed

"I vum it's Sunday--you won't see that harpooneer to-night; he's come

to anchor somewhere--come along then; DO come; WON'T ye come?"

I considered the matter a moment, and then up stairs we went, and I

was ushered into a small room, cold as a clam, and furnished, sure

enough, with a prodigious bed, almost big enough indeed for any four

harpooneers to sleep abreast.

"There," said the landlord, placing the candle on a crazy old sea

chest that did double duty as a wash-stand and centre table; "there,

make yourself comfortable now, and good night to ye." I turned

round from eyeing the bed, but he had disappeared.

Folding back the counterpane, I stooped over the bed. Though none of

the most elegant, it yet stood the scrutiny tolerably well. I then

glanced round the room; and besides the bedstead and centre table,

could see no other furniture belonging to the place, but a rude

shelf, the four walls, and a papered fireboard representing a man

striking a whale. Of things not properly belonging to the room,

there was a hammock lashed up, and thrown upon the floor in one

corner; also a large seaman's bag, containing the harpooneer's

wardrobe, no doubt in lieu of a land trunk. Likewise, there was a

parcel of outlandish bone fish hooks on the shelf over the

fire-place, and a tall harpoon standing at the head of the bed.

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But what is this on the chest? I took it up, and held it close to

the light, and felt it, and smelt it, and tried every way possible to

arrive at some satisfactory conclusion concerning it. I can compare

it to nothing but a large door mat, ornamented at the edges with

little tinkling tags something like the stained porcupine quills

round an Indian moccasin. There was a hole or slit in the middle of

this mat, as you see the same in South American ponchos. But could

it be possible that any sober harpooneer would get into a door mat,

and parade the streets of any Christian town in that sort of guise?

I put it on, to try it, and it weighed me down like a hamper, being

uncommonly shaggy and thick, and I thought a little damp, as though

this mysterious harpooneer had been wearing it of a rainy day. I

went up in it to a bit of glass stuck against the wall, and I never

saw such a sight in my life. I tore myself out of it in such a hurry

that I gave myself a kink in the neck.

I sat down on the side of the bed, and commenced thinking about this

head-peddling harpooneer, and his door mat. After thinking some time

on the bed-side, I got up and took off my monkey jacket, and then

stood in the middle of the room thinking. I then took off my coat,

and thought a little more in my shirt sleeves. But beginning to feel

very cold now, half undressed as I was, and remembering what the

landlord said about the harpooneer's not coming home at all that

night, it being so very late, I made no more ado, but jumped out of

my pantaloons and boots, and then blowing out the light tumbled into

bed, and commended myself to the care of heaven.

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Whether that mattress was stuffed with corn-cobs or broken crockery,

there is no telling, but I rolled about a good deal, and could not

sleep for a long time. At last I slid off into a light doze, and had

pretty nearly made a good offing towards the land of Nod, when I

heard a heavy footfall in the passage, and saw a glimmer of light

come into the room from under the door.

Lord save me, thinks I, that must be the harpooneer, the infernal

head-peddler. But I lay perfectly still, and resolved not to say a

word till spoken to. Holding a light in one hand, and that identical

New Zealand head in the other, the stranger entered the room, and

without looking towards the bed, placed his candle a good way off

from me on the floor in one corner, and then began working away at

the knotted cords of the large bag I before spoke of as being in the

room. I was all eagerness to see his face, but he kept it averted

for some time while employed in unlacing the bag's mouth. This

accomplished, however, he turned round--when, good heavens! what a

sight! Such a face! It was of a dark, purplish, yellow colour, here

and there stuck over with large blackish looking squares. Yes, it's

just as I thought, he's a terrible bedfellow; he's been in a fight,

got dreadfully cut, and here he is, just from the surgeon. But at

that moment he chanced to turn his face so towards the light, that I

plainly saw they could not be sticking-plasters at all, those black

squares on his cheeks. They were stains of some sort or other. At

first I knew not what to make of this; but soon an inkling of the

truth occurred to me. I remembered a story of a white man--a

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whaleman too--who, falling among the cannibals, had been tattooed by

them. I concluded that this harpooneer, in the course of his distant

voyages, must have met with a similar adventure. And what is it,

thought I, after all! It's only his outside; a man can be honest in

any sort of skin. But then, what to make of his unearthly

complexion, that part of it, I mean, lying round about, and

completely independent of the squares of tattooing. To be sure, it

might be nothing but a good coat of tropical tanning; but I never

heard of a hot sun's tanning a white man into a purplish yellow one.

However, I had never been in the South Seas; and perhaps the sun

there produced these extraordinary effects upon the skin. Now, while

all these ideas were passing through me like lightning, this

harpooneer never noticed me at all. But, after some difficulty

having opened his bag, he commenced fumbling in it, and presently

pulled out a sort of tomahawk, and a seal-skin wallet with the hair

on. Placing these on the old chest in the middle of the room, he

then took the New Zealand head--a ghastly thing enough--and crammed

it down into the bag. He now took off his hat--a new beaver

hat--when I came nigh singing out with fresh surprise. There was no

hair on his head--none to speak of at least--nothing but a small

scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead. His bald purplish head now

looked for all the world like a mildewed skull. Had not the stranger

stood between me and the door, I would have bolted out of it quicker

than ever I bolted a dinner.

Even as it was, I thought something of slipping out of the window,

but it was the second floor back. I am no coward, but what to make

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of this head-peddling purple rascal altogether passed my

comprehension. Ignorance is the parent of fear, and being completely

nonplussed and confounded about the stranger, I confess I was now as

much afraid of him as if it was the devil himself who had thus broken

into my room at the dead of night. In fact, I was so afraid of him

that I was not game enough just then to address him, and demand a

satisfactory answer concerning what seemed inexplicable in him.

Meanwhile, he continued the business of undressing, and at last

showed his chest and arms. As I live, these covered parts of him

were checkered with the same squares as his face; his back, too, was

all over the same dark squares; he seemed to have been in a Thirty

Years' War, and just escaped from it with a sticking-plaster shirt.

Still more, his very legs were marked, as if a parcel of dark green

frogs were running up the trunks of young palms. It was now quite

plain that he must be some abominable savage or other shipped aboard

of a whaleman in the South Seas, and so landed in this Christian

country. I quaked to think of it. A peddler of heads too--perhaps

the heads of his own brothers. He might take a fancy to

mine--heavens! look at that tomahawk!

But there was no time for shuddering, for now the savage went about

something that completely fascinated my attention, and convinced me

that he must indeed be a heathen. Going to his heavy grego, or

wrapall, or dreadnaught, which he had previously hung on a chair, he

fumbled in the pockets, and produced at length a curious little

deformed image with a hunch on its back, and exactly the colour of a

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three days' old Congo baby. Remembering the embalmed head, at first

I almost thought that this black manikin was a real baby preserved

in some similar manner. But seeing that it was not at all limber,

and that it glistened a good deal like polished ebony, I concluded

that it must be nothing but a wooden idol, which indeed it proved to

be. For now the savage goes up to the empty fire-place, and removing

the papered fire-board, sets up this little hunch-backed image, like

a tenpin, between the andirons. The chimney jambs and all the bricks

inside were very sooty, so that I thought this fire-place made a very

appropriate little shrine or chapel for his Congo idol.

I now screwed my eyes hard towards the half hidden image, feeling but

ill at ease meantime--to see what was next to follow. First he takes

about a double handful of shavings out of his grego pocket, and

places them carefully before the idol; then laying a bit of ship

biscuit on top and applying the flame from the lamp, he kindled the

shavings into a sacrificial blaze. Presently, after many hasty

snatches into the fire, and still hastier withdrawals of his fingers

(whereby he seemed to be scorching them badly), he at last succeeded

in drawing out the biscuit; then blowing off the heat and ashes a

little, he made a polite offer of it to the little negro. But the

little devil did not seem to fancy such dry sort of fare at all; he

never moved his lips. All these strange antics were accompanied by

still stranger guttural noises from the devotee, who seemed to be

praying in a sing-song or else singing some pagan psalmody or other,

during which his face twitched about in the most unnatural manner.

At last extinguishing the fire, he took the idol up very

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unceremoniously, and bagged it again in his grego pocket as

carelessly as if he were a sportsman bagging a dead woodcock.

All these queer proceedings increased my uncomfortableness, and

seeing him now exhibiting strong symptoms of concluding his business

operations, and jumping into bed with me, I thought it was high time,

now or never, before the light was put out, to break the spell in

which I had so long been bound.

But the interval I spent in deliberating what to say, was a fatal

one. Taking up his tomahawk from the table, he examined the head of

it for an instant, and then holding it to the light, with his mouth

at the handle, he puffed out great clouds of tobacco smoke. The next

moment the light was extinguished, and this wild cannibal, tomahawk

between his teeth, sprang into bed with me. I sang out, I could not

help it now; and giving a sudden grunt of astonishment he began

feeling me.

Stammering out something, I knew not what, I rolled away from him

against the wall, and then conjured him, whoever or whatever he might

be, to keep quiet, and let me get up and light the lamp again. But

his guttural responses satisfied me at once that he but ill

comprehended my meaning.

"Who-e debel you?"--he at last said--"you no speak-e, dam-me, I

kill-e." And so saying the lighted tomahawk began flourishing about

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me in the dark.

"Landlord, for God's sake, Peter Coffin!" shouted I. "Landlord!

Watch! Coffin! Angels! save me!"

"Speak-e! tell-ee me who-ee be, or dam-me, I kill-e!" again growled

the cannibal, while his horrid flourishings of the tomahawk scattered

the hot tobacco ashes about me till I thought my linen would get on

fire. But thank heaven, at that moment the landlord came into the

room light in hand, and leaping from the bed I ran up to him.

"Don't be afraid now," said he, grinning again, "Queequeg here

wouldn't harm a hair of your head."

"Stop your grinning," shouted I, "and why didn't you tell me that

that infernal harpooneer was a cannibal?"

"I thought ye know'd it;--didn't I tell ye, he was a peddlin' heads

around town?--but turn flukes again and go to sleep. Queequeg, look

here--you sabbee me, I sabbee--you this man sleepe you--you sabbee?"

"Me sabbee plenty"--grunted Queequeg, puffing away at his pipe and

sitting up in bed.

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"You gettee in," he added, motioning to me with his tomahawk, and

throwing the clothes to one side. He really did this in not only a

civil but a really kind and charitable way. I stood looking at him a

moment. For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely

looking cannibal. What's all this fuss I have been making about,

thought I to myself--the man's a human being just as I am: he has

just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him.

Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

"Landlord," said I, "tell him to stash his tomahawk there, or pipe,

or whatever you call it; tell him to stop smoking, in short, and I

will turn in with him. But I don't fancy having a man smoking in bed

with me. It's dangerous. Besides, I ain't insured."

This being told to Queequeg, he at once complied, and again politely

motioned me to get into bed--rolling over to one side as much as to

say--I won't touch a leg of ye."

"Good night, landlord," said I, "you may go."

I turned in, and never slept better in my life.

CHAPTER 4

The Counterpane.

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Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg's arm

thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had

almost thought I had been his wife. The counterpane was of

patchwork, full of odd little parti-coloured squares and triangles;

and this arm of his tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan

labyrinth of a figure, no two parts of which were of one precise

shade--owing I suppose to his keeping his arm at sea unmethodically

in sun and shade, his shirt sleeves irregularly rolled up at various

times--this same arm of his, I say, looked for all the world like a

strip of that same patchwork quilt. Indeed, partly lying on it as

the arm did when I first awoke, I could hardly tell it from the

quilt, they so blended their hues together; and it was only by the

sense of weight and pressure that I could tell that Queequeg was

hugging me.

My sensations were strange. Let me try to explain them. When I was

a child, I well remember a somewhat similar circumstance that befell

me; whether it was a reality or a dream, I never could entirely

settle. The circumstance was this. I had been cutting up some caper

or other--I think it was trying to crawl up the chimney, as I had

seen a little sweep do a few days previous; and my stepmother who,

somehow or other, was all the time whipping me, or sending me to bed

supperless,--my mother dragged me by the legs out of the chimney and

packed me off to bed, though it was only two o'clock in the afternoon

of the 21st June, the longest day in the year in our hemisphere. I

felt dreadfully. But there was no help for it, so up stairs I went

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to my little room in the third floor, undressed myself as slowly as

possible so as to kill time, and with a bitter sigh got between the

sheets.

I lay there dismally calculating that sixteen entire hours must

elapse before I could hope for a resurrection. Sixteen hours in bed!

the small of my back ached to think of it. And it was so light too;

the sun shining in at the window, and a great rattling of coaches in

the streets, and the sound of gay voices all over the house. I felt

worse and worse--at last I got up, dressed, and softly going down in

my stockinged feet, sought out my stepmother, and suddenly threw

myself at her feet, beseeching her as a particular favour to give me a

good slippering for my misbehaviour; anything indeed but condemning

me to lie abed such an unendurable length of time. But she was the

best and most conscientious of stepmothers, and back I had to go to

my room. For several hours I lay there broad awake, feeling a great

deal worse than I have ever done since, even from the greatest

subsequent misfortunes. At last I must have fallen into a troubled

nightmare of a doze; and slowly waking from it--half steeped in

dreams--I opened my eyes, and the before sun-lit room was now wrapped

in outer darkness. Instantly I felt a shock running through all my

frame; nothing was to be seen, and nothing was to be heard; but a

supernatural hand seemed placed in mine. My arm hung over the

counterpane, and the nameless, unimaginable, silent form or phantom,

to which the hand belonged, seemed closely seated by my bed-side.

For what seemed ages piled on ages, I lay there, frozen with the most

awful fears, not daring to drag away my hand; yet ever thinking that

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if I could but stir it one single inch, the horrid spell would be

broken. I knew not how this consciousness at last glided away from

me; but waking in the morning, I shudderingly remembered it all, and

for days and weeks and months afterwards I lost myself in confounding

attempts to explain the mystery. Nay, to this very hour, I often

puzzle myself with it.

Now, take away the awful fear, and my sensations at feeling the

supernatural hand in mine were very similar, in their strangeness,

to those which I experienced on waking up and seeing Queequeg's pagan

arm thrown round me. But at length all the past night's events

soberly recurred, one by one, in fixed reality, and then I lay only

alive to the comical predicament. For though I tried to move his

arm--unlock his bridegroom clasp--yet, sleeping as he was, he still

hugged me tightly, as though naught but death should part us twain.

I now strove to rouse him--"Queequeg!"--but his only answer was a

snore. I then rolled over, my neck feeling as if it were in a

horse-collar; and suddenly felt a slight scratch. Throwing aside the

counterpane, there lay the tomahawk sleeping by the savage's side, as

if it were a hatchet-faced baby. A pretty pickle, truly, thought I;

abed here in a strange house in the broad day, with a cannibal and a

tomahawk! "Queequeg!--in the name of goodness, Queequeg, wake!" At

length, by dint of much wriggling, and loud and incessant

expostulations upon the unbecomingness of his hugging a fellow male

in that matrimonial sort of style, I succeeded in extracting a grunt;

and presently, he drew back his arm, shook himself all over like a

Newfoundland dog just from the water, and sat up in bed, stiff as a

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pike-staff, looking at me, and rubbing his eyes as if he did not

altogether remember how I came to be there, though a dim

consciousness of knowing something about me seemed slowly dawning

over him. Meanwhile, I lay quietly eyeing him, having no serious

misgivings now, and bent upon narrowly observing so curious a

creature. When, at last, his mind seemed made up touching the

character of his bedfellow, and he became, as it were, reconciled to

the fact; he jumped out upon the floor, and by certain signs and

sounds gave me to understand that, if it pleased me, he would dress

first and then leave me to dress afterwards, leaving the whole

apartment to myself. Thinks I, Queequeg, under the circumstances,

this is a very civilized overture; but, the truth is, these savages

have an innate sense of delicacy, say what you will; it is marvellous

how essentially polite they are. I pay this particular compliment to

Queequeg, because he treated me with so much civility and

consideration, while I was guilty of great rudeness; staring at him

from the bed, and watching all his toilette motions; for the time my

curiosity getting the better of my breeding. Nevertheless, a man

like Queequeg you don't see every day, he and his ways were well

worth unusual regarding.

He commenced dressing at top by donning his beaver hat, a very tall

one, by the by, and then--still minus his trowsers--he hunted up his

boots. What under the heavens he did it for, I cannot tell, but his

next movement was to crush himself--boots in hand, and hat on--under

the bed; when, from sundry violent gaspings and strainings, I

inferred he was hard at work booting himself; though by no law of

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propriety that I ever heard of, is any man required to be private

when putting on his boots. But Queequeg, do you see, was a creature

in the transition stage--neither caterpillar nor butterfly. He was

just enough civilized to show off his outlandishness in the strangest

possible manners. His education was not yet completed. He was an

undergraduate. If he had not been a small degree civilized, he very

probably would not have troubled himself with boots at all; but then,

if he had not been still a savage, he never would have dreamt of

getting under the bed to put them on. At last, he emerged with his

hat very much dented and crushed down over his eyes, and began

creaking and limping about the room, as if, not being much accustomed

to boots, his pair of damp, wrinkled cowhide ones--probably not made

to order either--rather pinched and tormented him at the first go off

of a bitter cold morning.

Seeing, now, that there were no curtains to the window, and that the

street being very narrow, the house opposite commanded a plain view

into the room, and observing more and more the indecorous figure that

Queequeg made, staving about with little else but his hat and boots

on; I begged him as well as I could, to accelerate his toilet

somewhat, and particularly to get into his pantaloons as soon as

possible. He complied, and then proceeded to wash himself. At that

time in the morning any Christian would have washed his face; but

Queequeg, to my amazement, contented himself with restricting his

ablutions to his chest, arms, and hands. He then donned his

waistcoat, and taking up a piece of hard soap on the wash-stand

centre table, dipped it into water and commenced lathering his face.

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I was watching to see where he kept his razor, when lo and behold, he

takes the harpoon from the bed corner, slips out the long wooden

stock, unsheathes the head, whets it a little on his boot, and

striding up to the bit of mirror against the wall, begins a vigorous

scraping, or rather harpooning of his cheeks. Thinks I, Queequeg,

this is using Rogers's best cutlery with a vengeance. Afterwards I

wondered the less at this operation when I came to know of what fine

steel the head of a harpoon is made, and how exceedingly sharp the

long straight edges are always kept.

The rest of his toilet was soon achieved, and he proudly marched out

of the room, wrapped up in his great pilot monkey jacket, and

sporting his harpoon like a marshal's baton.

CHAPTER 5

Breakfast.

I quickly followed suit, and descending into the bar-room accosted

the grinning landlord very pleasantly. I cherished no malice towards

him, though he had been skylarking with me not a little in the matter

of my bedfellow.

However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a

good thing; the more's the pity. So, if any one man, in his own

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proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not

be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be

spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully

laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you

perhaps think for.

The bar-room was now full of the boarders who had been dropping in

the night previous, and whom I had not as yet had a good look at.

They were nearly all whalemen; chief mates, and second mates, and

third mates, and sea carpenters, and sea coopers, and sea

blacksmiths, and harpooneers, and ship keepers; a brown and brawny

company, with bosky beards; an unshorn, shaggy set, all wearing

monkey jackets for morning gowns.

You could pretty plainly tell how long each one had been ashore.

This young fellow's healthy cheek is like a sun-toasted pear in hue,

and would seem to smell almost as musky; he cannot have been three

days landed from his Indian voyage. That man next him looks a few

shades lighter; you might say a touch of satin wood is in him. In

the complexion of a third still lingers a tropic tawn, but slightly

bleached withal; HE doubtless has tarried whole weeks ashore. But

who could show a cheek like Queequeg? which, barred with various

tints, seemed like the Andes' western slope, to show forth in one

array, contrasting climates, zone by zone.

"Grub, ho!" now cried the landlord, flinging open a door, and in we

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went to breakfast.

They say that men who have seen the world, thereby become quite at

ease in manner, quite self-possessed in company. Not always, though:

Ledyard, the great New England traveller, and Mungo Park, the Scotch

one; of all men, they possessed the least assurance in the parlor.

But perhaps the mere crossing of Siberia in a sledge drawn by dogs as

Ledyard did, or the taking a long solitary walk on an empty stomach,

in the negro heart of Africa, which was the sum of poor Mungo's

performances--this kind of travel, I say, may not be the very best

mode of attaining a high social polish. Still, for the most part,

that sort of thing is to be had anywhere.

These reflections just here are occasioned by the circumstance that

after we were all seated at the table, and I was preparing to hear

some good stories about whaling; to my no small surprise, nearly

every man maintained a profound silence. And not only that, but they

looked embarrassed. Yes, here were a set of sea-dogs, many of whom

without the slightest bashfulness had boarded great whales on the

high seas--entire strangers to them--and duelled them dead without

winking; and yet, here they sat at a social breakfast table--all of

the same calling, all of kindred tastes--looking round as sheepishly

at each other as though they had never been out of sight of some

sheepfold among the Green Mountains. A curious sight; these bashful

bears, these timid warrior whalemen!

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But as for Queequeg--why, Queequeg sat there among them--at the head

of the table, too, it so chanced; as cool as an icicle. To be sure I

cannot say much for his breeding. His greatest admirer could not

have cordially justified his bringing his harpoon into breakfast with

him, and using it there without ceremony; reaching over the table

with it, to the imminent jeopardy of many heads, and grappling the

beefsteaks towards him. But THAT was certainly very coolly done by

him, and every one knows that in most people's estimation, to do

anything coolly is to do it genteelly.

We will not speak of all Queequeg's peculiarities here; how he

eschewed coffee and hot rolls, and applied his undivided attention to

beefsteaks, done rare. Enough, that when breakfast was over he

withdrew like the rest into the public room, lighted his

tomahawk-pipe, and was sitting there quietly digesting and smoking

with his inseparable hat on, when I sallied out for a stroll.

CHAPTER 6

The Street.

If I had been astonished at first catching a glimpse of so outlandish

an individual as Queequeg circulating among the polite society of a

civilized town, that astonishment soon departed upon taking my first

daylight stroll through the streets of New Bedford.

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In thoroughfares nigh the docks, any considerable seaport will

frequently offer to view the queerest looking nondescripts from

foreign parts. Even in Broadway and Chestnut streets, Mediterranean

mariners will sometimes jostle the affrighted ladies. Regent Street

is not unknown to Lascars and Malays; and at Bombay, in the Apollo

Green, live Yankees have often scared the natives. But New Bedford

beats all Water Street and Wapping. In these last-mentioned haunts

you see only sailors; but in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand

chatting at street corners; savages outright; many of whom yet carry

on their bones unholy flesh. It makes a stranger stare.

But, besides the Feegeeans, Tongatobooarrs, Erromanggoans,

Pannangians, and Brighggians, and, besides the wild specimens of the

whaling-craft which unheeded reel about the streets, you will see

other sights still more curious, certainly more comical. There

weekly arrive in this town scores of green Vermonters and New

Hampshire men, all athirst for gain and glory in the fishery. They

are mostly young, of stalwart frames; fellows who have felled

forests, and now seek to drop the axe and snatch the whale-lance.

Many are as green as the Green Mountains whence they came. In some

things you would think them but a few hours old. Look there! that

chap strutting round the corner. He wears a beaver hat and

swallow-tailed coat, girdled with a sailor-belt and sheath-knife.

Here comes another with a sou'-wester and a bombazine cloak.

No town-bred dandy will compare with a country-bred one--I mean a

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downright bumpkin dandy--a fellow that, in the dog-days, will mow his

two acres in buckskin gloves for fear of tanning his hands. Now when

a country dandy like this takes it into his head to make a

distinguished reputation, and joins the great whale-fishery, you

should see the comical things he does upon reaching the seaport. In

bespeaking his sea-outfit, he orders bell-buttons to his waistcoats;

straps to his canvas trowsers. Ah, poor Hay-Seed! how bitterly will

burst those straps in the first howling gale, when thou art driven,

straps, buttons, and all, down the throat of the tempest.

But think not that this famous town has only harpooneers, cannibals,

and bumpkins to show her visitors. Not at all. Still New Bedford is

a queer place. Had it not been for us whalemen, that tract of land

would this day perhaps have been in as howling condition as the coast

of Labrador. As it is, parts of her back country are enough to

frighten one, they look so bony. The town itself is perhaps the

dearest place to live in, in all New England. It is a land of oil,

true enough: but not like Canaan; a land, also, of corn and wine.

The streets do not run with milk; nor in the spring-time do they pave

them with fresh eggs. Yet, in spite of this, nowhere in all America

will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more

opulent, than in New Bedford. Whence came they? how planted upon

this once scraggy scoria of a country?

Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty

mansion, and your question will be answered. Yes; all these brave

houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and

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Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up

hither from the bottom of the sea. Can Herr Alexander perform a feat

like that?

In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their

daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises a-piece.

You must go to New Bedford to see a brilliant wedding; for, they

say, they have reservoirs of oil in every house, and every night

recklessly burn their lengths in spermaceti candles.

In summer time, the town is sweet to see; full of fine maples--long

avenues of green and gold. And in August, high in air, the beautiful

and bountiful horse-chestnuts, candelabra-wise, proffer the passer-by

their tapering upright cones of congregated blossoms. So omnipotent

is art; which in many a district of New Bedford has superinduced

bright terraces of flowers upon the barren refuse rocks thrown aside

at creation's final day.

And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses.

But roses only bloom in summer; whereas the fine carnation of their

cheeks is perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens. Elsewhere

match that bloom of theirs, ye cannot, save in Salem, where they tell

me the young girls breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell

them miles off shore, as though they were drawing nigh the odorous

Moluccas instead of the Puritanic sands.

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CHAPTER 7

The Chapel.

In this same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman's Chapel, and few

are the moody fishermen, shortly bound for the Indian Ocean or

Pacific, who fail to make a Sunday visit to the spot. I am sure that

I did not.

Returning from my first morning stroll, I again sallied out upon this

special errand. The sky had changed from clear, sunny cold, to

driving sleet and mist. Wrapping myself in my shaggy jacket of the

cloth called bearskin, I fought my way against the stubborn storm.

Entering, I found a small scattered congregation of sailors, and

sailors' wives and widows. A muffled silence reigned, only broken at

times by the shrieks of the storm. Each silent worshipper seemed

purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were

insular and incommunicable. The chaplain had not yet arrived; and

there these silent islands of men and women sat steadfastly eyeing

several marble tablets, with black borders, masoned into the wall on

either side the pulpit. Three of them ran something like the

following, but I do not pretend to quote:--

SACRED

TO THE MEMORY

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OF

JOHN TALBOT,

Who, at the age of eighteen, was lost overboard,

Near the Isle of Desolation, off Patagonia,

November 1st, 1836.

THIS TABLET

Is erected to his Memory

BY HIS

SISTER.

_____________

SACRED

TO THE MEMORY

OF

ROBERT LONG, WILLIS ELLERY,

NATHAN COLEMAN, WALTER CANNY, SETH MACY,

AND SAMUEL GLEIG,

Forming one of the boats' crews

OF

THE SHIP ELIZA

Who were towed out of sight by a Whale,

On the Off-shore Ground in the

PACIFIC,

December 31st, 1839.

THIS MARBLE

Is here placed by their surviving

SHIPMATES.

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_____________

SACRED

TO THE MEMORY

OF

The late

CAPTAIN EZEKIEL HARDY,

Who in the bows of his boat was killed by a

Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan,

AUGUST 3d, 1833.

THIS TABLET

Is erected to his Memory by HIS WIDOW.

Shaking off the sleet from my ice-glazed hat and jacket, I seated

myself near the door, and turning sideways was surprised to see

Queequeg near me. Affected by the solemnity of the scene, there was

a wondering gaze of incredulous curiosity in his countenance. This

savage was the only person present who seemed to notice my entrance;

because he was the only one who could not read, and, therefore, was

not reading those frigid inscriptions on the wall. Whether any of

the relatives of the seamen whose names appeared there were now among

the congregation, I knew not; but so many are the unrecorded

accidents in the fishery, and so plainly did several women present

wear the countenance if not the trappings of some unceasing grief,

that I feel sure that here before me were assembled those, in whose

unhealing hearts the sight of those bleak tablets sympathetically

caused the old wounds to bleed afresh.

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Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing

among flowers can say--here, HERE lies my beloved; ye know not the

desolation that broods in bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in

those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in

those immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids and unbidden

infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and

refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished

without a grave. As well might those tablets stand in the cave of

Elephanta as here.

In what census of living creatures, the dead of mankind are included;

why it is that a universal proverb says of them, that they tell no

tales, though containing more secrets than the Goodwin Sands; how it

is that to his name who yesterday departed for the other world, we

prefix so significant and infidel a word, and yet do not thus entitle

him, if he but embarks for the remotest Indies of this living earth;

why the Life Insurance Companies pay death-forfeitures upon

immortals; in what eternal, unstirring paralysis, and deadly,

hopeless trance, yet lies antique Adam who died sixty round centuries

ago; how it is that we still refuse to be comforted for those who we

nevertheless maintain are dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why all the

living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a

knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city. All these things are

not without their meanings.

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But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these

dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.

It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a

Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky

light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who

had gone before me. Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But

somehow I grew merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine

chance for promotion, it seems--aye, a stove boat will make me an

immortal by brevet. Yes, there is death in this business of

whaling--a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into

Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this

matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow

here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at

things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun

through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.

Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take

my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And therefore three

cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they

will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.

CHAPTER 8

The Pulpit.

I had not been seated very long ere a man of a certain venerable

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robustness entered; immediately as the storm-pelted door flew back

upon admitting him, a quick regardful eyeing of him by all the

congregation, sufficiently attested that this fine old man was the

chaplain. Yes, it was the famous Father Mapple, so called by the

whalemen, among whom he was a very great favourite. He had been a

sailor and a harpooneer in his youth, but for many years past had

dedicated his life to the ministry. At the time I now write of,

Father Mapple was in the hardy winter of a healthy old age; that sort

of old age which seems merging into a second flowering youth, for

among all the fissures of his wrinkles, there shone certain mild

gleams of a newly developing bloom--the spring verdure peeping forth

even beneath February's snow. No one having previously heard his

history, could for the first time behold Father Mapple without the

utmost interest, because there were certain engrafted clerical

peculiarities about him, imputable to that adventurous maritime life

he had led. When he entered I observed that he carried no umbrella,

and certainly had not come in his carriage, for his tarpaulin hat ran

down with melting sleet, and his great pilot cloth jacket seemed

almost to drag him to the floor with the weight of the water it had

absorbed. However, hat and coat and overshoes were one by one

removed, and hung up in a little space in an adjacent corner; when,

arrayed in a decent suit, he quietly approached the pulpit.

Like most old fashioned pulpits, it was a very lofty one, and since a

regular stairs to such a height would, by its long angle with the

floor, seriously contract the already small area of the chapel, the

architect, it seemed, had acted upon the hint of Father Mapple, and

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finished the pulpit without a stairs, substituting a perpendicular

side ladder, like those used in mounting a ship from a boat at sea.

The wife of a whaling captain had provided the chapel with a handsome

pair of red worsted man-ropes for this ladder, which, being itself

nicely headed, and stained with a mahogany colour, the whole

contrivance, considering what manner of chapel it was, seemed by no

means in bad taste. Halting for an instant at the foot of the

ladder, and with both hands grasping the ornamental knobs of the

man-ropes, Father Mapple cast a look upwards, and then with a truly

sailor-like but still reverential dexterity, hand over hand, mounted

the steps as if ascending the main-top of his vessel.

The perpendicular parts of this side ladder, as is usually the case

with swinging ones, were of cloth-covered rope, only the rounds were

of wood, so that at every step there was a joint. At my first

glimpse of the pulpit, it had not escaped me that however convenient

for a ship, these joints in the present instance seemed unnecessary.

For I was not prepared to see Father Mapple after gaining the height,

slowly turn round, and stooping over the pulpit, deliberately drag up

the ladder step by step, till the whole was deposited within, leaving

him impregnable in his little Quebec.

I pondered some time without fully comprehending the reason for this.

Father Mapple enjoyed such a wide reputation for sincerity and

sanctity, that I could not suspect him of courting notoriety by any

mere tricks of the stage. No, thought I, there must be some sober

reason for this thing; furthermore, it must symbolize something

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unseen. Can it be, then, that by that act of physical isolation, he

signifies his spiritual withdrawal for the time, from all outward

worldly ties and connexions? Yes, for replenished with the meat and

wine of the word, to the faithful man of God, this pulpit, I see, is

a self-containing stronghold--a lofty Ehrenbreitstein, with a

perennial well of water within the walls.

