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owing I suppose to his keeping his arm at sea unmethodically in sun

and shade, his shirt sleeves irregularly rolled up at various times--

this same arm of his, I say, looked for all the world like a strip

of that same patchwork quilt.  Indeed, partly lying on it as the arm

did when I first awoke, I could hardly tell it from the quilt,

they so blended their hues together; and it was only by the sense

of weight and pressure that I could tell that Queequeg was hugging me.



My sensations were strange.  Let me try to explain them.  When I was

a child, I well remember a somewhat similar circumstance that befell me;

whether it was a reality or a dream, I never could entirely settle.

The circumstance was this.  I had been cutting up some caper or other--

I think it was trying to crawl up the chimney, as I had seen a little

sweep do a few days previous; and my stepmother who, somehow or other,

was all the time whipping me, or sending me to bed supperless,--

my mother dragged me by the legs out of the chimney and packed me off

to bed, though it was only two o'clock in the afternoon of the 21st June,

the longest day in the year in our hemisphere.  I felt dreadfully.

But there was no help for it, so up stairs I went to my little room

in the third floor, undressed myself as slowly as possible so as to

kill time, and with a bitter sigh got between the sheets.



I lay there dismally calculating that sixteen entire hours

must elapse before I could hope for a resurrection.

Sixteen hours in bed! the small of my back ached to think of it.

And it was so light too; the sun shining in at the window,

and a great rattling of coaches in the streets, and the sound

of gay voices all over the house.  I felt worse and worse--

at last I got up, dressed, and softly going down in my

stockinged feet, sought out my stepmother, and suddenly threw

myself at her feet, beseeching her as a particular favor 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 sunlit room was now wrapped in outer darkness.

Instantly I felt a shock running through all my frame;

nothing was to be seen, and nothing was to be heard;

but a supernatural hand seemed placed in mine.  My arm hung

over the counterpane, and the nameless, unimaginable, silent form

or phantom, to which the hand belonged, seemed closely

seated by my bed-side. For what seemed ages piled on ages,

I lay there, frozen with the most awful fears, not daring

to drag away my hand; yet ever thinking that if I could but

stir it one single inch, the horrid spell would be broken.

I knew not how this consciousness at last glided away from me;

but waking in the morning, I shudderingly remembered it all,

and for days and weeks and months afterwards I lost myself

in confounding attempts to explain the mystery.  Nay, to this

very hour, I often puzzle myself with it.



Now, take away the awful fear, and my sensations at

feeling the supernatural hand in mine were very similar,

in their strangeness, to those which I experienced on waking

up and seeing Queequeg's pagan arm thrown round me.

But at length all the past night's events soberly recurred,

one by one, in fixed reality, and then I lay only alive to

the comical predicament.  For though I tried to move his arm--

unlock his bridegroom clasp--yet, sleeping as he was, he still

hugged me tightly, as though naught but death should part us twain.

I now strove to rouse him--"Queequeg!"--but his only answer

was a snore.  I then rolled over, my neck feeling as if it

were in a horse-collar; and suddenly felt a slight scratch.

Throwing aside the counterpane, there lay the tomahawk sleeping

by the savage's side, as if it were a hatchet-faced baby.

A pretty pickle, truly, thought I; abed here in a strange

house in the broad day, with a cannibal and a tomahawk!

"Queequeg!--in the name of goodness, Queequeg, wake!"  At length,

by dint of much wriggling, and loud and incessant expostulations

upon the unbecomingness of his hugging a fellow male in that

matrimonial sort of style, I succeeded in extracting a grunt;

and presently, he drew back his arm, shook himself all over

like a Newfoundland dog just from the water, and sat up in bed,

stiff as a pike-staff, looking at me, and rubbing his eyes

as if he did not altogether remember how I came to be there,

though a dim consciousness of knowing something about me seemed

slowly dawning over him.  Meanwhile, I lay quietly eyeing him,

having no serious misgivings now, and bent upon narrowly observing

so curious a creature.  When, at last, his mind seemed made

up touching the character of his bedfellow, and he became,

as it were, reconciled to the fact; he jumped out upon the floor,

and by certain signs and sounds gave me to understand that,

if it pleased me, he would dress first and then leave me

to dress afterwards, leaving the whole apartment to myself.

Thinks I, Queequeg, under the circumstances, this is a very

civilized overture; but, the truth is, these savages have an

innate sense of delicacy, say what you will; it is marvellous

how essentially polite they are.  I pay this particular

compliment to Queequeg, because he treated me with so much

civility and consideration, while I was guilty of great rudeness;

staring at him from the bed, and watching all his toilette motions;

for the time my curiosity getting the better of my breeding.

Nevertheless, a man like Queequeg you don't see every day,

he and his ways were well worth unusual regarding.



He commenced dressing at top by donning his beaver hat,

a very tall one, by the by, and then--still minus his trowsers--

he hunted up his boots.  What under the heavens he did it for,

I cannot tell, but his next movement was to crush himself--

boots in hand, and hat on--under the bed; when, from sundry

violent gaspings and strainings, I inferred he was hard at work

booting himself; though by no law of propriety that I ever heard of,

is any man required to be private when putting on his boots.

But Queequeg, do you see, was a creature in the transition state--

neither caterpillar nor butterfly.  He was just enough civilized

to show off his outlandishness in the strangest possible manner.

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.

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CHAPTER 11



Nightgown





We had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals,

and Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown

tattooed legs over mine, and then drawing them back;

so entirely sociable and free and easy were we; when, at last,

by reason of our confabulations, what little nappishness remained

in us altogether departed, and we felt like getting up again,

though day-break was yet some way down the future.



Yes, we became very wakeful; so much so that our recumbent

position began to grow wearisome, and by little and little we

found ourselves sitting up; the clothes well tucked around us,

leaning against the headboard with our four knees drawn up

close together, and our two noses bending over them, as if

our knee-pans were warming-pans. We felt very nice and snug,

the more so since it was so chilly out of doors; indeed out

of bed-clothes too, seeing that there was no fire in the room.

The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth,

some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality

in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast.

Nothing exists in itself.  If you flatter yourself that you

are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time,

then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more.  But if,

like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown

of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general

consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm.

For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished

with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich.

For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing

but the blankets between you and your snugness and the cold

of the outer air.  Then there you lie like the one warm spark

in the heart of an arctic crystal.



We had been sitting in this crouching manner for some time,

when all at once I thought I would open my eyes; for when

between sheets, whether by day or by night, and whether

asleep or awake, I have a way of always keeping my eyes shut,

in order the more to concentrate the snugness of being in bed.

Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his

eyes be closed; as if, darkness were indeed the proper element

of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part.

Upon opening my eyes then, and coming out of my own pleasant

and self-created darkness into the imposed and coarse outer gloom

of the unilluminated twelve-o'clock-at-night, I experienced

a disagreeable revulsion.  Nor did I at all object to the hint

from Queequeg that perhaps it were best to strike a light,

seeing that we were so wide awake; and besides he felt a strong

desire to have a few quiet puffs from his Tomahawk.  Be it said,

that though I had felt such a strong repugnance to his smoking

in the bed the night before, yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices

grow when love once comes to bend them.  For now I liked

nothing better than to have Queequeg smoking by me, even in bed,

because he seemed to be full of such serene household joy then.

I no more felt unduly concerned for the landlord's policy of insurance.

I was only alive to the condensed confidential comfortableness

of sharing a pipe and a blanket with a real friend.

With our shaggy jackets drawn about our shoulders, we now passed

the Tomahawk from one to the other, till slowly there grew

over us a blue hanging tester of smoke, illuminated by the flame

of the new-lit lamp.



Whether it was that this undulating tester rolled the savage

away to far distant scenes, I know not, but he now spoke

of his native island; and, eager to hear his history,

I begged him to go on and tell it.  He gladly complied.

Though at the time I but ill comprehended not a few of his words,

yet subsequent disclosures, when I had become more familiar

with his broken phraseology, now enable me to present the whole

story such as it may prove in the mere skeleton I give.







CHAPTER 12



Biographical





Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West

and South.  It is not down on any map; true places never are.



When a new-hatched savage running wild about his native woodlands

in a grass clout, followed by the nibbling goats, as if he were

a green sapling; even then, in Queequeg's ambitious soul,

lurked a strong desire to see something more of Christendom

than a specimen whaler or two.  His father was a High Chief,

a King; his uncle a High Priest; and on the maternal side

he boasted aunts who were the wives of unconquerable warriors.

There was excellent blood in his veins--royal stuff;

though sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal propensity

he nourished in his untutored youth.



A Sag Harbor ship visited his father's bay, and Queequeg sought

a passage to Christian lands.  But the ship, having her full

complement of seamen, spurned his suit; and not all the King

his father's influence could prevail.  But Queequeg vowed a vow.

Alone in his canoe, he paddled off to a distant strait, which he

knew the ship must pass through when she quitted the island.

On one side was a coral reef; on the other a low tongue of land,

covered with mangrove thickets that grew out into the water.

Hiding his canoe, still afloat, among these thickets, with its

prow seaward, he sat down in the stern, paddle low in hand;

and when the ship was gliding by, like a flash he darted out;

gained her side; with one backward dash of his foot capsized

and sank his canoe; climbed up the chains; and throwing himself

at full length upon the deck, grappled a ring-bolt there,

and swore not to let it go, though hacked in pieces.



In vain the captain threatened to throw him overboard; suspended a

cutlass over his naked wrists; Queequeg was the son of a King,

and Queequeg budged not.  Struck by his desperate dauntlessness,

and his wild desire to visit Christendom, the captain at last relented,

and told him he might make himself at home.  But this fine young savage--

this sea Prince of Wales, never saw the Captain's cabin.

They put him down among the sailors, and made a whaleman of him.

But like Czar Peter content to toil in the shipyards of foreign cities,

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"Get the axe!  For God's sake, run for the doctor, some one,

while I pry it open!"



"Look here," said the landlady, quickly putting down

the vinegar-cruet, so as to have one hand free; "look here;

are you talking about prying open any of my doors?"--

and with that she seized my arm.  "What's the matter with you?

What's the matter with you, shipmate?"



In as calm, but rapid a manner as possible, I gave her to understand

the whole case.  Unconsciously clapping the vinegar-cruet

to one side of her nose, she ruminated for an instant;

then exclaimed--"No! I haven't seen it since I put it there."

Running to a little closet under the landing of the stairs, she glanced

in, and returning, told me that Queequeg's harpoon was missing.

"He's killed himself," she cried.  "It's unfort'nate Stiggs done

over again there goes another counterpane--God pity his poor mother!--

it will be the ruin of my house.  Has the poor lad a sister?

Where's that girl?--there, Betty, go to Snarles the Painter,

and tell him to paint me a sign, with--"no suicides permitted here,

and no smoking in the parlor;"--might as well kill both

birds at once.  Kill?  The Lord be merciful to his ghost!

What's that noise there?  You, young man, avast there!"



And running up after me, she caught me as I was again trying to force

open the door.



"I won't allow it; I won't have my premises spoiled.

Go for the locksmith, there's one about a mile from here.  But avast!"

putting her hand in her side pocket, "here's a key that'll fit, I guess;

let's see."  And with that, she turned it in the lock; but alas!

Queequeg's supplemental bolt remained unwithdrawn within.



"Have to burst it open," said I, and was running down the entry

a little, for a good start, when the landlady caught at me,

again vowing I should not break down her premises; but I tore

from her, and with a sudden bodily rush dashed myself full

against the mark.



With a prodigious noise the door flew open, and the knob

slamming against the wall, sent the plaster to the ceiling;

and there, good heavens! there sat Queequeg, altogether cool

and self-collected; right in the middle of the room;

squatting on his hams, and holding Yojo on top of his head.

He looked neither one way nor the other way but sat like a carved

image with scarce a sign of active life.



"Queequeg," said I, going up to him, "Queequeg, what's

the matter with you?"



"He hain't been a sittin' so all day, has he?" said the landlady.



But all we said, not a word could we drag out of him;

I almost felt like pushing him over, so as to change his position,

for it was almost intolerable, it seemed so painfully and

unnaturally constrained; especially, as in all probability

he had been sitting so for upwards of eight or ten hours,

going too without his regular meals.



"Mrs. Hussey," said I, "he's alive at all events; so leave us,

if you please, and I will see to this strange affair myself."



Closing the door upon the landlady, I endeavored to prevail

upon Queequeg to take a chair; but in vain.  There he sat;

and all he could do--for all my polite arts and blandishments--

he would not move a peg, nor say a single word, nor even look

at me, nor notice my presence in any 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 a part of his creed, I suppose;

well, then, let him rest; he'll get up sooner or later, no doubt.

It can't last for ever, thank God, and his Ramadan only comes

once a year; and I don't believe it's very punctual then.



I went down to supper.  After sitting a long time listening to the long

stories of some sailors who had just come from a plum-pudding voyage,

as they called it (that is, a short whaling-voyage in a schooner or brig,

confined to the north of the line, in the Atlantic Ocean only);

after listening to these plum-puddingers till nearly eleven o'clock, I

went up stairs to go to bed, feeling quite sure by this time Queequeg

must certainly have brought his Ramadan to a termination.  But no;

there he was just where I had left him; he had not stirred an inch.

I began to grow vexed with him; it seemed so downright senseless

and insane to be sitting there all day and half the night on his hams

in a cold room, holding a piece of wood on his head.



"For heaven's sake, Queequeg, get up and shake yourself; get up and have

some supper.  You'll starve; you'll kill yourself, Queequeg."  But not

a word did he reply.