But the side ladder was not the only strange feature of the place,

borrowed from the chaplain's former sea-farings. Between the marble

cenotaphs on either hand of the pulpit, the wall which formed its

back was adorned with a large painting representing a gallant ship

beating against a terrible storm off a lee coast of black rocks and

snowy breakers. But high above the flying scud and dark-rolling

clouds, there floated a little isle of sunlight, from which beamed

forth an angel's face; and this bright face shed a distinct spot of

radiance upon the ship's tossed deck, something like that silver

plate now inserted into the Victory's plank where Nelson fell. "Ah,

noble ship," the angel seemed to say, "beat on, beat on, thou noble

ship, and bear a hardy helm; for lo! the sun is breaking through; the

clouds are rolling off--serenest azure is at hand."

Nor was the pulpit itself without a trace of the same sea-taste that

had achieved the ladder and the picture. Its panelled front was in

the likeness of a ship's bluff bows, and the Holy Bible rested on a

projecting piece of scroll work, fashioned after a ship's

fiddle-headed beak.

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What could be more full of meaning?--for the pulpit is ever this

earth's foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit

leads the world. From thence it is the storm of God's quick wrath is

first descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt. From

thence it is the God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for

favourable winds. Yes, the world's a ship on its passage out, and not

a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.

CHAPTER 9

The Sermon.

Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of unassuming authority

ordered the scattered people to condense. "Starboard gangway,

there! side away to larboard--larboard gangway to starboard!

Midships! midships!"

There was a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots among the benches, and a

still slighter shuffling of women's shoes, and all was quiet again,

and every eye on the preacher.

He paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit's bows, folded his

large brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and

offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying

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at the bottom of the sea.

This ended, in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of

a bell in a ship that is foundering at sea in a fog--in such tones he

commenced reading the following hymn; but changing his manner towards

the concluding stanzas, burst forth with a pealing exultation and

joy--

"The ribs and terrors in the whale,

Arched over me a dismal gloom,

While all God's sun-lit waves rolled by,

And lift me deepening down to doom.

"I saw the opening maw of hell,

With endless pains and sorrows there;

Which none but they that feel can tell--

Oh, I was plunging to despair.

"In black distress, I called my God,

When I could scarce believe him mine,

He bowed his ear to my complaints--

No more the whale did me confine.

"With speed he flew to my relief,

As on a radiant dolphin borne;

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Awful, yet bright, as lightning shone

The face of my Deliverer God.

"My song for ever shall record

That terrible, that joyful hour;

I give the glory to my God,

His all the mercy and the power.

Nearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled high above the

howling of the storm. A brief pause ensued; the preacher slowly

turned over the leaves of the Bible, and at last, folding his hand

down upon the proper page, said: "Beloved shipmates, clinch the last

verse of the first chapter of Jonah--'And God had prepared a great

fish to swallow up Jonah.'"

"Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters--four yarns--is

one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures.

Yet what depths of the soul does Jonah's deep sealine sound! what a

pregnant lesson to us is this prophet! What a noble thing is that

canticle in the fish's belly! How billow-like and boisterously

grand! We feel the floods surging over us; we sound with him to the

kelpy bottom of the waters; sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is

about us! But WHAT is this lesson that the book of Jonah teaches?

Shipmates, it is a two-stranded lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful

men, and a lesson to me as a pilot of the living God. As sinful men,

it is a lesson to us all, because it is a story of the sin,

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hard-heartedness, suddenly awakened fears, the swift punishment,

repentance, prayers, and finally the deliverance and joy of Jonah.

As with all sinners among men, the sin of this son of Amittai was in

his wilful disobedience of the command of God--never mind now what

that command was, or how conveyed--which he found a hard command.

But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to

do--remember that--and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors

to persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it

is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God

consists.

"With this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah still further flouts at

God, by seeking to flee from Him. He thinks that a ship made by men

will carry him into countries where God does not reign, but only the

Captains of this earth. He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and

seeks a ship that's bound for Tarshish. There lurks, perhaps, a

hitherto unheeded meaning here. By all accounts Tarshish could have

been no other city than the modern Cadiz. That's the opinion of

learned men. And where is Cadiz, shipmates? Cadiz is in Spain; as

far by water, from Joppa, as Jonah could possibly have sailed in

those ancient days, when the Atlantic was an almost unknown sea.

Because Joppa, the modern Jaffa, shipmates, is on the most easterly

coast of the Mediterranean, the Syrian; and Tarshish or Cadiz more

than two thousand miles to the westward from that, just outside the

Straits of Gibraltar. See ye not then, shipmates, that Jonah sought

to flee world-wide from God? Miserable man! Oh! most contemptible

and worthy of all scorn; with slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking

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from his God; prowling among the shipping like a vile burglar

hastening to cross the seas. So disordered, self-condemning is his

look, that had there been policemen in those days, Jonah, on the mere

suspicion of something wrong, had been arrested ere he touched a

deck. How plainly he's a fugitive! no baggage, not a hat-box,

valise, or carpet-bag,--no friends accompany him to the wharf with

their adieux. At last, after much dodging search, he finds the

Tarshish ship receiving the last items of her cargo; and as he steps

on board to see its Captain in the cabin, all the sailors for the

moment desist from hoisting in the goods, to mark the stranger's evil

eye. Jonah sees this; but in vain he tries to look all ease and

confidence; in vain essays his wretched smile. Strong intuitions of

the man assure the mariners he can be no innocent. In their gamesome

but still serious way, one whispers to the other--"Jack, he's robbed

a widow;" or, "Joe, do you mark him; he's a bigamist;" or, "Harry

lad, I guess he's the adulterer that broke jail in old Gomorrah, or

belike, one of the missing murderers from Sodom." Another runs to

read the bill that's stuck against the spile upon the wharf to which

the ship is moored, offering five hundred gold coins for the

apprehension of a parricide, and containing a description of his

person. He reads, and looks from Jonah to the bill; while all his

sympathetic shipmates now crowd round Jonah, prepared to lay their

hands upon him. Frighted Jonah trembles, and summoning all his

boldness to his face, only looks so much the more a coward. He will

not confess himself suspected; but that itself is strong suspicion.

So he makes the best of it; and when the sailors find him not to be

the man that is advertised, they let him pass, and he descends into

the cabin.

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"'Who's there?' cries the Captain at his busy desk, hurriedly making

out his papers for the Customs--'Who's there?' Oh! how that harmless

question mangles Jonah! For the instant he almost turns to flee

again. But he rallies. 'I seek a passage in this ship to Tarshish;

how soon sail ye, sir?' Thus far the busy Captain had not looked up

to Jonah, though the man now stands before him; but no sooner does he

hear that hollow voice, than he darts a scrutinizing glance. 'We

sail with the next coming tide,' at last he slowly answered, still

intently eyeing him. 'No sooner, sir?'--'Soon enough for any honest

man that goes a passenger.' Ha! Jonah, that's another stab. But he

swiftly calls away the Captain from that scent. 'I'll sail with

ye,'--he says,--'the passage money how much is that?--I'll pay now.'

For it is particularly written, shipmates, as if it were a thing not

to be overlooked in this history, 'that he paid the fare thereof' ere

the craft did sail. And taken with the context, this is full of

meaning.

"Now Jonah's Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects

crime in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless.

In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely,

and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at

all frontiers. So Jonah's Captain prepares to test the length of

Jonah's purse, ere he judge him openly. He charges him thrice the

usual sum; and it's assented to. Then the Captain knows that Jonah

is a fugitive; but at the same time resolves to help a flight that

paves its rear with gold. Yet when Jonah fairly takes out his purse,

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prudent suspicions still molest the Captain. He rings every coin to

find a counterfeit. Not a forger, any way, he mutters; and Jonah is

put down for his passage. 'Point out my state-room, Sir,' says Jonah

now, 'I'm travel-weary; I need sleep.' 'Thou lookest like it,' says

the Captain, 'there's thy room.' Jonah enters, and would lock the

door, but the lock contains no key. Hearing him foolishly fumbling

there, the Captain laughs lowly to himself, and mutters something

about the doors of convicts' cells being never allowed to be locked

within. All dressed and dusty as he is, Jonah throws himself into

his berth, and finds the little state-room ceiling almost resting on

his forehead. The air is close, and Jonah gasps. Then, in that

contracted hole, sunk, too, beneath the ship's water-line, Jonah

feels the heralding presentiment of that stifling hour, when the

whale shall hold him in the smallest of his bowels' wards.

"Screwed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly

oscillates in Jonah's room; and the ship, heeling over towards the

wharf with the weight of the last bales received, the lamp, flame and

all, though in slight motion, still maintains a permanent obliquity

with reference to the room; though, in truth, infallibly straight

itself, it but made obvious the false, lying levels among which it

hung. The lamp alarms and frightens Jonah; as lying in his berth his

tormented eyes roll round the place, and this thus far successful

fugitive finds no refuge for his restless glance. But that

contradiction in the lamp more and more appals him. The floor, the

ceiling, and the side, are all awry. 'Oh! so my conscience hangs in

me!' he groans, 'straight upwards, so it burns; but the chambers of

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my soul are all in crookedness!'

"Like one who after a night of drunken revelry hies to his bed, still

reeling, but with conscience yet pricking him, as the plungings of

the Roman race-horse but so much the more strike his steel tags into

him; as one who in that miserable plight still turns and turns in

giddy anguish, praying God for annihilation until the fit be passed;

and at last amid the whirl of woe he feels, a deep stupor steals over

him, as over the man who bleeds to death, for conscience is the

wound, and there's naught to staunch it; so, after sore wrestlings in

his berth, Jonah's prodigy of ponderous misery drags him drowning

down to sleep.

"And now the time of tide has come; the ship casts off her cables;

and from the deserted wharf the uncheered ship for Tarshish, all

careening, glides to sea. That ship, my friends, was the first of

recorded smugglers! the contraband was Jonah. But the sea rebels; he

will not bear the wicked burden. A dreadful storm comes on, the

ship is like to break. But now when the boatswain calls all hands to

lighten her; when boxes, bales, and jars are clattering overboard;

when the wind is shrieking, and the men are yelling, and every plank

thunders with trampling feet right over Jonah's head; in all this

raging tumult, Jonah sleeps his hideous sleep. He sees no black sky

and raging sea, feels not the reeling timbers, and little hears he or

heeds he the far rush of the mighty whale, which even now with open

mouth is cleaving the seas after him. Aye, shipmates, Jonah was gone

down into the sides of the ship--a berth in the cabin as I have taken

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it, and was fast asleep. But the frightened master comes to him, and

shrieks in his dead ear, 'What meanest thou, O, sleeper! arise!'

Startled from his lethargy by that direful cry, Jonah staggers to his

feet, and stumbling to the deck, grasps a shroud, to look out upon

the sea. But at that moment he is sprung upon by a panther billow

leaping over the bulwarks. Wave after wave thus leaps into the ship,

and finding no speedy vent runs roaring fore and aft, till the

mariners come nigh to drowning while yet afloat. And ever, as the

white moon shows her affrighted face from the steep gullies in the

blackness overhead, aghast Jonah sees the rearing bowsprit pointing

high upward, but soon beat downward again towards the tormented deep.

"Terrors upon terrors run shouting through his soul. In all his

cringing attitudes, the God-fugitive is now too plainly known. The

sailors mark him; more and more certain grow their suspicions of him,

and at last, fully to test the truth, by referring the whole matter

to high Heaven, they fall to casting lots, to see for whose

cause this great tempest was upon them. The lot is Jonah's; that

discovered, then how furiously they mob him with their questions.

'What is thine occupation? Whence comest thou? Thy country? What

people? But mark now, my shipmates, the behavior of poor Jonah. The

eager mariners but ask him who he is, and where from; whereas, they

not only receive an answer to those questions, but likewise another

answer to a question not put by them, but the unsolicited answer is

forced from Jonah by the hard hand of God that is upon him.

"'I am a Hebrew,' he cries--and then--'I fear the Lord the God of

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Heaven who hath made the sea and the dry land!' Fear him, O Jonah?

Aye, well mightest thou fear the Lord God THEN! Straightway, he now

goes on to make a full confession; whereupon the mariners became more

and more appalled, but still are pitiful. For when Jonah, not yet

supplicating God for mercy, since he but too well knew the darkness

of his deserts,--when wretched Jonah cries out to them to take him

and cast him forth into the sea, for he knew that for HIS sake this

great tempest was upon them; they mercifully turn from him, and seek

by other means to save the ship. But all in vain; the indignant gale

howls louder; then, with one hand raised invokingly to God, with the

other they not unreluctantly lay hold of Jonah.

"And now behold Jonah taken up as an anchor and dropped into the sea;

when instantly an oily calmness floats out from the east, and the sea

is still, as Jonah carries down the gale with him, leaving smooth

water behind. He goes down in the whirling heart of such a

masterless commotion that he scarce heeds the moment when he drops

seething into the yawning jaws awaiting him; and the whale shoots-to

all his ivory teeth, like so many white bolts, upon his prison. Then

Jonah prayed unto the Lord out of the fish's belly. But observe his

prayer, and learn a weighty lesson. For sinful as he is, Jonah does

not weep and wail for direct deliverance. He feels that his dreadful

punishment is just. He leaves all his deliverance to God, contenting

himself with this, that spite of all his pains and pangs, he will

still look towards His holy temple. And here, shipmates, is true and

faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for

punishment. And how pleasing to God was this conduct in Jonah, is

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shown in the eventual deliverance of him from the sea and the whale.

Shipmates, I do not place Jonah before you to be copied for his sin

but I do place him before you as a model for repentance. Sin not;

but if you do, take heed to repent of it like Jonah."

While he was speaking these words, the howling of the shrieking,

slanting storm without seemed to add new power to the preacher, who,

when describing Jonah's sea-storm, seemed tossed by a storm himself.

His deep chest heaved as with a ground-swell; his tossed arms seemed

the warring elements at work; and the thunders that rolled away from

off his swarthy brow, and the light leaping from his eye, made all

his simple hearers look on him with a quick fear that was strange to

them.

There now came a lull in his look, as he silently turned over the

leaves of the Book once more; and, at last, standing motionless, with

closed eyes, for the moment, seemed communing with God and himself.

But again he leaned over towards the people, and bowing his head

lowly, with an aspect of the deepest yet manliest humility, he spake

these words:

"Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon you; both his hands press

upon me. I have read ye by what murky light may be mine the lesson

that Jonah teaches to all sinners; and therefore to ye, and still

more to me, for I am a greater sinner than ye. And now how gladly

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would I come down from this mast-head and sit on the hatches there

where you sit, and listen as you listen, while some one of you reads

ME that other and more awful lesson which Jonah teaches to ME, as a

pilot of the living God. How being an anointed pilot-prophet, or

speaker of true things, and bidden by the Lord to sound those

unwelcome truths in the ears of a wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at

the hostility he should raise, fled from his mission, and sought to

escape his duty and his God by taking ship at Joppa. But God is

everywhere; Tarshish he never reached. As we have seen, God came

upon him in the whale, and swallowed him down to living gulfs of

doom, and with swift slantings tore him along 'into the midst of the

seas,' where the eddying depths sucked him ten thousand fathoms down,

and 'the weeds were wrapped about his head,' and all the watery world

of woe bowled over him. Yet even then beyond the reach of any

plummet--'out of the belly of hell'--when the whale grounded upon the

ocean's utmost bones, even then, God heard the engulphed, repenting

prophet when he cried. Then God spake unto the fish; and from the

shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the whale came breeching up

towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air and

earth; and 'vomited out Jonah upon the dry land;' when the word of

the Lord came a second time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten--his ears,

like two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the

ocean--Jonah did the Almighty's bidding. And what was that,

shipmates? To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was

it!

"This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to that pilot of

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the living God who slights it. Woe to him whom this world charms

from Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters

when God has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please

rather than to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than

goodness! Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonour! Woe

to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation!

Yea, woe to him who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching

to others is himself a castaway!"

He dropped and fell away from himself for a moment; then lifting his

face to them again, showed a deep joy in his eyes, as he cried out

with a heavenly enthusiasm,--"But oh! shipmates! on the starboard

hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of

that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the

main-truck higher than the kelson is low? Delight is to him--a far,

far upward, and inward delight--who against the proud gods and

commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self.

Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of

this base treacherous world has gone down beneath him. Delight is to

him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and

destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of

Senators and Judges. Delight,--top-gallant delight is to him, who

acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a

patriot to heaven. Delight is to him, whom all the waves of the

billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake from this

sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness will be

his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath--O

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Father!--chiefly known to me by Thy rod--mortal or immortal, here I

die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world's, or

mine own. Yet this is nothing: I leave eternity to Thee; for what

is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?"

He said no more, but slowly waving a benediction, covered his face

with his hands, and so remained kneeling, till all the people had

departed, and he was left alone in the place.

CHAPTER 10

A Bosom Friend.

Returning to the Spouter-Inn from the Chapel, I found Queequeg there

quite alone; he having left the Chapel before the benediction some

time. He was sitting on a bench before the fire, with his feet on

the stove hearth, and in one hand was holding close up to his face

that little negro idol of his; peering hard into its face, and with a

jack-knife gently whittling away at its nose, meanwhile humming to

himself in his heathenish way.

But being now interrupted, he put up the image; and pretty soon,

going to the table, took up a large book there, and placing it on his

lap began counting the pages with deliberate regularity; at every

fiftieth page--as I fancied--stopping a moment, looking vacantly

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around him, and giving utterance to a long-drawn gurgling whistle of

astonishment. He would then begin again at the next fifty; seeming

to commence at number one each time, as though he could not count

more than fifty, and it was only by such a large number of fifties

being found together, that his astonishment at the multitude of pages

was excited.

With much interest I sat watching him. Savage though he was, and

hideously marred about the face--at least to my taste--his

countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means

disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul. Through all his unearthly

tattooings, I thought I saw the traces of a simple honest heart; and

in his large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of

a spirit that would dare a thousand devils. And besides all this,

there was a certain lofty bearing about the Pagan, which even his

uncouthness could not altogether maim. He looked like a man who had

never cringed and never had had a creditor. Whether it was, too,

that his head being shaved, his forehead was drawn out in freer and

brighter relief, and looked more expansive than it otherwise would,

this I will not venture to decide; but certain it was his head was

phrenologically an excellent one. It may seem ridiculous, but it

reminded me of General Washington's head, as seen in the popular

busts of him. It had the same long regularly graded retreating slope

from above the brows, which were likewise very projecting, like two

long promontories thickly wooded on top. Queequeg was George

Washington cannibalistically developed.

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Whilst I was thus closely scanning him, half-pretending meanwhile to

be looking out at the storm from the casement, he never heeded my

presence, never troubled himself with so much as a single glance; but

appeared wholly occupied with counting the pages of the marvellous

book. Considering how sociably we had been sleeping together the

night previous, and especially considering the affectionate arm I had

found thrown over me upon waking in the morning, I thought this

indifference of his very strange. But savages are strange beings; at

times you do not know exactly how to take them. At first they are

overawing; their calm self-collectedness of simplicity seems a

Socratic wisdom. I had noticed also that Queequeg never consorted at

all, or but very little, with the other seamen in the inn. He made

no advances whatever; appeared to have no desire to enlarge the

circle of his acquaintances. All this struck me as mighty singular;

yet, upon second thoughts, there was something almost sublime in it.

Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of

Cape Horn, that is--which was the only way he could get there--thrown

among people as strange to him as though he were in the planet

Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the

utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to

himself. Surely this was a touch of fine philosophy; though no doubt

he had never heard there was such a thing as that. But, perhaps, to

be true philosophers, we mortals should not be conscious of so living

or so striving. So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives

himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic

old woman, he must have "broken his digester."

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As I sat there in that now lonely room; the fire burning low, in that

mild stage when, after its first intensity has warmed the air, it

then only glows to be looked at; the evening shades and phantoms

gathering round the casements, and peering in upon us silent,

solitary twain; the storm booming without in solemn swells; I began

to be sensible of strange feelings. I felt a melting in me. No more

my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish

world. This soothing savage had redeemed it. There he sat, his very

indifference speaking a nature in which there lurked no civilized

hypocrisies and bland deceits. Wild he was; a very sight of sights

to see; yet I began to feel myself mysteriously drawn towards him.

And those same things that would have repelled most others, they were

the very magnets that thus drew me. I'll try a pagan friend, thought

I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy. I drew

my bench near him, and made some friendly signs and hints, doing my

best to talk with him meanwhile. At first he little noticed these

advances; but presently, upon my referring to his last night's

hospitalities, he made out to ask me whether we were again to be

bedfellows. I told him yes; whereat I thought he looked pleased,

perhaps a little complimented.

We then turned over the book together, and I endeavored to explain to

him the purpose of the printing, and the meaning of the few pictures

that were in it. Thus I soon engaged his interest; and from that we

went to jabbering the best we could about the various outer sights to

be seen in this famous town. Soon I proposed a social smoke; and,

producing his pouch and tomahawk, he quietly offered me a puff. And

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then we sat exchanging puffs from that wild pipe of his, and keeping

it regularly passing between us.

If there yet lurked any ice of indifference towards me in the Pagan's

breast, this pleasant, genial smoke we had, soon thawed it out, and

left us cronies. He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and

unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his

forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that

henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country's phrase, that we

were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be.

In a countryman, this sudden flame of friendship would have seemed

far too premature, a thing to be much distrusted; but in this simple

savage those old rules would not apply.

After supper, and another social chat and smoke, we went to our room

together. He made me a present of his embalmed head; took out his

enormous tobacco wallet, and groping under the tobacco, drew out some

thirty dollars in silver; then spreading them on the table, and

mechanically dividing them into two equal portions, pushed one of

them towards me, and said it was mine. I was going to remonstrate;

but he silenced me by pouring them into my trowsers' pockets. I let

them stay. He then went about his evening prayers, took out his

idol, and removed the paper fireboard. By certain signs and

symptoms, I thought he seemed anxious for me to join him; but well

knowing what was to follow, I deliberated a moment whether, in case

he invited me, I would comply or otherwise.

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I was a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible

Presbyterian Church. How then could I unite with this wild idolator

in worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship? thought I.

Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and

earth--pagans and all included--can possibly be jealous of an

insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! But what is

worship?--to do the will of God--THAT is worship. And what is the

will of God?--to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man

to do to me--THAT is the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow

man. And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me? Why,

unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship.

Consequently, I must then unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn

idolator. So I kindled the shavings; helped prop up the innocent

little idol; offered him burnt biscuit with Queequeg; salamed before

him twice or thrice; kissed his nose; and that done, we undressed and

went to bed, at peace with our own consciences and all the world.

But we did not go to sleep without some little chat.

How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for

confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say,

there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old

couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus,

then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg--a cosy, loving

pair.

CHAPTER 11

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Nightgown.

We had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and

Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs

over mine, and then drawing them back; so entirely sociable and free

and easy were we; when, at last, by reason of our confabulations,

what little nappishness remained in us altogether departed, and we

felt like getting up again, though day-break was yet some way down

the future.

Yes, we became very wakeful; so much so that our recumbent position

began to grow wearisome, and by little and little we found ourselves

sitting up; the clothes well tucked around us, leaning against the

head-board with our four knees drawn up close together, and our two

noses bending over them, as if our kneepans were warming-pans. We

felt very nice and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of

doors; indeed out of bed-clothes too, seeing that there was no fire

in the room. The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily

warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality

in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing

exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over

comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to

be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed,

the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled,

why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most

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delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping

apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the

luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of

deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and

your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like

the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.

We had been sitting in this crouching manner for some time, when all

at once I thought I would open my eyes; for when between sheets,

whether by day or by night, and whether asleep or awake, I have a way

of always keeping my eyes shut, in order the more to concentrate the

snugness of being in bed. Because no man can ever feel his own

identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were

indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more

congenial to our clayey part. Upon opening my eyes then, and coming

out of my own pleasant and self-created darkness into the imposed and

coarse outer gloom of the unilluminated twelve-o'clock-at-night, I

experienced a disagreeable revulsion. Nor did I at all object to the

hint from Queequeg that perhaps it were best to strike a light,

seeing that we were so wide awake; and besides he felt a strong

desire to have a few quiet puffs from his Tomahawk. Be it said, that

though I had felt such a strong repugnance to his smoking in the bed

the night before, yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when

love once comes to bend them. For now I liked nothing better than

to have Queequeg smoking by me, even in bed, because he seemed to be

full of such serene household joy then. I no more felt unduly

concerned for the landlord's policy of insurance. I was only alive

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to the condensed confidential comfortableness of sharing a pipe and a

blanket with a real friend. With our shaggy jackets drawn about our

shoulders, we now passed the Tomahawk from one to the other, till

slowly there grew over us a blue hanging tester of smoke, illuminated

by the flame of the new-lit lamp.

Whether it was that this undulating tester rolled the savage away to

far distant scenes, I know not, but he now spoke of his native

island; and, eager to hear his history, I begged him to go on and

tell it. He gladly complied. Though at the time I but ill

comprehended not a few of his words, yet subsequent disclosures, when

I had become more familiar with his broken phraseology, now enable me

to present the whole story such as it may prove in the mere skeleton

I give.

CHAPTER 12

Biographical.

Queequeg was a native of Rokovoko, an island far away to the West

and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.

When a new-hatched savage running wild about his native woodlands in

a grass clout, followed by the nibbling goats, as if he were a green

sapling; even then, in Queequeg's ambitious soul, lurked a strong

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desire to see something more of Christendom than a specimen whaler or

two. His father was a High Chief, a King; his uncle a High Priest;

and on the maternal side he boasted aunts who were the wives of

unconquerable warriors. There was excellent blood in his

veins--royal stuff; though sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal

propensity he nourished in his untutored youth.

A Sag Harbor ship visited his father's bay, and Queequeg sought a

passage to Christian lands. But the ship, having her full complement

of seamen, spurned his suit; and not all the King his father's

influence could prevail. But Queequeg vowed a vow. Alone in his

canoe, he paddled off to a distant strait, which he knew the ship

must pass through when she quitted the island. On one side was a

coral reef; on the other a low tongue of land, covered with mangrove

thickets that grew out into the water. Hiding his canoe, still

afloat, among these thickets, with its prow seaward, he sat down in

the stern, paddle low in hand; and when the ship was gliding by, like

a flash he darted out; gained her side; with one backward dash of his

foot capsized and sank his canoe; climbed up the chains; and throwing

himself at full length upon the deck, grappled a ring-bolt there, and

swore not to let it go, though hacked in pieces.

In vain the captain threatened to throw him overboard; suspended a

cutlass over his naked wrists; Queequeg was the son of a King, and

Queequeg budged not. Struck by his desperate dauntlessness, and his

wild desire to visit Christendom, the captain at last relented, and

told him he might make himself at home. But this fine young

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savage--this sea Prince of Wales, never saw the Captain's cabin.

They put him down among the sailors, and made a whaleman of him. But

like Czar Peter content to toil in the shipyards of foreign cities,

Queequeg disdained no seeming ignominy, if thereby he might happily

gain the power of enlightening his untutored countrymen. For at

bottom--so he told me--he was actuated by a profound desire to learn

among the Christians, the arts whereby to make his people still

happier than they were; and more than that, still better than they

were. But, alas! the practices of whalemen soon convinced him that

even Christians could be both miserable and wicked; infinitely more

so, than all his father's heathens. Arrived at last in old Sag

Harbor; and seeing what the sailors did there; and then going on to

Nantucket, and seeing how they spent their wages in that place also,

poor Queequeg gave it up for lost. Thought he, it's a wicked world

in all meridians; I'll die a pagan.

And thus an old idolator at heart, he yet lived among these

Christians, wore their clothes, and tried to talk their gibberish.

Hence the queer ways about him, though now some time from home.

By hints, I asked him whether he did not propose going back, and

having a coronation; since he might now consider his father dead and

gone, he being very old and feeble at the last accounts. He answered

no, not yet; and added that he was fearful Christianity, or rather

Christians, had unfitted him for ascending the pure and undefiled

throne of thirty pagan Kings before him. But by and by, he said, he

would return,--as soon as he felt himself baptized again. For the

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nonce, however, he proposed to sail about, and sow his wild oats in

all four oceans. They had made a harpooneer of him, and that barbed

iron was in lieu of a sceptre now.

I asked him what might be his immediate purpose, touching his future

movements. He answered, to go to sea again, in his old vocation.

Upon this, I told him that whaling was my own design, and informed

him of my intention to sail out of Nantucket, as being the most

promising port for an adventurous whaleman to embark from. He at

once resolved to accompany me to that island, ship aboard the same

vessel, get into the same watch, the same boat, the same mess with

me, in short to share my every hap; with both my hands in his, boldly

dip into the Potluck of both worlds. To all this I joyously

assented; for besides the affection I now felt for Queequeg, he was

an experienced harpooneer, and as such, could not fail to be of great

usefulness to one, who, like me, was wholly ignorant of the mysteries

of whaling, though well acquainted with the sea, as known to merchant

seamen.

His story being ended with his pipe's last dying puff, Queequeg

embraced me, pressed his forehead against mine, and blowing out the

light, we rolled over from each other, this way and that, and very

soon were sleeping.

CHAPTER 13

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Wheelbarrow.

Next morning, Monday, after disposing of the embalmed head to a

barber, for a block, I settled my own and comrade's bill; using,

however, my comrade's money. The grinning landlord, as well as the

boarders, seemed amazingly tickled at the sudden friendship which had

sprung up between me and Queequeg--especially as Peter Coffin's cock

and bull stories about him had previously so much alarmed me

concerning the very person whom I now companied with.

We borrowed a wheelbarrow, and embarking our things, including my own

poor carpet-bag, and Queequeg's canvas sack and hammock, away we went

down to "the Moss," the little Nantucket packet schooner moored at

the wharf. As we were going along the people stared; not at Queequeg

so much--for they were used to seeing cannibals like him in their

streets,--but at seeing him and me upon such confidential terms. But

we heeded them not, going along wheeling the barrow by turns, and

Queequeg now and then stopping to adjust the sheath on his harpoon

barbs. I asked him why he carried such a troublesome thing with him

ashore, and whether all whaling ships did not find their own

harpoons. To this, in substance, he replied, that though what I

hinted was true enough, yet he had a particular affection for his own

harpoon, because it was of assured stuff, well tried in many a mortal

combat, and deeply intimate with the hearts of whales. In short,

like many inland reapers and mowers, who go into the farmers' meadows

armed with their own scythes--though in no wise obliged to furnish

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them--even so, Queequeg, for his own private reasons, preferred his

own harpoon.

Shifting the barrow from my hand to his, he told me a funny story

about the first wheelbarrow he had ever seen. It was in Sag Harbor.

The owners of his ship, it seems, had lent him one, in which to carry

his heavy chest to his boarding house. Not to seem ignorant about

the thing--though in truth he was entirely so, concerning the precise

way in which to manage the barrow--Queequeg puts his chest upon it;

lashes it fast; and then shoulders the barrow and marches up the

wharf. "Why," said I, "Queequeg, you might have known better than

that, one would think. Didn't the people laugh?"

Upon this, he told me another story. The people of his island of

Rokovoko, it seems, at their wedding feasts express the fragrant

water of young cocoanuts into a large stained calabash like a

punchbowl; and this punchbowl always forms the great central ornament

on the braided mat where the feast is held. Now a certain grand

merchant ship once touched at Rokovoko, and its commander--from all

accounts, a very stately punctilious gentleman, at least for a sea

captain--this commander was invited to the wedding feast of

Queequeg's sister, a pretty young princess just turned of ten. Well;

when all the wedding guests were assembled at the bride's bamboo

cottage, this Captain marches in, and being assigned the post of

honour, placed himself over against the punchbowl, and between the

High Priest and his majesty the King, Queequeg's father. Grace being

said,--for those people have their grace as well as we--though

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Queequeg told me that unlike us, who at such times look downwards to

our platters, they, on the contrary, copying the ducks, glance

upwards to the great Giver of all feasts--Grace, I say, being said,

the High Priest opens the banquet by the immemorial ceremony of the

island; that is, dipping his consecrated and consecrating fingers

into the bowl before the blessed beverage circulates. Seeing himself

placed next the Priest, and noting the ceremony, and thinking

himself--being Captain of a ship--as having plain precedence over a

mere island King, especially in the King's own house--the Captain

coolly proceeds to wash his hands in the punchbowl;--taking it I

suppose for a huge finger-glass. "Now," said Queequeg, "what you

tink now?--Didn't our people laugh?"

At last, passage paid, and luggage safe, we stood on board the

schooner. Hoisting sail, it glided down the Acushnet river. On one

side, New Bedford rose in terraces of streets, their ice-covered

trees all glittering in the clear, cold air. Huge hills and

mountains of casks on casks were piled upon her wharves, and side by

side the world-wandering whale ships lay silent and safely moored at

last; while from others came a sound of carpenters and coopers, with

blended noises of fires and forges to melt the pitch, all betokening

that new cruises were on the start; that one most perilous and long

voyage ended, only begins a second; and a second ended, only begins a

third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness,

yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.

Gaining the more open water, the bracing breeze waxed fresh; the

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little Moss tossed the quick foam from her bows, as a young colt his

snortings. How I snuffed that Tartar air!--how I spurned that

turnpike earth!--that common highway all over dented with the marks

of slavish heels and hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity

of the sea which will permit no records.

At the same foam-fountain, Queequeg seemed to drink and reel with me.

His dusky nostrils swelled apart; he showed his filed and pointed

teeth. On, on we flew; and our offing gained, the Moss did homage to

the blast; ducked and dived her bows as a slave before the Sultan.

Sideways leaning, we sideways darted; every ropeyarn tingling like a

wire; the two tall masts buckling like Indian canes in land

tornadoes. So full of this reeling scene were we, as we stood by the

plunging bowsprit, that for some time we did not notice the jeering

glances of the passengers, a lubber-like assembly, who marvelled that

two fellow beings should be so companionable; as though a white man

were anything more dignified than a whitewashed negro. But there

were some boobies and bumpkins there, who, by their intense

greenness, must have come from the heart and centre of all verdure.

Queequeg caught one of these young saplings mimicking him behind his

back. I thought the bumpkin's hour of doom was come. Dropping his

harpoon, the brawny savage caught him in his arms, and by an almost

miraculous dexterity and strength, sent him high up bodily into the

air; then slightly tapping his stern in mid-somerset, the fellow

landed with bursting lungs upon his feet, while Queequeg, turning his

back upon him, lighted his tomahawk pipe and passed it to me for a

puff.

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"Capting! Capting! yelled the bumpkin, running towards that officer;

"Capting, Capting, here's the devil."

"Hallo, YOU sir," cried the Captain, a gaunt rib of the sea, stalking

up to Queequeg, "what in thunder do you mean by that? Don't you know

you might have killed that chap?"

"What him say?" said Queequeg, as he mildly turned to me.

"He say," said I, "that you came near kill-e that man there,"

pointing to the still shivering greenhorn.

"Kill-e," cried Queequeg, twisting his tattooed face into an

unearthly expression of disdain, "ah! him bevy small-e fish-e;

Queequeg no kill-e so small-e fish-e; Queequeg kill-e big whale!"

"Look you," roared the Captain, "I'll kill-e YOU, you cannibal, if

you try any more of your tricks aboard here; so mind your eye."

But it so happened just then, that it was high time for the Captain

to mind his own eye. The prodigious strain upon the main-sail had

parted the weather-sheet, and the tremendous boom was now flying from

side to side, completely sweeping the entire after part of the deck.

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The poor fellow whom Queequeg had handled so roughly, was swept

overboard; all hands were in a panic; and to attempt snatching at the

boom to stay it, seemed madness. It flew from right to left, and

back again, almost in one ticking of a watch, and every instant

seemed on the point of snapping into splinters. Nothing was done,

and nothing seemed capable of being done; those on deck rushed

towards the bows, and stood eyeing the boom as if it were the lower

jaw of an exasperated whale. In the midst of this consternation,

Queequeg dropped deftly to his knees, and crawling under the path of

the boom, whipped hold of a rope, secured one end to the bulwarks,

and then flinging the other like a lasso, caught it round the boom as

it swept over his head, and at the next jerk, the spar was that way

trapped, and all was safe. The schooner was run into the wind, and

while the hands were clearing away the stern boat, Queequeg, stripped

to the waist, darted from the side with a long living arc of a leap.

For three minutes or more he was seen swimming like a dog, throwing

his long arms straight out before him, and by turns revealing his

brawny shoulders through the freezing foam. I looked at the grand

and glorious fellow, but saw no one to be saved. The greenhorn had

gone down. Shooting himself perpendicularly from the water,

Queequeg, now took an instant's glance around him, and seeming to see

just how matters were, dived down and disappeared. A few minutes

more, and he rose again, one arm still striking out, and with the

other dragging a lifeless form. The boat soon picked them up. The

poor bumpkin was restored. All hands voted Queequeg a noble trump;

the captain begged his pardon. From that hour I clove to Queequeg

like a barnacle; yea, till poor Queequeg took his last long dive.

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Was there ever such unconsciousness? He did not seem to think that

he at all deserved a medal from the Humane and Magnanimous Societies.

He only asked for water--fresh water--something to wipe the brine

off; that done, he put on dry clothes, lighted his pipe, and leaning

against the bulwarks, and mildly eyeing those around him, seemed to

be saying to himself--"It's a mutual, joint-stock world, in all

meridians. We cannibals must help these Christians."

CHAPTER 14

Nantucket.

Nothing more happened on the passage worthy the mentioning; so, after

a fine run, we safely arrived in Nantucket.

Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner

of the world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more

lonely than the Eddystone lighthouse. Look at it--a mere hillock,

and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background. There is more

sand there than you would use in twenty years as a substitute for

blotting paper. Some gamesome wights will tell you that they have to

plant weeds there, they don't grow naturally; that they import Canada

thistles; that they have to send beyond seas for a spile to stop a

leak in an oil cask; that pieces of wood in Nantucket are carried

about like bits of the true cross in Rome; that people there plant

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toadstools before their houses, to get under the shade in summer

time; that one blade of grass makes an oasis, three blades in a day's

walk a prairie; that they wear quicksand shoes, something like

Laplander snow-shoes; that they are so shut up, belted about, every

way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island of by the ocean,

that to their very chairs and tables small clams will sometimes be

found adhering, as to the backs of sea turtles. But these

extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no Illinois.

Look now at the wondrous traditional story of how this island was

settled by the red-men. Thus goes the legend. In olden times an

eagle swooped down upon the New England coast, and carried off an

infant Indian in his talons. With loud lament the parents saw their

child borne out of sight over the wide waters. They resolved to

follow in the same direction. Setting out in their canoes, after a

perilous passage they discovered the island, and there they found an

empty ivory casket,--the poor little Indian's skeleton.

What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should

take to the sea for a livelihood! They first caught crabs and

quohogs in the sand; grown bolder, they waded out with nets for

mackerel; more experienced, they pushed off in boats and captured

cod; and at last, launching a navy of great ships on the sea,

explored this watery world; put an incessant belt of

circumnavigations round it; peeped in at Behring's Straits; and in

all seasons and all oceans declared everlasting war with the

mightiest animated mass that has survived the flood; most monstrous

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and most mountainous! That Himmalehan, salt-sea Mastodon, clothed

with such portentousness of unconscious power, that his very panics

are more to be dreaded than his most fearless and malicious assaults!

And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing

from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery

world like so many Alexanders; parcelling out among them the

Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, as the three pirate powers did

Poland. Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada;

let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing

banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the

Nantucketer's. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own

empires; other seamen having but a right of way through it. Merchant

ships are but extension bridges; armed ones but floating forts; even

pirates and privateers, though following the sea as highwaymen the

road, they but plunder other ships, other fragments of the land like

themselves, without seeking to draw their living from the bottomless

deep itself. The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea;

he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro

ploughing it as his own special plantation. THERE is his home; THERE

lies his business, which a Noah's flood would not interrupt, though

it overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea, as

prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs

them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the

land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another

world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the

landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep

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between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of

land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very

pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.

CHAPTER 15

Chowder.

It was quite late in the evening when the little Moss came snugly to

anchor, and Queequeg and I went ashore; so we could attend to no

business that day, at least none but a supper and a bed. The

landlord of the Spouter-Inn had recommended us to his cousin Hosea

Hussey of the Try Pots, whom he asserted to be the proprietor of one

of the best kept hotels in all Nantucket, and moreover he had assured

us that Cousin Hosea, as he called him, was famous for his chowders.

In short, he plainly hinted that we could not possibly do better than

try pot-luck at the Try Pots. But the directions he had given us

about keeping a yellow warehouse on our starboard hand till we opened

a white church to the larboard, and then keeping that on the larboard

hand till we made a corner three points to the starboard, and that

done, then ask the first man we met where the place was: these

crooked directions of his very much puzzled us at first, especially

as, at the outset, Queequeg insisted that the yellow warehouse--our

first point of departure--must be left on the larboard hand, whereas

I had understood Peter Coffin to say it was on the starboard.

However, by dint of beating about a little in the dark, and now and

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then knocking up a peaceable inhabitant to inquire the way, we at

last came to something which there was no mistaking.

Two enormous wooden pots painted black, and suspended by asses' ears,

swung from the cross-trees of an old top-mast, planted in front of an

old doorway. The horns of the cross-trees were sawed off on the

other side, so that this old top-mast looked not a little like a

gallows. Perhaps I was over sensitive to such impressions at the

time, but I could not help staring at this gallows with a vague

misgiving. A sort of crick was in my neck as I gazed up to the two

remaining horns; yes, TWO of them, one for Queequeg, and one for me.

It's ominous, thinks I. A Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my

first whaling port; tombstones staring at me in the whalemen's

chapel; and here a gallows! and a pair of prodigious black pots too!

Are these last throwing out oblique hints touching Tophet?

I was called from these reflections by the sight of a freckled woman

with yellow hair and a yellow gown, standing in the porch of the inn,

under a dull red lamp swinging there, that looked much like an

injured eye, and carrying on a brisk scolding with a man in a purple

woollen shirt.

"Get along with ye," said she to the man, "or I'll be combing ye!"

"Come on, Queequeg," said I, "all right. There's Mrs. Hussey."

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And so it turned out; Mr. Hosea Hussey being from home, but leaving

Mrs. Hussey entirely competent to attend to all his affairs. Upon

making known our desires for a supper and a bed, Mrs. Hussey,

postponing further scolding for the present, ushered us into a little

room, and seating us at a table spread with the relics of a recently

concluded repast, turned round to us and said--"Clam or Cod?"

"What's that about Cods, ma'am?" said I, with much politeness.

"Clam or Cod?" she repeated.

"A clam for supper? a cold clam; is THAT what you mean, Mrs. Hussey?"

says I, "but that's a rather cold and clammy reception in the winter

time, ain't it, Mrs. Hussey?"

But being in a great hurry to resume scolding the man in the purple

Shirt, who was waiting for it in the entry, and seeming to hear

nothing but the word "clam," Mrs. Hussey hurried towards an open door

leading to the kitchen, and bawling out "clam for two," disappeared.

"Queequeg," said I, "do you think that we can make out a supper for

us both on one clam?"

However, a warm savory steam from the kitchen served to belie the

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apparently cheerless prospect before us. But when that smoking

chowder came in, the mystery was delightfully explained. Oh, sweet

friends! hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely

bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted

pork cut up into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and

plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt. Our appetites being

sharpened by the frosty voyage, and in particular, Queequeg seeing

his favourite fishing food before him, and the chowder being

surpassingly excellent, we despatched it with great expedition: when

leaning back a moment and bethinking me of Mrs. Hussey's clam and cod

announcement, I thought I would try a little experiment. Stepping to

the kitchen door, I uttered the word "cod" with great emphasis, and

resumed my seat. In a few moments the savoury steam came forth

again, but with a different flavor, and in good time a fine

cod-chowder was placed before us.

We resumed business; and while plying our spoons in the bowl, thinks

I to myself, I wonder now if this here has any effect on the head?

What's that stultifying saying about chowder-headed people? "But

look, Queequeg, ain't that a live eel in your bowl? Where's your

harpoon?"

Fishiest of all fishy places was the Try Pots, which well deserved

its name; for the pots there were always boiling chowders. Chowder

for breakfast, and chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper, till

you began to look for fish-bones coming through your clothes. The

area before the house was paved with clam-shells. Mrs. Hussey wore a

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polished necklace of codfish vertebra; and Hosea Hussey had his

account books bound in superior old shark-skin. There was a fishy

flavor to the milk, too, which I could not at all account for, till

one morning happening to take a stroll along the beach among some

fishermen's boats, I saw Hosea's brindled cow feeding on fish

remnants, and marching along the sand with each foot in a cod's

decapitated head, looking very slip-shod, I assure ye.

Supper concluded, we received a lamp, and directions from Mrs. Hussey

concerning the nearest way to bed; but, as Queequeg was about to

precede me up the stairs, the lady reached forth her arm, and

demanded his harpoon; she allowed no harpoon in her chambers. "Why

not? said I; "every true whaleman sleeps with his harpoon--but why

not?" "Because it's dangerous," says she. "Ever since young Stiggs

coming from that unfort'nt v'y'ge of his, when he was gone four years

and a half, with only three barrels of ILE, was found dead in my

first floor back, with his harpoon in his side; ever since then I

allow no boarders to take sich dangerous weepons in their rooms at

night. So, Mr. Queequeg" (for she had learned his name), "I will

just take this here iron, and keep it for you till morning. But the

chowder; clam or cod to-morrow for breakfast, men?"

"Both," says I; "and let's have a couple of smoked herring by way of

variety."

CHAPTER 16

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The Ship.

In bed we concocted our plans for the morrow. But to my surprise and

no small concern, Queequeg now gave me to understand, that he had

been diligently consulting Yojo--the name of his black little

god--and Yojo had told him two or three times over, and strongly

insisted upon it everyway, that instead of our going together among

the whaling-fleet in harbor, and in concert selecting our craft;

instead of this, I say, Yojo earnestly enjoined that the selection of

the ship should rest wholly with me, inasmuch as Yojo purposed

befriending us; and, in order to do so, had already pitched upon a

vessel, which, if left to myself, I, Ishmael, should infallibly light

upon, for all the world as though it had turned out by chance; and in

that vessel I must immediately ship myself, for the present

irrespective of Queequeg.

I have forgotten to mention that, in many things, Queequeg placed

great confidence in the excellence of Yojo's judgment and surprising

forecast of things; and cherished Yojo with considerable esteem, as a

rather good sort of god, who perhaps meant well enough upon the

whole, but in all cases did not succeed in his benevolent designs.

Now, this plan of Queequeg's, or rather Yojo's, touching the

selection of our craft; I did not like that plan at all. I had not a

little relied upon Queequeg's sagacity to point out the whaler best

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fitted to carry us and our fortunes securely. But as all my

remonstrances produced no effect upon Queequeg, I was obliged to

acquiesce; and accordingly prepared to set about this business with a

determined rushing sort of energy and vigor, that should quickly

settle that trifling little affair. Next morning early, leaving

Queequeg shut up with Yojo in our little bedroom--for it seemed that

it was some sort of Lent or Ramadan, or day of fasting, humiliation,

and prayer with Queequeg and Yojo that day; HOW it was I never could

find out, for, though I applied myself to it several times, I never

could master his liturgies and XXXIX Articles--leaving Queequeg,

then, fasting on his tomahawk pipe, and Yojo warming himself at his

sacrificial fire of shavings, I sallied out among the shipping.

After much prolonged sauntering and many random inquiries, I learnt

that there were three ships up for three-years' voyages--The

Devil-dam, the Tit-bit, and the Pequod. DEVIL-DAM, I do not know

the origin of; TIT-BIT is obvious; PEQUOD, you will no doubt

remember, was the name of a celebrated tribe of Massachusetts

Indians; now extinct as the ancient Medes. I peered and pryed about

the Devil-dam; from her, hopped over to the Tit-bit; and finally,

going on board the Pequod, looked around her for a moment, and then

decided that this was the very ship for us.

You may have seen many a quaint craft in your day, for aught I

know;--square-toed luggers; mountainous Japanese junks; butter-box

galliots, and what not; but take my word for it, you never saw such a

rare old craft as this same rare old Pequod. She was a ship of the

old school, rather small if anything; with an old-fashioned

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claw-footed look about her. Long seasoned and weather-stained in the

typhoons and calms of all four oceans, her old hull's complexion was

darkened like a French grenadier's, who has alike fought in Egypt and

Siberia. Her venerable bows looked bearded. Her masts--cut

somewhere on the coast of Japan, where her original ones were lost

overboard in a gale--her masts stood stiffly up like the spines of

the three old kings of Cologne. Her ancient decks were worn and

wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped flag-stone in Canterbury

Cathedral where Becket bled. But to all these her old antiquities,

were added new and marvellous features, pertaining to the wild

business that for more than half a century she had followed. Old

Captain Peleg, many years her chief-mate, before he commanded another

vessel of his own, and now a retired seaman, and one of the principal

owners of the Pequod,--this old Peleg, during the term of his

chief-mateship, had built upon her original grotesqueness, and inlaid

it, all over, with a quaintness both of material and device,

unmatched by anything except it be Thorkill-Hake's carved buckler or

bedstead. She was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor,

his neck heavy with pendants of polished ivory. She was a thing of

trophies. A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the

chased bones of her enemies. All round, her unpanelled, open

bulwarks were garnished like one continuous jaw, with the long sharp

teeth of the sperm whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her old

hempen thews and tendons to. Those thews ran not through base blocks

of land wood, but deftly travelled over sheaves of sea-ivory.

Scorning a turnstile wheel at her reverend helm, she sported there a

tiller; and that tiller was in one mass, curiously carved from the

long narrow lower jaw of her hereditary foe. The helmsman who

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steered by that tiller in a tempest, felt like the Tartar, when he

holds back his fiery steed by clutching its jaw. A noble craft, but

somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.

Now when I looked about the quarter-deck, for some one having

authority, in order to propose myself as a candidate for the voyage,

at first I saw nobody; but I could not well overlook a strange sort

of tent, or rather wigwam, pitched a little behind the main-mast. It

seemed only a temporary erection used in port. It was of a conical

shape, some ten feet high; consisting of the long, huge slabs of

limber black bone taken from the middle and highest part of the jaws

of the right-whale. Planted with their broad ends on the deck, a

circle of these slabs laced together, mutually sloped towards each

other, and at the apex united in a tufted point, where the loose

hairy fibres waved to and fro like the top-knot on some old

Pottowottamie Sachem's head. A triangular opening faced towards the

bows of the ship, so that the insider commanded a complete view

forward.

And half concealed in this queer tenement, I at length found one who

by his aspect seemed to have authority; and who, it being noon, and

the ship's work suspended, was now enjoying respite from the burden

of command. He was seated on an old-fashioned oaken chair, wriggling

all over with curious carving; and the bottom of which was formed of

a stout interlacing of the same elastic stuff of which the wigwam was

constructed.

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There was nothing so very particular, perhaps, about the appearance

of the elderly man I saw; he was brown and brawny, like most old

seamen, and heavily rolled up in blue pilot-cloth, cut in the Quaker

style; only there was a fine and almost microscopic net-work of the

minutest wrinkles interlacing round his eyes, which must have arisen

from his continual sailings in many hard gales, and always looking to

windward;--for this causes the muscles about the eyes to become

pursed together. Such eye-wrinkles are very effectual in a scowl.

"Is this the Captain of the Pequod?" said I, advancing to the door of

the tent.

"Supposing it be the captain of the Pequod, what dost thou want of

him?" he demanded.

"I was thinking of shipping."

"Thou wast, wast thou? I see thou art no Nantucketer--ever been in

a stove boat?"

"No, Sir, I never have."

"Dost know nothing at all about whaling, I dare say--eh?

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"Nothing, Sir; but I have no doubt I shall soon learn. I've been

several voyages in the merchant service, and I think that--"

"Merchant service be damned. Talk not that lingo to me. Dost see

that leg?--I'll take that leg away from thy stern, if ever thou

talkest of the marchant service to me again. Marchant service

indeed! I suppose now ye feel considerable proud of having served in

those marchant ships. But flukes! man, what makes thee want to go a

whaling, eh?--it looks a little suspicious, don't it, eh?--Hast not

been a pirate, hast thou?--Didst not rob thy last Captain, didst

thou?--Dost not think of murdering the officers when thou gettest to

sea?"

I protested my innocence of these things. I saw that under the mask

of these half humorous innuendoes, this old seaman, as an insulated

Quakerish Nantucketer, was full of his insular prejudices, and rather

distrustful of all aliens, unless they hailed from Cape Cod or the

Vineyard.

"But what takes thee a-whaling? I want to know that before I think

of shipping ye."

"Well, sir, I want to see what whaling is. I want to see the world."

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"Want to see what whaling is, eh? Have ye clapped eye on Captain

Ahab?"

"Who is Captain Ahab, sir?"

"Aye, aye, I thought so. Captain Ahab is the Captain of this ship."

"I am mistaken then. I thought I was speaking to the Captain

himself."

"Thou art speaking to Captain Peleg--that's who ye are speaking to,

young man. It belongs to me and Captain Bildad to see the Pequod

fitted out for the voyage, and supplied with all her needs, including

crew. We are part owners and agents. But as I was going to say, if

thou wantest to know what whaling is, as thou tellest ye do, I can

put ye in a way of finding it out before ye bind yourself to it, past

backing out. Clap eye on Captain Ahab, young man, and thou wilt find

that he has only one leg."

"What do you mean, sir? Was the other one lost by a whale?"

"Lost by a whale! Young man, come nearer to me: it was devoured,

chewed up, crunched by the monstrousest parmacetty that ever chipped

a boat!--ah, ah!"

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I was a little alarmed by his energy, perhaps also a little touched

at the hearty grief in his concluding exclamation, but said as calmly

as I could, "What you say is no doubt true enough, sir; but how could

I know there was any peculiar ferocity in that particular whale,

though indeed I might have inferred as much from the simple fact of

the accident."

"Look ye now, young man, thy lungs are a sort of soft, d'ye see; thou

dost not talk shark a bit. SURE, ye've been to sea before now; sure

of that?"

"Sir," said I, "I thought I told you that I had been four voyages in

the merchant--"

"Hard down out of that! Mind what I said about the marchant

service--don't aggravate me--I won't have it. But let us understand

each other. I have given thee a hint about what whaling is; do ye

yet feel inclined for it?"

"I do, sir."

"Very good. Now, art thou the man to pitch a harpoon down a live

whale's throat, and then jump after it? Answer, quick!"

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"I am, sir, if it should be positively indispensable to do so; not to

be got rid of, that is; which I don't take to be the fact."

"Good again. Now then, thou not only wantest to go a-whaling, to

find out by experience what whaling is, but ye also want to go in

order to see the world? Was not that what ye said? I thought so.

Well then, just step forward there, and take a peep over the

weather-bow, and then back to me and tell me what ye see there."

For a moment I stood a little puzzled by this curious request, not

knowing exactly how to take it, whether humorously or in earnest.

But concentrating all his crow's feet into one scowl, Captain Peleg

started me on the errand.

Going forward and glancing over the weather bow, I perceived that the

ship swinging to her anchor with the flood-tide, was now obliquely

pointing towards the open ocean. The prospect was unlimited, but

exceedingly monotonous and forbidding; not the slightest variety that

I could see.

"Well, what's the report?" said Peleg when I came back; "what did ye

see?"

"Not much," I replied--"nothing but water; considerable horizon

though, and there's a squall coming up, I think."

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"Well, what does thou think then of seeing the world? Do ye wish to

go round Cape Horn to see any more of it, eh? Can't ye see the world

where you stand?"

I was a little staggered, but go a-whaling I must, and I would; and

the Pequod was as good a ship as any--I thought the best--and all

this I now repeated to Peleg. Seeing me so determined, he expressed

his willingness to ship me.

"And thou mayest as well sign the papers right off," he added--"come

along with ye." And so saying, he led the way below deck into the

cabin.

Seated on the transom was what seemed to me a most uncommon and

surprising figure. It turned out to be Captain Bildad, who along

with Captain Peleg was one of the largest owners of the vessel; the

other shares, as is sometimes the case in these ports, being held by

a crowd of old annuitants; widows, fatherless children, and chancery

wards; each owning about the value of a timber head, or a foot of

plank, or a nail or two in the ship. People in Nantucket invest

their money in whaling vessels, the same way that you do yours in

approved state stocks bringing in good interest.

Now, Bildad, like Peleg, and indeed many other Nantucketers, was a

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Quaker, the island having been originally settled by that sect; and

to this day its inhabitants in general retain in an uncommon measure

the peculiarities of the Quaker, only variously and anomalously

modified by things altogether alien and heterogeneous. For some of

these same Quakers are the most sanguinary of all sailors and

whale-hunters. They are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a

vengeance.

So that there are instances among them of men, who, named with

Scripture names--a singularly common fashion on the island--and in

childhood naturally imbibing the stately dramatic thee and thou of

the Quaker idiom; still, from the audacious, daring, and boundless

adventure of their subsequent lives, strangely blend with these

unoutgrown peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes of character, not

unworthy a Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman. And

when these things unite in a man of greatly superior natural force,

with a globular brain and a ponderous heart; who has also by the

stillness and seclusion of many long night-watches in the remotest

waters, and beneath constellations never seen here at the north, been

led to think untraditionally and independently; receiving all

nature's sweet or savage impressions fresh from her own virgin

voluntary and confiding breast, and thereby chiefly, but with some

help from accidental advantages, to learn a bold and nervous lofty

language--that man makes one in a whole nation's census--a mighty

pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies. Nor will it at all

detract from him, dramatically regarded, if either by birth or other

circumstances, he have what seems a half wilful overruling morbidness

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at the bottom of his nature. For all men tragically great are made

so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition,

all mortal greatness is but disease. But, as yet we have not to do

with such an one, but with quite another; and still a man, who, if

indeed peculiar, it only results again from another phase of the

Quaker, modified by individual circumstances.

Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a well-to-do, retired

whaleman. But unlike Captain Peleg--who cared not a rush for what

are called serious things, and indeed deemed those self-same serious

things the veriest of all trifles--Captain Bildad had not only been

originally educated according to the strictest sect of Nantucket

Quakerism, but all his subsequent ocean life, and the sight of many

unclad, lovely island creatures, round the Horn--all that had not

moved this native born Quaker one single jot, had not so much as

altered one angle of his vest. Still, for all this immutableness,

was there some lack of common consistency about worthy Captain

Peleg. Though refusing, from conscientious scruples, to bear arms

against land invaders, yet himself had illimitably invaded the

Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn foe to human bloodshed, yet

had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns upon tuns of

leviathan gore. How now in the contemplative evening of his days,

the pious Bildad reconciled these things in the reminiscence, I do

not know; but it did not seem to concern him much, and very probably

he had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a

man's religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another.

This world pays dividends. Rising from a little cabin-boy in short

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clothes of the drabbest drab, to a harpooneer in a broad shad-bellied

waistcoat; from that becoming boat-header, chief-mate, and captain,

and finally a ship owner; Bildad, as I hinted before, had concluded

his adventurous career by wholly retiring from active life at the

goodly age of sixty, and dedicating his remaining days to the quiet

receiving of his well-earned income.

Now, Bildad, I am sorry to say, had the reputation of being an

incorrigible old hunks, and in his sea-going days, a bitter, hard

task-master. They told me in Nantucket, though it certainly seems a

curious story, that when he sailed the old Categut whaleman, his

crew, upon arriving home, were mostly all carried ashore to the

hospital, sore exhausted and worn out. For a pious man, especially

for a Quaker, he was certainly rather hard-hearted, to say the

least. He never used to swear, though, at his men, they said; but

somehow he got an inordinate quantity of cruel, unmitigated hard work

out of them. When Bildad was a chief-mate, to have his drab-coloured

eye intently looking at you, made you feel completely nervous, till

you could clutch something--a hammer or a marling-spike, and go to

work like mad, at something or other, never mind what. Indolence and

idleness perished before him. His own person was the exact

embodiment of his utilitarian character. On his long, gaunt body, he

carried no spare flesh, no superfluous beard, his chin having a soft,

economical nap to it, like the worn nap of his broad-brimmed hat.

Such, then, was the person that I saw seated on the transom when I

followed Captain Peleg down into the cabin. The space between the

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decks was small; and there, bolt-upright, sat old Bildad, who always

sat so, and never leaned, and this to save his coat tails. His

broad-brim was placed beside him; his legs were stiffly crossed; his

drab vesture was buttoned up to his chin; and spectacles on nose, he

seemed absorbed in reading from a ponderous volume.

"Bildad," cried Captain Peleg, "at it again, Bildad, eh? Ye have

been studying those Scriptures, now, for the last thirty years, to my

certain knowledge. How far ye got, Bildad?"

As if long habituated to such profane talk from his old shipmate,

Bildad, without noticing his present irreverence, quietly looked up,

and seeing me, glanced again inquiringly towards Peleg.

"He says he's our man, Bildad," said Peleg, "he wants to ship."

"Dost thee?" said Bildad, in a hollow tone, and turning round to me.

"I dost," said I unconsciously, he was so intense a Quaker.

"What do ye think of him, Bildad?" said Peleg.

"He'll do," said Bildad, eyeing me, and then went on spelling away at

his book in a mumbling tone quite audible.

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I thought him the queerest old Quaker I ever saw, especially as

Peleg, his friend and old shipmate, seemed such a blusterer. But I

said nothing, only looking round me sharply. Peleg now threw open a

chest, and drawing forth the ship's articles, placed pen and ink

before him, and seated himself at a little table. I began to think

it was high time to settle with myself at what terms I would be

willing to engage for the voyage. I was already aware that in the

whaling business they paid no wages; but all hands, including the

captain, received certain shares of the profits called lays, and that

these lays were proportioned to the degree of importance pertaining

to the respective duties of the ship's company. I was also aware

that being a green hand at whaling, my own lay would not be very

large; but considering that I was used to the sea, could steer a

ship, splice a rope, and all that, I made no doubt that from all I

had heard I should be offered at least the 275th lay--that is, the

275th part of the clear net proceeds of the voyage, whatever that

might eventually amount to. And though the 275th lay was what they

call a rather LONG LAY, yet it was better than nothing; and if we had

a lucky voyage, might pretty nearly pay for the clothing I would wear

out on it, not to speak of my three years' beef and board, for which

I would not have to pay one stiver.

It might be thought that this was a poor way to accumulate a princely

fortune--and so it was, a very poor way indeed. But I am one of

those that never take on about princely fortunes, and am quite

content if the world is ready to board and lodge me, while I am

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putting up at this grim sign of the Thunder Cloud. Upon the whole, I

thought that the 275th lay would be about the fair thing, but would not

have been surprised had I been offered the 200th, considering I was

of a broad-shouldered make.

But one thing, nevertheless, that made me a little distrustful about

receiving a generous share of the profits was this: Ashore, I had

heard something of both Captain Peleg and his unaccountable old crony

Bildad; how that they being the principal proprietors of the Pequod,

therefore the other and more inconsiderable and scattered owners,

left nearly the whole management of the ship's affairs to these two.

And I did not know but what the stingy old Bildad might have a mighty

deal to say about shipping hands, especially as I now found him on

board the Pequod, quite at home there in the cabin, and reading his

Bible as if at his own fireside. Now while Peleg was vainly trying

to mend a pen with his jack-knife, old Bildad, to my no small

surprise, considering that he was such an interested party in these

proceedings; Bildad never heeded us, but went on mumbling to himself

out of his book, "LAY not up for yourselves treasures upon earth,

where moth--"

"Well, Captain Bildad," interrupted Peleg, "what d'ye say, what lay

shall we give this young man?"

"Thou knowest best," was the sepulchral reply, "the seven hundred and

seventy-seventh wouldn't be too much, would it?--'where moth and rust

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do corrupt, but LAY--'"

LAY, indeed, thought I, and such a lay! the seven hundred and

seventy-seventh! Well, old Bildad, you are determined that I, for

one, shall not LAY up many LAYS here below, where moth and rust do

corrupt. It was an exceedingly LONG LAY that, indeed; and though

from the magnitude of the figure it might at first deceive a

landsman, yet the slightest consideration will show that though seven

hundred and seventy-seven is a pretty large number, yet, when you

come to make a TEENTH of it, you will then see, I say, that the seven

hundred and seventy-seventh part of a farthing is a good deal less

than seven hundred and seventy-seven gold doubloons; and so I thought

at the time.

"Why, blast your eyes, Bildad," cried Peleg, "thou dost not want to

swindle this young man! he must have more than that."

"Seven hundred and seventy-seventh," again said Bildad, without

lifting his eyes; and then went on mumbling--"for where your treasure

is, there will your heart be also."

"I am going to put him down for the three hundredth," said Peleg, "do

ye hear that, Bildad! The three hundredth lay, I say."

Bildad laid down his book, and turning solemnly towards him said,

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"Captain Peleg, thou hast a generous heart; but thou must consider

the duty thou owest to the other owners of this ship--widows and

orphans, many of them--and that if we too abundantly reward the

labors of this young man, we may be taking the bread from those

widows and those orphans. The seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay,

Captain Peleg."

"Thou Bildad!" roared Peleg, starting up and clattering about the

cabin. "Blast ye, Captain Bildad, if I had followed thy advice in

these matters, I would afore now had a conscience to lug about that

would be heavy enough to founder the largest ship that ever sailed

round Cape Horn."

"Captain Peleg," said Bildad steadily, "thy conscience may be drawing

ten inches of water, or ten fathoms, I can't tell; but as thou art

still an impenitent man, Captain Peleg, I greatly fear lest thy

conscience be but a leaky one; and will in the end sink thee

foundering down to the fiery pit, Captain Peleg."

"Fiery pit! fiery pit! ye insult me, man; past all natural bearing,

ye insult me. It's an all-fired outrage to tell any human creature

that he's bound to hell. Flukes and flames! Bildad, say that again

to me, and start my soul-bolts, but I'll--I'll--yes, I'll swallow a

live goat with all his hair and horns on. Out of the cabin, ye

canting, drab-coloured son of a wooden gun--a straight wake with ye!"