Despairing of him, therefore, I determined to go to bed and to sleep;

and no doubt, before a great while, he would follow me.

But previous to turning in, I took my heavy bearskin jacket,

and threw it over him, as it promised to be a very cold night;

and he had nothing but his ordinary round jacket on.

For some time, do all I would, I could not get into the faintest doze.

I had blown out the candle; and the mere thought of Queequeg--

not four feet off--sitting there in that uneasy position,

stark alone in the cold and dark; this made me really wretched.

Think of it; sleeping all night in the same room with a wide

awake pagan on his hams in this dreary, unaccountable Ramadan!



But somehow I dropped off at last, and knew nothing more till

break of day; when, looking over the bedside, there squatted

Queequeg, as if he had been screwed down to the floor.

But as soon as the first glimpse of sun entered the window,

up he got, with stiff and grating joints, but with a cheerful look;

limped towards me where I lay; pressed his forehead again

against mine; and said his Ramadan was over.



Now, as I before hinted, I have no objection to any person's religion,

be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult

any other person, because that other person don't believe it also.

But when a man's religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive

torment to him; and, in fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable

inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual

aside and argue the point with him.



And just so I now did with Queequeg.  "Queequeg," said I,

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with the body; telling him to establish himself accordingly.

He put his hand upon the sleeper's rear, as though feeling if it

was soft enough; and then, without more ado, sat quietly down there.



"Gracious!  Queequeg, don't sit there," said I.



"Oh; perry dood seat," said Queequeg, "my country way;

won't hurt him face."



"Face!" said I, "call that his face? very benevolent countenance then;

but how hard he breathes, he's heaving himself; get off,

Queequeg, you are heavy, it's grinding the face of the poor.

Get off, Queequeg!  Look, he'll twitch you off soon.

I wonder he don't wake."



Queequeg removed himself to just beyond the head of the sleeper,

and lighted his tomahawk pipe.  I sat at the feet.

We kept the pipe passing over the sleeper, from one to the other.

Meanwhile, upon questioning him in his broken fashion, Queequeg gave

me to understand that, in his land, owing to the absence of settees

and sofas of all sorts, the king, chiefs, and great people generally,

were in the custom of fattening some of the lower orders for ottomans;

and to furnish a house comfortably in that respect, you had only

to buy up eight or ten lazy fellows, and lay them round in the piers

and alcoves.  Besides, it was very convenient on an excursion;

much better than those garden-chairs which are convertible into

walking sticks; upon occasion, a chief calling his attendant,

and desiring him to make a settee of himself under a spreading tree,

perhaps in some damp marshy place.



While narrating these things, every time Queequeg received the tomahawk

from me, he flourished the hatchet-side of it over the sleeper's head.



"What's that for, Queequeg?"



"Perry easy, kill-e; oh! perry easy!



He was going on with some wild reminiscences about his tomahawk-pipe

which, it seemed, had in its two uses both brained his foes and soothed

his soul, when we were directly attracted to the sleeping rigger.

The strong vapor now completely filling the contracted hole,

it began to tell upon him.  He breathed with a sort of muffledness;

then seemed troubled in the nose; then revolved over once or twice;

then sat up and rubbed his eyes.



"Holloa!" he breathed at last, "who be ye smokers?"



"Shipped men," answered I, "when does she sail?"



"Aye, aye, ye are going in her, be ye?  She sails to-day. The Captain

came aboard last night."



"What Captain?--Ahab?"



"Who but him indeed?"



I was going to ask him some further questions concerning Ahab,

when we heard a noise on deck.



"Holloa!  Starbuck's astir," said the rigger.  "He's a lively chief

mate that; good man, and a pious; but all alive now, I must turn to."

And so saying he went on deck, and we followed.



It was now clear sunrise.  Soon the crew came on board in twos and threes;

the riggers bestirred themselves; the mates were actively engaged;

and several of the shore people were busy in bringing various last

things on board.  Meanwhile Captain Ahab remained invisibly enshrined

within his cabin.







CHAPTER 22



Merry Christmas





At length, towards noon, upon the final dismissal of the ship's riggers,

and after the Pequod had been hauled out from the wharf, and after the

ever-thoughtful Charity had come off in a whale-boat, with her last gift--

a nightcap for Stubb, the second mate, her brother-in-law, and a spare

Bible for the steward--after all this, the two Captains, Peleg and Bildad,

issued from the cabin, and turning to the chief mate, Peleg said:



"Now, Mr. Starbuck, are you sure everything is right?

Captain Ahab is all ready--just spoke to him--nothing more

to be got from shore, eh?  Well, call all hands, then.

Muster 'em aft here--blast 'em!"



"No need of profane words, however great the hurry, Peleg," said Bildad,

"but away with thee, friend Starbuck, and do our bidding."



How now!  Here upon the very point of starting for the voyage,

Captain Peleg and Captain Bildad were going it with a high hand on

the quarter-deck, just as if they were to be joint-commanders at sea,

as well as to all appearances in port.  And, as for Captain Ahab,

no sign of him was yet to be seen; Only, they said he was in the cabin.

But then, the idea was, that his presence was by no means necessary

in getting the ship under weigh, and steering her well out to sea.

Indeed, as that was not at all his proper business, but the pilot's;

and as he was not yet completely recovered--so they said--therefore,

Captain Ahab stayed below.  And all this seemed natural enough;

especially as in the merchant service many captains never show

themselves on deck for a considerable time after heaving up the anchor,

but remain over the cabin table, having a farewell merry-making with

their shore friends, before they quit the ship for good with the pilot.



But there was not much chance to think over the matter, for Captain Peleg

was now all alive.  He seemed to do most of the talking and commanding,

and not Bildad.



"Aft here, ye sons of bachelors," he cried, as the sailors lingered

at the main-mast. "Mr. Starbuck, drive 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 offices,

was one of the licensed pilots of the port--he being suspected

to have got himself made a pilot in order to save the Nantucket

pilot-fee to all the ships he was concerned in, for he never

piloted any other craft--Bildad, I say, might now be seen actively

engaged in looking over the bows for the approaching anchor,

and at intervals singing what seemed a dismal stave of psalmody,

to cheer the hands at the windlass, who roared forth some sort

of a chorus about the girls in Booble Alley, with hearty good will.

Nevertheless, not three days previous, Bildad had told them

that no profane songs would be allowed on board the Pequod,

particularly in getting under weigh; and Charity, his sister,

had placed a small choice copy of Watts in each seaman's berth.



Meantime, overseeing the other part of the ship, Captain Peleg

ripped and swore astern in the most frightful manner.

I almost thought he would sink the ship before the anchor could

be got up; involuntarily I paused on my handspike, and told

Queequeg to do the same, thinking of the perils we both ran,

in starting on the voyage with such a devil for a pilot.

I was comforting myself, however, with the thought that in pious

Bildad might be found some salvation, spite of his seven hundred

and seventy-seventh lay; when I felt a sudden sharp poke in my rear,

and turning round, was horrified at the apparition of Captain Peleg

in the act of withdrawing his leg from my immediate vicinity.

That was my first kick.



"Is that the way they heave in the marchant service?" he roared.

"Spring, thou sheep-head; spring, and break thy backbone!  Why don't

ye spring, I say, all of ye--spring!  Quohog! spring, thou chap with

the red whiskers; spring there, Scotch-cap; spring, thou green pants.

Spring, I say, all of ye, and spring your eyes out!"  And so saying,

he moved along the windlass, here and there using his leg very freely,

while imperturbable Bildad kept leading off with his psalmody.

Thinks I, Captain Peleg must have been drinking something to-day.



At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided.

It was a short, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged

into night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean,

whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor.

The long rows of teeth on the bulwarks glistened in the moonlight;

and like the white ivory tusks of some huge elephant, vast curving

icicles depended from the bows.

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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 warranty to cherish such emotions.

For though the harpooneers, with the great body of the crew,

were a far more barbaric, heathenish, and motley set than any

of the tame merchant-ship companies which my previous experiences

had made me acquainted with, still I ascribed this--and rightly

ascribed it--to the fierce uniqueness of the very nature of that wild

Scandinavian vocation in which I had so abandonedly embarked.

But it was especially the aspect of the three chief officers

of the ship, the mates, which was most forcibly calculated

to allay these colorless misgivings, and induce confidence

and cheerfulness in every presentment of the voyage.

Three better, more likely sea-officers and men, each in his

own different way, could not readily be found, and they were

every one of them Americans; a Nantucketer, a Vineyarder,

a Cape man.  Now, it being Christmas when the ship shot

from out her harbor, for a space we had biting Polar weather,

though all the time running away from it to the southward;

and by every degree and minute of latitude which we sailed,

gradually leaving that merciless winter, and all its intolerable

weather behind us.  It was one of those less lowering,

but still grey and gloomy enough mornings of the transition,

when with a fair wind the ship was rushing through the water

with a vindictive sort of leaping and melancholy rapidity,

that as I mounted to the deck at the call of the forenoon watch,

so soon as I levelled my glance towards the taffrail,

foreboding shivers ran over me.  Reality outran apprehension;

Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck.



There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him,

nor of the recovery from any.  He looked like a man cut away

from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all

the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle

from their compacted aged robustness.  His whole high, broad form,

seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould,

like Cellini's cast Perseus.  Threading its way out from among

his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny

scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing,

you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish.

It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight,

lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly

darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and

grooves out the bark from top to bottom ere running off into

the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded.

Whether that mark was born with him, or whether it was the scar

left by some desperate wound, no one could certainly say.

By some tacit consent, throughout the voyage little

or no allusion was made to it, especially by the mates.

But once Tashtego's senior, an old Gay-Head Indian among the crew,

superstitiously asserted that not till he was full forty years

old did Ahab become that way branded, and then it came upon him,

not in the fury of any mortal fray, but in an elemental strife

at sea.  Yet, this wild hint seemed inferentially negatived,

by what a grey Manxman insinuated, an old sepulchral man,

who, having never before sailed out of Nantucket, had never

ere this laid eye upon wild Ahab.  Nevertheless, the old

sea-traditions, the immemorial credulities, popularly invested

this old Manxman with preternatural powers of discernment.

So that no white sailor seriously contradicted him when he said

that if ever Captain Ahab should be tranquilly laid out--

which might hardly come to pass, so he muttered--then, whoever should

do that last office for the dead, would find a birth-mark on him

from crown to sole.



So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me,

and the livid brand which streaked it, that for the first few moments

I hardly noted that not a little of this overbearing grimness

was owing to the barbaric white leg upon which he partly stood.

It had previously come to me that this ivory leg had at sea been

fashioned from the polished bone of the sperm whale's jaw.

"Aye, he was dismasted off Japan," said the old Gay-Head Indian once;

"but like his dismasted craft, he shipped another mast without

coming home for it.  He has a quiver of 'em."



I was struck with the singular posture he maintained.

Upon each side of the Pequod's quarter deck, and pretty close

to the mizzen shrouds, there was an auger hole, bored about half

an inch or so, into the plank.  His bone leg steadied in that hole;

one arm elevated, and holding by a shroud; Captain Ahab stood erect,

looking straight out beyond the ship's ever-pitching prow.

There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate,

unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless,

forward dedication of that glance.  Not a word he spoke;

nor did his officers say aught to him; though by all their

minutest gestures and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy,

if not painful, consciousness of being under a troubled

master-eye. And not only that, but moody stricken Ahab stood

before them with a crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless

regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.



Ere long, from his first visit in the air, he withdrew into his cabin.

But after that morning, he was every day visible to the crew;

either standing in his pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory stool he had;

or heavily walking the deck.  As the sky grew less gloomy; indeed, began

to grow a little genial, he became still less and less a recluse;

as if, when the ship had sailed from home, nothing but the dead wintry

bleakness of the sea had then kept him so secluded.  And, by and by,

it came to pass, that he was almost continually in the air;

but, as yet, for all that he said, or perceptibly did, on the at

last sunny deck, he seemed as unnecessary there as another mast.

But the Pequod was only making a passage now; not regularly cruising;

nearly all whaling preparatives needing supervision the mates were fully

competent to, so that there was little or nothing, out of himself,

to employ or excite Ahab, now; and thus chase away, for that one interval,

t/files/moby11.txt  view on Meta::CPAN

Some moments passed, during which the thick vapor came

from his mouth in quick and constant puffs, which blew back

again into his face.  "How now," he soliloquized at last,

withdrawing the tube, "this smoking no longer soothes.

Oh, my pipe! hard must it go with me if thy charm be gone!

Here have I been unconsciously toiling, not pleasuring--

aye, and ignorantly smoking to windward all the while; to windward,

and with such nervous whiffs, as if, like the dying whale,

my final jets were the strongest and fullest of trouble.

What business have I with this pipe?  This thing that is

meant for sereneness, to send up mild white vapors among

mild white hairs, not among torn iron-grey locks like mine.

I'll smoke no more-"



He tossed the still lighted pipe into the sea.  The fire hissed

in the waves; the same instant the ship shot by the bubble

the sinking pipe made.  With slouched hat, Ahab lurchingly

paced the planks.







CHAPTER 31



Queen Mab





Next morning Stubb accosted Flask.



"Such a queer dream, King-Post, I never had.  You know the old man's

ivory leg, well I dreamed he kicked me with it; and when I tried

to kick back, upon my soul, my little man, I kicked my leg right off!