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As he thundered out this he made a rush at Bildad, but with a

marvellous oblique, sliding celerity, Bildad for that time eluded

him.

Alarmed at this terrible outburst between the two principal and

responsible owners of the ship, and feeling half a mind to give up

all idea of sailing in a vessel so questionably owned and temporarily

commanded, I stepped aside from the door to give egress to Bildad,

who, I made no doubt, was all eagerness to vanish from before the

awakened wrath of Peleg. But to my astonishment, he sat down again

on the transom very quietly, and seemed to have not the slightest

intention of withdrawing. He seemed quite used to impenitent Peleg

and his ways. As for Peleg, after letting off his rage as he had,

there seemed no more left in him, and he, too, sat down like a lamb,

though he twitched a little as if still nervously agitated. "Whew!"

he whistled at last--"the squall's gone off to leeward, I think.

Bildad, thou used to be good at sharpening a lance, mend that pen,

will ye. My jack-knife here needs the grindstone. That's he; thank

ye, Bildad. Now then, my young man, Ishmael's thy name, didn't ye

say? Well then, down ye go here, Ishmael, for the three hundredth

lay."

"Captain Peleg," said I, "I have a friend with me who wants to ship

too--shall I bring him down to-morrow?"

"To be sure," said Peleg. "Fetch him along, and we'll look at him."

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"What lay does he want?" groaned Bildad, glancing up from the book

in which he had again been burying himself.

"Oh! never thee mind about that, Bildad," said Peleg. "Has he ever

whaled it any?" turning to me.

"Killed more whales than I can count, Captain Peleg."

"Well, bring him along then."

And, after signing the papers, off I went; nothing doubting but that

I had done a good morning's work, and that the Pequod was the

identical ship that Yojo had provided to carry Queequeg and me round

the Cape.

But I had not proceeded far, when I began to bethink me that the

Captain with whom I was to sail yet remained unseen by me; though,

indeed, in many cases, a whale-ship will be completely fitted out,

and receive all her crew on board, ere the captain makes himself

visible by arriving to take command; for sometimes these voyages are

so prolonged, and the shore intervals at home so exceedingly brief,

that if the captain have a family, or any absorbing concernment of

that sort, he does not trouble himself much about his ship in port,

but leaves her to the owners till all is ready for sea. However, it

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is always as well to have a look at him before irrevocably committing

yourself into his hands. Turning back I accosted Captain Peleg,

inquiring where Captain Ahab was to be found.

"And what dost thou want of Captain Ahab? It's all right enough;

thou art shipped."

"Yes, but I should like to see him."

"But I don't think thou wilt be able to at present. I don't know

exactly what's the matter with him; but he keeps close inside the

house; a sort of sick, and yet he don't look so. In fact, he ain't

sick; but no, he isn't well either. Any how, young man, he won't

always see me, so I don't suppose he will thee. He's a queer man,

Captain Ahab--so some think--but a good one. Oh, thou'lt like him

well enough; no fear, no fear. He's a grand, ungodly, god-like man,

Captain Ahab; doesn't speak much; but, when he does speak, then you

may well listen. Mark ye, be forewarned; Ahab's above the common;

Ahab's been in colleges, as well as 'mong the cannibals; been used to

deeper wonders than the waves; fixed his fiery lance in mightier,

stranger foes than whales. His lance! aye, the keenest and the surest

that out of all our isle! Oh! he ain't Captain Bildad; no, and he

ain't Captain Peleg; HE'S AHAB, boy; and Ahab of old, thou knowest,

was a crowned king!"

"And a very vile one. When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did

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they not lick his blood?"

"Come hither to me--hither, hither," said Peleg, with a significance

in his eye that almost startled me. "Look ye, lad; never say that on

board the Pequod. Never say it anywhere. Captain Ahab did not name

himself. 'Twas a foolish, ignorant whim of his crazy, widowed

mother, who died when he was only a twelvemonth old. And yet the old

squaw Tistig, at Gayhead, said that the name would somehow prove

prophetic. And, perhaps, other fools like her may tell thee the

same. I wish to warn thee. It's a lie. I know Captain Ahab well;

I've sailed with him as mate years ago; I know what he is--a good

man--not a pious, good man, like Bildad, but a swearing good

man--something like me--only there's a good deal more of him. Aye,

aye, I know that he was never very jolly; and I know that on the

passage home, he was a little out of his mind for a spell; but it was

the sharp shooting pains in his bleeding stump that brought that

about, as any one might see. I know, too, that ever since he lost

his leg last voyage by that accursed whale, he's been a kind of

moody--desperate moody, and savage sometimes; but that will all pass

off. And once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee, young man,

it's better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad

one. So good-bye to thee--and wrong not Captain Ahab, because he

happens to have a wicked name. Besides, my boy, he has a wife--not

three voyages wedded--a sweet, resigned girl. Think of that; by that

sweet girl that old man has a child: hold ye then there can be any

utter, hopeless harm in Ahab? No, no, my lad; stricken, blasted, if

he be, Ahab has his humanities!"

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As I walked away, I was full of thoughtfulness; what had been

incidentally revealed to me of Captain Ahab, filled me with a certain

wild vagueness of painfulness concerning him. And somehow, at the

time, I felt a sympathy and a sorrow for him, but for I don't know

what, unless it was the cruel loss of his leg. And yet I also felt a

strange awe of him; but that sort of awe, which I cannot at all

describe, was not exactly awe; I do not know what it was. But I felt

it; and it did not disincline me towards him; though I felt

impatience at what seemed like mystery in him, so imperfectly as he

was known to me then. However, my thoughts were at length carried in

other directions, so that for the present dark Ahab slipped my mind.

CHAPTER 17

The Ramadan.

As Queequeg's Ramadan, or Fasting and Humiliation, was to continue

all day, I did not choose to disturb him till towards night-fall; for

I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody's religious

obligations, never mind how comical, and could not find it in my

heart to undervalue even a congregation of ants worshipping a

toad-stool; or those other creatures in certain parts of our earth,

who with a degree of footmanism quite unprecedented in other planets,

bow down before the torso of a deceased landed proprietor merely on

account of the inordinate possessions yet owned and rented in his

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name.

I say, we good Presbyterian Christians should be charitable in these

things, and not fancy ourselves so vastly superior to other mortals,

pagans and what not, because of their half-crazy conceits on these

subjects. There was Queequeg, now, certainly entertaining the most

absurd notions about Yojo and his Ramadan;--but what of that?

Queequeg thought he knew what he was about, I suppose; he seemed to

be content; and there let him rest. All our arguing with him would

not avail; let him be, I say: and Heaven have mercy on us

all--Presbyterians and Pagans alike--for we are all somehow

dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.

Towards evening, when I felt assured that all his performances and

rituals must be over, I went up to his room and knocked at the door;

but no answer. I tried to open it, but it was fastened inside.

"Queequeg," said I softly through the key-hole:--all silent. "I say,

Queequeg! why don't you speak? It's I--Ishmael." But all remained

still as before. I began to grow alarmed. I had allowed him such

abundant time; I thought he might have had an apoplectic fit. I

looked through the key-hole; but the door opening into an odd corner

of the room, the key-hole prospect was but a crooked and sinister

one. I could only see part of the foot-board of the bed and a line

of the wall, but nothing more. I was surprised to behold resting

against the wall the wooden shaft of Queequeg's harpoon, which the

landlady the evening previous had taken from him, before our mounting

to the chamber. That's strange, thought I; but at any rate, since

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the harpoon stands yonder, and he seldom or never goes abroad without

it, therefore he must be inside here, and no possible mistake.

"Queequeg!--Queequeg!"--all still. Something must have happened.

Apoplexy! I tried to burst open the door; but it stubbornly

resisted. Running down stairs, I quickly stated my suspicions to the

first person I met--the chamber-maid. "La! la!" she cried, "I

thought something must be the matter. I went to make the bed after

breakfast, and the door was locked; and not a mouse to be heard; and

it's been just so silent ever since. But I thought, may be, you had

both gone off and locked your baggage in for safe keeping. La! la,

ma'am!--Mistress! murder! Mrs. Hussey! apoplexy!"--and with these

cries, she ran towards the kitchen, I following.

Mrs. Hussey soon appeared, with a mustard-pot in one hand and a

vinegar-cruet in the other, having just broken away from the

occupation of attending to the castors, and scolding her little black

boy meantime.

"Wood-house!" cried I, "which way to it? Run for God's sake, and

fetch something to pry open the door--the axe!--the axe! he's had a

stroke; depend upon it!"--and so saying I was unmethodically rushing

up stairs again empty-handed, when Mrs. Hussey interposed the

mustard-pot and vinegar-cruet, and the entire castor of her

countenance.

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"What's the matter with you, young man?"

"Get the axe! For God's sake, run for the doctor, some one, while I

pry it open!"

"Look here," said the landlady, quickly putting down the

vinegar-cruet, so as to have one hand free; "look here; are you

talking about prying open any of my doors?"--and with that she seized

my arm. "What's the matter with you? What's the matter with you,

shipmate?"

In as calm, but rapid a manner as possible, I gave her to understand

the whole case. Unconsciously clapping the vinegar-cruet to one side

of her nose, she ruminated for an instant; then exclaimed--"No! I

haven't seen it since I put it there." Running to a little closet

under the landing of the stairs, she glanced in, and returning, told

me that Queequeg's harpoon was missing. "He's killed himself," she

cried. "It's unfort'nate Stiggs done over again there goes another

counterpane--God pity his poor mother!--it will be the ruin of my

house. Has the poor lad a sister? Where's that girl?--there, Betty,

go to Snarles the Painter, and tell him to paint me a sign, with--"no

suicides permitted here, and no smoking in the parlor;"--might as

well kill both birds at once. Kill? The Lord be merciful to his

ghost! What's that noise there? You, young man, avast there!"

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And running up after me, she caught me as I was again trying to force

open the door.

"I don't allow it; I won't have my premises spoiled. Go for the

locksmith, there's one about a mile from here. But avast!" putting

her hand in her side-pocket, "here's a key that'll fit, I guess;

let's see." And with that, she turned it in the lock; but, alas!

Queequeg's supplemental bolt remained unwithdrawn within.

"Have to burst it open," said I, and was running down the entry a

little, for a good start, when the landlady caught at me, again

vowing I should not break down her premises; but I tore from her, and

with a sudden bodily rush dashed myself full against the mark.

With a prodigious noise the door flew open, and the knob slamming

against the wall, sent the plaster to the ceiling; and there, good

heavens! there sat Queequeg, altogether cool and self-collected;

right in the middle of the room; squatting on his hams, and holding

Yojo on top of his head. He looked neither one way nor the other

way, but sat like a carved image with scarce a sign of active life.

"Queequeg," said I, going up to him, "Queequeg, what's the matter

with you?"

"He hain't been a sittin' so all day, has he?" said the landlady.

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But all we said, not a word could we drag out of him; I almost felt

like pushing him over, so as to change his position, for it was

almost intolerable, it seemed so painfully and unnaturally

constrained; especially, as in all probability he had been sitting so

for upwards of eight or ten hours, going too without his regular

meals.

"Mrs. Hussey," said I, "he's ALIVE at all events; so leave us, if you

please, and I will see to this strange affair myself."

Closing the door upon the landlady, I endeavored to prevail upon

Queequeg to take a chair; but in vain. There he sat; and all he

could do--for all my polite arts and blandishments--he would not move

a peg, nor say a single word, nor even look at me, nor notice my

presence in the slightest way.

I wonder, thought I, if this can possibly be a part of his Ramadan;

do they fast on their hams that way in his native island. It must be

so; yes, it's part of his creed, I suppose; well, then, let him

rest; he'll get up sooner or later, no doubt. It can't last for

ever, thank God, and his Ramadan only comes once a year; and I don't

believe it's very punctual then.

I went down to supper. After sitting a long time listening to the

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long stories of some sailors who had just come from a plum-pudding

voyage, as they called it (that is, a short whaling-voyage in a

schooner or brig, confined to the north of the line, in the Atlantic

Ocean only); after listening to these plum-puddingers till nearly

eleven o'clock, I went up stairs to go to bed, feeling quite sure by

this time Queequeg must certainly have brought his Ramadan to a

termination. But no; there he was just where I had left him; he had

not stirred an inch. I began to grow vexed with him; it seemed so

downright senseless and insane to be sitting there all day and half

the night on his hams in a cold room, holding a piece of wood on his

head.

"For heaven's sake, Queequeg, get up and shake yourself; get up and

have some supper. You'll starve; you'll kill yourself, Queequeg."

But not a word did he reply.

Despairing of him, therefore, I determined to go to bed and to sleep;

and no doubt, before a great while, he would follow me. But previous

to turning in, I took my heavy bearskin jacket, and threw it over

him, as it promised to be a very cold night; and he had nothing but

his ordinary round jacket on. For some time, do all I would, I could

not get into the faintest doze. I had blown out the candle; and the

mere thought of Queequeg--not four feet off--sitting there in that

uneasy position, stark alone in the cold and dark; this made me

really wretched. Think of it; sleeping all night in the same room

with a wide awake pagan on his hams in this dreary, unaccountable

Ramadan!

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But somehow I dropped off at last, and knew nothing more till break

of day; when, looking over the bedside, there squatted Queequeg, as

if he had been screwed down to the floor. But as soon as the first

glimpse of sun entered the window, up he got, with stiff and grating

joints, but with a cheerful look; limped towards me where I lay;

pressed his forehead again against mine; and said his Ramadan was

over.

Now, as I before hinted, I have no objection to any person's

religion, be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or

insult any other person, because that other person don't believe it

also. But when a man's religion becomes really frantic; when it is a

positive torment to him; and, in fine, makes this earth of ours an

uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that

individual aside and argue the point with him.

And just so I now did with Queequeg. "Queequeg," said I, "get into

bed now, and lie and listen to me." I then went on, beginning with

the rise and progress of the primitive religions, and coming down to

the various religions of the present time, during which time I

labored to show Queequeg that all these Lents, Ramadans, and

prolonged ham-squattings in cold, cheerless rooms were stark

nonsense; bad for the health; useless for the soul; opposed, in

short, to the obvious laws of Hygiene and common sense. I told him,

too, that he being in other things such an extremely sensible and

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sagacious savage, it pained me, very badly pained me, to see him now

so deplorably foolish about this ridiculous Ramadan of his. Besides,

argued I, fasting makes the body cave in; hence the spirit caves in;

and all thoughts born of a fast must necessarily be half-starved.

This is the reason why most dyspeptic religionists cherish such

melancholy notions about their hereafters. In one word, Queequeg,

said I, rather digressively; hell is an idea first born on an

undigested apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the

hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans.

I then asked Queequeg whether he himself was ever troubled with

dyspepsia; expressing the idea very plainly, so that he could take it

in. He said no; only upon one memorable occasion. It was after a

great feast given by his father the king, on the gaining of a great

battle wherein fifty of the enemy had been killed by about two

o'clock in the afternoon, and all cooked and eaten that very evening.

"No more, Queequeg," said I, shuddering; "that will do;" for I knew

the inferences without his further hinting them. I had seen a sailor

who had visited that very island, and he told me that it was the

custom, when a great battle had been gained there, to barbecue all

the slain in the yard or garden of the victor; and then, one by one,

they were placed in great wooden trenchers, and garnished round like

a pilau, with breadfruit and cocoanuts; and with some parsley in

their mouths, were sent round with the victor's compliments to all

his friends, just as though these presents were so many Christmas

turkeys.

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After all, I do not think that my remarks about religion made much

impression upon Queequeg. Because, in the first place, he somehow

seemed dull of hearing on that important subject, unless considered

from his own point of view; and, in the second place, he did not more

than one third understand me, couch my ideas simply as I would; and,

finally, he no doubt thought he knew a good deal more about the true

religion than I did. He looked at me with a sort of condescending

concern and compassion, as though he thought it a great pity that

such a sensible young man should be so hopelessly lost to evangelical

pagan piety.

At last we rose and dressed; and Queequeg, taking a prodigiously

hearty breakfast of chowders of all sorts, so that the landlady

should not make much profit by reason of his Ramadan, we sallied out

to board the Pequod, sauntering along, and picking our teeth with

halibut bones.

CHAPTER 18

His Mark.

As we were walking down the end of the wharf towards the ship,

Queequeg carrying his harpoon, Captain Peleg in his gruff voice

loudly hailed us from his wigwam, saying he had not suspected my

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friend was a cannibal, and furthermore announcing that he let no

cannibals on board that craft, unless they previously produced their

papers.

"What do you mean by that, Captain Peleg?" said I, now jumping on the

bulwarks, and leaving my comrade standing on the wharf.

"I mean," he replied, "he must show his papers."

"Yes," said Captain Bildad in his hollow voice, sticking his head

from behind Peleg's, out of the wigwam. "He must show that he's

converted. Son of darkness," he added, turning to Queequeg, "art

thou at present in communion with any Christian church?"

"Why," said I, "he's a member of the first Congregational Church."

Here be it said, that many tattooed savages sailing in Nantucket

ships at last come to be converted into the churches.

"First Congregational Church," cried Bildad, "what! that worships in

Deacon Deuteronomy Coleman's meeting-house?" and so saying, taking

out his spectacles, he rubbed them with his great yellow bandana

handkerchief, and putting them on very carefully, came out of the

wigwam, and leaning stiffly over the bulwarks, took a good long look

at Queequeg.

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"How long hath he been a member?" he then said, turning to me; "not

very long, I rather guess, young man."

"No," said Peleg, "and he hasn't been baptized right either, or it

would have washed some of that devil's blue off his face."

"Do tell, now," cried Bildad, "is this Philistine a regular member of

Deacon Deuteronomy's meeting? I never saw him going there, and I

pass it every Lord's day."

"I don't know anything about Deacon Deuteronomy or his meeting," said

I; "all I know is, that Queequeg here is a born member of the First

Congregational Church. He is a deacon himself, Queequeg is."

"Young man," said Bildad sternly, "thou art skylarking with

me--explain thyself, thou young Hittite. What church dost thee mean?

answer me."

Finding myself thus hard pushed, I replied. "I mean, sir, the same

ancient Catholic Church to which you and I, and Captain Peleg there,

and Queequeg here, and all of us, and every mother's son and soul of

us belong; the great and everlasting First Congregation of this whole

worshipping world; we all belong to that; only some of us cherish

some queer crotchets no ways touching the grand belief; in THAT we

all join hands."

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"Splice, thou mean'st SPLICE hands," cried Peleg, drawing nearer.

"Young man, you'd better ship for a missionary, instead of a

fore-mast hand; I never heard a better sermon. Deacon

Deuteronomy--why Father Mapple himself couldn't beat it, and he's

reckoned something. Come aboard, come aboard; never mind about the

papers. I say, tell Quohog there--what's that you call him? tell

Quohog to step along. By the great anchor, what a harpoon he's got

there! looks like good stuff that; and he handles it about right. I

say, Quohog, or whatever your name is, did you ever stand in the head

of a whale-boat? did you ever strike a fish?"

Without saying a word, Queequeg, in his wild sort of way, jumped upon

the bulwarks, from thence into the bows of one of the whale-boats

hanging to the side; and then bracing his left knee, and poising his

harpoon, cried out in some such way as this:--

"Cap'ain, you see him small drop tar on water dere? You see him?

well, spose him one whale eye, well, den!" and taking sharp aim at

it, he darted the iron right over old Bildad's broad brim, clean

across the ship's decks, and struck the glistening tar spot out of

sight.

"Now," said Queequeg, quietly hauling in the line, "spos-ee him

whale-e eye; why, dad whale dead."

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"Quick, Bildad," said Peleg, his partner, who, aghast at the close

vicinity of the flying harpoon, had retreated towards the cabin

gangway. "Quick, I say, you Bildad, and get the ship's papers. We

must have Hedgehog there, I mean Quohog, in one of our boats. Look

ye, Quohog, we'll give ye the ninetieth lay, and that's more than

ever was given a harpooneer yet out of Nantucket."

So down we went into the cabin, and to my great joy Queequeg was soon

enrolled among the same ship's company to which I myself belonged.

When all preliminaries were over and Peleg had got everything ready

for signing, he turned to me and said, "I guess, Quohog there don't

know how to write, does he? I say, Quohog, blast ye! dost thou sign

thy name or make thy mark?

But at this question, Queequeg, who had twice or thrice before taken

part in similar ceremonies, looked no ways abashed; but taking the

offered pen, copied upon the paper, in the proper place, an exact

counterpart of a queer round figure which was tattooed upon his arm;

so that through Captain Peleg's obstinate mistake touching his

appellative, it stood something like this:--

Quohog.

his X mark.

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Meanwhile Captain Bildad sat earnestly and steadfastly eyeing

Queequeg, and at last rising solemnly and fumbling in the huge

pockets of his broad-skirted drab coat, took out a bundle of tracts,

and selecting one entitled "The Latter Day Coming; or No Time to

Lose," placed it in Queequeg's hands, and then grasping them and the

book with both his, looked earnestly into his eyes, and said, "Son of

darkness, I must do my duty by thee; I am part owner of this ship,

and feel concerned for the souls of all its crew; if thou still

clingest to thy Pagan ways, which I sadly fear, I beseech thee,

remain not for aye a Belial bondsman. Spurn the idol Bell, and the

hideous dragon; turn from the wrath to come; mind thine eye, I say;

oh! goodness gracious! steer clear of the fiery pit!"

Something of the salt sea yet lingered in old Bildad's language,

heterogeneously mixed with Scriptural and domestic phrases.

"Avast there, avast there, Bildad, avast now spoiling our

harpooneer," Peleg. "Pious harpooneers never make good voyagers--it

takes the shark out of 'em; no harpooneer is worth a straw who aint

pretty sharkish. There was young Nat Swaine, once the bravest

boat-header out of all Nantucket and the Vineyard; he joined the

meeting, and never came to good. He got so frightened about his

plaguy soul, that he shrinked and sheered away from whales, for fear

of after-claps, in case he got stove and went to Davy Jones."

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"Peleg! Peleg!" said Bildad, lifting his eyes and hands, "thou

thyself, as I myself, hast seen many a perilous time; thou knowest,

Peleg, what it is to have the fear of death; how, then, can'st thou

prate in this ungodly guise. Thou beliest thine own heart, Peleg.

Tell me, when this same Pequod here had her three masts overboard in

that typhoon on Japan, that same voyage when thou went mate with

Captain Ahab, did'st thou not think of Death and the Judgment then?"

"Hear him, hear him now," cried Peleg, marching across the cabin, and

thrusting his hands far down into his pockets,--"hear him, all of ye.

Think of that! When every moment we thought the ship would sink!

Death and the Judgment then? What? With all three masts making such

an everlasting thundering against the side; and every sea breaking

over us, fore and aft. Think of Death and the Judgment then? No!

no time to think about Death then. Life was what Captain Ahab and I

was thinking of; and how to save all hands--how to rig

jury-masts--how to get into the nearest port; that was what I was

thinking of."

Bildad said no more, but buttoning up his coat, stalked on deck,

where we followed him. There he stood, very quietly overlooking some

sailmakers who were mending a top-sail in the waist. Now and then he

stooped to pick up a patch, or save an end of tarred twine, which

otherwise might have been wasted.

CHAPTER 19

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The Prophet.

"Shipmates, have ye shipped in that ship?"

Queequeg and I had just left the Pequod, and were sauntering away from

the water, for the moment each occupied with his own thoughts, when

the above words were put to us by a stranger, who, pausing before us,

levelled his massive forefinger at the vessel in question. He was

but shabbily apparelled in faded jacket and patched trowsers; a rag

of a black handkerchief investing his neck. A confluent small-pox

had in all directions flowed over his face, and left it like the

complicated ribbed bed of a torrent, when the rushing waters have

been dried up.

"Have ye shipped in her?" he repeated.

"You mean the ship Pequod, I suppose," said I, trying to gain a

little more time for an uninterrupted look at him.

"Aye, the Pequod--that ship there," he said, drawing back his whole

arm, and then rapidly shoving it straight out from him, with the

fixed bayonet of his pointed finger darted full at the object.

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"Yes," said I, "we have just signed the articles."

"Anything down there about your souls?"

"About what?"

"Oh, perhaps you hav'n't got any," he said quickly. "No matter

though, I know many chaps that hav'n't got any,--good luck to 'em;

and they are all the better off for it. A soul's a sort of a fifth

wheel to a wagon."

"What are you jabbering about, shipmate?" said I.

"HE'S got enough, though, to make up for all deficiencies of that

sort in other chaps," abruptly said the stranger, placing a nervous

emphasis upon the word HE.

"Queequeg," said I, "let's go; this fellow has broken loose from

somewhere; he's talking about something and somebody we don't know."

"Stop!" cried the stranger. "Ye said true--ye hav'n't seen Old

Thunder yet, have ye?"

"Who's Old Thunder?" said I, again riveted with the insane

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earnestness of his manner.

"Captain Ahab."

"What! the captain of our ship, the Pequod?"

"Aye, among some of us old sailor chaps, he goes by that name. Ye

hav'n't seen him yet, have ye?"

"No, we hav'n't. He's sick they say, but is getting better, and will

be all right again before long."

"All right again before long!" laughed the stranger, with a solemnly

derisive sort of laugh. "Look ye; when Captain Ahab is all right,

then this left arm of mine will be all right; not before."

"What do you know about him?"

"What did they TELL you about him? Say that!"

"They didn't tell much of anything about him; only I've heard that

he's a good whale-hunter, and a good captain to his crew."

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"That's true, that's true--yes, both true enough. But you must jump

when he gives an order. Step and growl; growl and go--that's the

word with Captain Ahab. But nothing about that thing that happened

to him off Cape Horn, long ago, when he lay like dead for three days

and nights; nothing about that deadly skrimmage with the Spaniard

afore the altar in Santa?--heard nothing about that, eh? Nothing

about the silver calabash he spat into? And nothing about his losing

his leg last voyage, according to the prophecy. Didn't ye hear a

word about them matters and something more, eh? No, I don't think ye

did; how could ye? Who knows it? Not all Nantucket, I guess. But

hows'ever, mayhap, ye've heard tell about the leg, and how he lost

it; aye, ye have heard of that, I dare say. Oh yes, THAT every one

knows a'most--I mean they know he's only one leg; and that a

parmacetti took the other off."

"My friend," said I, "what all this gibberish of yours is about, I

don't know, and I don't much care; for it seems to me that you must

be a little damaged in the head. But if you are speaking of Captain

Ahab, of that ship there, the Pequod, then let me tell you, that I

know all about the loss of his leg."

"ALL about it, eh--sure you do?--all?"

"Pretty sure."

With finger pointed and eye levelled at the Pequod, the beggar-like

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stranger stood a moment, as if in a troubled reverie; then starting a

little, turned and said:--"Ye've shipped, have ye? Names down on the

papers? Well, well, what's signed, is signed; and what's to be, will

be; and then again, perhaps it won't be, after all. Anyhow, it's

all fixed and arranged a'ready; and some sailors or other must go

with him, I suppose; as well these as any other men, God pity 'em!

Morning to ye, shipmates, morning; the ineffable heavens bless ye;

I'm sorry I stopped ye."

"Look here, friend," said I, "if you have anything important to tell

us, out with it; but if you are only trying to bamboozle us, you are

mistaken in your game; that's all I have to say."

"And it's said very well, and I like to hear a chap talk up that way;

you are just the man for him--the likes of ye. Morning to ye,

shipmates, morning! Oh! when ye get there, tell 'em I've concluded

not to make one of 'em."

"Ah, my dear fellow, you can't fool us that way--you can't fool us.

It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a

great secret in him."

"Morning to ye, shipmates, morning."

"Morning it is," said I. "Come along, Queequeg, let's leave this

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crazy man. But stop, tell me your name, will you?"

"Elijah."

Elijah! thought I, and we walked away, both commenting, after each

other's fashion, upon this ragged old sailor; and agreed that he was

nothing but a humbug, trying to be a bugbear. But we had not gone

perhaps above a hundred yards, when chancing to turn a corner, and

looking back as I did so, who should be seen but Elijah following us,

though at a distance. Somehow, the sight of him struck me so, that I

said nothing to Queequeg of his being behind, but passed on with my

comrade, anxious to see whether the stranger would turn the same

corner that we did. He did; and then it seemed to me that he was

dogging us, but with what intent I could not for the life of me

imagine. This circumstance, coupled with his ambiguous,

half-hinting, half-revealing, shrouded sort of talk, now begat in me

all kinds of vague wonderments and half-apprehensions, and all

connected with the Pequod; and Captain Ahab; and the leg he had lost;

and the Cape Horn fit; and the silver calabash; and what Captain

Peleg had said of him, when I left the ship the day previous; and the

prediction of the squaw Tistig; and the voyage we had bound ourselves

to sail; and a hundred other shadowy things.

I was resolved to satisfy myself whether this ragged Elijah was

really dogging us or not, and with that intent crossed the way with

Queequeg, and on that side of it retraced our steps. But Elijah

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passed on, without seeming to notice us. This relieved me; and once

more, and finally as it seemed to me, I pronounced him in my heart, a

humbug.

CHAPTER 20

All Astir.

A day or two passed, and there was great activity aboard the Pequod.

Not only were the old sails being mended, but new sails were coming

on board, and bolts of canvas, and coils of rigging; in short,

everything betokened that the ship's preparations were hurrying to a

close. Captain Peleg seldom or never went ashore, but sat in his

wigwam keeping a sharp look-out upon the hands: Bildad did all the

purchasing and providing at the stores; and the men employed in the

hold and on the rigging were working till long after night-fall.

On the day following Queequeg's signing the articles, word was given

at all the inns where the ship's company were stopping, that their

chests must be on board before night, for there was no telling how

soon the vessel might be sailing. So Queequeg and I got down our

traps, resolving, however, to sleep ashore till the last. But it

seems they always give very long notice in these cases, and the ship

did not sail for several days. But no wonder; there was a good deal

to be done, and there is no telling how many things to be thought of,

before the Pequod was fully equipped.

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Every one knows what a multitude of things--beds, sauce-pans, knives

and forks, shovels and tongs, napkins, nut-crackers, and what not,

are indispensable to the business of housekeeping. Just so with

whaling, which necessitates a three-years' housekeeping upon the wide

ocean, far from all grocers, costermongers, doctors, bakers, and

bankers. And though this also holds true of merchant vessels, yet

not by any means to the same extent as with whalemen. For besides

the great length of the whaling voyage, the numerous articles

peculiar to the prosecution of the fishery, and the impossibility of

replacing them at the remote harbors usually frequented, it must be

remembered, that of all ships, whaling vessels are the most exposed

to accidents of all kinds, and especially to the destruction and loss

of the very things upon which the success of the voyage most depends.

Hence, the spare boats, spare spars, and spare lines and harpoons,

and spare everythings, almost, but a spare Captain and duplicate

ship.

At the period of our arrival at the Island, the heaviest storage of

the Pequod had been almost completed; comprising her beef, bread,

water, fuel, and iron hoops and staves. But, as before hinted, for

some time there was a continual fetching and carrying on board of

divers odds and ends of things, both large and small.

Chief among those who did this fetching and carrying was Captain

Bildad's sister, a lean old lady of a most determined and

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indefatigable spirit, but withal very kindhearted, who seemed

resolved that, if SHE could help it, nothing should be found wanting

in the Pequod, after once fairly getting to sea. At one time she

would come on board with a jar of pickles for the steward's pantry;

another time with a bunch of quills for the chief mate's desk, where

he kept his log; a third time with a roll of flannel for the small of

some one's rheumatic back. Never did any woman better deserve her

name, which was Charity--Aunt Charity, as everybody called her. And

like a sister of charity did this charitable Aunt Charity bustle

about hither and thither, ready to turn her hand and heart to

anything that promised to yield safety, comfort, and consolation to

all on board a ship in which her beloved brother Bildad was

concerned, and in which she herself owned a score or two of

well-saved dollars.

But it was startling to see this excellent hearted Quakeress coming

on board, as she did the last day, with a long oil-ladle in one hand,

and a still longer whaling lance in the other. Nor was Bildad himself

nor Captain Peleg at all backward. As for Bildad, he carried about

with him a long list of the articles needed, and at every fresh

arrival, down went his mark opposite that article upon the paper.

Every once in a while Peleg came hobbling out of his whalebone den,

roaring at the men down the hatchways, roaring up to the riggers at

the mast-head, and then concluded by roaring back into his wigwam.

During these days of preparation, Queequeg and I often visited the

craft, and as often I asked about Captain Ahab, and how he was, and

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when he was going to come on board his ship. To these questions they

would answer, that he was getting better and better, and was expected

aboard every day; meantime, the two captains, Peleg and Bildad, could

attend to everything necessary to fit the vessel for the voyage. If

I had been downright honest with myself, I would have seen very

plainly in my heart that I did but half fancy being committed this

way to so long a voyage, without once laying my eyes on the man who

was to be the absolute dictator of it, so soon as the ship sailed out

upon the open sea. But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes

happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly

strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself. And much this

way it was with me. I said nothing, and tried to think nothing.

At last it was given out that some time next day the ship would

certainly sail. So next morning, Queequeg and I took a very early

start.

CHAPTER 21

Going Aboard.

It was nearly six o'clock, but only grey imperfect misty dawn, when

we drew nigh the wharf.

"There are some sailors running ahead there, if I see right," said I

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to Queequeg, "it can't be shadows; she's off by sunrise, I guess;

come on!"

"Avast!" cried a voice, whose owner at the same time coming close

behind us, laid a hand upon both our shoulders, and then insinuating

himself between us, stood stooping forward a little, in the uncertain

twilight, strangely peering from Queequeg to me. It was Elijah.

"Going aboard?"

"Hands off, will you," said I.

"Lookee here," said Queequeg, shaking himself, "go 'way!"

"Ain't going aboard, then?"

"Yes, we are," said I, "but what business is that of yours? Do you

know, Mr. Elijah, that I consider you a little impertinent?"

"No, no, no; I wasn't aware of that," said Elijah, slowly and

wonderingly looking from me to Queequeg, with the most unaccountable

glances.

"Elijah," said I, "you will oblige my friend and me by withdrawing.

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We are going to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and would prefer not

to be detained."

"Ye be, be ye? Coming back afore breakfast?"

"He's cracked, Queequeg," said I, "come on."

"Holloa!" cried stationary Elijah, hailing us when we had removed a

few paces.

"Never mind him," said I, "Queequeg, come on."

But he stole up to us again, and suddenly clapping his hand on my

shoulder, said--"Did ye see anything looking like men going towards

that ship a while ago?"

Struck by this plain matter-of-fact question, I answered, saying,

"Yes, I thought I did see four or five men; but it was too dim to be

sure."

"Very dim, very dim," said Elijah. "Morning to ye."

Once more we quitted him; but once more he came softly after us; and

touching my shoulder again, said, "See if you can find 'em now, will

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ye?

"Find who?"

"Morning to ye! morning to ye!" he rejoined, again moving off. "Oh!

I was going to warn ye against--but never mind, never mind--it's all

one, all in the family too;--sharp frost this morning, ain't it?

Good-bye to ye. Shan't see ye again very soon, I guess; unless it's

before the Grand Jury." And with these cracked words he finally

departed, leaving me, for the moment, in no small wonderment at his

frantic impudence.

At last, stepping on board the Pequod, we found everything in

profound quiet, not a soul moving. The cabin entrance was locked

within; the hatches were all on, and lumbered with coils of rigging.

Going forward to the forecastle, we found the slide of the scuttle

open. Seeing a light, we went down, and found only an old rigger

there, wrapped in a tattered pea-jacket. He was thrown at whole

length upon two chests, his face downwards and inclosed in his folded

arms. The profoundest slumber slept upon him.

"Those sailors we saw, Queequeg, where can they have gone to?" said

I, looking dubiously at the sleeper. But it seemed that, when on the

wharf, Queequeg had not at all noticed what I now alluded to; hence I

would have thought myself to have been optically deceived in that

matter, were it not for Elijah's otherwise inexplicable question.

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But I beat the thing down; and again marking the sleeper, jocularly

hinted to Queequeg that perhaps we had best sit up with the body;

telling him to establish himself accordingly. He put his hand upon

the sleeper's rear, as though feeling if it was soft enough; and

then, without more ado, sat quietly down there.

"Gracious! Queequeg, don't sit there," said I.

"Oh! perry dood seat," said Queequeg, "my country way; won't hurt

him face."

"Face!" said I, "call that his face? very benevolent countenance

then; but how hard he breathes, he's heaving himself; get off,

Queequeg, you are heavy, it's grinding the face of the poor. Get

off, Queequeg! Look, he'll twitch you off soon. I wonder he don't

wake."

Queequeg removed himself to just beyond the head of the sleeper, and

lighted his tomahawk pipe. I sat at the feet. We kept the pipe

passing over the sleeper, from one to the other. Meanwhile, upon

questioning him in his broken fashion, Queequeg gave me to understand

that, in his land, owing to the absence of settees and sofas of all

sorts, the king, chiefs, and great people generally, were in the

custom of fattening some of the lower orders for ottomans; and to

furnish a house comfortably in that respect, you had only to buy up

eight or ten lazy fellows, and lay them round in the piers and

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alcoves. Besides, it was very convenient on an excursion; much

better than those garden-chairs which are convertible into

walking-sticks; upon occasion, a chief calling his attendant, and

desiring him to make a settee of himself under a spreading tree,

perhaps in some damp marshy place.

While narrating these things, every time Queequeg received the

tomahawk from me, he flourished the hatchet-side of it over the

sleeper's head.

"What's that for, Queequeg?"

"Perry easy, kill-e; oh! perry easy!

He was going on with some wild reminiscences about his tomahawk-pipe,

which, it seemed, had in its two uses both brained his foes and

soothed his soul, when we were directly attracted to the sleeping

rigger. The strong vapour now completely filling the contracted hole,

it began to tell upon him. He breathed with a sort of muffledness;

then seemed troubled in the nose; then revolved over once or twice;

then sat up and rubbed his eyes.

"Holloa!" he breathed at last, "who be ye smokers?"

"Shipped men," answered I, "when does she sail?"

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"Aye, aye, ye are going in her, be ye? She sails to-day. The

Captain came aboard last night."

"What Captain?--Ahab?"

"Who but him indeed?"

I was going to ask him some further questions concerning Ahab, when

we heard a noise on deck.

"Holloa! Starbuck's astir," said the rigger. "He's a lively chief

mate, that; good man, and a pious; but all alive now, I must turn

to." And so saying he went on deck, and we followed.

It was now clear sunrise. Soon the crew came on board in twos and

threes; the riggers bestirred themselves; the mates were actively

engaged; and several of the shore people were busy in bringing

various last things on board. Meanwhile Captain Ahab remained

invisibly enshrined within his cabin.

CHAPTER 22

Merry Christmas.

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At length, towards noon, upon the final dismissal of the ship's

riggers, and after the Pequod had been hauled out from the wharf, and

after the ever-thoughtful Charity had come off in a whale-boat, with

her last gift--a night-cap for Stubb, the second mate, her

brother-in-law, and a spare Bible for the steward--after all this,

the two Captains, Peleg and Bildad, issued from the cabin, and

turning to the chief mate, Peleg said:

"Now, Mr. Starbuck, are you sure everything is right? Captain Ahab

is all ready--just spoke to him--nothing more to be got from shore,

eh? Well, call all hands, then. Muster 'em aft here--blast 'em!"

"No need of profane words, however great the hurry, Peleg," said

Bildad, "but away with thee, friend Starbuck, and do our bidding."

How now! Here upon the very point of starting for the voyage,

Captain Peleg and Captain Bildad were going it with a high hand on

the quarter-deck, just as if they were to be joint-commanders at sea,

as well as to all appearances in port. And, as for Captain Ahab, no

sign of him was yet to be seen; only, they said he was in the cabin.

But then, the idea was, that his presence was by no means necessary

in getting the ship under weigh, and steering her well out to sea.

Indeed, as that was not at all his proper business, but the pilot's;

and as he was not yet completely recovered--so they said--therefore,

Captain Ahab stayed below. And all this seemed natural enough;

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especially as in the merchant service many captains never show

themselves on deck for a considerable time after heaving up the

anchor, but remain over the cabin table, having a farewell

merry-making with their shore friends, before they quit the ship for

good with the pilot.

But there was not much chance to think over the matter, for Captain

Peleg was now all alive. He seemed to do most of the talking and

commanding, and not Bildad.

"Aft here, ye sons of bachelors," he cried, as the sailors lingered

at the main-mast. "Mr. Starbuck, drive'em aft."

"Strike the tent there!"--was the next order. As I hinted before,

this whalebone marquee was never pitched except in port; and on board

the Pequod, for thirty years, the order to strike the tent was well

known to be the next thing to heaving up the anchor.

"Man the capstan! Blood and thunder!--jump!"--was the next command,

and the crew sprang for the handspikes.

Now in getting under weigh, the station generally occupied by the

pilot is the forward part of the ship. And here Bildad, who, with

Peleg, be it known, in addition to his other officers, was one of the

licensed pilots of the port--he being suspected to have got himself

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made a pilot in order to save the Nantucket pilot-fee to all the

ships he was concerned in, for he never piloted any other

craft--Bildad, I say, might now be seen actively engaged in looking

over the bows for the approaching anchor, and at intervals singing

what seemed a dismal stave of psalmody, to cheer the hands at the

windlass, who roared forth some sort of a chorus about the girls in

Booble Alley, with hearty good will. Nevertheless, not three days

previous, Bildad had told them that no profane songs would be allowed

on board the Pequod, particularly in getting under weigh; and

Charity, his sister, had placed a small choice copy of Watts in each

seaman's berth.

Meantime, overseeing the other part of the ship, Captain Peleg ripped

and swore astern in the most frightful manner. I almost thought he

would sink the ship before the anchor could be got up; involuntarily

I paused on my handspike, and told Queequeg to do the same, thinking

of the perils we both ran, in starting on the voyage with such a

devil for a pilot. I was comforting myself, however, with the

thought that in pious Bildad might be found some salvation, spite of

his seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay; when I felt a sudden sharp

poke in my rear, and turning round, was horrified at the apparition

of Captain Peleg in the act of withdrawing his leg from my immediate

vicinity. That was my first kick.

"Is that the way they heave in the marchant service?" he roared.

"Spring, thou sheep-head; spring, and break thy backbone! Why don't

ye spring, I say, all of ye--spring! Quohog! spring, thou chap with

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the red whiskers; spring there, Scotch-cap; spring, thou green

pants. Spring, I say, all of ye, and spring your eyes out!" And so

saying, he moved along the windlass, here and there using his leg

very freely, while imperturbable Bildad kept leading off with his

psalmody. Thinks I, Captain Peleg must have been drinking something

to-day.

At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It

was a short, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged

into night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean,

whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor. The long

rows of teeth on the bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; and like

the white ivory tusks of some huge elephant, vast curving icicles

depended from the bows.

Lank Bildad, as pilot, headed the first watch, and ever and anon, as

the old craft deep dived into the green seas, and sent the shivering

frost all over her, and the winds howled, and the cordage rang, his

steady notes were heard,--

"Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood,

Stand dressed in living green.

So to the Jews old Canaan stood,

While Jordan rolled between."

Never did those sweet words sound more sweetly to me than then. They

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were full of hope and fruition. Spite of this frigid winter night in

the boisterous Atlantic, spite of my wet feet and wetter jacket,

there was yet, it then seemed to me, many a pleasant haven in store;

and meads and glades so eternally vernal, that the grass shot up by

the spring, untrodden, unwilted, remains at midsummer.

At last we gained such an offing, that the two pilots were needed no

longer. The stout sail-boat that had accompanied us began ranging

alongside.

It was curious and not unpleasing, how Peleg and Bildad were affected

at this juncture, especially Captain Bildad. For loath to depart,

yet; very loath to leave, for good, a ship bound on so long and

perilous a voyage--beyond both stormy Capes; a ship in which some

thousands of his hard earned dollars were invested; a ship, in which

an old shipmate sailed as captain; a man almost as old as he, once

more starting to encounter all the terrors of the pitiless jaw; loath

to say good-bye to a thing so every way brimful of every interest to

him,--poor old Bildad lingered long; paced the deck with anxious

strides; ran down into the cabin to speak another farewell word

there; again came on deck, and looked to windward; looked towards the

wide and endless waters, only bounded by the far-off unseen Eastern

Continents; looked towards the land; looked aloft; looked right and

left; looked everywhere and nowhere; and at last, mechanically

coiling a rope upon its pin, convulsively grasped stout Peleg by the

hand, and holding up a lantern, for a moment stood gazing heroically

in his face, as much as to say, "Nevertheless, friend Peleg, I can

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stand it; yes, I can."

As for Peleg himself, he took it more like a philosopher; but for all

his philosophy, there was a tear twinkling in his eye, when the

lantern came too near. And he, too, did not a little run from cabin

to deck--now a word below, and now a word with Starbuck, the chief

mate.

But, at last, he turned to his comrade, with a final sort of look

about him,--"Captain Bildad--come, old shipmate, we must go. Back

the main-yard there! Boat ahoy! Stand by to come close alongside,

now! Careful, careful!--come, Bildad, boy--say your last. Luck to

ye, Starbuck--luck to ye, Mr. Stubb--luck to ye, Mr. Flask--good-bye

and good luck to ye all--and this day three years I'll have a hot

supper smoking for ye in old Nantucket. Hurrah and away!"

"God bless ye, and have ye in His holy keeping, men," murmured old

Bildad, almost incoherently. "I hope ye'll have fine weather now, so

that Captain Ahab may soon be moving among ye--a pleasant sun is all

he needs, and ye'll have plenty of them in the tropic voyage ye go.

Be careful in the hunt, ye mates. Don't stave the boats needlessly,

ye harpooneers; good white cedar plank is raised full three per cent.

within the year. Don't forget your prayers, either. Mr. Starbuck,

mind that cooper don't waste the spare staves. Oh! the sail-needles

are in the green locker! Don't whale it too much a' Lord's days,

men; but don't miss a fair chance either, that's rejecting Heaven's

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good gifts. Have an eye to the molasses tierce, Mr. Stubb; it was a

little leaky, I thought. If ye touch at the islands, Mr. Flask,

beware of fornication. Good-bye, good-bye! Don't keep that cheese

too long down in the hold, Mr. Starbuck; it'll spoil. Be careful

with the butter--twenty cents the pound it was, and mind ye, if--"

"Come, come, Captain Bildad; stop palavering,--away!" and with that,

Peleg hurried him over the side, and both dropt into the boat.

Ship and boat diverged; the cold, damp night breeze blew between; a

screaming gull flew overhead; the two hulls wildly rolled; we gave

three heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the

lone Atlantic.

CHAPTER 23

The Lee Shore.

Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, newlanded

mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn.

When on that shivering winter's night, the Pequod thrust her

vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see

standing at her helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe

and fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a

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four years' dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for

still another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his

feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories

yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of

Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him as with the

storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The

port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is

safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all

that's kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the

land, is that ship's direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality;

one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her

shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail

off shore; in so doing, fights 'gainst the very winds that fain would

blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea's landlessness again; for

refuge's sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her

bitterest foe!

Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally

intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the

intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea;

while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on

the treacherous, slavish shore?

But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless,

indefinite as God--so, better is it to perish in that howling

infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were

safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land!

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Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take

heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray

of thy ocean-perishing--straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!

CHAPTER 24

The Advocate.

As Queequeg and I are now fairly embarked in this business of

whaling; and as this business of whaling has somehow come to be

regarded among landsmen as a rather unpoetical and disreputable

pursuit; therefore, I am all anxiety to convince ye, ye landsmen, of

the injustice hereby done to us hunters of whales.

In the first place, it may be deemed almost superfluous to establish

the fact, that among people at large, the business of whaling is not

accounted on a level with what are called the liberal professions.

If a stranger were introduced into any miscellaneous metropolitan

society, it would but slightly advance the general opinion of his

merits, were he presented to the company as a harpooneer, say; and if

in emulation of the naval officers he should append the initials

S.W.F. (Sperm Whale Fishery) to his visiting card, such a procedure

would be deemed pre-eminently presuming and ridiculous.

Doubtless one leading reason why the world declines honouring us

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whalemen, is this: they think that, at best, our vocation amounts to

a butchering sort of business; and that when actively engaged

therein, we are surrounded by all manner of defilements. Butchers we

are, that is true. But butchers, also, and butchers of the bloodiest

badge have been all Martial Commanders whom the world invariably

delights to honour. And as for the matter of the alleged

uncleanliness of our business, ye shall soon be initiated into

certain facts hitherto pretty generally unknown, and which, upon the

whole, will triumphantly plant the sperm whale-ship at least among

the cleanliest things of this tidy earth. But even granting the

charge in question to be true; what disordered slippery decks of a

whale-ship are comparable to the unspeakable carrion of those

battle-fields from which so many soldiers return to drink in all

ladies' plaudits? And if the idea of peril so much enhances the

popular conceit of the soldier's profession; let me assure ye that

many a veteran who has freely marched up to a battery, would quickly

recoil at the apparition of the sperm whale's vast tail, fanning into

eddies the air over his head. For what are the comprehensible

terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of

God!

But, though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it

unwittingly pay us the profoundest homage; yea, an all-abounding

adoration! for almost all the tapers, lamps, and candles that burn

round the globe, burn, as before so many shrines, to our glory!

But look at this matter in other lights; weigh it in all sorts of

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scales; see what we whalemen are, and have been.

Why did the Dutch in De Witt's time have admirals of their whaling

fleets? Why did Louis XVI. of France, at his own personal expense,

fit out whaling ships from Dunkirk, and politely invite to that town

some score or two of families from our own island of Nantucket? Why

did Britain between the years 1750 and 1788 pay to her whalemen in

bounties upwards of L1,000,000? And lastly, how comes it that we

whalemen of America now outnumber all the rest of the banded whalemen

in the world; sail a navy of upwards of seven hundred vessels; manned

by eighteen thousand men; yearly consuming 4,000,000 of dollars; the

ships worth, at the time of sailing, $20,000,000! and every year

importing into our harbors a well reaped harvest of $7,000,000. How

comes all this, if there be not something puissant in whaling?

But this is not the half; look again.

I freely assert, that the cosmopolite philosopher cannot, for his

life, point out one single peaceful influence, which within the last

sixty years has operated more potentially upon the whole broad world,

taken in one aggregate, than the high and mighty business of whaling.

One way and another, it has begotten events so remarkable in

themselves, and so continuously momentous in their sequential issues,

that whaling may well be regarded as that Egyptian mother, who bore

offspring themselves pregnant from her womb. It would be a hopeless,

endless task to catalogue all these things. Let a handful suffice.

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For many years past the whale-ship has been the pioneer in ferreting

out the remotest and least known parts of the earth. She has

explored seas and archipelagoes which had no chart, where no Cook or

Vancouver had ever sailed. If American and European men-of-war

now peacefully ride in once savage harbors, let them fire salutes to

the honour and glory of the whale-ship, which originally showed them

the way, and first interpreted between them and the savages. They

may celebrate as they will the heroes of Exploring Expeditions, your

Cooks, your Krusensterns; but I say that scores of anonymous

Captains have sailed out of Nantucket, that were as great, and

greater than your Cook and your Krusenstern. For in their

succourless empty-handedness, they, in the heathenish sharked waters,

and by the beaches of unrecorded, javelin islands, battled with

virgin wonders and terrors that Cook with all his marines and

muskets would not willingly have dared. All that is made such a

flourish of in the old South Sea Voyages, those things were but the

life-time commonplaces of our heroic Nantucketers. Often,

adventures which Vancouver dedicates three chapters to, these men

accounted unworthy of being set down in the ship's common log. Ah,

the world! Oh, the world!

Until the whale fishery rounded Cape Horn, no commerce but colonial,

scarcely any intercourse but colonial, was carried on between Europe

and the long line of the opulent Spanish provinces on the Pacific

coast. It was the whaleman who first broke through the jealous

policy of the Spanish crown, touching those colonies; and, if space

permitted, it might be distinctly shown how from those whalemen at

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last eventuated the liberation of Peru, Chili, and Bolivia from the

yoke of Old Spain, and the establishment of the eternal democracy in

those parts.

That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia, was

given to the enlightened world by the whaleman. After its first

blunder-born discovery by a Dutchman, all other ships long shunned

those shores as pestiferously barbarous; but the whale-ship touched

there. The whale-ship is the true mother of that now mighty colony.

Moreover, in the infancy of the first Australian settlement, the

emigrants were several times saved from starvation by the benevolent

biscuit of the whale-ship luckily dropping an anchor in their waters.

The uncounted isles of all Polynesia confess the same truth, and do

commercial homage to the whale-ship, that cleared the way for the

missionary and the merchant, and in many cases carried the primitive

missionaries to their first destinations. If that double-bolted

land, Japan, is ever to become hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone

to whom the credit will be due; for already she is on the threshold.

But if, in the face of all this, you still declare that whaling has

no aesthetically noble associations connected with it, then am I

ready to shiver fifty lances with you there, and unhorse you with a

split helmet every time.

The whale has no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler, you

will say.

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THE WHALE NO FAMOUS AUTHOR, AND WHALING NO FAMOUS CHRONICLER? Who

wrote the first account of our Leviathan? Who but mighty Job! And

who composed the first narrative of a whaling-voyage? Who, but no

less a prince than Alfred the Great, who, with his own royal pen,

took down the words from Other, the Norwegian whale-hunter of those

times! And who pronounced our glowing eulogy in Parliament? Who,

but Edmund Burke!

True enough, but then whalemen themselves are poor devils; they have

no good blood in their veins.

NO GOOD BLOOD IN THEIR VEINS? They have something better than royal

blood there. The grandmother of Benjamin Franklin was Mary Morrel;

afterwards, by marriage, Mary Folger, one of the old settlers of

Nantucket, and the ancestress to a long line of Folgers and

harpooneers--all kith and kin to noble Benjamin--this day darting the

barbed iron from one side of the world to the other.

Good again; but then all confess that somehow whaling is not

respectable.

WHALING NOT RESPECTABLE? Whaling is imperial! By old English

statutory law, the whale is declared "a royal fish."*

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Oh, that's only nominal! The whale himself has never figured in any

grand imposing way.

THE WHALE NEVER FIGURED IN ANY GRAND IMPOSING WAY? In one of the

mighty triumphs given to a Roman general upon his entering the

world's capital, the bones of a whale, brought all the way from the

Syrian coast, were the most conspicuous object in the cymballed

procession.*

*See subsequent chapters for something more on this head.

Grant it, since you cite it; but, say what you will, there is no real

dignity in whaling.

NO DIGNITY IN WHALING? The dignity of our calling the very heavens

attest. Cetus is a constellation in the South! No more! Drive

down your hat in presence of the Czar, and take it off to Queequeg!

No more! I know a man that, in his lifetime, has taken three hundred

and fifty whales. I account that man more honourable than that great

captain of antiquity who boasted of taking as many walled towns.

And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet

undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real

repute in that small but high hushed world which I might not be

unreasonably ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do anything that, upon

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the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left undone; if,

at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any

precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the

honour and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College

and my Harvard.

CHAPTER 25

Postscript.

In behalf of the dignity of whaling, I would fain advance naught but

substantiated facts. But after embattling his facts, an advocate who

should wholly suppress a not unreasonable surmise, which might tell

eloquently upon his cause--such an advocate, would he not be

blameworthy?

It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, even

modern ones, a certain curious process of seasoning them for their

functions is gone through. There is a saltcellar of state, so

called, and there may be a castor of state. How they use the salt,

precisely--who knows? Certain I am, however, that a king's head is

solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad. Can it

be, though, that they anoint it with a view of making its interior

run well, as they anoint machinery? Much might be ruminated here,

concerning the essential dignity of this regal process, because in

common life we esteem but meanly and contemptibly a fellow who

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anoints his hair, and palpably smells of that anointing. In truth, a

mature man who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that man has

probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere. As a general rule, he

can't amount to much in his totality.

But the only thing to be considered here, is this--what kind of oil

is used at coronations? Certainly it cannot be olive oil, nor

macassar oil, nor castor oil, nor bear's oil, nor train oil, nor

cod-liver oil. What then can it possibly be, but sperm oil in

its unmanufactured, unpolluted state, the sweetest of all oils?

Think of that, ye loyal Britons! we whalemen supply your kings and

queens with coronation stuff!

CHAPTER 26

Knights and Squires.

The chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and

a Quaker by descent. He was a long, earnest man, and though born on

an icy coast, seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his flesh

being hard as twice-baked biscuit. Transported to the Indies, his

live blood would not spoil like bottled ale. He must have been born

in some time of general drought and famine, or upon one of those fast

days for which his state is famous. Only some thirty arid summers

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had he seen; those summers had dried up all his physical

superfluousness. But this, his thinness, so to speak, seemed no more

the token of wasting anxieties and cares, than it seemed the

indication of any bodily blight. It was merely the condensation of

the man. He was by no means ill-looking; quite the contrary. His

pure tight skin was an excellent fit; and closely wrapped up in it,

and embalmed with inner health and strength, like a revivified

Egyptian, this Starbuck seemed prepared to endure for long ages to

come, and to endure always, as now; for be it Polar snow or torrid

sun, like a patent chronometer, his interior vitality was warranted

to do well in all climates. Looking into his eyes, you seemed to

see there the yet lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he

had calmly confronted through life. A staid, steadfast man, whose

life for the most part was a telling pantomime of action, and not a

tame chapter of sounds. Yet, for all his hardy sobriety and

fortitude, there were certain qualities in him which at times

affected, and in some cases seemed well nigh to overbalance all the

rest. Uncommonly conscientious for a seaman, and endued with a deep

natural reverence, the wild watery loneliness of his life did

therefore strongly incline him to superstition; but to that sort of

superstition, which in some organizations seems rather to spring,

somehow, from intelligence than from ignorance. Outward portents and

inward presentiments were his. And if at times these things bent the

welded iron of his soul, much more did his far-away domestic memories

of his young Cape wife and child, tend to bend him still more from

the original ruggedness of his nature, and open him still further to

those latent influences which, in some honest-hearted men, restrain

the gush of dare-devil daring, so often evinced by others in the more

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perilous vicissitudes of the fishery. "I will have no man in my

boat," said Starbuck, "who is not afraid of a whale." By this, he

seemed to mean, not only that the most reliable and useful courage

was that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered

peril, but that an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous

comrade than a coward.

"Aye, aye," said Stubb, the second mate, "Starbuck, there, is as

careful a man as you'll find anywhere in this fishery." But we shall

ere long see what that word "careful" precisely means when used by a

man like Stubb, or almost any other whale hunter.

Starbuck was no crusader after perils; in him courage was not a

sentiment; but a thing simply useful to him, and always at hand upon

all mortally practical occasions. Besides, he thought, perhaps, that

in this business of whaling, courage was one of the great staple

outfits of the ship, like her beef and her bread, and not to be

foolishly wasted. Wherefore he had no fancy for lowering for whales

after sun-down; nor for persisting in fighting a fish that too much

persisted in fighting him. For, thought Starbuck, I am here in this

critical ocean to kill whales for my living, and not to be killed by

them for theirs; and that hundreds of men had been so killed Starbuck

well knew. What doom was his own father's? Where, in the bottomless

deeps, could he find the torn limbs of his brother?

With memories like these in him, and, moreover, given to a certain

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superstitiousness, as has been said; the courage of this Starbuck

which could, nevertheless, still flourish, must indeed have been

extreme. But it was not in reasonable nature that a man so

organized, and with such terrible experiences and remembrances as he

had; it was not in nature that these things should fail in latently

engendering an element in him, which, under suitable circumstances,

would break out from its confinement, and burn all his courage up.

And brave as he might be, it was that sort of bravery chiefly,

visible in some intrepid men, which, while generally abiding firm in

the conflict with seas, or winds, or whales, or any of the ordinary

irrational horrors of the world, yet cannot withstand those more

terrific, because more spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you

from the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man.

But were the coming narrative to reveal in any instance, the complete

abasement of poor Starbuck's fortitude, scarce might I have the heart

to write it; for it is a thing most sorrowful, nay shocking, to

expose the fall of valour in the soul. Men may seem detestable as

joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there

may be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal,

is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that

over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to

throw their costliest robes. That immaculate manliness we feel

within ourselves, so far within us, that it remains intact though all

the outer character seem gone; bleeds with keenest anguish at the

undraped spectacle of a valor-ruined man. Nor can piety itself, at

such a shameful sight, completely stifle her upbraidings against the

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permitting stars. But this august dignity I treat of, is not the

dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which has no

robed investiture. Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields

a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all

hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God

absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His

omnipresence, our divine equality!

If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall

hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them

tragic graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased,

among them all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if

I shall touch that workman's arm with some ethereal light; if I shall

spread a rainbow over his disastrous set of sun; then against all

mortal critics bear me out in it, thou Just Spirit of Equality,

which hast spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind!

Bear me out in it, thou great democratic God! who didst not refuse to

the swart convict, Bunyan, the pale, poetic pearl; Thou who didst

clothe with doubly hammered leaves of finest gold, the stumped and

paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson

from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst

thunder him higher than a throne! Thou who, in all Thy mighty,

earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from the

kingly commons; bear me out in it, O God!

CHAPTER 27

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Knights and Squires.

Stubb was the second mate. He was a native of Cape Cod; and hence,

according to local usage, was called a Cape-Cod-man. A

happy-go-lucky; neither craven nor valiant; taking perils as they

came with an indifferent air; and while engaged in the most imminent

crisis of the chase, toiling away, calm and collected as a journeyman

joiner engaged for the year. Good-humored, easy, and careless, he

presided over his whale-boat as if the most deadly encounter were but

a dinner, and his crew all invited guests. He was as particular

about the comfortable arrangement of his part of the boat, as an

old stage-driver is about the snugness of his box. When close to the

whale, in the very death-lock of the fight, he handled his unpitying

lance coolly and off-handedly, as a whistling tinker his hammer. He

would hum over his old rigadig tunes while flank and flank with the

most exasperated monster. Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted

the jaws of death into an easy chair. What he thought of death

itself, there is no telling. Whether he ever thought of it at all,

might be a question; but, if he ever did chance to cast his mind that

way after a comfortable dinner, no doubt, like a good sailor, he took

it to be a sort of call of the watch to tumble aloft, and bestir

themselves there, about something which he would find out when he

obeyed the order, and not sooner.

What, perhaps, with other things, made Stubb such an easy-going,

unfearing man, so cheerily trudging off with the burden of life in a

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world full of grave pedlars, all bowed to the ground with their

packs; what helped to bring about that almost impious good-humor of

his; that thing must have been his pipe. For, like his nose, his

short, black little pipe was one of the regular features of his face.

You would almost as soon have expected him to turn out of his bunk

without his nose as without his pipe. He kept a whole row of pipes

there ready loaded, stuck in a rack, within easy reach of his hand;

and, whenever he turned in, he smoked them all out in succession,

lighting one from the other to the end of the chapter; then loading

them again to be in readiness anew. For, when Stubb dressed, instead

of first putting his legs into his trowsers, he put his pipe into his

mouth.

I say this continual smoking must have been one cause, at least, of

his peculiar disposition; for every one knows that this earthly air,

whether ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless

miseries of the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it; and as

in time of the cholera, some people go about with a camphorated

handkerchief to their mouths; so, likewise, against all mortal

tribulations, Stubb's tobacco smoke might have operated as a sort of

disinfecting agent.

The third mate was Flask, a native of Tisbury, in Martha's Vineyard.

A short, stout, ruddy young fellow, very pugnacious concerning

whales, who somehow seemed to think that the great leviathans had

personally and hereditarily affronted him; and therefore it was a

sort of point of honour with him, to destroy them whenever

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encountered. So utterly lost was he to all sense of reverence for

the many marvels of their majestic bulk and mystic ways; and so dead

to anything like an apprehension of any possible danger from

encountering them; that in his poor opinion, the wondrous whale was

but a species of magnified mouse, or at least water-rat, requiring

only a little circumvention and some small application of time and

trouble in order to kill and boil. This ignorant, unconscious

fearlessness of his made him a little waggish in the matter of

whales; he followed these fish for the fun of it; and a three years'

voyage round Cape Horn was only a jolly joke that lasted that length

of time. As a carpenter's nails are divided into wrought nails and

cut nails; so mankind may be similarly divided. Little Flask was one

of the wrought ones; made to clinch tight and last long. They called

him King-Post on board of the Pequod; because, in form, he could be

well likened to the short, square timber known by that name in Arctic

whalers; and which by the means of many radiating side timbers

inserted into it, serves to brace the ship against the icy

concussions of those battering seas.

Now these three mates--Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, were momentous

men. They it was who by universal prescription commanded three of the

Pequod's boats as headsmen. In that grand order of battle in which

Captain Ahab would probably marshal his forces to descend on the

whales, these three headsmen were as captains of companies. Or,

being armed with their long keen whaling spears, they were as a

picked trio of lancers; even as the harpooneers were flingers of

javelins.

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And since in this famous fishery, each mate or headsman, like a

Gothic Knight of old, is always accompanied by his boat-steerer or

harpooneer, who in certain conjunctures provides him with a fresh

lance, when the former one has been badly twisted, or elbowed in the

assault; and moreover, as there generally subsists between the two, a

close intimacy and friendliness; it is therefore but meet, that in

this place we set down who the Pequod's harpooneers were, and to what

headsman each of them belonged.

First of all was Queequeg, whom Starbuck, the chief mate, had

selected for his squire. But Queequeg is already known.