And then, presto!  Ahab seemed a pyramid, and I like a blazing fool,

kept kicking at it.  But what was still more curious, Flask--you know

how curious all dreams are--through all this rage that I was in,

I somehow seemed to be thinking to myself, that after all,

it was not much of an insult, that kick from Ahab.  'Why,' thinks I,

'what's the row?  It's not a real leg, only a false one.'

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 whale-bone cane.  Yes,' thinks I, 'it was only

a playful cudgelling--in fact, only a whaleboning that he gave me--

not a base kick.  Besides,' thinks I, 'look at it once; why, the end

of it--the foot part--what a small sort of end it is; whereas, if a

broad footed farmer kicked me, there's a devilish broad insult.

But this insult is whittled down to a point only.'  But now comes

the greatest joke of the dream, Flask.  While I was battering away

at the pyramid, a sort of badger-haired old merman, with a hump

on his back, takes me by the shoulders, and slews me round.

'What are you 'bout?' says he.  Slid! man, but I was frightened.

Such a phiz!  But, somehow, next moment I was over the fright.

'What am I about?' says I at last.  'And what business is that of yours,

I should like to know, Mr. Humpback?  Do you want a kick?'

By the lord, Flask, I had no sooner said that, than he turned

round his stern to me, bent over, and dragging up a lot of seaweed

he had for a clout--what do you think, I saw?--why thunder alive,

man, his stern was stuck full of marlinspikes, with the points out.

Says I on second thought, 'I guess I won't kick you, old fellow.'

'Wise Stubb,' said he, 'wise Stubb;' and kept muttering it all

the time, a sort of eating of his own gums like a chimney hag.

Seeing he wasn't going to stop saying over his 'wise Stubb,

wise Stubb,' I thought I might as well fall to kicking the pyramid again.

But I had only just lifted my foot for it, when he roared out,

'Stop that kicking!'  'Halloa,' says I, 'what's the matter now,

old fellow?'  'Look ye here,' says he; 'let's argue the insult.

Captain Ahab kicked ye, didn't he?'  'Yes, he did,' says I--'right here

it was.'  'Very good,' says he--'he used his ivory leg, didn't he?'

'Yes, he did,' says I. 'Well then,' says he, 'wise Stubb, what have

you to complain of?  Didn't he kick with right good will? it wasn't

a common pitch pine leg he kicked with, was it?  No, you were kicked

by a great man, and with a beautiful ivory leg, Stubb.  It's an honor;

I consider it an honor.  Listen, wise Stubb.  In old England

the greatest lords think it great glory to be slapped by a queen,

and made garter-knights of; but, be your boast, Stubb, that ye were

kicked by old Ahab, and made a wise man of.  Remember what I say;

be kicked by him; account his kicks honors; and on no account kick back;

for you can't help yourself, wise Stubb.  Don't you see that pyramid?'

With that, he all of a sudden seemed somehow, in some queer fashion,

to swim off into the air.  I snored; rolled over; and there I was

in my hammock!  Now, what do you think of that dream, Flask?"



"I don't know; it seems a sort of foolish to me, tho.'"



"May be; may be.  But it's made a wise man of me, Flask.  D'ye see Ahab

standing there, sideways looking over the stern?  Well, the best thing

you can do, Flask, is to let the old man alone; never speak to him,

whatever he says.  Halloa!  What's that he shouts?  Hark!"



"Mast-head, there!  Look sharp, all of ye!  There are whales hereabouts!



If ye see a white one, split your lungs for him!



"What do you think of that now, Flask? ain't there a small

drop of something queer about that, eh?  A white whale--did ye

mark that, man?  Look ye--there's something special in the wind.

Stand by for it, Flask.  Ahab has that that's bloody on his mind.

But, mum; he comes this way."







CHAPTER 32



Cetology





Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we

shall be lost in its unshored harborless 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.

t/files/moby11.txt  view on Meta::CPAN

And however the general experiences in the fishery may amend

such reports as these; yet in their full terribleness, even to the

bloodthirsty item of Povelson, the superstitious belief in them is,

in some vicissitudes of their vocation, revived in the minds

of the hunters.



So that overawed by the rumors and portents concerning him,

not a few of the fishermen recalled, in reference to Moby Dick,

the earlier days of the Sperm Whale fishery, when it was oftentimes

hard to induce long practised Right whalemen to embark in the perils

of this new and daring warfare; such men protesting that although

other leviathans might be hopefully pursued, yet to chase and point

lances at such an apparition as the Sperm Whale was not for mortal man.

That to attempt it, would be inevitably to be torn into a quick eternity.

On this head, there are some remarkable documents that may be consulted.



Nevertheless, some there were, who even in the face of these things

were ready to give chase to Moby Dick; and a still greater number who,

chancing only to hear of him distantly and vaguely, without the specific

details of any certain calamity, and without superstitious accompaniments

were sufficiently hardy not to flee from the battle if offered.



One of the wild suggestions referred to, as at last coming to be linked

with the White Whale in the minds of the superstitiously inclined,

was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous; that he had

actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same

instant of time.



Nor, credulous as such minds must have been, was this conceit

altogether without some faint show of superstitious probability.

For as the secrets of the currents in the seas have never yet

been divulged, even to the most erudite research; so the hidden ways

of the Sperm Whale when beneath the surface remain, in great part,

unaccountable to his pursuers; and from time to time have originated

the most curious and contradictory speculations regarding them,

especially concerning the mystic modes whereby, after sounding

to a great depth, he transports himself with such vast swiftness

to the most widely distant points.



It is a thing well known to both American and English

whale-ships, and as well a thing placed upon authoritative

record years ago by Scoresby, that some whales have been

captured far north in the Pacific, in whose bodies have been

found the barbs of harpoons darted in the Greenland seas.

Nor is it to be gainsaid, that in some of these instances it has

been declared that the interval of time between the two assaults

could not have exceeded very many days.  Hence, by inference,

it has been believed by some whalemen, that the Nor' West Passage,

so long a problem to man, was never a problem to the whale.

So that here, in the real living experience of living men,

the prodigies related in old times of the inland Strello mountain

in Portugal (near whose top there was said to be a lake in which

the wrecks of ships floated up to the surface); and that still

more wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain near Syracuse

(whose waters were believed to have come from the Holy Land

by an underground passage); these fabulous narrations are almost

fully equalled by the realities of the whalemen.



Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these;

and knowing that after repeated, intrepid assaults, the White Whale

had escaped alive; it cannot be much matter of surprise that

some whalemen should go still further in their superstitions;

declaring Moby Dick not only ubiquitous, but immortal

(for immortality is but ubiquity in time); that though groves

of spears should be planted in his flanks, he would still swim

away unharmed; or if indeed he should ever be made to spout

thick blood, such a sight would be but a ghastly deception;

for again in unensanguined billows hundreds of leagues away,

his unsullied jet would once more be seen.



But even stripped of these supernatural surmisings, there was enough

in the earthly make and incontestable character of the monster

to strike the imagination with unwonted power.  For, it was not

so much his uncommon bulk that so much distinguished him from

other sperm whales, but, as was elsewhere thrown out--a peculiar

snow-white wrinkled forehead, and a high, pyramidical white hump.

These were his prominent features; the tokens whereby,

even in the limitless, uncharted seas, he revealed his identity,

at a long distance, to those who knew him.



The rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted,

and marbled with the same shrouded hue, that, in the end,

he had gained his distinctive appellation of the White Whale;

a name, indeed, literally justified by his vivid aspect,

when seen gliding at high noon through a dark blue sea,

leaving a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all spangled

with golden gleamings.



Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable hue, nor yet his

deformed lower jaw, that so much invested the whale with natural terror,

as that unexampled, intelligent malignity which, according to

specific accounts, he had over and over again evinced in his assaults.

More than all, his treacherous retreats struck more of dismay than

perhaps aught else.  For, when swimming before his exulting pursuers,

with every apparent symptom of alarm, he had several times been known

to turn around suddenly, and, bearing down upon them, either stave their

boats to splinters, or drive them back in consternation to their ship.



Already several fatalities had attended his chase.

But though similar disasters, however little bruited ashore,

were by no means unusual in the fishery; yet, in most instances,

such seemed the White Whale's infernal aforethought of ferocity,

that every dismembering or death that he caused, was not wholly

regarded as having been inflicted by an unintelligent agent.



Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds

of his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips

of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam

out of the white curds of the whale's direful wrath into the serene,

exasperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal.



His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in

the eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow,

had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe,

blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life

of the whale.  That captain was Ahab.  And then it was, that suddenly

sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had

reaped away Ahab's leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field.

No turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him

with more seeming malice.  Small reason was there to doubt, then,

that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild

t/files/moby11.txt  view on Meta::CPAN

The First Lowering





The phantoms, for so they then seemed, were flitting on the other

side of the deck, and, with a noiseless celerity, were casting loose

the tackles and bands of the boat which swung there.  This boat had

always been deemed one of the spare boats, though technically called

the captain's, on account of its hanging from the starboard quarter.

The figure that now stood by its bows was tall and swart,

with one white tooth evilly protruding from its steel-like lips.

A rumpled Chinese jacket of black cotton funereally invested him,

with wide black trowsers of the same dark stuff.  But strangely

crowning this ebonness was a glistening white plaited turban,

the living hair braided and coiled round and round upon his head.

Less swart in aspect, the companions of this figure were of that vivid,

tiger-yellow complexion peculiar to some of the aboriginal natives

of the Manillas;--a race notorious for a certain diabolism of subtilty,

and by some honest white mariners supposed to be the paid spies

and secret confidential agents on the water of the devil, their lord,

whose counting-room they suppose to be elsewhere.



While yet the wondering ship's company were gazing upon these strangers,

Ahab cried out to the white-turbaned old man at their head,

"All ready there, Fedallah?"



"Ready," was the half-hissed reply.



"Lower away then; d'ye hear?" shouting across the deck.

"Lower away there, I say."



Such was the thunder of his voice, that spite of their

amazement the men sprang over the rail; the sheaves whirled

round in the blocks; with a wallow, the three boats dropped

into the sea; while, with a dexterous, off-handed daring,

unknown in any other vocation, the sailors, goat-like, leaped

down the rolling ship's side into the tossed boats below.



Hardly had they pulled out from under the ship's lee, when a fourth keel,

coming from the windward side, pulled round under the stern,

and showed the five strangers rowing Ahab, who, standing erect

in the stern, loudly hailed Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, to spread

themselves widely, so as to cover a large expanse of water.

But with all their eyes again riveted upon the swart Fedallah and

his crew, the inmates of the other boats obeyed not the command.



"Captain Ahab?-" said Starbuck.



"Spread yourselves," cried Ahab; "give way, all four boats.

Thou, Flask, pull out more to leeward!"



"Aye, aye, sir," cheerily cried little King-Post, sweeping round his

great steering oar.  "Lay back!" addressing his crew.  "There!--there!--

there again!  There she blows right ahead, boys!--lay back!



"Never heed yonder yellow boys, Archy."



"Oh, I don't mind'em, sir," said Archy; "I knew it all before now.

Didn't I hear 'em in the hold?  And didn't I tell Cabaco here of it?

What say ye, Cabaco?  They are stowaways, Mr. Flask."



"Pull, pull, my fine hearts-alive; pull, my children;

pull, my little ones," drawlingly and soothingly sighed Stubb

to his crew, some of whom still showed signs of uneasiness.

"Why don't you break your backbones, my boys?  What is it you stare at?

Those chaps in yonder boat?  Tut!  They are only five more hands

come to help us never mind from where the more the merrier.

Pull, then, do pull; never mind the brimstone devils are good

fellows enough.  So, so; there you are now; that's the stroke

for a thousand pounds; that's the stroke to sweep the stakes!

Hurrah for the gold cup of sperm oil, my heroes!

Three cheers, men--all hearts alive!  Easy, easy; don't be in a hurry--

don't be in a hurry.  Why don't you snap your oars, you rascals?

Bite something, you dogs!  So, so, so, then:--softly, softly!

That's it--that's it! long and strong.  Give way there, give way!

The devil fetch ye, ye ragamuffin rapscallions; ye are all asleep.

Stop snoring, ye sleepers, and pull.  Pull, will ye? pull,

can't ye? pull, won't ye?  Why in the name of gudgeons and

ginger-cakes don't ye pull?--pull and break something! pull,

and start your eyes out!  Here," whipping out the sharp knife

from his girdle; "every mother's son of ye draw his knife,

and pull with the blade between his teeth.  That's it--that's it.

Now ye do something; that looks like it, my steel-bits. Start her--

start her, my silverspoons!  Start her, marling-spikes!"



Stubb's exordium to his crew is given here at large,

because he had rather a peculiar way of talking to them in general,

and especially in inculcating the religion of rowing.

But you must not suppose from this specimen of his sermonizings

that he ever flew into downright passions with his congregation.

Not at all; and therein consisted his chief peculiarity.

He would say the most terrific things to his crew, in a tone

so strangely compounded of fun and fury, and the fury seemed

so calculated merely as a spice to the fun, that no oarsman

could hear such queer invocations without pulling for

dear life, and yet pulling for the mere joke of the thing.

Besides he all the time looked so easy and indolent himself,

so loungingly managed his steering-oar, and so broadly gaped--

open-mouthed at times--that the mere sight of such a yawning commander,

by sheer force of contrast, acted like a charm upon the crew.

Then again, Stubb was one of those odd sort of humorists,

whose jollity is sometimes so curiously ambiguous, as to put

all inferiors on their guard in the matter of obeying them.