Next was Tashtego, an unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most westerly

promontory of Martha's Vineyard, where there still exists the last

remnant of a village of red men, which has long supplied the

neighboring island of Nantucket with many of her most daring

harpooneers. In the fishery, they usually go by the generic name of

Gay-Headers. Tashtego's long, lean, sable hair, his high cheek

bones, and black rounding eyes--for an Indian, Oriental in their

largeness, but Antarctic in their glittering expression--all this

sufficiently proclaimed him an inheritor of the unvitiated blood of

those proud warrior hunters, who, in quest of the great New England

moose, had scoured, bow in hand, the aboriginal forests of the main.

But no longer snuffing in the trail of the wild beasts of the

woodland, Tashtego now hunted in the wake of the great whales of the

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sea; the unerring harpoon of the son fitly replacing the infallible

arrow of the sires. To look at the tawny brawn of his lithe snaky

limbs, you would almost have credited the superstitions of some of

the earlier Puritans, and half-believed this wild Indian to be a son

of the Prince of the Powers of the Air. Tashtego was Stubb the

second mate's squire.

Third among the harpooneers was Daggoo, a gigantic, coal-black

negro-savage, with a lion-like tread--an Ahasuerus to behold.

Suspended from his ears were two golden hoops, so large that the

sailors called them ring-bolts, and would talk of securing the

top-sail halyards to them. In his youth Daggoo had voluntarily

shipped on board of a whaler, lying in a lonely bay on his native

coast. And never having been anywhere in the world but in Africa,

Nantucket, and the pagan harbors most frequented by whalemen; and

having now led for many years the bold life of the fishery in the

ships of owners uncommonly heedful of what manner of men they

shipped; Daggoo retained all his barbaric virtues, and erect as a

giraffe, moved about the decks in all the pomp of six feet five in

his socks. There was a corporeal humility in looking up at him; and

a white man standing before him seemed a white flag come to beg truce

of a fortress. Curious to tell, this imperial negro, Ahasuerus

Daggoo, was the Squire of little Flask, who looked like a chess-man

beside him. As for the residue of the Pequod's company, be it said,

that at the present day not one in two of the many thousand men

before the mast employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans

born, though pretty nearly all the officers are. Herein it is the

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same with the American whale fishery as with the American army and

military and merchant navies, and the engineering forces employed in

the construction of the American Canals and Railroads. The same, I

say, because in all these cases the native American liberally

provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying

the muscles. No small number of these whaling seamen belong to the

Azores, where the outward bound Nantucket whalers frequently touch to

augment their crews from the hardy peasants of those rocky shores.

In like manner, the Greenland whalers sailing out of Hull or London,

put in at the Shetland Islands, to receive the full complement of

their crew. Upon the passage homewards, they drop them there again.

How it is, there is no telling, but Islanders seem to make the best

whalemen. They were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod, ISOLATOES

too, I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but

each ISOLATO living on a separate continent of his own. Yet now,

federated along one keel, what a set these Isolatoes were! An

Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the isles of the sea, and all

the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab in the Pequod to lay the

world's grievances before that bar from which not very many of them

ever come back. Black Little Pip--he never did--oh, no! he went

before. Poor Alabama boy! On the grim Pequod's forecastle, ye shall

ere long see him, beating his tambourine; prelusive of the eternal

time, when sent for, to the great quarter-deck on high, he was bid

strike in with angels, and beat his tambourine in glory; called a

coward here, hailed a hero there!

CHAPTER 28

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Ahab.

For several days after leaving Nantucket, nothing above hatches was

seen of Captain Ahab. The mates regularly relieved each other at the

watches, and for aught that could be seen to the contrary, they

seemed to be the only commanders of the ship; only they sometimes

issued from the cabin with orders so sudden and peremptory, that

after all it was plain they but commanded vicariously. Yes, their

supreme lord and dictator was there, though hitherto unseen by any

eyes not permitted to penetrate into the now sacred retreat of the

cabin.

Every time I ascended to the deck from my watches below, I instantly

gazed aft to mark if any strange face were visible; for my first

vague disquietude touching the unknown captain, now in the seclusion

of the sea, became almost a perturbation. This was strangely

heightened at times by the ragged Elijah's diabolical incoherences

uninvitedly recurring to me, with a subtle energy I could not have

before conceived of. But poorly could I withstand them, much as in

other moods I was almost ready to smile at the solemn whimsicalities

of that outlandish prophet of the wharves. But whatever it was of

apprehensiveness or uneasiness--to call it so--which I felt, yet

whenever I came to look about me in the ship, it seemed against all

warrantry to cherish such emotions. For though the harpooneers, with

the great body of the crew, were a far more barbaric, heathenish, and

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motley set than any of the tame merchant-ship companies which my

previous experiences had made me acquainted with, still I ascribed

this--and rightly ascribed it--to the fierce uniqueness of the very

nature of that wild Scandinavian vocation in which I had so

abandonedly embarked. But it was especially the aspect of the three

chief officers of the ship, the mates, which was most forcibly

calculated to allay these colourless misgivings, and induce confidence

and cheerfulness in every presentment of the voyage. Three better,

more likely sea-officers and men, each in his own different way,

could not readily be found, and they were every one of them

Americans; a Nantucketer, a Vineyarder, a Cape man. Now, it being

Christmas when the ship shot from out her harbor, for a space we had

biting Polar weather, though all the time running away from it to the

southward; and by every degree and minute of latitude which we

sailed, gradually leaving that merciless winter, and all its

intolerable weather behind us. It was one of those less lowering,

but still grey and gloomy enough mornings of the transition, when

with a fair wind the ship was rushing through the water with a

vindictive sort of leaping and melancholy rapidity, that as I mounted

to the deck at the call of the forenoon watch, so soon as I levelled

my glance towards the taffrail, foreboding shivers ran over me.

Reality outran apprehension; Captain Ahab stood upon his

quarter-deck.

There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the

recovery from any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake,

when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without

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consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged

robustness. His whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze,

and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini's cast Perseus.

Threading its way out from among his grey hairs, and continuing right

down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till it

disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly

whitish. It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the

straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning

tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels

and grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off into the

soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded. Whether

that mark was born with him, or whether it was the scar left by some

desperate wound, no one could certainly say. By some tacit consent,

throughout the voyage little or no allusion was made to it,

especially by the mates. But once Tashtego's senior, an old Gay-Head

Indian among the crew, superstitiously asserted that not till he was

full forty years old did Ahab become that way branded, and then it

came upon him, not in the fury of any mortal fray, but in an

elemental strife at sea. Yet, this wild hint seemed inferentially

negatived, by what a grey Manxman insinuated, an old sepulchral man,

who, having never before sailed out of Nantucket, had never ere this

laid eye upon wild Ahab. Nevertheless, the old sea-traditions, the

immemorial credulities, popularly invested this old Manxman with

preternatural powers of discernment. So that no white sailor

seriously contradicted him when he said that if ever Captain Ahab

should be tranquilly laid out--which might hardly come to pass, so he

muttered--then, whoever should do that last office for the dead,

would find a birth-mark on him from crown to sole.

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So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and the

livid brand which streaked it, that for the first few moments I

hardly noted that not a little of this overbearing grimness was owing

to the barbaric white leg upon which he partly stood. It had

previously come to me that this ivory leg had at sea been fashioned

from the polished bone of the sperm whale's jaw. "Aye, he was

dismasted off Japan," said the old Gay-Head Indian once; "but like

his dismasted craft, he shipped another mast without coming home for

it. He has a quiver of 'em."

I was struck with the singular posture he maintained. Upon each side

of the Pequod's quarter deck, and pretty close to the mizzen shrouds,

there was an auger hole, bored about half an inch or so, into the

plank. His bone leg steadied in that hole; one arm elevated, and

holding by a shroud; Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out

beyond the ship's ever-pitching prow. There was an infinity of

firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the

fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance. Not a word he

spoke; nor did his officers say aught to him; though by all their

minutest gestures and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if

not painful, consciousness of being under a troubled master-eye. And

not only that, but moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a

crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing

dignity of some mighty woe.

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Ere long, from his first visit in the air, he withdrew into his

cabin. But after that morning, he was every day visible to the crew;

either standing in his pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory stool he

had; or heavily walking the deck. As the sky grew less gloomy;

indeed, began to grow a little genial, he became still less and less

a recluse; as if, when the ship had sailed from home, nothing but the

dead wintry bleakness of the sea had then kept him so secluded. And,

by and by, it came to pass, that he was almost continually in the

air; but, as yet, for all that he said, or perceptibly did, on the at

last sunny deck, he seemed as unnecessary there as another mast. But

the Pequod was only making a passage now; not regularly cruising;

nearly all whaling preparatives needing supervision the mates were

fully competent to, so that there was little or nothing, out of

himself, to employ or excite Ahab, now; and thus chase away, for that

one interval, the clouds that layer upon layer were piled upon his

brow, as ever all clouds choose the loftiest peaks to pile themselves

upon.

Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling persuasiveness of the

pleasant, holiday weather we came to, seemed gradually to charm him

from his mood. For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April

and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the

barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send

forth some few green sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants;

so Ahab did, in the end, a little respond to the playful allurings of

that girlish air. More than once did he put forth the faint blossom

of a look, which, in any other man, would have soon flowered out in a

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smile.

CHAPTER 29

Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb.

Some days elapsed, and ice and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now

went rolling through the bright Quito spring, which, at sea, almost

perpetually reigns on the threshold of the eternal August of the

Tropic. The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing,

redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped

up--flaked up, with rose-water snow. The starred and stately nights

seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely

pride, the memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden

helmeted suns! For sleeping man, 'twas hard to choose between such

winsome days and such seducing nights. But all the witcheries of

that unwaning weather did not merely lend new spells and potencies to

the outward world. Inward they turned upon the soul, especially when

the still mild hours of eve came on; then, memory shot her crystals

as the clear ice most forms of noiseless twilights. And all these

subtle agencies, more and more they wrought on Ahab's texture.

Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the

less man has to do with aught that looks like death. Among

sea-commanders, the old greybeards will oftenest leave their berths

to visit the night-cloaked deck. It was so with Ahab; only that now,

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of late, he seemed so much to live in the open air, that truly

speaking, his visits were more to the cabin, than from the cabin to

the planks. "It feels like going down into one's tomb,"--he would

mutter to himself--"for an old captain like me to be descending this

narrow scuttle, to go to my grave-dug berth."

So, almost every twenty-four hours, when the watches of the night

were set, and the band on deck sentinelled the slumbers of the band

below; and when if a rope was to be hauled upon the forecastle, the

sailors flung it not rudely down, as by day, but with some

cautiousness dropt it to its place for fear of disturbing their

slumbering shipmates; when this sort of steady quietude would begin

to prevail, habitually, the silent steersman would watch the

cabin-scuttle; and ere long the old man would emerge, gripping at the

iron banister, to help his crippled way. Some considering touch of

humanity was in him; for at times like these, he usually abstained

from patrolling the quarter-deck; because to his wearied mates,

seeking repose within six inches of his ivory heel, such would have

been the reverberating crack and din of that bony step, that their

dreams would have been on the crunching teeth of sharks. But once,

the mood was on him too deep for common regardings; and as with

heavy, lumber-like pace he was measuring the ship from taffrail to

mainmast, Stubb, the old second mate, came up from below, with a

certain unassured, deprecating humorousness, hinted that if Captain

Ahab was pleased to walk the planks, then, no one could say nay; but

there might be some way of muffling the noise; hinting something

indistinctly and hesitatingly about a globe of tow, and the insertion

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into it, of the ivory heel. Ah! Stubb, thou didst not know Ahab

then.

"Am I a cannon-ball, Stubb," said Ahab, "that thou wouldst wad me

that fashion? But go thy ways; I had forgot. Below to thy nightly

grave; where such as ye sleep between shrouds, to use ye to the

filling one at last.--Down, dog, and kennel!"

Starting at the unforseen concluding exclamation of the so suddenly

scornful old man, Stubb was speechless a moment; then said excitedly,

"I am not used to be spoken to that way, sir; I do but less than half

like it, sir."

"Avast! gritted Ahab between his set teeth, and violently moving

away, as if to avoid some passionate temptation.

"No, sir; not yet," said Stubb, emboldened, "I will not tamely be

called a dog, sir."

"Then be called ten times a donkey, and a mule, and an ass, and

begone, or I'll clear the world of thee!"

As he said this, Ahab advanced upon him with such overbearing terrors

in his aspect, that Stubb involuntarily retreated.

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"I was never served so before without giving a hard blow for it,"

muttered Stubb, as he found himself descending the cabin-scuttle.

"It's very queer. Stop, Stubb; somehow, now, I don't well know

whether to go back and strike him, or--what's that?--down here on my

knees and pray for him? Yes, that was the thought coming up in me;

but it would be the first time I ever DID pray. It's queer; very

queer; and he's queer too; aye, take him fore and aft, he's about the

queerest old man Stubb ever sailed with. How he flashed at me!--his

eyes like powder-pans! is he mad? Anyway there's something on his

mind, as sure as there must be something on a deck when it cracks.

He aint in his bed now, either, more than three hours out of the

twenty-four; and he don't sleep then. Didn't that Dough-Boy, the

steward, tell me that of a morning he always finds the old man's

hammock clothes all rumpled and tumbled, and the sheets down at the

foot, and the coverlid almost tied into knots, and the pillow a sort

of frightful hot, as though a baked brick had been on it? A hot old

man! I guess he's got what some folks ashore call a conscience; it's

a kind of Tic-Dolly-row they say--worse nor a toothache. Well, well;

I don't know what it is, but the Lord keep me from catching it. He's

full of riddles; I wonder what he goes into the after hold for, every

night, as Dough-Boy tells me he suspects; what's that for, I should

like to know? Who's made appointments with him in the hold? Ain't

that queer, now? But there's no telling, it's the old game--Here

goes for a snooze. Damn me, it's worth a fellow's while to be born

into the world, if only to fall right asleep. And now that I think

of it, that's about the first thing babies do, and that's a sort of

queer, too. Damn me, but all things are queer, come to think of 'em.

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But that's against my principles. Think not, is my eleventh

commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth--So here goes

again. But how's that? didn't he call me a dog? blazes! he called me

ten times a donkey, and piled a lot of jackasses on top of THAT! He

might as well have kicked me, and done with it. Maybe he DID kick

me, and I didn't observe it, I was so taken all aback with his brow,

somehow. It flashed like a bleached bone. What the devil's the

matter with me? I don't stand right on my legs. Coming afoul of

that old man has a sort of turned me wrong side out. By the Lord, I

must have been dreaming, though--How? how? how?--but the only way's

to stash it; so here goes to hammock again; and in the morning, I'll

see how this plaguey juggling thinks over by daylight."

CHAPTER 30

The Pipe.

When Stubb had departed, Ahab stood for a while leaning over the

bulwarks; and then, as had been usual with him of late, calling a

sailor of the watch, he sent him below for his ivory stool, and also

his pipe. Lighting the pipe at the binnacle lamp and planting the

stool on the weather side of the deck, he sat and smoked.

In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were

fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhale. How could

one look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod of bones, without

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bethinking him of the royalty it symbolized? For a Khan of the

plank, and a king of the sea, and a great lord of Leviathans was

Ahab.

Some moments passed, during which the thick vapour came from his mouth

in quick and constant puffs, which blew back again into his face.

"How now," he soliloquized at last, withdrawing the tube, "this

smoking no longer soothes. Oh, my pipe! hard must it go with me if

thy charm be gone! Here have I been unconsciously toiling, not

pleasuring--aye, and ignorantly smoking to windward all the while; to

windward, and with such nervous whiffs, as if, like the dying whale,

my final jets were the strongest and fullest of trouble. What

business have I with this pipe? This thing that is meant for

sereneness, to send up mild white vapours among mild white hairs, not

among torn iron-grey locks like mine. I'll smoke no more--"

He tossed the still lighted pipe into the sea. The fire hissed in

the waves; the same instant the ship shot by the bubble the sinking

pipe made. With slouched hat, Ahab lurchingly paced the planks.

CHAPTER 31

Queen Mab.

Next morning Stubb accosted Flask.

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"Such a queer dream, King-Post, I never had. You know the old man's

ivory leg, well I dreamed he kicked me with it; and when I tried to

kick back, upon my soul, my little man, I kicked my leg right off!

And then, presto! Ahab seemed a pyramid, and I, like a blazing fool,

kept kicking at it. But what was still more curious, Flask--you know

how curious all dreams are--through all this rage that I was in, I

somehow seemed to be thinking to myself, that after all, it was not

much of an insult, that kick from Ahab. 'Why,' thinks I, 'what's the

row? It's not a real leg, only a false leg.' And there's a mighty

difference between a living thump and a dead thump. That's what

makes a blow from the hand, Flask, fifty times more savage to bear

than a blow from a cane. The living member--that makes the living

insult, my little man. And thinks I to myself all the while, mind,

while I was stubbing my silly toes against that cursed pyramid--so

confoundedly contradictory was it all, all the while, I say, I was

thinking to myself, 'what's his leg now, but a cane--a whalebone

cane. Yes,' thinks I, 'it was only a playful cudgelling--in fact,

only a whaleboning that he gave me--not a base kick. Besides,'

thinks I, 'look at it once; why, the end of it--the foot part--what a

small sort of end it is; whereas, if a broad footed farmer kicked me,

THERE'S a devilish broad insult. But this insult is whittled down to

a point only.' But now comes the greatest joke of the dream, Flask.

While I was battering away at the pyramid, a sort of badger-haired

old merman, with a hump on his back, takes me by the shoulders, and

slews me round. 'What are you 'bout?' says he. Slid! man, but I was

frightened. Such a phiz! But, somehow, next moment I was over the

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fright. 'What am I about?' says I at last. 'And what business is

that of yours, I should like to know, Mr. Humpback? Do YOU want a

kick?' By the lord, Flask, I had no sooner said that, than he turned

round his stern to me, bent over, and dragging up a lot of seaweed he

had for a clout--what do you think, I saw?--why thunder alive, man,

his stern was stuck full of marlinspikes, with the points out. Says

I, on second thoughts, 'I guess I won't kick you, old fellow.' 'Wise

Stubb,' said he, 'wise Stubb;' and kept muttering it all the time, a

sort of eating of his own gums like a chimney hag. Seeing he wasn't

going to stop saying over his 'wise Stubb, wise Stubb,' I thought I

might as well fall to kicking the pyramid again. But I had only just

lifted my foot for it, when he roared out, 'Stop that kicking!'

'Halloa,' says I, 'what's the matter now, old fellow?' 'Look ye

here,' says he; 'let's argue the insult. Captain Ahab kicked ye,

didn't he?' 'Yes, he did,' says I--'right HERE it was.' 'Very

good,' says he--'he used his ivory leg, didn't he?' 'Yes, he did,'

says I. 'Well then,' says he, 'wise Stubb, what have you to complain

of? Didn't he kick with right good will? it wasn't a common pitch

pine leg he kicked with, was it? No, you were kicked by a great man,

and with a beautiful ivory leg, Stubb. It's an honour; I consider it

an honour. Listen, wise Stubb. In old England the greatest lords

think it great glory to be slapped by a queen, and made

garter-knights of; but, be YOUR boast, Stubb, that ye were kicked by

old Ahab, and made a wise man of. Remember what I say; BE kicked by

him; account his kicks honours; and on no account kick back; for you

can't help yourself, wise Stubb. Don't you see that pyramid?' With

that, he all of a sudden seemed somehow, in some queer fashion, to

swim off into the air. I snored; rolled over; and there I was in my

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hammock! Now, what do you think of that dream, Flask?"

"I don't know; it seems a sort of foolish to me, tho.'"

"May be; may be. But it's made a wise man of me, Flask. D'ye see

Ahab standing there, sideways looking over the stern? Well, the best

thing you can do, Flask, is to let the old man alone; never speak to

him, whatever he says. Halloa! What's that he shouts? Hark!"

"Mast-head, there! Look sharp, all of ye! There are whales

hereabouts!

If ye see a white one, split your lungs for him!

"What do you think of that now, Flask? ain't there a small drop of

something queer about that, eh? A white whale--did ye mark that,

man? Look ye--there's something special in the wind. Stand by for

it, Flask. Ahab has that that's bloody on his mind. But, mum; he

comes this way."

CHAPTER 32

Cetology.

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Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be

lost in its unshored, harbourless immensities. Ere that come to pass;

ere the Pequod's weedy hull rolls side by side with the barnacled

hulls of the leviathan; at the outset it is but well to attend to a

matter almost indispensable to a thorough appreciative understanding

of the more special leviathanic revelations and allusions of all

sorts which are to follow.

It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera,

that I would now fain put before you. Yet is it no easy task. The

classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here

essayed. Listen to what the best and latest authorities have laid

down.

"No branch of Zoology is so much involved as that which is entitled

Cetology," says Captain Scoresby, A.D. 1820.

"It is not my intention, were it in my power, to enter into the

inquiry as to the true method of dividing the cetacea into groups and

families.... Utter confusion exists among the historians of this

animal" (sperm whale), says Surgeon Beale, A.D. 1839.

"Unfitness to pursue our research in the unfathomable waters."

"Impenetrable veil covering our knowledge of the cetacea." "A field

strewn with thorns." "All these incomplete indications but serve to

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torture us naturalists."

Thus speak of the whale, the great Cuvier, and John Hunter, and

Lesson, those lights of zoology and anatomy. Nevertheless, though of

real knowledge there be little, yet of books there are a plenty; and

so in some small degree, with cetology, or the science of whales.

Many are the men, small and great, old and new, landsmen and seamen,

who have at large or in little, written of the whale. Run over a

few:--The Authors of the Bible; Aristotle; Pliny; Aldrovandi; Sir

Thomas Browne; Gesner; Ray; Linnaeus; Rondeletius; Willoughby; Green;

Artedi; Sibbald; Brisson; Marten; Lacepede; Bonneterre; Desmarest;

Baron Cuvier; Frederick Cuvier; John Hunter; Owen; Scoresby; Beale;

Bennett; J. Ross Browne; the Author of Miriam Coffin; Olmstead; and

the Rev. T. Cheever. But to what ultimate generalizing purpose all

these have written, the above cited extracts will show.

Of the names in this list of whale authors, only those following Owen

ever saw living whales; and but one of them was a real professional

harpooneer and whaleman. I mean Captain Scoresby. On the separate

subject of the Greenland or right-whale, he is the best existing

authority. But Scoresby knew nothing and says nothing of the great

sperm whale, compared with which the Greenland whale is almost

unworthy mentioning. And here be it said, that the Greenland whale

is an usurper upon the throne of the seas. He is not even by any

means the largest of the whales. Yet, owing to the long priority of

his claims, and the profound ignorance which, till some seventy years

back, invested the then fabulous or utterly unknown sperm-whale, and

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which ignorance to this present day still reigns in all but some few

scientific retreats and whale-ports; this usurpation has been every

way complete. Reference to nearly all the leviathanic allusions in

the great poets of past days, will satisfy you that the Greenland

whale, without one rival, was to them the monarch of the seas. But

the time has at last come for a new proclamation. This is Charing

Cross; hear ye! good people all,--the Greenland whale is

deposed,--the great sperm whale now reigneth!

There are only two books in being which at all pretend to put the

living sperm whale before you, and at the same time, in the remotest

degree succeed in the attempt. Those books are Beale's and

Bennett's; both in their time surgeons to English South-Sea

whale-ships, and both exact and reliable men. The original matter

touching the sperm whale to be found in their volumes is necessarily

small; but so far as it goes, it is of excellent quality, though

mostly confined to scientific description. As yet, however, the

sperm whale, scientific or poetic, lives not complete in any

literature. Far above all other hunted whales, his is an unwritten

life.

Now the various species of whales need some sort of popular

comprehensive classification, if only an easy outline one for the

present, hereafter to be filled in all its departments by subsequent

laborers. As no better man advances to take this matter in hand, I

hereupon offer my own poor endeavors. I promise nothing complete;

because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very

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reason infallibly be faulty. I shall not pretend to a minute

anatomical description of the various species, or--in this place at

least--to much of any description. My object here is simply to

project the draught of a systematization of cetology. I am the

architect, not the builder.

But it is a ponderous task; no ordinary letter-sorter in the

Post-Office is equal to it. To grope down into the bottom of the sea

after them; to have one's hands among the unspeakable foundations,

ribs, and very pelvis of the world; this is a fearful thing. What am

I that I should essay to hook the nose of this leviathan! The awful

tauntings in Job might well appal me. "Will he the (leviathan) make

a covenant with thee? Behold the hope of him is vain! But I have

swam through libraries and sailed through oceans; I have had to do

with whales with these visible hands; I am in earnest; and I will

try. There are some preliminaries to settle.

First: The uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Cetology

is in the very vestibule attested by the fact, that in some quarters

it still remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish. In his

System of Nature, A.D. 1776, Linnaeus declares, "I hereby separate

the whales from the fish." But of my own knowledge, I know that down

to the year 1850, sharks and shad, alewives and herring, against

Linnaeus's express edict, were still found dividing the possession of

the same seas with the Leviathan.

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The grounds upon which Linnaeus would fain have banished the whales

from the waters, he states as follows: "On account of their warm

bilocular heart, their lungs, their movable eyelids, their hollow

ears, penem intrantem feminam mammis lactantem," and finally, "ex

lege naturae jure meritoque." I submitted all this to my friends

Simeon Macey and Charley Coffin, of Nantucket, both messmates of mine

in a certain voyage, and they united in the opinion that the reasons

set forth were altogether insufficient. Charley profanely hinted

they were humbug.

Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned

ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me.

This fundamental thing settled, the next point is, in what internal

respect does the whale differ from other fish. Above, Linnaeus has

given you those items. But in brief, they are these: lungs and warm

blood; whereas, all other fish are lungless and cold blooded.

Next: how shall we define the whale, by his obvious externals, so as

conspicuously to label him for all time to come? To be short, then,

a whale is A SPOUTING FISH WITH A HORIZONTAL TAIL. There you have

him. However contracted, that definition is the result of expanded

meditation. A walrus spouts much like a whale, but the walrus is not

a fish, because he is amphibious. But the last term of the

definition is still more cogent, as coupled with the first. Almost

any one must have noticed that all the fish familiar to landsmen have

not a flat, but a vertical, or up-and-down tail. Whereas, among

spouting fish the tail, though it may be similarly shaped, invariably

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assumes a horizontal position.

By the above definition of what a whale is, I do by no means exclude

from the leviathanic brotherhood any sea creature hitherto identified

with the whale by the best informed Nantucketers; nor, on the other

hand, link with it any fish hitherto authoritatively regarded as

alien.* Hence, all the smaller, spouting, and horizontal tailed fish

must be included in this ground-plan of Cetology. Now, then, come

the grand divisions of the entire whale host.

*I am aware that down to the present time, the fish styled Lamatins

and Dugongs (Pig-fish and Sow-fish of the Coffins of Nantucket) are

included by many naturalists among the whales. But as these pig-fish

are a noisy, contemptible set, mostly lurking in the mouths of

rivers, and feeding on wet hay, and especially as they do not spout,

I deny their credentials as whales; and have presented them with

their passports to quit the Kingdom of Cetology.

First: According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary

BOOKS (subdivisible into CHAPTERS), and these shall comprehend them

all, both small and large.

I. THE FOLIO WHALE; II. the OCTAVO WHALE; III. the DUODECIMO WHALE.

As the type of the FOLIO I present the SPERM WHALE; of the OCTAVO,

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the GRAMPUS; of the DUODECIMO, the PORPOISE.

FOLIOS. Among these I here include the following chapters:--I. The

SPERM WHALE; II. the RIGHT WHALE; III. the FIN-BACK WHALE; IV. the

HUMP-BACKED WHALE; V. the RAZOR-BACK WHALE; VI. the SULPHUR-BOTTOM

WHALE.

BOOK I. (FOLIO), CHAPTER I. (SPERM WHALE).--This whale, among the

English of old vaguely known as the Trumpa whale, and the Physeter

whale, and the Anvil Headed whale, is the present Cachalot of the

French, and the Pottsfich of the Germans, and the Macrocephalus of

the Long Words. He is, without doubt, the largest inhabitant of the

globe; the most formidable of all whales to encounter; the most

majestic in aspect; and lastly, by far the most valuable in commerce;

he being the only creature from which that valuable substance,

spermaceti, is obtained. All his peculiarities will, in many other

places, be enlarged upon. It is chiefly with his name that I now

have to do. Philologically considered, it is absurd. Some centuries

ago, when the Sperm whale was almost wholly unknown in his own

proper individuality, and when his oil was only accidentally obtained

from the stranded fish; in those days spermaceti, it would seem, was

popularly supposed to be derived from a creature identical with the

one then known in England as the Greenland or Right Whale. It was

the idea also, that this same spermaceti was that quickening humor of

the Greenland Whale which the first syllable of the word literally

expresses. In those times, also, spermaceti was exceedingly scarce,

not being used for light, but only as an ointment and medicament. It

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was only to be had from the druggists as you nowadays buy an ounce of

rhubarb. When, as I opine, in the course of time, the true nature of

spermaceti became known, its original name was still retained by the

dealers; no doubt to enhance its value by a notion so strangely

significant of its scarcity. And so the appellation must at last

have come to be bestowed upon the whale from which this spermaceti

was really derived.

BOOK I. (FOLIO), CHAPTER II. (RIGHT WHALE).--In one respect this is

the most venerable of the leviathans, being the one first regularly

hunted by man. It yields the article commonly known as whalebone or

baleen; and the oil specially known as "whale oil," an inferior

article in commerce. Among the fishermen, he is indiscriminately

designated by all the following titles: The Whale; the Greenland

Whale; the Black Whale; the Great Whale; the True Whale; the Right

Whale. There is a deal of obscurity concerning the identity of the

species thus multitudinously baptised. What then is the whale, which

I include in the second species of my Folios? It is the Great

Mysticetus of the English naturalists; the Greenland Whale of the

English whalemen; the Baliene Ordinaire of the French whalemen; the

Growlands Walfish of the Swedes. It is the whale which for more than

two centuries past has been hunted by the Dutch and English in the

Arctic seas; it is the whale which the American fishermen have long

pursued in the Indian ocean, on the Brazil Banks, on the Nor' West

Coast, and various other parts of the world, designated by them Right

Whale Cruising Grounds.

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Some pretend to see a difference between the Greenland whale of the

English and the right whale of the Americans. But they precisely

agree in all their grand features; nor has there yet been presented a

single determinate fact upon which to ground a radical distinction.

It is by endless subdivisions based upon the most inconclusive

differences, that some departments of natural history become so

repellingly intricate. The right whale will be elsewhere treated of

at some length, with reference to elucidating the sperm whale.

BOOK I. (FOLIO), CHAPTER III. (FIN-BACK).--Under this head I reckon a

monster which, by the various names of Fin-Back, Tall-Spout, and

Long-John, has been seen almost in every sea and is commonly the

whale whose distant jet is so often descried by passengers crossing

the Atlantic, in the New York packet-tracks. In the length he

attains, and in his baleen, the Fin-back resembles the right whale,

but is of a less portly girth, and a lighter colour, approaching to

olive. His great lips present a cable-like aspect, formed by the

intertwisting, slanting folds of large wrinkles. His grand

distinguishing feature, the fin, from which he derives his name, is

often a conspicuous object. This fin is some three or four feet

long, growing vertically from the hinder part of the back, of an

angular shape, and with a very sharp pointed end. Even if not the

slightest other part of the creature be visible, this isolated fin

will, at times, be seen plainly projecting from the surface. When

the sea is moderately calm, and slightly marked with spherical

ripples, and this gnomon-like fin stands up and casts shadows upon

the wrinkled surface, it may well be supposed that the watery circle

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surrounding it somewhat resembles a dial, with its style and wavy

hour-lines graved on it. On that Ahaz-dial the shadow often goes

back. The Fin-Back is not gregarious. He seems a whale-hater, as

some men are man-haters. Very shy; always going solitary;

unexpectedly rising to the surface in the remotest and most sullen

waters; his straight and single lofty jet rising like a tall

misanthropic spear upon a barren plain; gifted with such wondrous

power and velocity in swimming, as to defy all present pursuit from

man; this leviathan seems the banished and unconquerable Cain of his

race, bearing for his mark that style upon his back. From having the

baleen in his mouth, the Fin-Back is sometimes included with the

right whale, among a theoretic species denominated WHALEBONE WHALES,

that is, whales with baleen. Of these so called Whalebone whales,

there would seem to be several varieties, most of which, however, are

little known. Broad-nosed whales and beaked whales; pike-headed

whales; bunched whales; under-jawed whales and rostrated whales, are

the fishermen's names for a few sorts.

In connection with this appellative of "Whalebone whales," it is of

great importance to mention, that however such a nomenclature may be

convenient in facilitating allusions to some kind of whales, yet it

is in vain to attempt a clear classification of the Leviathan,

founded upon either his baleen, or hump, or fin, or teeth;

notwithstanding that those marked parts or features very obviously

seem better adapted to afford the basis for a regular system of

Cetology than any other detached bodily distinctions, which the

whale, in his kinds, presents. How then? The baleen, hump,

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back-fin, and teeth; these are things whose peculiarities are

indiscriminately dispersed among all sorts of whales, without any

regard to what may be the nature of their structure in other and

more essential particulars. Thus, the sperm whale and the humpbacked

whale, each has a hump; but there the similitude ceases. Then, this

same humpbacked whale and the Greenland whale, each of these has

baleen; but there again the similitude ceases. And it is just the

same with the other parts above mentioned. In various sorts of

whales, they form such irregular combinations; or, in the case of any

one of them detached, such an irregular isolation; as utterly to defy

all general methodization formed upon such a basis. On this rock

every one of the whale-naturalists has split.

But it may possibly be conceived that, in the internal parts of the

whale, in his anatomy--there, at least, we shall be able to hit the

right classification. Nay; what thing, for example, is there in the

Greenland whale's anatomy more striking than his baleen? Yet we have

seen that by his baleen it is impossible correctly to classify the

Greenland whale. And if you descend into the bowels of the various

leviathans, why there you will not find distinctions a fiftieth part

as available to the systematizer as those external ones already

enumerated. What then remains? nothing but to take hold of the

whales bodily, in their entire liberal volume, and boldly sort them

that way. And this is the Bibliographical system here adopted; and

it is the only one that can possibly succeed, for it alone is

practicable. To proceed.

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BOOK I. (FOLIO) CHAPTER IV. (HUMP-BACK).--This whale is often seen on

the northern American coast. He has been frequently captured there,

and towed into harbor. He has a great pack on him like a peddler; or

you might call him the Elephant and Castle whale. At any rate, the

popular name for him does not sufficiently distinguish him, since the

sperm whale also has a hump though a smaller one. His oil is not

very valuable. He has baleen. He is the most gamesome and

light-hearted of all the whales, making more gay foam and white water

generally than any other of them.

BOOK I. (FOLIO), CHAPTER V. (RAZOR-BACK).--Of this whale little is

known but his name. I have seen him at a distance off Cape Horn. Of

a retiring nature, he eludes both hunters and philosophers. Though

no coward, he has never yet shown any part of him but his back, which

rises in a long sharp ridge. Let him go. I know little more of him,

nor does anybody else.

BOOK I. (FOLIO), CHAPTER VI. (SULPHUR-BOTTOM).--Another retiring

gentleman, with a brimstone belly, doubtless got by scraping along

the Tartarian tiles in some of his profounder divings. He is seldom

seen; at least I have never seen him except in the remoter southern

seas, and then always at too great a distance to study his

countenance. He is never chased; he would run away with rope-walks

of line. Prodigies are told of him. Adieu, Sulphur Bottom! I can

say nothing more that is true of ye, nor can the oldest Nantucketer.

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Thus ends BOOK I. (FOLIO), and now begins BOOK II. (OCTAVO).

OCTAVOES.*--These embrace the whales of middling magnitude, among

which present may be numbered:--I., the GRAMPUS; II., the BLACK FISH;

III., the NARWHALE; IV., the THRASHER; V., the KILLER.

*Why this book of whales is not denominated the Quarto is very plain.

Because, while the whales of this order, though smaller than those

of the former order, nevertheless retain a proportionate likeness to

them in figure, yet the bookbinder's Quarto volume in its dimensioned

form does not preserve the shape of the Folio volume, but the Octavo

volume does.

BOOK II. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER I. (GRAMPUS).--Though this fish, whose

loud sonorous breathing, or rather blowing, has furnished a proverb

to landsmen, is so well known a denizen of the deep, yet is he not

popularly classed among whales. But possessing all the grand

distinctive features of the leviathan, most naturalists have

recognised him for one. He is of moderate octavo size, varying from

fifteen to twenty-five feet in length, and of corresponding

dimensions round the waist. He swims in herds; he is never regularly

hunted, though his oil is considerable in quantity, and pretty good

for light. By some fishermen his approach is regarded as premonitory

of the advance of the great sperm whale.

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BOOK II. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER II. (BLACK FISH).--I give the popular

fishermen's names for all these fish, for generally they are the

best. Where any name happens to be vague or inexpressive, I shall

say so, and suggest another. I do so now, touching the Black Fish,

so-called, because blackness is the rule among almost all whales.

So, call him the Hyena Whale, if you please. His voracity is well

known, and from the circumstance that the inner angles of his lips

are curved upwards, he carries an everlasting Mephistophelean grin on

his face. This whale averages some sixteen or eighteen feet in

length. He is found in almost all latitudes. He has a peculiar way

of showing his dorsal hooked fin in swimming, which looks something

like a Roman nose. When not more profitably employed, the sperm

whale hunters sometimes capture the Hyena whale, to keep up the

supply of cheap oil for domestic employment--as some frugal

housekeepers, in the absence of company, and quite alone by

themselves, burn unsavory tallow instead of odorous wax. Though

their blubber is very thin, some of these whales will yield you

upwards of thirty gallons of oil.

BOOK II. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER III. (NARWHALE), that is, NOSTRIL

WHALE.--Another instance of a curiously named whale, so named I

suppose from his peculiar horn being originally mistaken for a peaked

nose. The creature is some sixteen feet in length, while its horn

averages five feet, though some exceed ten, and even attain to

fifteen feet. Strictly speaking, this horn is but a lengthened tusk,

growing out from the jaw in a line a little depressed from the

horizontal. But it is only found on the sinister side, which has an

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ill effect, giving its owner something analogous to the aspect of a

clumsy left-handed man. What precise purpose this ivory horn or

lance answers, it would be hard to say. It does not seem to be used

like the blade of the sword-fish and bill-fish; though some sailors

tell me that the Narwhale employs it for a rake in turning over the

bottom of the sea for food. Charley Coffin said it was used for an

ice-piercer; for the Narwhale, rising to the surface of the Polar

Sea, and finding it sheeted with ice, thrusts his horn up, and so

breaks through. But you cannot prove either of these surmises to be

correct. My own opinion is, that however this one-sided horn may

really be used by the Narwhale--however that may be--it would

certainly be very convenient to him for a folder in reading

pamphlets. The Narwhale I have heard called the Tusked whale, the

Horned whale, and the Unicorn whale. He is certainly a curious

example of the Unicornism to be found in almost every kingdom of

animated nature. From certain cloistered old authors I have gathered

that this same sea-unicorn's horn was in ancient days regarded as the

great antidote against poison, and as such, preparations of it

brought immense prices. It was also distilled to a volatile salts

for fainting ladies, the same way that the horns of the male deer are

manufactured into hartshorn. Originally it was in itself accounted

an object of great curiosity. Black Letter tells me that Sir Martin

Frobisher on his return from that voyage, when Queen Bess did

gallantly wave her jewelled hand to him from a window of Greenwich

Palace, as his bold ship sailed down the Thames; "when Sir Martin

returned from that voyage," saith Black Letter, "on bended knees he

presented to her highness a prodigious long horn of the Narwhale,

which for a long period after hung in the castle at Windsor." An

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Irish author avers that the Earl of Leicester, on bended knees, did

likewise present to her highness another horn, pertaining to a land

beast of the unicorn nature.

The Narwhale has a very picturesque, leopard-like look, being of a

milk-white ground colour, dotted with round and oblong spots of black.

His oil is very superior, clear and fine; but there is little of it,

and he is seldom hunted. He is mostly found in the circumpolar seas.

BOOK II. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER IV. (KILLER).--Of this whale little is

precisely known to the Nantucketer, and nothing at all to the

professed naturalist. From what I have seen of him at a distance,

I should say that he was about the bigness of a grampus. He is very

savage--a sort of Feegee fish. He sometimes takes the great Folio

whales by the lip, and hangs there like a leech, till the mighty

brute is worried to death. The Killer is never hunted. I never

heard what sort of oil he has. Exception might be taken to the name

bestowed upon this whale, on the ground of its indistinctness. For

we are all killers, on land and on sea; Bonapartes and Sharks

included.

BOOK II. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER V. (THRASHER).--This gentleman is famous

for his tail, which he uses for a ferule in thrashing his foes. He

mounts the Folio whale's back, and as he swims, he works his passage

by flogging him; as some schoolmasters get along in the world by a

similar process. Still less is known of the Thrasher than of the

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Killer. Both are outlaws, even in the lawless seas.

Thus ends BOOK II. (OCTAVO), and begins BOOK III. (DUODECIMO).

DUODECIMOES.--These include the smaller whales. I. The Huzza

Porpoise. II. The Algerine Porpoise. III. The Mealy-mouthed

Porpoise.

To those who have not chanced specially to study the subject, it may

possibly seem strange, that fishes not commonly exceeding four or

five feet should be marshalled among WHALES--a word, which, in the

popular sense, always conveys an idea of hugeness. But the creatures

set down above as Duodecimoes are infallibly whales, by the terms of

my definition of what a whale is--i.e. a spouting fish, with a

horizontal tail.

BOOK III. (DUODECIMO), CHAPTER 1. (HUZZA PORPOISE).--This is the

common porpoise found almost all over the globe. The name is of my

own bestowal; for there are more than one sort of porpoises, and

something must be done to distinguish them. I call him thus, because

he always swims in hilarious shoals, which upon the broad sea keep

tossing themselves to heaven like caps in a Fourth-of-July crowd.

Their appearance is generally hailed with delight by the mariner.

Full of fine spirits, they invariably come from the breezy billows to

windward. They are the lads that always live before the wind. They

are accounted a lucky omen. If you yourself can withstand three

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cheers at beholding these vivacious fish, then heaven help ye; the

spirit of godly gamesomeness is not in ye. A well-fed, plump Huzza

Porpoise will yield you one good gallon of good oil. But the fine

and delicate fluid extracted from his jaws is exceedingly valuable.

It is in request among jewellers and watchmakers. Sailors put it on

their hones. Porpoise meat is good eating, you know. It may never

have occurred to you that a porpoise spouts. Indeed, his spout is so

small that it is not very readily discernible. But the next time you

have a chance, watch him; and you will then see the great Sperm whale

himself in miniature.

BOOK III. (DUODECIMO), CHAPTER II. (ALGERINE PORPOISE).--A pirate.

Very savage. He is only found, I think, in the Pacific. He is

somewhat larger than the Huzza Porpoise, but much of the same general

make. Provoke him, and he will buckle to a shark. I have lowered

for him many times, but never yet saw him captured.

BOOK III. (DUODECIMO), CHAPTER III. (MEALY-MOUTHED PORPOISE).--The

largest kind of Porpoise; and only found in the Pacific, so far as it

is known. The only English name, by which he has hitherto been

designated, is that of the fishers--Right-Whale Porpoise, from the

circumstance that he is chiefly found in the vicinity of that Folio.

In shape, he differs in some degree from the Huzza Porpoise, being of

a less rotund and jolly girth; indeed, he is of quite a neat and

gentleman-like figure. He has no fins on his back (most other

porpoises have), he has a lovely tail, and sentimental Indian eyes of

a hazel hue. But his mealy-mouth spoils all. Though his entire

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back down to his side fins is of a deep sable, yet a boundary line,

distinct as the mark in a ship's hull, called the "bright waist,"

that line streaks him from stem to stern, with two separate colours,

black above and white below. The white comprises part of his head,

and the whole of his mouth, which makes him look as if he had just

escaped from a felonious visit to a meal-bag. A most mean and mealy

aspect! His oil is much like that of the common porpoise.

Beyond the DUODECIMO, this system does not proceed, inasmuch as the

Porpoise is the smallest of the whales. Above, you have all the

Leviathans of note. But there are a rabble of uncertain, fugitive,

half-fabulous whales, which, as an American whaleman, I know by

reputation, but not personally. I shall enumerate them by their

fore-castle appellations; for possibly such a list may be valuable to

future investigators, who may complete what I have here but begun.

If any of the following whales, shall hereafter be caught and marked,

then he can readily be incorporated into this System, according to

his Folio, Octavo, or Duodecimo magnitude:--The Bottle-Nose Whale;

the Junk Whale; the Pudding-Headed Whale; the Cape Whale; the Leading

Whale; the Cannon Whale; the Scragg Whale; the Coppered Whale; the

Elephant Whale; the Iceberg Whale; the Quog Whale; the Blue Whale; etc.

From Icelandic, Dutch, and old English authorities, there might

be quoted other lists of uncertain whales, blessed with all manner of

uncouth names. But I omit them as altogether obsolete; and can

hardly help suspecting them for mere sounds, full of Leviathanism,

but signifying nothing.

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Finally: It was stated at the outset, that this system would not be

here, and at once, perfected. You cannot but plainly see that I have

kept my word. But I now leave my cetological System standing thus

unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the

crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For

small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand

ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me

from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a

draught--nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength,

Cash, and Patience!

CHAPTER 33

The Specksynder.

Concerning the officers of the whale-craft, this seems as good a

place as any to set down a little domestic peculiarity on ship-board,

arising from the existence of the harpooneer class of officers, a

class unknown of course in any other marine than the whale-fleet.

The large importance attached to the harpooneer's vocation is evinced

by the fact, that originally in the old Dutch Fishery, two centuries

and more ago, the command of a whale ship was not wholly lodged in

the person now called the captain, but was divided between him and an

officer called the Specksynder. Literally this word means

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Fat-Cutter; usage, however, in time made it equivalent to Chief

Harpooneer. In those days, the captain's authority was restricted to

the navigation and general management of the vessel; while over the

whale-hunting department and all its concerns, the Specksynder or

Chief Harpooneer reigned supreme. In the British Greenland Fishery,

under the corrupted title of Specksioneer, this old Dutch official is

still retained, but his former dignity is sadly abridged. At present

he ranks simply as senior Harpooneer; and as such, is but one of the

captain's more inferior subalterns. Nevertheless, as upon the good

conduct of the harpooneers the success of a whaling voyage largely

depends, and since in the American Fishery he is not only an

important officer in the boat, but under certain circumstances (night

watches on a whaling ground) the command of the ship's deck is also

his; therefore the grand political maxim of the sea demands, that he

should nominally live apart from the men before the mast, and be in

some way distinguished as their professional superior; though always,

by them, familiarly regarded as their social equal.

Now, the grand distinction drawn between officer and man at sea, is

this--the first lives aft, the last forward. Hence, in whale-ships

and merchantmen alike, the mates have their quarters with the

captain; and so, too, in most of the American whalers the harpooneers

are lodged in the after part of the ship. That is to say, they take

their meals in the captain's cabin, and sleep in a place indirectly

communicating with it.

Though the long period of a Southern whaling voyage (by far the

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longest of all voyages now or ever made by man), the peculiar perils

of it, and the community of interest prevailing among a company, all

of whom, high or low, depend for their profits, not upon fixed wages,

but upon their common luck, together with their common vigilance,

intrepidity, and hard work; though all these things do in some cases

tend to beget a less rigorous discipline than in merchantmen

generally; yet, never mind how much like an old Mesopotamian family

these whalemen may, in some primitive instances, live together; for

all that, the punctilious externals, at least, of the quarter-deck

are seldom materially relaxed, and in no instance done away. Indeed,

many are the Nantucket ships in which you will see the skipper

parading his quarter-deck with an elated grandeur not surpassed in

any military navy; nay, extorting almost as much outward homage as if

he wore the imperial purple, and not the shabbiest of pilot-cloth.

And though of all men the moody captain of the Pequod was the least

given to that sort of shallowest assumption; and though the only

homage he ever exacted, was implicit, instantaneous obedience; though

he required no man to remove the shoes from his feet ere stepping

upon the quarter-deck; and though there were times when, owing to

peculiar circumstances connected with events hereafter to be

detailed, he addressed them in unusual terms, whether of

condescension or IN TERROREM, or otherwise; yet even Captain Ahab was

by no means unobservant of the paramount forms and usages of the sea.

Nor, perhaps, will it fail to be eventually perceived, that behind

those forms and usages, as it were, he sometimes masked himself;

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incidentally making use of them for other and more private ends than

they were legitimately intended to subserve. That certain sultanism

of his brain, which had otherwise in a good degree remained

unmanifested; through those forms that same sultanism became

incarnate in an irresistible dictatorship. For be a man's

intellectual superiority what it will, it can never assume the

practical, available supremacy over other men, without the aid of

some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always, in themselves,

more or less paltry and base. This it is, that for ever keeps God's

true princes of the Empire from the world's hustings; and leaves the

highest honours that this air can give, to those men who become famous

more through their infinite inferiority to the choice hidden handful

of the Divine Inert, than through their undoubted superiority over

the dead level of the mass. Such large virtue lurks in these small

things when extreme political superstitions invest them, that in some

royal instances even to idiot imbecility they have imparted potency.

But when, as in the case of Nicholas the Czar, the ringed crown of

geographical empire encircles an imperial brain; then, the plebeian

herds crouch abased before the tremendous centralization. Nor, will

the tragic dramatist who would depict mortal indomitableness in its

fullest sweep and direct swing, ever forget a hint, incidentally so

important in his art, as the one now alluded to.

But Ahab, my Captain, still moves before me in all his Nantucket

grimness and shagginess; and in this episode touching Emperors and

Kings, I must not conceal that I have only to do with a poor old

whale-hunter like him; and, therefore, all outward majestical

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trappings and housings are denied me. Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand

in thee, it must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in

the deep, and featured in the unbodied air!

CHAPTER 34

The Cabin-Table.

It is noon; and Dough-Boy, the steward, thrusting his pale

loaf-of-bread face from the cabin-scuttle, announces dinner to his

lord and master; who, sitting in the lee quarter-boat, has just been

taking an observation of the sun; and is now mutely reckoning the

latitude on the smooth, medallion-shaped tablet, reserved for that

daily purpose on the upper part of his ivory leg. From his complete

inattention to the tidings, you would think that moody Ahab had not

heard his menial. But presently, catching hold of the mizen shrouds,

he swings himself to the deck, and in an even, unexhilarated voice,

saying, "Dinner, Mr. Starbuck," disappears into the cabin.

When the last echo of his sultan's step has died away, and Starbuck,

the first Emir, has every reason to suppose that he is seated, then

Starbuck rouses from his quietude, takes a few turns along the

planks, and, after a grave peep into the binnacle, says, with some

touch of pleasantness, "Dinner, Mr. Stubb," and descends the scuttle.

The second Emir lounges about the rigging awhile, and then slightly

shaking the main brace, to see whether it will be all right with

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that important rope, he likewise takes up the old burden, and with a

rapid "Dinner, Mr. Flask," follows after his predecessors.

But the third Emir, now seeing himself all alone on the quarter-deck,

seems to feel relieved from some curious restraint; for, tipping all

sorts of knowing winks in all sorts of directions, and kicking off

his shoes, he strikes into a sharp but noiseless squall of a hornpipe

right over the Grand Turk's head; and then, by a dexterous sleight,

pitching his cap up into the mizentop for a shelf, he goes down

rollicking so far at least as he remains visible from the deck,

reversing all other processions, by bringing up the rear with music.

But ere stepping into the cabin doorway below, he pauses, ships a new

face altogether, and, then, independent, hilarious little Flask

enters King Ahab's presence, in the character of Abjectus, or the

Slave.

It is not the least among the strange things bred by the intense

artificialness of sea-usages, that while in the open air of the deck

some officers will, upon provocation, bear themselves boldly and

defyingly enough towards their commander; yet, ten to one, let those

very officers the next moment go down to their customary dinner in

that same commander's cabin, and straightway their inoffensive, not

to say deprecatory and humble air towards him, as he sits at the head

of the table; this is marvellous, sometimes most comical. Wherefore

this difference? A problem? Perhaps not. To have been Belshazzar,

King of Babylon; and to have been Belshazzar, not haughtily but

courteously, therein certainly must have been some touch of mundane

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grandeur. But he who in the rightly regal and intelligent spirit

presides over his own private dinner-table of invited guests, that

man's unchallenged power and dominion of individual influence for the

time; that man's royalty of state transcends Belshazzar's, for

Belshazzar was not the greatest. Who has but once dined his friends,

has tasted what it is to be Caesar. It is a witchery of social

czarship which there is no withstanding. Now, if to this

consideration you superadd the official supremacy of a ship-master,

then, by inference, you will derive the cause of that peculiarity of

sea-life just mentioned.

Over his ivory-inlaid table, Ahab presided like a mute, maned

sea-lion on the white coral beach, surrounded by his warlike but

still deferential cubs. In his own proper turn, each officer waited

to be served. They were as little children before Ahab; and yet, in

Ahab, there seemed not to lurk the smallest social arrogance. With

one mind, their intent eyes all fastened upon the old man's knife, as

he carved the chief dish before him. I do not suppose that for the

world they would have profaned that moment with the slightest

observation, even upon so neutral a topic as the weather. No! And

when reaching out his knife and fork, between which the slice of beef

was locked, Ahab thereby motioned Starbuck's plate towards him, the

mate received his meat as though receiving alms; and cut it tenderly;

and a little started if, perchance, the knife grazed against the

plate; and chewed it noiselessly; and swallowed it, not without

circumspection. For, like the Coronation banquet at Frankfort, where

the German Emperor profoundly dines with the seven Imperial

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Electors, so these cabin meals were somehow solemn meals, eaten in

awful silence; and yet at table old Ahab forbade not conversation;

only he himself was dumb. What a relief it was to choking Stubb,

when a rat made a sudden racket in the hold below. And poor little

Flask, he was the youngest son, and little boy of this weary family

party. His were the shinbones of the saline beef; his would have

been the drumsticks. For Flask to have presumed to help himself,

this must have seemed to him tantamount to larceny in the first

degree. Had he helped himself at that table, doubtless, never more

would he have been able to hold his head up in this honest world;

nevertheless, strange to say, Ahab never forbade him. And had Flask

helped himself, the chances were Ahab had never so much as noticed

it. Least of all, did Flask presume to help himself to butter.

Whether he thought the owners of the ship denied it to him, on

account of its clotting his clear, sunny complexion; or whether he

deemed that, on so long a voyage in such marketless waters, butter

was at a premium, and therefore was not for him, a subaltern; however

it was, Flask, alas! was a butterless man!

Another thing. Flask was the last person down at the dinner, and

Flask is the first man up. Consider! For hereby Flask's dinner was

badly jammed in point of time. Starbuck and Stubb both had the start

of him; and yet they also have the privilege of lounging in the rear.

If Stubb even, who is but a peg higher than Flask, happens to have

but a small appetite, and soon shows symptoms of concluding his

repast, then Flask must bestir himself, he will not get more than

three mouthfuls that day; for it is against holy usage for Stubb to

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precede Flask to the deck. Therefore it was that Flask once admitted

in private, that ever since he had arisen to the dignity of an

officer, from that moment he had never known what it was to be

otherwise than hungry, more or less. For what he ate did not so much

relieve his hunger, as keep it immortal in him. Peace and

satisfaction, thought Flask, have for ever departed from my stomach.

I am an officer; but, how I wish I could fish a bit of old-fashioned

beef in the forecastle, as I used to when I was before the mast.

There's the fruits of promotion now; there's the vanity of glory:

there's the insanity of life! Besides, if it were so that any mere

sailor of the Pequod had a grudge against Flask in Flask's official

capacity, all that sailor had to do, in order to obtain ample

vengeance, was to go aft at dinner-time, and get a peep at Flask

through the cabin sky-light, sitting silly and dumfoundered before

awful Ahab.

Now, Ahab and his three mates formed what may be called the first

table in the Pequod's cabin. After their departure, taking place in

inverted order to their arrival, the canvas cloth was cleared, or

rather was restored to some hurried order by the pallid steward. And

then the three harpooneers were bidden to the feast, they being its

residuary legatees. They made a sort of temporary servants' hall of

the high and mighty cabin.

In strange contrast to the hardly tolerable constraint and nameless

invisible domineerings of the captain's table, was the entire

care-free license and ease, the almost frantic democracy of those

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inferior fellows the harpooneers. While their masters, the mates,

seemed afraid of the sound of the hinges of their own jaws, the

harpooneers chewed their food with such a relish that there was a

report to it. They dined like lords; they filled their bellies like

Indian ships all day loading with spices. Such portentous appetites

had Queequeg and Tashtego, that to fill out the vacancies made by the

previous repast, often the pale Dough-Boy was fain to bring on a

great baron of salt-junk, seemingly quarried out of the solid ox.

And if he were not lively about it, if he did not go with a nimble

hop-skip-and-jump, then Tashtego had an ungentlemanly way of

accelerating him by darting a fork at his back, harpoon-wise. And

once Daggoo, seized with a sudden humor, assisted Dough-Boy's memory

by snatching him up bodily, and thrusting his head into a great empty

wooden trencher, while Tashtego, knife in hand, began laying out the

circle preliminary to scalping him. He was naturally a very nervous,

shuddering sort of little fellow, this bread-faced steward; the

progeny of a bankrupt baker and a hospital nurse. And what with the

standing spectacle of the black terrific Ahab, and the periodical

tumultuous visitations of these three savages, Dough-Boy's whole life

was one continual lip-quiver. Commonly, after seeing the harpooneers

furnished with all things they demanded, he would escape from their

clutches into his little pantry adjoining, and fearfully peep out at

them through the blinds of its door, till all was over.

It was a sight to see Queequeg seated over against Tashtego, opposing

his filed teeth to the Indian's: crosswise to them, Daggoo seated on

the floor, for a bench would have brought his hearse-plumed head to

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the low carlines; at every motion of his colossal limbs, making the

low cabin framework to shake, as when an African elephant goes

passenger in a ship. But for all this, the great negro was

wonderfully abstemious, not to say dainty. It seemed hardly possible

that by such comparatively small mouthfuls he could keep up the

vitality diffused through so broad, baronial, and superb a person.

But, doubtless, this noble savage fed strong and drank deep of the

abounding element of air; and through his dilated nostrils snuffed in

the sublime life of the worlds. Not by beef or by bread, are giants

made or nourished. But Queequeg, he had a mortal, barbaric smack of

the lip in eating--an ugly sound enough--so much so, that the

trembling Dough-Boy almost looked to see whether any marks of teeth

lurked in his own lean arms. And when he would hear Tashtego singing

out for him to produce himself, that his bones might be picked, the

simple-witted steward all but shattered the crockery hanging round

him in the pantry, by his sudden fits of the palsy. Nor did the

whetstone which the harpooneers carried in their pockets, for their

lances and other weapons; and with which whetstones, at dinner, they

would ostentatiously sharpen their knives; that grating sound did not

at all tend to tranquillize poor Dough-Boy. How could he forget that

in his Island days, Queequeg, for one, must certainly have been

guilty of some murderous, convivial indiscretions. Alas! Dough-Boy!

hard fares the white waiter who waits upon cannibals. Not a napkin

should he carry on his arm, but a buckler. In good time, though, to

his great delight, the three salt-sea warriors would rise and depart;

to his credulous, fable-mongering ears, all their martial bones

jingling in them at every step, like Moorish scimetars in scabbards.

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But, though these barbarians dined in the cabin, and nominally lived

there; still, being anything but sedentary in their habits, they were

scarcely ever in it except at mealtimes, and just before

sleeping-time, when they passed through it to their own peculiar

quarters.

In this one matter, Ahab seemed no exception to most American whale

captains, who, as a set, rather incline to the opinion that by rights

the ship's cabin belongs to them; and that it is by courtesy alone

that anybody else is, at any time, permitted there. So that, in real

truth, the mates and harpooneers of the Pequod might more properly be

said to have lived out of the cabin than in it. For when they did

enter it, it was something as a street-door enters a house; turning

inwards for a moment, only to be turned out the next; and, as a

permanent thing, residing in the open air. Nor did they lose much

hereby; in the cabin was no companionship; socially, Ahab was

inaccessible. Though nominally included in the census of

Christendom, he was still an alien to it. He lived in the world, as

the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled Missouri. And as when

Spring and Summer had departed, that wild Logan of the woods, burying

himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the winter there, sucking

his own paws; so, in his inclement, howling old age, Ahab's soul,

shut up in the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the sullen

paws of its gloom!

CHAPTER 35

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The Mast-Head.

It was during the more pleasant weather, that in due rotation with

the other seamen my first mast-head came round.

In most American whalemen the mast-heads are manned almost

simultaneously with the vessel's leaving her port; even though she

may have fifteen thousand miles, and more, to sail ere reaching her

proper cruising ground. And if, after a three, four, or five years'

voyage she is drawing nigh home with anything empty in her--say, an

empty vial even--then, her mast-heads are kept manned to the last;

and not till her skysail-poles sail in among the spires of the port,

does she altogether relinquish the hope of capturing one whale more.

Now, as the business of standing mast-heads, ashore or afloat, is a

very ancient and interesting one, let us in some measure expatiate

here. I take it, that the earliest standers of mast-heads were the

old Egyptians; because, in all my researches, I find none prior to

them. For though their progenitors, the builders of Babel, must

doubtless, by their tower, have intended to rear the loftiest

mast-head in all Asia, or Africa either; yet (ere the final truck was

put to it) as that great stone mast of theirs may be said to have

gone by the board, in the dread gale of God's wrath; therefore, we

cannot give these Babel builders priority over the Egyptians. And

that the Egyptians were a nation of mast-head standers, is an

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assertion based upon the general belief among archaeologists, that

the first pyramids were founded for astronomical purposes: a theory

singularly supported by the peculiar stair-like formation of all four

sides of those edifices; whereby, with prodigious long upliftings of

their legs, those old astronomers were wont to mount to the apex, and

sing out for new stars; even as the look-outs of a modern ship sing

out for a sail, or a whale just bearing in sight. In Saint Stylites,

the famous Christian hermit of old times, who built him a lofty stone

pillar in the desert and spent the whole latter portion of his life

on its summit, hoisting his food from the ground with a tackle; in

him we have a remarkable instance of a dauntless

stander-of-mast-heads; who was not to be driven from his place by

fogs or frosts, rain, hail, or sleet; but valiantly facing everything

out to the last, literally died at his post. Of modern

standers-of-mast-heads we have but a lifeless set; mere stone, iron,

and bronze men; who, though well capable of facing out a stiff gale,

are still entirely incompetent to the business of singing out upon

discovering any strange sight. There is Napoleon; who, upon the top

of the column of Vendome, stands with arms folded, some one hundred

and fifty feet in the air; careless, now, who rules the decks below;

whether Louis Philippe, Louis Blanc, or Louis the Devil. Great

Washington, too, stands high aloft on his towering main-mast in

Baltimore, and like one of Hercules' pillars, his column marks that

point of human grandeur beyond which few mortals will go. Admiral

Nelson, also, on a capstan of gun-metal, stands his mast-head in

Trafalgar Square; and ever when most obscured by that London smoke,

token is yet given that a hidden hero is there; for where there is

smoke, must be fire. But neither great Washington, nor Napoleon, nor

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Nelson, will answer a single hail from below, however madly invoked

to befriend by their counsels the distracted decks upon which they

gaze; however it may be surmised, that their spirits penetrate

through the thick haze of the future, and descry what shoals and what

rocks must be shunned.

It may seem unwarrantable to couple in any respect the mast-head

standers of the land with those of the sea; but that in truth it is

not so, is plainly evinced by an item for which Obed Macy, the sole

historian of Nantucket, stands accountable. The worthy Obed tells

us, that in the early times of the whale fishery, ere ships were

regularly launched in pursuit of the game, the people of that island

erected lofty spars along the sea-coast, to which the look-outs

ascended by means of nailed cleats, something as fowls go upstairs in

a hen-house. A few years ago this same plan was adopted by the Bay

whalemen of New Zealand, who, upon descrying the game, gave notice to

the ready-manned boats nigh the beach. But this custom has now

become obsolete; turn we then to the one proper mast-head, that of a

whale-ship at sea. The three mast-heads are kept manned from

sun-rise to sun-set; the seamen taking their regular turns (as at the

helm), and relieving each other every two hours. In the serene

weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant the mast-head; nay,

to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful. There you stand, a

hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if

the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your

legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships

once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes.

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There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing

ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy

trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most

part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests

you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling

accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary

excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt

securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of

what you shall have for dinner--for all your meals for three years

and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is

immutable.

In one of those southern whalesmen, on a long three or four years'

voyage, as often happens, the sum of the various hours you spend at

the mast-head would amount to several entire months. And it is much

to be deplored that the place to which you devote so considerable a

portion of the whole term of your natural life, should be so sadly

destitute of anything approaching to a cosy inhabitiveness, or

adapted to breed a comfortable localness of feeling, such as pertains

to a bed, a hammock, a hearse, a sentry box, a pulpit, a coach, or

any other of those small and snug contrivances in which men

temporarily isolate themselves. Your most usual point of perch is

the head of the t' gallant-mast, where you stand upon two thin

parallel sticks (almost peculiar to whalemen) called the t' gallant

cross-trees. Here, tossed about by the sea, the beginner feels about

as cosy as he would standing on a bull's horns. To be sure, in cold

weather you may carry your house aloft with you, in the shape of a

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watch-coat; but properly speaking the thickest watch-coat is no more

of a house than the unclad body; for as the soul is glued inside of

its fleshy tabernacle, and cannot freely move about in it, nor even

move out of it, without running great risk of perishing (like an

ignorant pilgrim crossing the snowy Alps in winter); so a watch-coat

is not so much of a house as it is a mere envelope, or additional

skin encasing you. You cannot put a shelf or chest of drawers in

your body, and no more can you make a convenient closet of your

watch-coat.