In obedience to a sign from Ahab, Starbuck was now pulling obliquely

across Stubb's bow; and when for a minute or so the two boats were

pretty near to each other, Stubb hailed the mate.



"Mr. Starbuck! larboard boat there, ahoy! a word with ye, sir,

if ye please!"



"Halloa!" returned Starbuck, turning round not a single inch

as he spoke; still earnestly but whisperingly urging his crew;

his face set like a flint from Stubb's.



"What think ye of those yellow boys, sir!



"Smuggled on board, somehow, before the ship sailed.

(Strong, strong, boys!)" in a whisper to his crew,

then speaking out loud again:  "A sad business, Mr. Stubb!

(seethe her, seethe her, my lads!) but never mind, Mr. Stubb,

all for the best.  Let all your crew pull strong, come what will.

(Spring, my men, spring!) There's hogsheads of sperm ahead,

Mr. Stubb, and that's what ye came for.  (Pull, my boys!)

Sperm, sperm's the play!  This at least is duty; duty and profit

hand in hand."



"Aye, aye, I thought as much," soliloquized Stubb, when the

boats diverged, "as soon as I clapt eye on 'em, I thought so.

Aye, and that's what he went into the after hold for, so often,

as Dough-Boy long suspected.  They were hidden down there.

The White Whale's at the bottom of it.  Well, well, so be it!

t/files/moby11.txt  view on Meta::CPAN

Though truly vivacious, tumultuous, ostentatious little Flask

would now and then stamp with impatience; but not one added

heave did he thereby give to the negro's lordly chest.

So have I seen Passion and Vanity stamping the living

magnanimous earth, but the earth did not alter her tides and her

seasons for that.



Meanwhile Stubb, the third mate, betrayed no such far-gazing solicitudes.

The whales might have made one of their regular soundings,

not a temporary dive from mere fright; and if that were the case,

Stubb, as his wont in such cases, it seems, was resolved to solace

the languishing interval with his pipe.  He withdrew it from

his hatband, where he always wore it aslant like a feather.

He loaded it, and rammed home the loading with his thumb-end;

but hardly had he ignited his match across the rough sandpaper

of his hand, when Tashtego, his harpooneer, whose eyes had been

setting to windward like two fixed stars, suddenly dropped like light

from his erect attitude to his seat, crying out in a quick phrensy

of hurry, "Down, down all, and give way!--there they are!"



To a landsman, no whale, nor any sign of a herring, would have been

visible at that moment; nothing but a troubled bit of greenish

white water, and thin scattered puffs of vapor hovering over it,

and suffusingly blowing off to leeward, like the confused scud from

white rolling billows.  The air around suddenly vibrated and tingled,

as it were, like the air over intensely heated plates of iron.

Beneath this atmospheric waving and curling, and partially beneath

a thin layer of water, also, the whales were swimming.  Seen in advance

of all the other indications, the puffs of vapor they spouted,

seemed their forerunning couriers and detached flying outriders.



All four boats were now in keen pursuit of that one spot

of troubled water and air.  But it bade far to outstrip them;

it flew on and on, as a mass of interblending bubbles borne

down a rapid stream from the hills.



"Pull, pull, my good boys," said Starbuck, in the lowest possible

but intensest concentrated whisper to his men; while the sharp

fixed glance from his eyes darted straight ahead of the bow,

almost seemed as two visible needles in two unerring binnacle compasses.

He did not say much to his crew, though, nor did his crew say anything

to him.  Only the silence of the boat was at intervals startlingly

pierced by one of his peculiar whispers, now harsh with command,

now soft with entreaty.



How different the loud little King-Post. "Sing out and

say something, my hearties.  Roar and pull, my thunderbolts!

Beach me, beach me on their black backs, boys; only do that for me,

and I'll sign over to you my Martha's Vineyard plantation, boys;

including wife and children, boys.  Lay me on--lay me on!

O Lord, Lord! but I shall go stark, staring mad!  See! see that

white water!"  And so shouting, he pulled his hat from his head,

and stamped up and down on it; then picking it up, flirted it

far off upon the sea; and finally fell to rearing and plunging

in the boat's stern like a crazed colt from the prairie.



"Look at that chap now," philosophically drawled Stubb, who, with his

unlighted short pipe, mechanically retained between his teeth,

at a short distance, followed after--"He's got fits, that Flask has.

Fits? yes, give him fits--that's the very word--pitch fits into 'em.

Merrily, merrily, hearts-alive. Pudding for supper, you know;--

merry's the word.  Pull, babes--pull, sucklings--pull, all.

But what the devil are you hurrying about?  Softly, softly,

and steadily, my men.  Only pull, and keep pulling; nothing more.

Crack all your backbones, and bite your knives in two--that's all.

Take it easy--why don't ye take it easy, I say, and burst all your

livers and lungs!"



But what it was that inscrutable Ahab said to that

tiger-yellow crew of his--these were words best omitted here;

for you live under the blessed light of the evangelical land.

Only the infidel sharks in the audacious seas may give ear

to such words, when, with tornado brow, and eyes of red murder,

and foam-glued lips, Ahab leaped after his prey.



Meanwhile, all the boats tore on.  The repeated specific

allusions of Flask to "that whale," as he called the fictitious

monster which he declared to be incessantly tantalizing

his boat's bow with its tail--these allusions of his were at

times so vivid and life-like, that they would cause some one

or two of his men to snatch a fearful look over his shoulder.

But this was against all rule; for the oarsmen must put

out their eyes, and ram a skewer through their necks;

usages announcing that they must have no organs but ears;

and no limbs but arms, in these critical moments.



It was a sight full of quick wonder and awe!  The vast swells

of the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made,

as they rolled along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a

boundless bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the boat,

as it would tip for an instant on the knife-like edge of the

sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening to cut it in two;

the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and hollows;

the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite hill;

the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side;--all these,

with the cries of the headsmen and harpooneers, and the shuddering

gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory

Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails,

like a wild hen after her screaming brood;--all this was thrilling.

Not the raw recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into

the fever heat of his first battle; not the dead man's ghost

encountering the first unknown phantom in the other world;--

neither of these can feel stranger and stronger emotions than

that man does, who for the first time finds himself pulling

into the charmed, churned circle of the hunted sperm whale.



The dancing white water made by the chase was now becoming more

and more visible, owing to the increasing darkness of the dun

cloud-shadows flung upon the sea.  The jets of vapor no longer blended,

but tilted everywhere to right and left; the whales seemed

separating their wakes.  The boats were pulled more apart;

Starbuck giving chase to three whales running dead to leeward.

Our sail was now set, and, with the still rising wind, we rushed along;

the boat going with such madness through the water, that the lee

oars could scarcely be worked rapidly enough to escape being torn

from the row-locks.



Soon we were running through a suffusing wide veil of mist;

neither ship nor boat to be seen.



"Give way, men," whispered Starbuck, drawing still further aft the sheet

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such a ducking of ensigns, that there does not seem to be much

right-down hearty good-will and brotherly love about it at all.

As touching Slave-ships meeting, why, they are in such a

prodigious hurry, they run away from each other as soon as possible.

And as for Pirates, when they chance to cross each other's

cross-bones, the first hail is--"How many skulls?"--

the same way that whalers hail--"How many barrels?"

And that question once answered, pirates straightway steer apart,

for they are infernal villains on both sides, and don't like

to see overmuch of each other's villanous likenesses.



But look at the godly, honest, unostentatious, hospitable, sociable,

free-and-easy whaler!  What does the whaler do when she meets

another whaler in any sort of decent weather?  She has a "Gam,"

a thing so utterly unknown to all other ships that they never

heard of the name even; and if by chance they should hear of it,

they only grin at it, and repeat gamesome stuff about "spouters"

and "blubber-boilers," and such like pretty exclamations.

Why it is that all Merchant-seamen, and also all Pirates and

Man-of-War's men, and Slave-ship sailors, cherish such a scornful

feeling towards Whale-ships; this is a question it would be hard

to answer.  Because, in the case of pirates, say, I should like to know

whether that profession of theirs has any peculiar glory about it.

It sometimes ends in uncommon elevation, indeed; but only at the gallows.

And besides, when a man is elevated in that odd fashion, he has

no proper foundation for his superior altitude.  Hence, I conclude,

that in boasting himself to be high lifted above a whaleman,

in that assertion the pirate has no solid basis to stand on.



But what is a Gam?  You might wear out your index-finger running

up and down the columns of dictionaries, and never find the word,

Dr. Johnson never attained to that erudition; Noah Webster's

ark does not hold it.  Nevertheless, this same expressive word

has now for many years been in constant use among some fifteen

thousand true born Yankees.  Certainly, it needs a definition,

and should be incorporated into the Lexicon.  With that view,

let me learnedly define it.



GAM.  NOUN--A social meeting of two (or more) Whaleships, generally on

a cruising-ground; when, after exchanging hails, they exchange

visits by boats' crews, the two captains remaining, for the time,

on board of one ship, and the two chief mates on the other.



There is another little item about Gamming which must not

be forgotten here.  All professions have their own little

peculiarities of detail; so has the whale fishery.  In a pirate,

man-of-war, or slave ship, when the captain is rowed anywhere

in his boat, he always sits in the stern sheets on a comfortable,

sometimes cushioned seat there, and often steers himself with a pretty

little milliner's tiller decorated with gay cords and ribbons.

But the whale-boat has no seat astern, no sofa of that sort whatever,

and no tiller at all.  High times indeed, if whaling captains were wheeled

about the water on castors like gouty old aldermen in patent chairs.

And as for a tiller, the whale-boat never admits of any such effeminacy;

and therefore as in gamming a complete boat's crew must leave the ship,

and hence as the boat steerer or harpooneer is of the number,

that subordinate is the steersman upon the occasion, and the captain,

having no place to sit in, is pulled off to his visit all standing

like a pine tree.  And often you will notice that being conscious

of the eyes of the whole visible world resting on him from

the sides of the two ships, this standing captain is all alive

to the importance of sustaining his dignity by maintaining his legs.

Nor is this any very easy matter; for in his rear is the immense

projecting steering oar hitting him now and then in the small of

his back, the after-oar reciprocating by rapping his knees in front.

He is thus completely wedged before and behind, and can only

expand himself sideways by settling down on his stretched legs;

but a sudden, violent pitch of the boat will often go far to topple him,

because length of foundation is nothing without corresponding breadth.

Merely make a spread angle of two poles, and you cannot stand them up.

Then, again, it would never do in plain sight of the world's riveted eyes,

it would never do, I say, for this straddling captain to be seen

steadying himself the slightest particle by catching hold of anything

with his hands; indeed, as token of his entire, buoyant self-command,

he generally carries his hands in his trowsers' pockets; but perhaps being

generally very large, heavy hands, he carries them there for ballast.

Nevertheless there have occurred instances, well authenticated ones too,

where the captain has been known for an uncommonly critical moment or two,

in a sudden squall say--to seize hold of the nearest oarsman's hair,

and hold on there like grim death.







CHAPTER 54



The Town-Ho's Story





(As told at the Golden Inn)





The Cape of Good Hope, and all the watery region round about there,

is much like some noted four corners of a great highway, where you

meet more travellers than in any other part.



It was not very long after speaking the Goney that another

homeward-bound whaleman, the Town-Ho,* was encountered.

She was manned almost wholly by Polynesians.  In the short gam that

ensued she gave us strong news of Moby Dick.  To some the general

interest in the White Whale was now wildly heightened by a circumstance

of the Town-Ho's story, which seemed obscurely to involve with the whale

a certain wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called

judgments of God which at times are said to overtake some men.

This latter circumstance, with its own particular accompaniments,

forming what may be called the secret part of the tragedy about to

be narrated, never reached the ears of Captain Ahab or his mates.

For that secret part of the story was unknown to the captain

of the Town-Ho himself.  It was the private property of three

confederate white seamen of that ship, one of whom, it seems,

communicated it to Tashtego with Romish injunctions of secrecy,

but the following night Tashtego rambled in his sleep, and revealed

so much of it in that way, that when he was wakened he could not

well withhold the rest.  Nevertheless, so potent an influence did

this thing have on those seamen in the Pequod who came to the full

knowledge of it, and by such a strange delicacy, to call it so,

were they governed in this matter, that they kept the secret among

themselves so that it never transpired abaft the Pequod's main-mast.

Interweaving in its proper place this darker thread with the story

as publicly narrated on the ship, the whole of this strange affair

I now proceed to put on lasting record.

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It was my turn to stand at the foremast-head; and with my

shoulders leaning against the slackened royal shrouds,

to and fro I idly swayed in what seemed an enchanted air.

No resolution could withstand it; in that dreamy mood losing

all consciousness, at last my soul went out of my body;

though my body still continued to sway as a pendulum will,

long after the power which first moved it is withdrawn.



Ere forgetfulness altogether came over me, I had noticed that

the seamen at the main and mizzen mast-heads were already drowsy.

So that at last all three of us lifelessly swung from the spars,

and for every swing that we made there was a nod from below from

the slumbering helmsman.  The waves, too, nodded their indolent crests;

and across the wide trance of the sea, east nodded to west,

and the sun over all.



Suddenly bubbles seemed bursting beneath my closed eyes;

like vices my hands grasped the shrouds; some invisible,

gracious agency preserved me; with a shock I came back to life.