Concerning all this, it is much to be deplored that the mast-heads of

a southern whale ship are unprovided with those enviable little tents

or pulpits, called CROW'S-NESTS, in which the look-outs of a

Greenland whaler are protected from the inclement weather of the

frozen seas. In the fireside narrative of Captain Sleet, entitled

"A Voyage among the Icebergs, in quest of the Greenland Whale, and

incidentally for the re-discovery of the Lost Icelandic Colonies of

Old Greenland;" in this admirable volume, all standers of mast-heads

are furnished with a charmingly circumstantial account of the then

recently invented CROW'S-NEST of the Glacier, which was the name of

Captain Sleet's good craft. He called it the SLEET'S CROW'S-NEST, in

honour of himself; he being the original inventor and patentee, and

free from all ridiculous false delicacy, and holding that if we call

our own children after our own names (we fathers being the original

inventors and patentees), so likewise should we denominate after

ourselves any other apparatus we may beget. In shape, the Sleet's

crow's-nest is something like a large tierce or pipe; it is open

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above, however, where it is furnished with a movable side-screen to

keep to windward of your head in a hard gale. Being fixed on the

summit of the mast, you ascend into it through a little trap-hatch in

the bottom. On the after side, or side next the stern of the ship,

is a comfortable seat, with a locker underneath for umbrellas,

comforters, and coats. In front is a leather rack, in which to keep

your speaking trumpet, pipe, telescope, and other nautical

conveniences. When Captain Sleet in person stood his mast-head in

this crow's-nest of his, he tells us that he always had a rifle with

him (also fixed in the rack), together with a powder flask and shot,

for the purpose of popping off the stray narwhales, or vagrant sea

unicorns infesting those waters; for you cannot successfully shoot at

them from the deck owing to the resistance of the water, but to shoot

down upon them is a very different thing. Now, it was plainly a

labor of love for Captain Sleet to describe, as he does, all the

little detailed conveniences of his crow's-nest; but though he so

enlarges upon many of these, and though he treats us to a very

scientific account of his experiments in this crow's-nest, with a

small compass he kept there for the purpose of counteracting the

errors resulting from what is called the "local attraction" of all

binnacle magnets; an error ascribable to the horizontal vicinity of

the iron in the ship's planks, and in the Glacier's case, perhaps, to

there having been so many broken-down blacksmiths among her crew; I

say, that though the Captain is very discreet and scientific here,

yet, for all his learned "binnacle deviations," "azimuth compass

observations," and "approximate errors," he knows very well, Captain

Sleet, that he was not so much immersed in those profound magnetic

meditations, as to fail being attracted occasionally towards that

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well replenished little case-bottle, so nicely tucked in on one side

of his crow's nest, within easy reach of his hand. Though, upon the

whole, I greatly admire and even love the brave, the honest, and

learned Captain; yet I take it very ill of him that he should so

utterly ignore that case-bottle, seeing what a faithful friend and

comforter it must have been, while with mittened fingers and hooded

head he was studying the mathematics aloft there in that bird's nest

within three or four perches of the pole.

But if we Southern whale-fishers are not so snugly housed aloft as

Captain Sleet and his Greenlandmen were; yet that disadvantage is

greatly counter-balanced by the widely contrasting serenity of those

seductive seas in which we South fishers mostly float. For one, I

used to lounge up the rigging very leisurely, resting in the top to

have a chat with Queequeg, or any one else off duty whom I might find

there; then ascending a little way further, and throwing a lazy leg

over the top-sail yard, take a preliminary view of the watery

pastures, and so at last mount to my ultimate destination.

Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept

but sorry guard. With the problem of the universe revolving in me,

how could I--being left completely to myself at such a

thought-engendering altitude--how could I but lightly hold my

obligations to observe all whale-ships' standing orders, "Keep your

weather eye open, and sing out every time."

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And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of

Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad

with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness;

and who offers to ship with the Phaedon instead of Bowditch in his

head. Beware of such an one, I say; your whales must be seen before

they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you

ten wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the

richer. Nor are these monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the

whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and

absent-minded young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth,

and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber. Childe Harold not

unfrequently perches himself upon the mast-head of some luckless

disappointed whale-ship, and in moody phrase ejaculates:--

"Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand

blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain."

Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded

young philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling

sufficient "interest" in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so

hopelessly lost to all honourable ambition, as that in their secret

souls they would rather not see whales than otherwise. But all in

vain; those young Platonists have a notion that their vision is

imperfect; they are short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the

visual nerve? They have left their opera-glasses at home.

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"Why, thou monkey," said a harpooneer to one of these lads, "we've

been cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a

whale yet. Whales are scarce as hen's teeth whenever thou art up

here." Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of

them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like

listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded

youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he

loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the

visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind

and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing

that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some

undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive

thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through

it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came;

becomes diffused through time and space; like Crammer's sprinkled

Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round

globe over.

There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a

gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from

the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on

ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your

identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover.

And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one

half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the

summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!

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CHAPTER 36

The Quarter-Deck.

(ENTER AHAB: THEN, ALL)

It was not a great while after the affair of the pipe, that one

morning shortly after breakfast, Ahab, as was his wont, ascended the

cabin-gangway to the deck. There most sea-captains usually walk at

that hour, as country gentlemen, after the same meal, take a few

turns in the garden.

Soon his steady, ivory stride was heard, as to and fro he paced his

old rounds, upon planks so familiar to his tread, that they were all

over dented, like geological stones, with the peculiar mark of his

walk. Did you fixedly gaze, too, upon that ribbed and dented brow;

there also, you would see still stranger foot-prints--the foot-prints

of his one unsleeping, ever-pacing thought.

But on the occasion in question, those dents looked deeper, even as

his nervous step that morning left a deeper mark. And, so full of

his thought was Ahab, that at every uniform turn that he made, now at

the main-mast and now at the binnacle, you could almost see that

thought turn in him as he turned, and pace in him as he paced; so

completely possessing him, indeed, that it all but seemed the inward

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mould of every outer movement.

"D'ye mark him, Flask?" whispered Stubb; "the chick that's in him

pecks the shell. 'Twill soon be out."

The hours wore on;--Ahab now shut up within his cabin; anon, pacing

the deck, with the same intense bigotry of purpose in his aspect.

It drew near the close of day. Suddenly he came to a halt by the

bulwarks, and inserting his bone leg into the auger-hole there, and

with one hand grasping a shroud, he ordered Starbuck to send

everybody aft.

"Sir!" said the mate, astonished at an order seldom or never given on

ship-board except in some extraordinary case.

"Send everybody aft," repeated Ahab. "Mast-heads, there! come down!"

When the entire ship's company were assembled, and with curious and

not wholly unapprehensive faces, were eyeing him, for he looked not

unlike the weather horizon when a storm is coming up, Ahab, after

rapidly glancing over the bulwarks, and then darting his eyes among

the crew, started from his standpoint; and as though not a soul were

nigh him resumed his heavy turns upon the deck. With bent head and

half-slouched hat he continued to pace, unmindful of the wondering

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whispering among the men; till Stubb cautiously whispered to Flask,

that Ahab must have summoned them there for the purpose of witnessing

a pedestrian feat. But this did not last long. Vehemently pausing,

he cried:--

"What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?"

"Sing out for him!" was the impulsive rejoinder from a score of

clubbed voices.

"Good!" cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones; observing the

hearty animation into which his unexpected question had so

magnetically thrown them.

"And what do ye next, men?"

"Lower away, and after him!"

"And what tune is it ye pull to, men?"

"A dead whale or a stove boat!"

More and more strangely and fiercely glad and approving, grew the

countenance of the old man at every shout; while the mariners began

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to gaze curiously at each other, as if marvelling how it was that

they themselves became so excited at such seemingly purposeless

questions.

But, they were all eagerness again, as Ahab, now half-revolving in

his pivot-hole, with one hand reaching high up a shroud, and tightly,

almost convulsively grasping it, addressed them thus:--

"All ye mast-headers have before now heard me give orders about a

white whale. Look ye! d'ye see this Spanish ounce of gold?"--holding

up a broad bright coin to the sun--"it is a sixteen dollar piece,

men. D'ye see it? Mr. Starbuck, hand me yon top-maul."

While the mate was getting the hammer, Ahab, without speaking, was

slowly rubbing the gold piece against the skirts of his jacket, as if

to heighten its lustre, and without using any words was meanwhile

lowly humming to himself, producing a sound so strangely muffled and

inarticulate that it seemed the mechanical humming of the wheels of

his vitality in him.

Receiving the top-maul from Starbuck, he advanced towards the

main-mast with the hammer uplifted in one hand, exhibiting the gold

with the other, and with a high raised voice exclaiming: "Whosoever

of ye raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a

crooked jaw; whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed whale, with

three holes punctured in his starboard fluke--look ye, whosoever of

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ye raises me that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my

boys!"

"Huzza! huzza!" cried the seamen, as with swinging tarpaulins they

hailed the act of nailing the gold to the mast.

"It's a white whale, I say," resumed Ahab, as he threw down the

topmaul: "a white whale. Skin your eyes for him, men; look sharp for

white water; if ye see but a bubble, sing out."

All this while Tashtego, Daggoo, and Queequeg had looked on with even

more intense interest and surprise than the rest, and at the mention

of the wrinkled brow and crooked jaw they had started as if each was

separately touched by some specific recollection.

"Captain Ahab," said Tashtego, "that white whale must be the same

that some call Moby Dick."

"Moby Dick?" shouted Ahab. "Do ye know the white whale then, Tash?"

"Does he fan-tail a little curious, sir, before he goes down?" said

the Gay-Header deliberately.

"And has he a curious spout, too," said Daggoo, "very bushy, even for

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a parmacetty, and mighty quick, Captain Ahab?"

"And he have one, two, three--oh! good many iron in him hide, too,

Captain," cried Queequeg disjointedly, "all twiske-tee be-twisk, like

him--him--" faltering hard for a word, and screwing his hand round

and round as though uncorking a bottle--"like him--him--"

"Corkscrew!" cried Ahab, "aye, Queequeg, the harpoons lie all twisted

and wrenched in him; aye, Daggoo, his spout is a big one, like a

whole shock of wheat, and white as a pile of our Nantucket wool after

the great annual sheep-shearing; aye, Tashtego, and he fan-tails like

a split jib in a squall. Death and devils! men, it is Moby Dick ye

have seen--Moby Dick--Moby Dick!"

"Captain Ahab," said Starbuck, who, with Stubb and Flask, had thus

far been eyeing his superior with increasing surprise, but at last

seemed struck with a thought which somewhat explained all the wonder.

"Captain Ahab, I have heard of Moby Dick--but it was not Moby Dick

that took off thy leg?"

"Who told thee that?" cried Ahab; then pausing, "Aye, Starbuck; aye,

my hearties all round; it was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick

that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now. Aye, aye," he

shouted with a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a

heart-stricken moose; "Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale

that razeed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!"

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Then tossing both arms, with measureless imprecations he shouted

out: "Aye, aye! and I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the

Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames

before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to

chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of

earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye,

men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave."

"Aye, aye!" shouted the harpooneers and seamen, running closer to the

excited old man: "A sharp eye for the white whale; a sharp lance for

Moby Dick!"

"God bless ye," he seemed to half sob and half shout. "God bless ye,

men. Steward! go draw the great measure of grog. But what's this

long face about, Mr. Starbuck; wilt thou not chase the white whale?

art not game for Moby Dick?"

"I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too,

Captain Ahab, if it fairly comes in the way of the business we

follow; but I came here to hunt whales, not my commander's vengeance.

How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest

it, Captain Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket

market."

"Nantucket market! Hoot! But come closer, Starbuck; thou requirest

a little lower layer. If money's to be the measurer, man, and the

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accountants have computed their great counting-house the globe, by

girdling it with guineas, one to every three parts of an inch; then,

let me tell thee, that my vengeance will fetch a great premium HERE!"

"He smites his chest," whispered Stubb, "what's that for? methinks it

rings most vast, but hollow."

"Vengeance on a dumb brute!" cried Starbuck, "that simply smote thee

from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing,

Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous."

"Hark ye yet again--the little lower layer. All visible objects,

man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event--in the living

act, the undoubted deed--there, some unknown but still reasoning

thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the

unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How

can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?

To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I

think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps

me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice

sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be

the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak

that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the

sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do

the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy

presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that

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fair play. Who's over me? Truth hath no confines. Take off thine

eye! more intolerable than fiends' glarings is a doltish stare! So,

so; thou reddenest and palest; my heat has melted thee to anger-glow.

But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat, that thing unsays

itself. There are men from whom warm words are small indignity. I

meant not to incense thee. Let it go. Look! see yonder Turkish

cheeks of spotted tawn--living, breathing pictures painted by the

sun. The Pagan leopards--the unrecking and unworshipping things,

that live; and seek, and give no reasons for the torrid life they

feel! The crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab,

in this matter of the whale? See Stubb! he laughs! See yonder

Chilian! he snorts to think of it. Stand up amid the general

hurricane, thy one tost sapling cannot, Starbuck! And what is it?

Reckon it. 'Tis but to help strike a fin; no wondrous feat for

Starbuck. What is it more? From this one poor hunt, then, the best

lance out of all Nantucket, surely he will not hang back, when every

foremast-hand has clutched a whetstone? Ah! constrainings seize

thee; I see! the billow lifts thee! Speak, but speak!--Aye, aye! thy

silence, then, THAT voices thee. (ASIDE) Something shot from my

dilated nostrils, he has inhaled it in his lungs. Starbuck now is

mine; cannot oppose me now, without rebellion."

"God keep me!--keep us all!" murmured Starbuck, lowly.

But in his joy at the enchanted, tacit acquiescence of the mate, Ahab

did not hear his foreboding invocation; nor yet the low laugh from

the hold; nor yet the presaging vibrations of the winds in the

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cordage; nor yet the hollow flap of the sails against the masts, as

for a moment their hearts sank in. For again Starbuck's downcast

eyes lighted up with the stubbornness of life; the subterranean laugh

died away; the winds blew on; the sails filled out; the ship heaved

and rolled as before. Ah, ye admonitions and warnings! why stay ye

not when ye come? But rather are ye predictions than warnings, ye

shadows! Yet not so much predictions from without, as verifications

of the foregoing things within. For with little external to

constrain us, the innermost necessities in our being, these still

drive us on.

"The measure! the measure!" cried Ahab.

Receiving the brimming pewter, and turning to the harpooneers, he

ordered them to produce their weapons. Then ranging them before him

near the capstan, with their harpoons in their hands, while his three

mates stood at his side with their lances, and the rest of the ship's

company formed a circle round the group; he stood for an instant

searchingly eyeing every man of his crew. But those wild eyes met

his, as the bloodshot eyes of the prairie wolves meet the eye of

their leader, ere he rushes on at their head in the trail of the

bison; but, alas! only to fall into the hidden snare of the Indian.

"Drink and pass!" he cried, handing the heavy charged flagon to the

nearest seaman. "The crew alone now drink. Round with it, round!

Short draughts--long swallows, men; 'tis hot as Satan's hoof. So,

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so; it goes round excellently. It spiralizes in ye; forks out at the

serpent-snapping eye. Well done; almost drained. That way it went,

this way it comes. Hand it me--here's a hollow! Men, ye seem the

years; so brimming life is gulped and gone. Steward, refill!

"Attend now, my braves. I have mustered ye all round this capstan;

and ye mates, flank me with your lances; and ye harpooneers, stand

there with your irons; and ye, stout mariners, ring me in, that I may

in some sort revive a noble custom of my fisherman fathers before

me. O men, you will yet see that--Ha! boy, come back? bad pennies

come not sooner. Hand it me. Why, now, this pewter had run brimming

again, were't not thou St. Vitus' imp--away, thou ague!

"Advance, ye mates! Cross your lances full before me. Well done!

Let me touch the axis." So saying, with extended arm, he grasped the

three level, radiating lances at their crossed centre; while so

doing, suddenly and nervously twitched them; meanwhile, glancing

intently from Starbuck to Stubb; from Stubb to Flask. It seemed as

though, by some nameless, interior volition, he would fain have

shocked into them the same fiery emotion accumulated within the

Leyden jar of his own magnetic life. The three mates quailed before

his strong, sustained, and mystic aspect. Stubb and Flask looked

sideways from him; the honest eye of Starbuck fell downright.

"In vain!" cried Ahab; "but, maybe, 'tis well. For did ye three but

once take the full-forced shock, then mine own electric thing, THAT

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had perhaps expired from out me. Perchance, too, it would have

dropped ye dead. Perchance ye need it not. Down lances! And now,

ye mates, I do appoint ye three cupbearers to my three pagan kinsmen

there--yon three most honourable gentlemen and noblemen, my valiant

harpooneers. Disdain the task? What, when the great Pope washes the

feet of beggars, using his tiara for ewer? Oh, my sweet cardinals!

your own condescension, THAT shall bend ye to it. I do not order ye;

ye will it. Cut your seizings and draw the poles, ye harpooneers!"

Silently obeying the order, the three harpooneers now stood with the

detached iron part of their harpoons, some three feet long, held,

barbs up, before him.

"Stab me not with that keen steel! Cant them; cant them over! know

ye not the goblet end? Turn up the socket! So, so; now, ye

cup-bearers, advance. The irons! take them; hold them while I fill!"

Forthwith, slowly going from one officer to the other, he brimmed

the harpoon sockets with the fiery waters from the pewter.

"Now, three to three, ye stand. Commend the murderous chalices!

Bestow them, ye who are now made parties to this indissoluble league.

Ha! Starbuck! but the deed is done! Yon ratifying sun now waits to

sit upon it. Drink, ye harpooneers! drink and swear, ye men that man

the deathful whaleboat's bow--Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all,

if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!" The long, barbed steel

goblets were lifted; and to cries and maledictions against the white

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whale, the spirits were simultaneously quaffed down with a hiss.

Starbuck paled, and turned, and shivered. Once more, and finally,

the replenished pewter went the rounds among the frantic crew; when,

waving his free hand to them, they all dispersed; and Ahab retired

within his cabin.

CHAPTER 37

Sunset.

THE CABIN; BY THE STERN WINDOWS; AHAB SITTING ALONE, AND GAZING OUT.

I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where'er

I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let

them; but first I pass.

Yonder, by ever-brimming goblet's rim, the warm waves blush like

wine. The gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun--slow dived from

noon--goes down; my soul mounts up! she wearies with her endless

hill. Is, then, the crown too heavy that I wear? this Iron Crown of

Lombardy. Yet is it bright with many a gem; I the wearer, see not

its far flashings; but darkly feel that I wear that, that dazzlingly

confounds. 'Tis iron--that I know--not gold. 'Tis split, too--that

I feel; the jagged edge galls me so, my brain seems to beat against

the solid metal; aye, steel skull, mine; the sort that needs no

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helmet in the most brain-battering fight!

Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly

spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it

lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne'er

enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying

power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst

of Paradise! Good night--good night! (WAVING HIS HAND, HE MOVES FROM

THE WINDOW.)

'Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find one stubborn, at the

least; but my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels,

and they revolve. Or, if you will, like so many ant-hills of powder,

they all stand before me; and I their match. Oh, hard! that to fire

others, the match itself must needs be wasting! What I've dared,

I've willed; and what I've willed, I'll do! They think me

mad--Starbuck does; but I'm demoniac, I am madness maddened! That

wild madness that's only calm to comprehend itself! The prophecy was

that I should be dismembered; and--Aye! I lost this leg. I now

prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer. Now, then, be the

prophet and the fulfiller one. That's more than ye, ye great gods,

ever were. I laugh and hoot at ye, ye cricket-players, ye pugilists,

ye deaf Burkes and blinded Bendigoes! I will not say as schoolboys

do to bullies--Take some one of your own size; don't pommel ME! No,

ye've knocked me down, and I am up again; but YE have run and hidden.

Come forth from behind your cotton bags! I have no long gun to

reach ye. Come, Ahab's compliments to ye; come and see if ye can

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swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve

yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed

purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run.

Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under

torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an

angle to the iron way!

CHAPTER 38

Dusk.

BY THE MAINMAST; STARBUCK LEANING AGAINST IT.

My soul is more than matched; she's overmanned; and by a madman!

Insufferable sting, that sanity should ground arms on such a field!

But he drilled deep down, and blasted all my reason out of me! I

think I see his impious end; but feel that I must help him to it.

Will I, nill I, the ineffable thing has tied me to him; tows me with

a cable I have no knife to cut. Horrible old man! Who's over him,

he cries;--aye, he would be a democrat to all above; look, how he

lords it over all below! Oh! I plainly see my miserable office,--to

obey, rebelling; and worse yet, to hate with touch of pity! For in

his eyes I read some lurid woe would shrivel me up, had I it. Yet is

there hope. Time and tide flow wide. The hated whale has the round

watery world to swim in, as the small gold-fish has its glassy globe.

His heaven-insulting purpose, God may wedge aside. I would up

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heart, were it not like lead. But my whole clock's run down; my

heart the all-controlling weight, I have no key to lift again.

[A BURST OF REVELRY FROM THE FORECASTLE.]

Oh, God! to sail with such a heathen crew that have small touch of

human mothers in them! Whelped somewhere by the sharkish sea. The

white whale is their demigorgon. Hark! the infernal orgies! that

revelry is forward! mark the unfaltering silence aft! Methinks it

pictures life. Foremost through the sparkling sea shoots on the gay,

embattled, bantering bow, but only to drag dark Ahab after it, where

he broods within his sternward cabin, builded over the dead water of

the wake, and further on, hunted by its wolfish gurglings. The long

howl thrills me through! Peace! ye revellers, and set the watch!

Oh, life! 'tis in an hour like this, with soul beat down and held to

knowledge,--as wild, untutored things are forced to feed--Oh, life!

'tis now that I do feel the latent horror in thee! but 'tis not me!

that horror's out of me! and with the soft feeling of the human in

me, yet will I try to fight ye, ye grim, phantom futures! Stand by

me, hold me, bind me, O ye blessed influences!

CHAPTER 39

First Night Watch.

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Fore-Top.

(STUBB SOLUS, AND MENDING A BRACE.)

Ha! ha! ha! ha! hem! clear my throat!--I've been thinking over it

ever since, and that ha, ha's the final consequence. Why so?

Because a laugh's the wisest, easiest answer to all that's queer; and

come what will, one comfort's always left--that unfailing comfort is,

it's all predestinated. I heard not all his talk with Starbuck; but

to my poor eye Starbuck then looked something as I the other evening

felt. Be sure the old Mogul has fixed him, too. I twigged it, knew

it; had had the gift, might readily have prophesied it--for when I

clapped my eye upon his skull I saw it. Well, Stubb, WISE

Stubb--that's my title--well, Stubb, what of it, Stubb? Here's a

carcase. I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will,

I'll go to it laughing. Such a waggish leering as lurks in all your

horribles! I feel funny. Fa, la! lirra, skirra! What's my juicy

little pear at home doing now? Crying its eyes out?--Giving a party

to the last arrived harpooneers, I dare say, gay as a frigate's

pennant, and so am I--fa, la! lirra, skirra! Oh--

We'll drink to-night with hearts as light,

To love, as gay and fleeting

As bubbles that swim, on the beaker's brim,

And break on the lips while meeting.

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A brave stave that--who calls? Mr. Starbuck? Aye, aye, sir--(ASIDE)

he's my superior, he has his too, if I'm not mistaken.--Aye, aye,

sir, just through with this job--coming.

CHAPTER 40

Midnight, Forecastle.

HARPOONEERS AND SAILORS.

(FORESAIL RISES AND DISCOVERS THE WATCH STANDING, LOUNGING, LEANING,

AND LYING IN VARIOUS ATTITUDES, ALL SINGING IN CHORUS.)

Farewell and adieu to you, Spanish ladies!

Farewell and adieu to you, ladies of Spain!

Our captain's commanded.--

1ST NANTUCKET SAILOR.

Oh, boys, don't be sentimental; it's bad for the digestion! Take a

tonic, follow me!

(SINGS, AND ALL FOLLOW)

Our captain stood upon the deck,

A spy-glass in his hand,

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A viewing of those gallant whales

That blew at every strand.

Oh, your tubs in your boats, my boys,

And by your braces stand,

And we'll have one of those fine whales,

Hand, boys, over hand!

So, be cheery, my lads! may your hearts never fail!

While the bold harpooner is striking the whale!

MATE'S VOICE FROM THE QUARTER-DECK.

Eight bells there, forward!

2ND NANTUCKET SAILOR.

Avast the chorus! Eight bells there! d'ye hear, bell-boy? Strike

the bell eight, thou Pip! thou blackling! and let me call the watch.

I've the sort of mouth for that--the hogshead mouth. So, so,

(THRUSTS HIS HEAD DOWN THE SCUTTLE,) Star-bo-l-e-e-n-s, a-h-o-y!

Eight bells there below! Tumble up!

DUTCH SAILOR.

Grand snoozing to-night, maty; fat night for that. I mark this in

our old Mogul's wine; it's quite as deadening to some as filliping to

others. We sing; they sleep--aye, lie down there, like ground-tier

butts. At 'em again! There, take this copper-pump, and hail 'em

through it. Tell 'em to avast dreaming of their lasses. Tell 'em

it's the resurrection; they must kiss their last, and come to

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judgment. That's the way--THAT'S it; thy throat ain't spoiled with

eating Amsterdam butter.

FRENCH SAILOR.

Hist, boys! let's have a jig or two before we ride to anchor in

Blanket Bay. What say ye? There comes the other watch. Stand by

all legs! Pip! little Pip! hurrah with your tambourine!

PIP.

(SULKY AND SLEEPY)

Don't know where it is.

FRENCH SAILOR.

Beat thy belly, then, and wag thy ears. Jig it, men, I say; merry's

the word; hurrah! Damn me, won't you dance? Form, now, Indian-file,

and gallop into the double-shuffle? Throw yourselves! Legs! legs!

ICELAND SAILOR.

I don't like your floor, maty; it's too springy to my taste. I'm

used to ice-floors. I'm sorry to throw cold water on the subject;

but excuse me.

MALTESE SAILOR.

Me too; where's your girls? Who but a fool would take his left hand

by his right, and say to himself, how d'ye do? Partners! I must

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have partners!

SICILIAN SAILOR.

Aye; girls and a green!--then I'll hop with ye; yea, turn

grasshopper!

LONG-ISLAND SAILOR.

Well, well, ye sulkies, there's plenty more of us. Hoe corn when you

may, say I. All legs go to harvest soon. Ah! here comes the music;

now for it!

AZORE SAILOR.

(ASCENDING, AND PITCHING THE TAMBOURINE UP THE SCUTTLE.)

Here you are, Pip; and there's the windlass-bitts; up you mount!

Now, boys!

(THE HALF OF THEM DANCE TO THE TAMBOURINE; SOME GO BELOW; SOME SLEEP

OR LIE AMONG THE COILS OF RIGGING. OATHS A-PLENTY.)

AZORE SAILOR.

(DANCING)

Go it, Pip! Bang it, bell-boy! Rig it, dig it, stig it, quig it,

bell-boy! Make fire-flies; break the jinglers!

PIP.

Jinglers, you say?--there goes another, dropped off; I pound it so.

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CHINA SAILOR.

Rattle thy teeth, then, and pound away; make a pagoda of thyself.

FRENCH SAILOR.

Merry-mad! Hold up thy hoop, Pip, till I jump through it! Split

jibs! tear yourselves!

TASHTEGO.

(QUIETLY SMOKING)

That's a white man; he calls that fun: humph! I save my sweat.

OLD MANX SAILOR.

I wonder whether those jolly lads bethink them of what they are

dancing over. I'll dance over your grave, I will--that's the

bitterest threat of your night-women, that beat head-winds round

corners. O Christ! to think of the green navies and the

green-skulled crews! Well, well; belike the whole world's a ball, as

you scholars have it; and so 'tis right to make one ballroom of it.

Dance on, lads, you're young; I was once.

3D NANTUCKET SAILOR.

Spell oh!--whew! this is worse than pulling after whales in a

calm--give us a whiff, Tash.

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(THEY CEASE DANCING, AND GATHER IN CLUSTERS. MEANTIME THE SKY

DARKENS--THE WIND RISES.)

LASCAR SAILOR.

By Brahma! boys, it'll be douse sail soon. The sky-born, high-tide

Ganges turned to wind! Thou showest thy black brow, Seeva!

MALTESE SAILOR.

(RECLINING AND SHAKING HIS CAP.)

It's the waves--the snow's caps turn to jig it now. They'll shake

their tassels soon. Now would all the waves were women, then I'd go

drown, and chassee with them evermore! There's naught so sweet on

earth--heaven may not match it!--as those swift glances of warm, wild

bosoms in the dance, when the over-arboring arms hide such ripe,

bursting grapes.

SICILIAN SAILOR.

(RECLINING.)

Tell me not of it! Hark ye, lad--fleet interlacings of the

limbs--lithe swayings--coyings--flutterings! lip! heart! hip! all

graze: unceasing touch and go! not taste, observe ye, else come

satiety. Eh, Pagan? (NUDGING.)

TAHITAN SAILOR.

(RECLINING ON A MAT.)

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Hail, holy nakedness of our dancing girls!--the Heeva-Heeva! Ah! low

veiled, high palmed Tahiti! I still rest me on thy mat, but the soft

soil has slid! I saw thee woven in the wood, my mat! green the first

day I brought ye thence; now worn and wilted quite. Ah me!--not thou

nor I can bear the change! How then, if so be transplanted to yon

sky? Hear I the roaring streams from Pirohitee's peak of spears,

when they leap down the crags and drown the villages?--The blast! the

blast! Up, spine, and meet it! (LEAPS TO HIS FEET.)

PORTUGUESE SAILOR.

How the sea rolls swashing 'gainst the side! Stand by for reefing,

hearties! the winds are just crossing swords, pell-mell they'll go

lunging presently.

DANISH SAILOR.

Crack, crack, old ship! so long as thou crackest, thou holdest! Well

done! The mate there holds ye to it stiffly. He's no more afraid

than the isle fort at Cattegat, put there to fight the Baltic with

storm-lashed guns, on which the sea-salt cakes!

4TH NANTUCKET SAILOR.

He has his orders, mind ye that. I heard old Ahab tell him he must

always kill a squall, something as they burst a waterspout with a

pistol--fire your ship right into it!

ENGLISH SAILOR.

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Blood! but that old man's a grand old cove! We are the lads to hunt

him up his whale!

ALL.

Aye! aye!

OLD MANX SAILOR.

How the three pines shake! Pines are the hardest sort of tree to

live when shifted to any other soil, and here there's none but the

crew's cursed clay. Steady, helmsman! steady. This is the sort of

weather when brave hearts snap ashore, and keeled hulls split at sea.

Our captain has his birthmark; look yonder, boys, there's another in

the sky--lurid-like, ye see, all else pitch black.

DAGGOO.

What of that? Who's afraid of black's afraid of me! I'm quarried

out of it!

SPANISH SAILOR.

(ASIDE.) He wants to bully, ah!--the old grudge makes me touchy

(ADVANCING.) Aye, harpooneer, thy race is the undeniable dark side of

mankind--devilish dark at that. No offence.

DAGGOO (GRIMLY).

None.

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ST. JAGO'S SAILOR.

That Spaniard's mad or drunk. But that can't be, or else in his one

case our old Mogul's fire-waters are somewhat long in working.

5TH NANTUCKET SAILOR.

What's that I saw--lightning? Yes.

SPANISH SAILOR.

No; Daggoo showing his teeth.

DAGGOO (SPRINGING).

Swallow thine, mannikin! White skin, white liver!

SPANISH SAILOR (MEETING HIM).

Knife thee heartily! big frame, small spirit!

ALL.

A row! a row! a row!

TASHTEGO (WITH A WHIFF).

A row a'low, and a row aloft--Gods and men--both brawlers! Humph!

BELFAST SAILOR.

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A row! arrah a row! The Virgin be blessed, a row! Plunge in with

ye!

ENGLISH SAILOR.

Fair play! Snatch the Spaniard's knife! A ring, a ring!

OLD MANX SAILOR.

Ready formed. There! the ringed horizon. In that ring Cain struck

Abel. Sweet work, right work! No? Why then, God, mad'st thou the

ring?

MATE'S VOICE FROM THE QUARTER-DECK.

Hands by the halyards! in top-gallant sails! Stand by to reef

topsails!

ALL.