And lo! close under our lee, not forty fathoms off, a gigantic

Sperm Whale lay rolling in the water like the capsized hull

of a frigate, his broad, glossy back, of an Ethiopian hue,

glistening in the sun's rays like a mirror.  But lazily undulating

in the trough of the sea, and ever and anon tranquilly spouting his

vapory jet, the whale looked like a portly burgher smoking his pipe

of a warm afternoon.  But that pipe, poor whale, was thy last.

As if struck by some enchanter's wand, the sleepy ship

and every sleeper in it all at once started into wakefulness;

and more than a score of voices from all parts of the vessel,

simultaneously with the three notes from aloft, shouted forth

the accustomed cry, as the great fish slowly and regularly

spouted the sparkling brine into the air.



"Clear away the boats!  Luff!" cried Ahab.  And obeying his own order,

he dashed the helm down before the helmsman could handle the spokes.



The sudden exclamations of the crew must have alarmed the whale; and ere

the boats were down, majestically turning, he swam away to the leeward,

but with such a steady tranquillity, and making so few ripples as he swam,

that thinking after all he might not as yet be alarmed, Ahab gave orders

that not an oar should be used, and no man must speak but in whispers.

So seated like Ontario Indians on the gunwales of the boats,

we swiftly but silently paddled along; the calm not admitting of

the noiseless sails being set.  Presently, as we thus glided in chase,

the monster perpendicularly flitted his tail forty feet into the air,

and then sank out of sight like a tower swallowed up.



"There go flukes!" was the cry, an announcement immediately

followed by Stubb's producing his match and igniting his pipe,

for now a respite was granted.  After the full interval of his

sounding had elapsed, the whale rose again, and being now in advance

of the smoker's boat, and much nearer to it than to any of the others,

Stubb counted upon the honor of the capture.  It was obvious,

now, that the whale had at length become aware of his pursuers.

All silence of cautiousness was therefore no longer of use.

Paddles were dropped, and oars came loudly into play.

And still puffing at his pipe, Stubb cheered on his crew

to the assault.



Yes, a mighty change had come over the fish.  All alive to his jeopardy,

he was going "head out"; that part obliquely projecting from the mad

yeast which he brewed.*





*It will be seen in some other place of what a very light substance

the entire interior of the sperm whale's enormous head consists.

Though apparently the most massive, it is by far the most buoyant

part about him.  So that with ease he elevates it in the air,

and invariably does so when going at his utmost speed.

Besides, such is the breadth of the upper part of the front of his head,

and such the tapering cut-water formation of the lower part,

that by obliquely elevating his head, he thereby may be said

to transform himself from a bluff-bowed sluggish galliot into

a sharppointed New York pilot-boat.





"Start her, start her, my men!  Don't hurry yourselves; take plenty

of time--but start her; start her like thunder-claps, that's all,"

cried Stubb, spluttering out the smoke as he spoke.  "Start her, now;

give 'em the long and strong stroke, Tashtego.  Start her, Tash, my boy--

start her, all; but keep cool, keep cool--cucumbers is the word--

easy, easy--only start her like grim death and grinning devils,

and raise the buried dead perpendicular out of their graves, boys--

that's all.  Start her!"



"Woo-hoo! Wa-hee!" screamed the Gay-Header in reply, raising some

old war-whoop to the skies; as every oarsman in the strained boat

involuntarily bounced forward with the one tremendous leading stroke

which the eager Indian gave.



But his wild screams were answered by others quite as wild.

"Kee-hee! Kee-hee!" yelled Daggoo, straining forwards and backwards

on his seat, like a pacing tiger in his cage.



"Ka-la! Koo-loo!" howled Queequeg, as if smacking his lips over a

mouthful of Grenadier's steak.  And thus with oars and yells the keels

cut the sea.  Meanwhile, Stubb, retaining his place in the van,

still encouraged his men to the onset, all the while puffing the smoke

from his mouth.  Like desperadoes they tugged and they strained,

till the welcome cry was heard--"Stand up, Tashtego!--give it to him!"

The harpoon was hurled.  "Stern all!"  The oarsmen backed water; the same

moment something went hot and hissing along every one of their wrists.

It was the magical line.  An instant before, Stubb had swiftly

caught two additional turns with it round the loggerhead, whence,

by reason of its increased rapid circlings, a hempen blue smoke

now jetted up and mingled with the steady fumes from his pipe.

As the line passed round and round the loggerhead; so also, just before

reaching that point, it blisteringly passed through and through both

of Stubb's hands, from which the hand-cloths, or squares of quilted

canvas sometimes worn at these times, had accidentally dropped.

It was like holding an enemy's sharp two-edged sword by the blade,

and that enemy all the time striving to wrest it out of your clutch.



"Wet the line! wet the line!" cried Stubb to the tub oarsman (him seated

by the tub) who, snatching off his hat, dashed the sea-water into it.*

More turns were taken, so that the line began holding its place.

The boat now flew through the boiling water like a shark all fins.

Stubb and Tashtego here changed places--stem for stern--a staggering

business truly in that rocking commotion.

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and deeper into the Tun, until some twenty feet of the pole

have gone down.



Now, the people of the Pequod had been baling some time in this way;

several tubs had been filled with the fragrant sperm; when all at

once a queer accident happened.  Whether it was that Tashtego,

that wild Indian, was so heedless and reckless as to let go for a moment

his one-handed hold on the great cabled tackles suspending the head;

or whether the place where he stood was so treacherous and oozy;

or whether the Evil One himself would have it to fall out so,

without stating his particular reasons; how it was exactly,

there is no telling now; but, on a sudden, as the eightieth

or ninetieth bucket came suckingly up--my God! poor Tashtego--

like the twin reciprocating bucket in a veritable well,

dropped head-foremost down into this great Tun of Heidelburgh,

and with a horrible oily gurgling, went clean out of sight!



"Man overboard!" cried Daggoo, who amid the general consternation

first came to his senses.  "Swing the bucket this way!"

and putting one foot into it, so as the better to secure his

slippery hand-hold on the whip itself the hoisters ran him high up

to the top of the head, almost before Tashtego could have reached

its interior bottom.  Meantime, there was a terrible tumult.

Looking over the side, they saw the before lifeless head throbbing

and heaving just below the surface of the sea, as if that moment

seized with some momentous idea; whereas it was only the poor

Indian unconsciously revealing by those struggles the perilous

depth to which he had sunk.



At this instant, while Daggoo, on the summit of the head, was clearing

the whip--which had somehow got foul of the great cutting tackles--

a sharp cracking noise was heard; and to the unspeakable horror

of all, one of the two enormous hooks suspending the head tore out,

and with a vast vibration the enormous mass sideways swung,

till the drunk ship reeled and shook as if smitten by an iceberg.

The one remaining hook, upon which the entire strain now depended,

seemed every instant to be on the point of giving way; an event

still more likely from the violent motions of the head.



"Come down, come down!" yelled the seamen to Daggoo, but with one hand

holding on to the heavy tackles, so that if the head should drop,

he would still remain suspended; the negro having cleared the foul line,

rammed down the bucket into the now collapsed well, meaning that

the buried harpooneer should grasp it, and so be hoisted out.



"In heaven's name, man," cried Stubb, "are you ramming

home a cartridge there?--Avast!  How will that help him;

jamming that iron-bound bucket on top of his head?

Avast, will ye!"



"Stand clear of the tackle!" cried a voice like the bursting

of a rocket.



Almost in the same instant, with a thunder-boom, the enormous

mass dropped into the sea, like Niagara's Table-Rock into

the whirlpool; the suddenly relieved hull rolled away from it,

to far down her glittering copper; and all caught their breath,

as half swinging--now over the sailors' heads, and now

over the water--Daggoo, through a thick mist of spray,

was dimly beheld clinging to the pendulous tackles, while poor,

buried-alive Tashtego was sinking utterly down to the bottom

of the sea!  But hardly had the blinding vapor cleared away,

when a naked figure with a boardingsword in his hand,

was for one swift moment seen hovering over the bulwarks.

The next, a loud splash announced that my brave Queequeg had

dived to the rescue.  One packed rush was made to the side,

and every eye counted every ripple, as moment followed moment,

and no sign of either the sinker or the diver could be seen.

Some hands now jumped into a boat alongside, and pushed a little

off from the ship.



"Ha! ha!" cried Daggoo, all at once, from his now quiet,

swinging perch overhead; and looking further off from the side,

we saw an arm thrust upright from the blue waves; a sight strange

to see, as an arm thrust forth from the grass over a grave.



"Both! both!--it is both!"-cried Daggoo again with a joyful shout;

and soon after, Queequeg was seen boldly striking out with one hand,

and with the other clutching the long hair of the Indian.  Drawn into

the waiting boat, they were quickly brought to the deck; but Tashtego

was long in coming to, and Queequeg did not look very brisk.



Now, how had this noble rescue been accomplished?  Why, diving after

the slowly descending head, Queequeg with his keen sword had made

side lunges near its bottom, so as to scuttle a large hole there;

then dropping his sword, had thrust his long arm far inwards

and upwards, and so hauled out our poor Tash by the head.

He averred, that upon first thrusting in for him, a leg was presented;

but well knowing that that was not as it ought to be, and might

occasion great trouble;--he had thrust back the leg, and by a

dexterous heave and toss, had wrought a somerset upon the Indian;

so that with the next trial, he came forth in the good old way--

head foremost.  As for the great head itself, that was doing

as well as could be expected.



And thus, through the courage and great skill in obstetrics of Queequeg,

the deliverance, or rather, delivery of Tashtego, was successfully

accomplished, in the teeth, too, of the most untoward and apparently

hopeless impediments; which is a lesson by no means to be forgotten.

Midwifery should be taught in the same course with fencing and boxing,

riding and rowing.



I know that this queer adventure of the Gay-Header's will be sure

to seem incredible to some landsmen, though they themselves may have

either seen or heard of some one's falling into a cistern ashore;

an accident which not seldom happens, and with much less reason too

than the Indian's, considering the exceeding slipperiness of the curb

of the Sperm Whale's well.



But, peradventure, it may be sagaciously urged, how is this?

We thought the tissued, infiltrated head of the Sperm Whale,

was the lightest and most corky part about him; and yet thou makest

it sink in an element of a far greater specific gravity than itself.

We have thee there.  Not at all, but I have ye; for at the time poor

Tash fell in, the case had been nearly emptied of its lighter contents,

leaving little but the dense tendinous wall of the well--a double welded,

hammered substance, as I have before said, much heavier than

the sea water, and a lump of which sinks in it like lead almost.

But the tendency to rapid sinking in this substance was in the present

instance materially counteracted by the other parts of the head remaining

undetached from it, so that it sank very slowly and deliberately indeed,

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Nor did it remain unwarranted by the event.



Towards noon whales were raised; but so soon as the ship sailed

down to them, they turned and fled with swift precipitancy;

a disordered flight, as of Cleopatra's barges from Actium.



Nevertheless, the boats pursued, and Stubb's was foremost.

By great exertion, Tashtego at last succeeded in planting

one iron; but the stricken whale, without at all sounding,

still continued his horizontal flight, with added fleetness.

Such unintermitted strainings upon the planted iron must sooner

or later inevitably extract it.  It became imperative to lance

the flying whale, or be content to lose him.  But to haul the boat

up to his flank was impossible, he swam so fast and furious.

What then remained?



Of all the wondrous devices and dexterities, the sleights of hand and

countless subtleties, to which the veteran whaleman is so often forced,

none exceed that fine manoeuvre with the lance called pitchpoling.

Small sword, or broad sword, in all its exercises boasts nothing like it.

It is only indispensable with an inveterate running whale;

its grand fact and feature is the wonderful distance to which the long

lance is accurately darted from a violently rocking, jerking boat,

under extreme headway.  Steel and wood included, the entire spear

is some ten or twelve feet in length; the staff is much slighter

than that of the harpoon, and also of a lighter material--pine.  It is

furnished with a small rope called a warp, of considerable length,

by which it can be hauled back to the hand after darting.



But before going further, it is important to mention here, that though

the harpoon may be pitchpoled in the same way with the lance, yet it

is seldom done; and when done, is still less frequently successful,

on account of the greater weight and inferior length of the harpoon

as compared with the lance, which in effect become serious drawbacks.

As a general thing, therefore, you must first get fast to a whale,

before any pitchpoling comes into play.



Look now at Stubb; a man who from his humorous,

deliberate coolness and equanimity in the direst emergencies,

was specially qualified to excel in pitchpoling.  Look at him;

he stands upright in the tossed bow of the flying boat;

wrapt in fleecy foam, the towing whale is forty feet ahead.

Handling the long lance lightly, glancing twice or thrice along

its length to see if it be exactly straight, Stubb whistlingly

gathers up the coil of the warp in one hand, so as to secure

its free end in his grasp, leaving the rest unobstructed.

Then holding the lance full before his waistband's middle,

he levels it at the whale; when, covering him with it,

he steadily depresses the butt-end in his hand, thereby elevating

the point till the weapon stands fairly balanced upon his palm,

fifteen feet in the air.  He minds you somewhat of a juggler,

balancing a long staff on his chin.  Next moment with a rapid,

nameless impulse, in a superb lofty arch the bright steel spans

the foaming distance, and quivers in the life spot of the whale.

Instead of sparkling water, he now spouts red blood.



"That drove the spigot out of him!" cried Stubb.  "'Tis July's

immortal Fourth; all fountains must run wine today!

Would now, it were old Orleans whiskey, or old Ohio, or unspeakable

old Monongahela!  Then, Tashtego, lad, I'd have ye hold a canakin

to the jet, and we'd drink round it!  Yea, verily, hearts alive,

we'd brew choice punch in the spread of his spout-hole there,

and from that live punch-bowl quaff the living stuff."



Again and again to such gamesome talk, the dexterous dart is repeated,

the spear returning to its master like a greyhound held in skilful leash.

The agonized whale goes into his flurry; the tow-line is slackened,

and the pitchpoler dropping astern, folds his hands, and mutely watches

the monster die.







CHAPTER 85



The Fountain





That for six thousand years--and no one knows how many millions

of ages before--the great whales should have been spouting all over

the sea, and sprinkling and mistifying the gardens of the deep,

as with so many sprinkling or mistifying pots; and that for some

centuries back, thousands of hunters should have been close by

the fountain of the whale, watching these sprinklings and spoutings--

that all this should be, and yet, that down to this blessed minute

(fifteen and a quarter minutes past one o'clock P.M. of this

sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1851), it should still remain

a problem, whether these spoutings are, after all, really water,

or nothing but vapor--this is surely a noteworthy thing.



Let us, then, look at this matter, along with some interesting

items contingent.  Every one knows that by the peculiar

cunning of their gills, the finny tribes in general breathe

the air which at all times is combined with the element

in which they swim; hence, a herring or a cod might live

a century, and never once raise its head above the surface.

But owing to his marked internal structure which gives him

regular lungs, like a human being's, the whale can only live

by inhaling the disengaged air in the open atmosphere.

Wherefore the necessity for his periodical visits to the upper world.

But he cannot in any degree breathe through his mouth, for,

in his ordinary attitude, the Sperm Whale's mouth is buried

at least eight feet beneath the surface; and what is still more,

his windpipe has no connexion with his mouth.  No, he breathes

through his spiracle alone; and this is on the top of his head.



If I say, that in any creature breathing is only a function

indispensable to vitality, inasmuch as it withdraws

from the air a certain element, which being subsequently

brought into contact with the blood imparts to the blood

its vivifying principle, I do not think I shall err;

though I may possibly use some superfluous scientific words.

Assume it, and it follows that if all the blood in a man could

be aerated with one breath, he might then seal up his nostrils

and not fetch another for a considerable time.  That is to say,

he would then live without breathing.  Anomalous as it may seem,

this is precisely the case with the whale, who systematically lives,

by intervals, his full hour and more (when at the bottom)

without drawing a single breath, or so much as in any way

inhaling a particle of air; for, remember, he has no gills.

How is this?  Between his ribs and on each side of his spine

he is supplied with a remarkable involved Cretan labyrinth

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business-like, but still half humorous manner, cursed Pip officially;

and that done, unofficially gave him much wholesome advice.

The substance was, Never jump from a boat, Pip, except--but all

the rest was indefinite, as the soundest advice ever is.

Now, in general, Stick to the boat, is your true motto in whaling;

but cases will sometimes happen when Leap from the boat, is still better.

Moreover, as if perceiving at last that if he should give undiluted

conscientious advice to Pip, he would be leaving him too wide a margin

to jump in for the future; Stubb suddenly dropped all advice,

and concluded with a peremptory command "Stick to the boat, Pip,

or by the Lord, I won't pick you up if you jump; mind that.

We can't afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell

for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama.  Bear that in mind,

and don't jump any more."  Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted,

that though man loved his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal,

which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.



But we are all in the hands of the Gods; and Pip jumped again.

It was under very similar circumstances to the first performance;

but this time he did not breast out the line; and hence, when the whale

started to run, Pip was left behind on the sea, like a hurried

traveller's trunk.  Alas!  Stubb was but too true to his word.

It was a beautiful, bounteous, blue day! the spangled sea calm

and cool, and flatly stretching away, all round, to the horizon,

like gold-beater's skin hammered out to the extremest.  Bobbing up

and down in that sea, Pip's ebon head showed like a head of cloves.

No boat-knife was lifted when he fell so rapidly astern.

Stubb's inexorable back was turned upon him; and the whale was winged.

In three minutes, a whole mile of shoreless ocean was between

Pip and Stubb.  Out from the centre of the sea, poor Pip turned

his crisp, curling, black head to the sun, another lonely castaway,

though the loftiest and the brightest.



Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy

to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore.

But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable.  The intense concentration

of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can

tell it?  Mark, how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea--

mark how closely they hug their ship and only coast along her sides.



But had Stubb really abandoned the poor little negro

to his fate?  No; he did not mean to, at least.

Because there were two boats in his wake, and he supposed,

no doubt, that they would of course come up to Pip very quickly,

and pick him up; though, indeed, such considerations towards

oarsmen jeopardized through their own timidity, is not

always manifested by the hunters in all similar instances;

and such instances not unfrequently occur; almost invariably

in the fishery, a coward, so called, is marked with the same

ruthless detestation peculiar to military navies and armies.



But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip,

suddenly spying whales close to them on one side, turned,

and gave chase; and Stubb's boat was now so far away,

and he and all his crew so intent upon his fish, that Pip's

ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably.

By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him;

but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot;

such, at least, they said he was.  The sea had jeeringly kept

his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul.

Not drowned entirely, though.  Rather carried down alive

to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped

primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes;

and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps;

and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities,

Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects,

that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs.

He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it;

and therefore his shipmates called him mad.  So man's insanity

is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason,

man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason,

is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised,

indifferent as his God.



For the rest blame not Stubb too hardly.  The thing is common

in that fishery; and in the sequel of the narrative, it will then

be seen what like abandonment befell myself.







CHAPTER 94



A Squeeze of the Hand







That whale of Stubb's, so dearly purchased, was duly brought

to the Pequod's side, where all those cutting and hoisting

operations previously detailed, were regularly gone through,

even to the baling of the Heidelburgh Tun, or Case.



While some were occupied with this latter duty, others were employed

in dragging away the larger tubs, so soon as filled with the sperm;

and when the proper time arrived, this same sperm was carefully

manipulated ere going to the try-works, of which anon.



It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when,

with several others, I sat down before a large Constantine's

bath of it, I found it strangely concreted into lumps,

here and there rolling about in the liquid part.

It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid.

A sweet and unctuous duty!  No wonder that in old times this

sperm was such a favorite cosmetic.  Such a clearer! such

a sweetener! such a softener; such a delicious mollifier!

After having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt

like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralize.



As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter

exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship

under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed

my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues,

woven almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers,

and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes

their wine; as.  I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,--

literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets;

I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow;

I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm,

I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit

the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue

in allaying the heat of anger; while bathing in that bath,

I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice,

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marked with their usual cabalistics, and the keystone sun entering

the equinoctial point at Libra.



Before this equatorial coin, Ahab, not unobserved by others,

was now pausing.



"There's something ever egotistical in mountain-tops

and towers, and all other grand and lofty things; look here,--

three peaks as proud as Lucifer.  The firm tower, that is Ahab;

the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous, the undaunted,

and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all are Ahab;

and this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe,

which, like a magician's glass, to each and every man in turn

but mirrors back his own mysterious self.  Great pains,

small gains for those who ask the world to solve them; it cannot

solve itself.  Methinks now this coined sun wears a ruddy face;

but see! aye, he enters the sign of storms, the equinox!

and but six months before he wheeled out of a former equinox

at Aries!  From storm to storm!  So be it, then.  Born in throes,

't is fit that man should live in pains and die in pangs!

So be it, then!  Here's stout stuff for woe to work on.

So be it, then."



"No fairy fingers can have pressed the gold, but devil's

claws must have left their mouldings there since yesterday,"

murmured Starbuck to himself, leaning against the bulwarks.

"The old man seems to read Belshazzar's awful writing.

I have never marked the coin inspectingly.  He goes below; let me read.

A dark valley between three mighty, heaven-abiding peaks,

that almost seem the Trinity, in some faint earthly symbol.

So in this vale of Death, God girds us round; and over all our gloom,

the sun of Righteousness still shines a beacon and a hope.

If we bend down our eyes, the dark vale shows her mouldy soil;

but if we lift them, the bright sun meets our glance half way, to cheer.

Yet, oh, the great sun is no fixture; and if, at midnight, we would

fain snatch some sweet solace from him, we gaze for him in vain!

This coin speaks wisely, mildly, truly, but still sadly to me.

I will quit it, lest Truth shake me falsely."



"There now's the old Mogul," soliloquized Stubb by the try-works,

"he's been twigging it; and there goes Starbuck from the same,

and both with faces which I should say might be somewhere

within nine fathoms long.  And all from looking at a piece

of gold, which did I have it now on Negro Hill or in

Corlaer's Hook, I'd not look at it very long ere spending it.

Humph! in my poor, insignificant opinion, I regard this as queer.

I have seen doubloons before now in my voyagings; your doubloons

of old Spain, your doubloons of Peru, your doubloons of Chili,

your doubloons of Bolivia, your doubloons of Popayan;

with plenty of gold moidores and pistoles, and joes,

and half joes, and quarter joes.  What then should there be

in this doubloon of the Equator that is so killing wonderful?

By Golconda! let me read it once.  Halloa! here's signs and

wonders truly!  That, now, is what old Bowditch in his Epitome

calls the zodiac, and what my almanack below calls ditto.

I'll get the almanack; and as I have heard devils can be raised

with Daboll's arithmetic, I'll try my hand at raising a meaning

out of these queer curvicues here with the Massachusetts calendar.

Here's the book.  Let's see now.  Signs and wonders;

and the sun, he's always among 'em.  Hem, hem, hem; here they are--

here they go--all alive:  Aries, or the Ram; Taurus, or the Bull

and Jimimi! here's Gemini himself, or the Twins.  Well; the sun

he wheels among 'em.  Aye, here on the coin he's just crossing

the threshold between two of twelve sitting-rooms all in a ring.

Book! you lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places.

You'll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come

in to supply the thoughts.  That's my small experience,

so far as the Massachusetts calendar, and Bowditch's navigator,

and Daboll's arithmetic go.  Signs and wonders, eh?  Pity if there

is nothing wonderful in signs, and significant in wonders!

There's a clue somewhere; wait a bit; hist--hark!  By Jove, I have it!

Look you, Doubloon, your zodiac here is the life of man in one

round chapter; and now I'll read it off, straight out of the book.

Come, Almanack!  To begin:  there's Aries, or the Ram--

lecherous dog, he begets us; then, Taurus, or the Bull--

he bumps us the first thing; then Gemini, or the Twins--

that is, Virtue and Vice; we try to reach Virtue,

when lo! comes Cancer the Crab, and drags us back; and here,

going from Virtue, Leo, a roaring Lion, lies in the path--

he gives a few fierce bites and surly dabs with his paw;

we escape, and hail Virgo, the Virgin! that's our first love;

we marry and think to be happy for aye, when pop comes Libra,

or the Scales--happiness weighed and found wanting; and while we

are very sad about that, Lord! how we suddenly jump, as Scorpio,

or the Scorpion, stings us in the rear; we are curing the wound,

when whang comes the arrows all round; Sagittarius, or the Archer,

is amusing himself.  As we pluck out the shafts, stand aside!

here's the battering-ram, Capricornus, or the Goat; full tilt,

he comes rushing, and headlong we are tossed; when Aquarius,

or the Waterbearer, pours out his whole deluge and drowns us;

and to wind up with Pisces, or the Fishes, we sleep.

There's a sermon now, writ in high heaven, and the sun goes through

it every year, and yet comes out of it all alive and hearty.

Jollily he, aloft there, wheels through toil and trouble; and so,

alow here, does jolly Stubb.  Oh, jolly's the word for aye!

Adieu, Doubloon!  But stop; here comes little King-Post;

dodge round the try-works, now, and let's hear what he'll have

to say.  There; he's before it; he'll out with something presently.

So, so; he's beginning."



"I see nothing here, but a round thing made of gold, and whoever raises

a certain whale, this round thing belongs to him.  So, what's all

this staring been about?  It is worth sixteen dollars, that's true;

and at two cents the cigar, that's nine hundred and sixty cigars.

I won't smoke dirty pipes like Stubb, but I like cigars, and here's nine

hundred and sixty of them; so here goes Flask aloft to spy 'em out."



"Shall I call that Wise or foolish, now; if it be really wise it has

a foolish look to it; yet, if it be really foolish, then has it a sort

of wiseish look to it.  But, avast; here comes our old Manxman--the old

hearse-driver, he must have been, that is, before he took to the sea.

He luffs up before the doubloon; halloa, and goes round on the other

side of the mast; why, there's a horse-shoe nailed on that side;

and now he's back again; what does that mean?  Hark! he's muttering--

voice like an old worn-out coffee-mill. Prick ears, and listen!"



"If the White Whale be raised, it must be in a month and a day,

when the sun stands in some one of these signs.  I've studied signs,

and know their marks; they were taught me two score years ago,

by the old witch in Copenhagen.  Now, in what sign will the sun then be?

The horse-shoe sign; for there it is, right opposite the gold.

And what's the horse-shoe sign?  The lion is the horse-shoe sign--

the roaring and devouring lion.  Ship, old ship! my old head shakes

to think of thee."



"There's another rendering now; but still one text.  All sorts of men

in one kind of world, you see.  Dodge again! here comes Queequeg--

all tattooing--looks like the signs of the Zodiac himself.  What says

the Cannibal?  As I live he's comparing notes; looking at his thigh bone;

thinks the sun is in the thigh, or in the calf, or in the bowels,

I suppose, as the old women talk Surgeon's Astronomy in the back country.

And by Jove, he's found something there in the vicinity of his thigh--

I guess it's Sagittarius, or the Archer.  No:  he don't know what to make

of the doubloon; he takes it for an old button off some king's trowsers.

But, aside again! here comes that ghost-devil, Fedallah; tail coiled

out of sight as usual, oakum in the toes of his pumps as usual.

What does he say, with that look of his?  Ah, only makes a sign

to the sign and bows himself; there is a sun on the coin--

fire worshipper, depend upon it.  Ho! more and more.  This way comes Pip--

poor boy! would he had died, or I; he's half horrible to me.

He too has been watching all of these interpreters myself included--

and look now, he comes to read, with that unearthly idiot face.

Stand away again and hear him.  Hark!"



"I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look."



"Upon my soul, he's been studying Murray's Grammar!  Improving his mind,

poor fellow!  But what's that he says now--hist!"



"I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look."



"Why, he's getting it by heart--hist! again."

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also helped to hoist his own weight, by pulling hand-over-hand upon

one of the running parts of the tackle.  Soon he was carefully swung

inside the high bulwarks, and gently landed upon the capstan head.

With his ivory arm frankly thrust forth in welcome, the other

captain advanced, and Ahab, putting out his ivory leg, and crossing

the ivory arm (like two sword-fish blades) cried out in his walrus way,

"Aye, aye, hearty! let us shake bones together!--an arm and a leg!--

an arm that never can shrink, d'ye see; and a leg that never can run.

Where did'st thou see the White Whale?--how long ago?"



"The White Whale," said the Englishman, pointing his ivory arm

towards the East, and taking a rueful sight along it, as if it

had been a telescope; There I saw him, on the Line, last season."



"And he took that arm off, did he?" asked Ahab, now sliding

down from the capstan, and resting on the Englishman's shoulder,

as he did so.



"Aye, he was the cause of it, at least; and that leg, too?"



"Spin me the yarn," said Ahab; "how was it?"



"It was the first time in my life that I ever cruised on the Line,"

began the Englishman.  "I was ignorant of the White Whale at that time.

Well, one day we lowered for a pod of four or five whales, and my

boat fastened to one of them; a regular circus horse he was, too,

that went milling and milling round so that my boat's crew could

only trim dish, by sitting all their sterns on the outer gunwale.

Presently up breaches from the bottom of the sea a bouncing great whale,

with a milky-white head and hump, all crows' feet and wrinkles."



"It was he, it was he!" cried Ahab, suddenly letting out

his suspended breath.



"And harpoons sticking in near his starboard fin.  Aye, aye--

they were mine--my irons," cried Ahab, exultingly--"but on!"



"Give me a chance, then," said the Englishman, good-humoredly. "Well,

this old great-grandfather, with the white head and hump, runs all afoam

into the pod, and goes to snapping furiously at my fast-line!



"Aye, I see!--wanted to part it; free the fast-fish--an old trick--

I know him."



"How it was exactly," continued the one-armed commander,

"I do not know; but in biting the line, it got foul of his teeth,

caught there somehow; but we didn't know it then; so that when we

afterwards pulled on the line, bounce we came plump on to his hump!

instead of the other whale's; that went off to windward, all fluking.

Seeing how matters stood, and what a noble great whale it was--

the noblest and biggest I ever saw, sir, in my life--I resolved

to capture him, spite of the boiling rage he seemed to be in.

And thinking the hap-hazard line would get loose, or the tooth

it was tangled to might draw (for I have a devil of a boat's

crew for a pull on a whale-line); seeing all this, I say,

I jumped into my first mate's boat--Mr. Mounttop's here

(by the way, Captain--Mounttop; Mounttop--the captain);--

as I was saying, I jumped into Mounttop's boat, which, d'ye see,

was gunwale and gunwale with mine, then; and snatching the

first harpoon, let this old great-grandfather have it.  But, Lord,

look you, sir--hearts and souls alive, man--the next instant,

in a jiff, I was blind as a bat--both eyes out--all befogged

and bedeadened with black foam--the whale's tail looming straight

up out of it, perpendicular in the air, like a marble steeple.

No use sterning all, then; but as I was groping at midday,

with a blinding sun, all crown-jewels; as I was groping, I say,

after the second iron, to toss it overboard--down comes the tail

like a Lima tower, cutting my boat in two, leaving each half

in splinters; and, flukes first, the white hump backed through

the wreck, as though it was all chips.  We all struck out.

To escape his terrible flailings, I seized hold of my harpoon-pole

sticking in him, and for a moment clung to that like a sucking fish.

But a combing sea dashed me off, and at the same instant,

the fish, taking one good dart forwards, went down like a flash;

and the barb of that cursed second iron towing along near me

caught me here" (clapping his hand just below his shoulder);

"yes, caught me just here, I say, and bore me down to

Hell's flames, I was thinking; when, when, all of a sudden,

thank the good God, the barb ript its way along the flesh--

clear along the whole length of my arm--came out nigh my wrist,

and up I floated;--and that gentleman there will tell you the rest

(by the way, captain--Dr. Bunger, ship's surgeon:  Bunger, my lad,--

the captain). Now, Bunger boy, spin your part of the yarn."



The professional gentleman thus familiarly pointed out,

had been all the time standing near them, with nothing

specific visible, to denote his gentlemanly rank on board.

His face was an exceedingly round but sober one; he was dressed

in a faded blue woollen frock or shirt, and patched trowsers;

and had thus far been dividing his attention between a marlingspike

he held in one hand, and a pill-box held in the other,

occasionally casting a critical glance at the ivory limbs of

the two crippled captains.  But, at his superior's introduction

of him to Ahab, he politely bowed, and straightway went on

to do his captain's bidding.



"It was a shocking bad wound," began the whale-surgeon;

"and, taking my advice, Captain Boomer here, stood our old Sammy-"



"Samuel Enderby is the name of my ship," interrupted the

one-armed captain, addressing Ahab; "go on, boy."



"Stood our old Sammy off to the northward, to get out of the blazing

hot weather there on the Line.  But it was no use--I did all I could;

sat up with him nights; was very severe with him in the matter of diet-"



"Oh, very severe!" chimed in the patient himself; then suddenly

altering his voice, "Drinking hot rum toddies with me every night,

till he couldn't see to put on the bandages; and sending me

to bed, half seas over, about three o'clock in the morning.

Oh, ye stars! he sat up with me indeed, and was very severe

in my diet.  Oh! a great watcher, and very dietetically severe,

is Dr. Bunger.  (Bunger, you dog, laugh out! why don't ye?

You know you're a precious jolly rascal.) But, heave ahead, boy,

I'd rather be killed by you than kept alive by any other man."



"My captain, you must have ere this perceived, respected sir"--

said the imperturbable godly-looking Bunger, slightly bowing

to Ahab--"is apt to be facetious at times; he spins us many

clever things of that sort.  But I may as well say--en passant,

as the French remark--that I myself--that is to say, Jack Bunger,

late of the reverend clergy--am a strict total abstinence man;

I never drink-"



"Water!" cried the captain; "he never drinks it; it's a sort

of fits to him; fresh water throws him into the hydrophobia;

but go on--go on with the arm story."



"Yes, I may as well," said the surgeon, coolly.  "I was about

observing, sir, before Captain Boomer's facetious interruption,

that spite of my best and severest endeavors, the wound kept getting

worse and worse; the truth was, sir, it was as ugly gaping wound

as surgeon ever saw; more than two feet and several inches long.

I measured it with the lead line.  In short, it grew black;

I knew what was threatened, and off it came.  But I had no hand

in shipping that ivory arm there; that thing is against all rule"--

pointing at it with the marlingspike--"that is the captain's work,

not mine; he ordered the carpenter to make it; he had that club-hammer

there put to the end, to knock some one's brains out with, I suppose,

as he tried mine once.  He flies into diabolical passions sometimes.

Do ye see this dent, sir"--removing his hat, and brushing aside his hair,

and exposing a bowl-like cavity in his skull, but which bore not

the slightest scarry trace, or any token of ever having been a wound--

"Well, the captain there will tell you how that came there; he knows."



"No, I don't," said the captain, "but his mother did;

he was born with it.  Oh, you solemn rogue, you--you Bunger!

was there ever such another Bunger in the watery world?

Bunger, when you die, you ought to die in pickle, you dog;

you should be preserved to future ages, you rascal."



"What became of the White Whale?" now cried Ahab, who thus far had been

impatiently listening to this byeplay between the two Englishmen.



"Oh!" cried the one-armed captain, Oh, yes!  Well; after he sounded,

we didn't see him again for some time; in fact, as I before hinted,

I didn't then know what whale it was that had served me such a trick,

till some time afterwards, when coming back to the Line, we heard

about Moby Dick--as some call him--and then I knew it was he."



"Did'st thou cross his wake again?"



"Twice."



"But could not fasten?"



"Didn't want to try to; ain't one limb enough?  What should I

do without this other arm?  And I'm thinking Moby Dick doesn't

bite so much as he swallows."



"Well, then," interrupted Bunger, "give him your left arm for

bait to get the right.  Do you know, gentlemen"--very gravely

and mathematically bowing to each Captain in succession--"Do

you know, gentlemen, that the digestive organs of the whale

are so inscrutably constructed by Divine Providence, that it is

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if need were, could be statistically stated.



Nor, considered aright, does it seem any argument in favor

of the gradual extinction of the Sperm Whale, for example,

that in former years (the latter part of the last century, say)

these Leviathans, in small pods, were encountered much

oftener than at present, and, in consequence, the voyages

were not so prolonged, and were also much more remunerative.

Because, as has been elsewhere noticed, those whales, influenced by

some views to safety, now swim the seas in immense caravans,

so that to a large degree the scattered solitaries, yokes,

and pods, and schools of other days are now aggregated into

vast but widely separated, unfrequent armies.  That is all.

And equally fallacious seems the conceit, that because the so-called

whale-bone whales no longer haunt many grounds in former years

abounding with them, hence that species also is declining.

For they are only being driven from promontory to cape; and if

one coast is no longer enlivened with their jets, then, be sure,

some other and remoter strand has been very recently startled

by the unfamiliar spectacle.



Furthermore:  concerning these last mentioned Leviathans,

they have two firm fortresses, which, in all human probability,

will for ever remain impregnable.  And as upon the invasion of

their valleys, the frosty Swiss have retreated to their mountains;

so, hunted from the savannas and glades of the middle seas,

the whale-bone whales can at last resort to their Polar citadels,

and diving under the ultimate glassy barriers and walls there,

come up among icy fields and floes! and in a charmed circle

of everlasting December, bid defiance to all pursuit from man.



But as perhaps fifty of these whale-bone whales are harpooned

for one cachalot, some philosophers of the forecastle have

concluded that this positive havoc has already very seriously

diminished their battalions.  But though for some time past

a number of these whales, not less than 13,000, have been

annually slain on the nor'west coast by the Americans alone;

yet there are considerations which render even this circumstance

of little or no account as an opposing argument in this matter.



Natural as it is to be somewhat incredulous concerning the populousness

of the more enormous creatures of the globe, yet what shall we

say to Harto, the historian of Goa, when he tells us that at one

hunting the King of Siam took 4,000 elephants; that in those regions

elephants are numerous as droves of cattle in the temperate climes.

And there seems no reason to doubt that if these elephants,

which have now been hunted for thousands of years, by Semiramis,

by Porus, by Hannibal, and by all the successive monarchs of the East--

if they still survive there in great numbers, much more may

the great whale outlast all hunting, since he has a pasture

to expatiate in, which is precisely twice as large as all Asia,

both Americas, Europe and Africa, New Holland, and all the Isles

of the sea combined.



Moreover:  we are to consider, that from the presumed great longevity

of whales, their probably attaining the age of a century and more,

therefore at any one period of time, several distinct adult

generations must be contemporary.  And what this is, we may soon

gain some idea of, by imagining all the grave-yards, cemeteries,

and family vaults of creation yielding up the live bodies of all

the men, women, and children who were alive seventy-five years ago;

and adding this countless host to the present human population

of the globe.



Wherefore, for all these things, we account the whale immortal

in his species, however perishable in his individuality.

He swam the seas before the continents broke water; he once

swam over the site of the Tuileries, and Windsor Castle,

and the Kremlin.  In Noah's flood he despised Noah's Ark;

and if ever the world is to be again flooded, like the Netherlands,

to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still survive,

and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial flood,

spout his frothed defiance to the skies.







CHAPTER 106



Ahab's Leg







The precipitating manner in which Captain Ahab had quitted

the Samuel Enderby of London, had not been unattended with some small

violence to his own person.  He had lighted with such energy upon a thwart

of his boat that his ivory leg had received a half-splintering shock.

And when after gaining his own deck, and his own pivot-hole there,

he so vehemently wheeled round with an urgent command to the steersman

(it was, as ever, something about his not steering inflexibly enough);

then, the already shaken ivory received such an additional twist

and wrench, that though it still remained entire, and to all

appearances lusty, yet Ahab did not deem it entirely trustworthy.



And, indeed, it seemed small matter for wonder, that for all

his pervading, mad recklessness, Ahab, did at times give careful

heed to the condition of that dead bone upon which he partly stood.

For it had not been very long prior to the Pequod's sailing

from Nantucket, that he had been found one night lying prone upon

the ground, and insensible; by some unknown, and seemingly inexplicable,

unimaginable casualty, his ivory limb having been so violently displaced,

that it had stake-wise smitten, and all but pierced his groin;

nor was it without extreme difficulty that the agonizing wound

was entirely cured.



Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind,

that all the anguish of that then present suffering was but the

direct issue of a former woe; and he too plainly seemed to see,

that as the most poisonous reptile of the marsh perpetuates

his kind as inevitably as the sweetest songster of the grove;

so, equally with every felicity, all miserable events do naturally

beget their like.  Yea, more than equally, thought Ahab;

since both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than

the ancestry and posterity of Joy.  For, not to hint of this:

that it is an inference from certain canonic teachings, that while

some natural enjoyments here shall have no children born to them

for the other world, but, on the contrary, shall be followed by

the joy-childlessness of all hell's despair; whereas, some guilty

mortal miseries shall still fertilely beget to themselves

an eternally progressive progeny of griefs beyond the grave;

not at all to hint of this, there still seems an inequality

in the deeper analysis of the thing.  For, thought Ahab,

t/files/moby11.txt  view on Meta::CPAN

The three corresponding new sails were now bent and reefed,

and a storm-trysail was set further aft; so that the ship soon

went through the water with some precision again; and the course--

for the present, East-south-east--which he was to steer, if practicable,

was once more given to the helmsman.  For during the violence

of the gale, he had only steered according to its vicissitudes.

But as he was now bringing the ship as near her course as possible,

watching the compass meanwhile, lo! a good sign! the wind seemed

coming round astern; aye, the foul breeze became fair!



Instantly the yards were squared, to the lively song of "Ho!

the fair wind! oh-ye-ho cheerly, men!" the crew singing for joy,

that so promising an event should so soon have falsified the evil

portents preceding it.



In compliance with the standing order of his commander--

to report immediately, and at any one of the twenty-four hours,

any decided change in the affairs of the deck,--Starbuck had

no sooner trimmed the yards to the breeze--however reluctantly

and gloomily,--than he mechanically went below to apprise

Captain Ahab of the circumstance.



Ere knocking at his state-room, he involuntarily paused before it

a moment.  The cabin lamp--taking long swings this way and that--

was burning fitfully, and casting fitful shadows upon the old

man's bolted door,--a thin one, with fixed blinds inserted,

in place of upper panels.  The isolated subterraneousness

of the cabin made a certain humming silence to reign there,

though it was hooped round by all the roar of the elements.

The loaded muskets in the rack were shiningly revealed,

as they stood upright against the forward bulkhead.

Starbuck was an honest, upright man; but out of Starbuck's heart,

at that instant when he saw the muskets, there strangely

evolved an evil thought; but so blent with its neutral or good

accompaniments that for the instant he hardly knew it for itself.



"He would have shot me once," he murmured, "yes, there's the very

musket that he pointed at me;--that one with the studded stock;

let me touch it--lift it.  Strange, that I, who have

handled so many deadly lances, strange, that I should shake

so now.  Loaded?  I must see.  Aye, aye; and powder in the pan;--

that's not good.  Best spill it?--wait.  I'll cure myself of this.

I'll hold the musket boldly while I think.--I come to report

a fair wind to him.  But how fair?  Fair for death and doom,--

that's fair for Moby Dick.  It's a fair wind that's only fair for

that accursed fish.--The very tube he pointed at me!--the very one;

this one--I hold it here; he would have killed me with the very

thing I handle now.--Aye and he would fain kill all his crew.

Does he not say he will not strike his spars to any gale?

Has he not dashed his heavenly quadrant? and in these same

perilous seas, gropes he not his way by mere dead reckoning

of the error-abounding log? and in this very Typhoon, did he not

swear that he would have no lightning-rods? But shall this crazed

old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship's company down

to doom with him?--Yes, it would make him the wilful murderer

of thirty men and more, if this ship come to any deadly harm;

and come to deadly harm, my soul swears this ship will,

if Ahab have his way.  If, then, he were this instant--

put aside, that crime would not be his.  Ha! is he muttering

in his sleep?  Yes, just there,--in there, he's sleeping.

Sleeping? aye, but still alive, and soon awake again.

I can't withstand thee, then, old man.  Not reasoning;

not remonstrance; not entreaty wilt thou hearken to;

all this thou scornest.  Flat obedience to thy own flat commands,

this is all thou breathest.  Aye, and say'st the men have vow'd

thy vow; say'st all of us are Ahabs.  Great God forbid!--

But is there no other way? no lawful way?--Make him a prisoner

to be taken home?  What! hope to wrest this old man's living

power from his own living hands?  Only a fool would try it.

Say he were pinioned even; knotted all over with ropes

and hawsers; chained down to ring-bolts on this cabin floor;

he would be more hideous than a caged tiger, then.  I could

not endure the sight; could not possibly fly his howlings;

all comfort, sleep itself, inestimable reason would leave me

on the long intolerable voyage.  What, then, remains?  The land

is hundreds of leagues away, and locked Japan the nearest.

I stand alone here upon an open sea, with two oceans and a

whole continent between me and law.--Aye, aye, 'tis so.--

Is heaven a murderer when its lightning strikes a would-be

murderer in his bed, tindering sheets and skin together?--

And would I be a murderer, then, if"--and slowly, stealthily,

and half sideways looking, he placed the loaded musket's end

against the door.



"On this level, Ahab's hammock swings within; his head this way.

A touch, and Starbuck may survive to hug his wife and child again.--

Oh Mary!  Mary!--boy! boy! boy!--But if I wake thee not to death,

old man, who can tell to what unsounded deeps Starbuck's body this day

week may sink, with all the crew!  Great God, where art Thou?  Shall I?

shall I?--The wind has gone down and shifted, sir; the fore and main

topsails are reefed and set! she heads her course."



"Stern all!  Oh Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart at last!"



Such were the sounds that now came hurtling from out the old man's

tormented sleep, as if Starbuck's voice had caused the long dumb

dream to speak.



The yet levelled musket shook like a drunkard's arm against the panel;

Starbuck seemed wrestling with an angel, but turning from the door,

he placed the death-tube in its rack, and left the place.



"He's too sound asleep, Mr. Stubb; go thou down, and wake him,

and tell him.  I must see to the deck here.  Thou know'st

what to say."







CHAPTER 124



The Needle





Next morning the not-yet-subsided sea rolled in long slow

billows of mighty bulk, and striving in the Pequod's

gurgling track, pushed her on like giants' palms outspread.

The strong unstaggering breeze abounded so, that sky and air

seemed vast outbellying sails; the whole world boomed before

the wind.  Muffled in the full morning light, the invisible

sun was only known by the spread intensity of his place;

where his bayonet rays moved on in stacks.  Emblazonings, as of

t/files/moby11.txt  view on Meta::CPAN

"Your hat, your hat, sir!" suddenly cried the Sicilian seaman,

who being posted at the mizen-mast-head, stood directly behind Ahab,

though somewhat lower than his level, and with a deep gulf

of air dividing them.



But already the sable wing was before the old man's eyes;

the long hooked bill at his head:  with a scream, the black

hawk darted away with his prize.



An eagle flew thrice round Tarquin's head, removing his cap to

replace it, and thereupon Tanaquil, his wife, declared that Tarquin

would be king of Rome.  But only by the replacing of the cap

was that omen accounted good.  Ahab's hat was never restored;

the wild hawk flew on and on with it; far in advance of the prow:

and at last disappeared; while from the point of that disappearance,

a minute black spot was dimly discerned, falling from that vast

height into the sea.







CHAPTER 131



The Pequod Meets The Delight







The intense Pequod sailed on; the rolling waves and days went by;

the life-buoy-coffin still lightly swung; and another ship,

most miserably misnamed the Delight, was descried.

As she drew nigh, all eyes were fixed upon her broad beams,

called shears, which, in some whaling-ships, cross the quarter-deck

at the height of eight or nine feet; serving to carry the spare,

unrigged, or disabled boats.



Upon the stranger's shears were beheld the shattered, white ribs,

and some few splintered planks, of what had once been a whale-boat;

but you now saw through this wreck, as plainly as you see through

the peeled, half-unhinged, and bleaching skeleton of a horse.



"Hast seen the White Whale?"



"Look!" replied the hollow-cheeked captain from his taffrail;

and with his trumpet he pointed to the wreck.



"Hast killed him?"



"The harpoon is not yet forged that will ever will do that,"

answered the other, sadly glancing upon a rounded hammock on

the deck, whose gathered sides some noiseless sailors were busy

in sewing together.



"Not forged!" and snatching Perth's levelled iron from the crotch,

Ahab held it out, exclaiming--"Look ye, Nantucketer; here in this

hand I hold his death!  Tempered in blood, and tempered by lightning

are these barbs; and I swear to temper them triply in that hot place

behind the fin, where the White Whale most feels his accursed life!"



"Then God keep thee, old man--see'st thou that"--

pointing to the hammock--"I bury but one of five stout men,

who were alive only yesterday; but were dead ere night.

Only that one I bury; the rest were buried before they died;

you sail upon their tomb."  Then turning to his crew--"Are

ye ready there? place the plank then on the rail, and lift

the body; so, then--Oh!  God"--advancing towards the hammock

with uplifted hands--"may the resurrection and the life-"



"Brace forward!  Up helm!" cried Ahab like lightning to his men.



But the suddenly started Pequod was not quick enough to escape

the sound of the splash that the corpse soon made as it struck the sea;

not so quick, indeed, but that some of the flying bubbles might have

sprinkled her hull with their ghostly baptism.



As Ahab now glided from the dejected Delight, the strange life-buoy

hanging at the Pequod's stern came into conspicuous relief.



"Ha! yonder! look yonder, men!" cried a foreboding voice in her wake.

"In vain, oh, ye strangers, ye fly our sad burial; ye but turn us

your taffrail to show us your coffin!"







CHAPTER 132



The Symphony





It was a clear steel-blue day.  The firmaments of air and sea were

hardly separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air

was transparently pure and soft, with a woman's look, and the robust

and man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells,

as Samson's chest in his sleep.



Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small,

unspeckled birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air;

but to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue,

rushed mighty leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; and these were

the strong, troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea.



But though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades

and shadows without; those two seemed one; it was only the sex,

as it were, that distinguished them.



Aloft, like a royal czar and king, the sun seemed giving this

gentle air to this bold and rolling sea; even as bride to groom.

And at the girdling line of the horizon, a soft and tremulous motion--

most seen here at the Equator--denoted the fond, throbbing trust,

the loving alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom away.



Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles;

haggardly firm and unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals,

that still glow in the ashes of ruin; untottering Ahab stood

forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting his splintered

helmet of a brow to the fair girl's forehead of heaven.



Oh, immortal infancy, and innocency of the azure!

Invisible winged creatures that frolic all round us!

Sweet childhood of air and sky! how oblivious were ye of old Ahab's

close-coiled woe!  But so have I seen little Miriam and Martha,

laughing-eyed elves, heedlessly gambol around their old sire;

sporting with the circle of singed locks which grew on the marge

of that burnt-out crater of his brain.



Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side

and watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze,

the more and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity.

But the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel,

for a moment, the cankerous thing in his soul.  That glad,

happy air, that winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him;

the step-mother world, so long cruel--forbidding--now threw

affectionate arms round his stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously

sob over him, as if over one, that however wilful and erring,

she could yet find it in her heart to save and to bless.

From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea;

nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.



Starbuck saw the old man; saw him, how he heavily leaned over the side;

and he seemed to hear in his own true heart the measureless

sobbing that stole out of the centre of the serenity around.

Careful not to touch him, or be noticed by him, he yet drew near

to him, and stood there.



Ahab turned.



"Starbuck!"



"Sir."



"Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky.

On such a day--very much such a sweetness as this--I struck

my first whale--a boy-harpooneer of eighteen!  Forty--forty--

forty years ago!--ago!  Forty years of continual whaling! forty

years of privation, and peril, and storm-time! forty years on

the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land,

for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep!

Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not

spent three ashore.  When I think of this life I have led;

the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of

a Captain's exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any

sympathy from the green country without--oh, weariness! heaviness!

Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command!--when I think of all this;

only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before--

and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare--

fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soul!--when the poorest

landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken

the world's fresh bread to my mouldy crusts--away, whole oceans away,

from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for

Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow--

wife? wife?--rather a widow with her husband alive?  Aye, I widowed

that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then,

the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow,

with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously,

foamingly chased his prey--more a demon than a man!--aye, aye! what

a forty years' fool--fool--old fool, has old Ahab been!

Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy the arm

at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer

or better is Ahab now?  Behold.  Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard,

that with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been

snatched from under me?  Here, brush this old hair aside;

it blinds me, that I seem to weep.  Locks so grey did never grow

but from out some ashes!  But do I look very old, so very,

very old, Starbuck?  I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped,

as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries

since Paradise.  God!  God!  God!--crack my heart!--stave my brain!--

mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey hairs, have I lived

enough joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus intolerably old?

Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye;

it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze

upon God.  By the green land; by the bright hearthstone! this

is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye.

No, no; stay on board, on board!--lower not when I do; when branded

Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick.  That hazard shall not be thine.

No, no! not with the far away home I see in that eye!"



"Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart,

after all! why should any one give chase to that hated fish!

Away with me! let us fly these deadly waters! let us home!

Wife and child, too, are Starbuck's--wife and child of

his brotherly, sisterly, play-fellow youth; even as thine, sir,

are the wife and child of thy loving, longing, paternal old age!

Away! let us away!--this instant let me alter the course!

How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl

on our way to see old Nantucket again!  I think, sir, they have

some such mild blue days, even as this, in Nantucket."



"They have, they have.  I have seen them--some summer days

in the morning.  About this time--yes, it is his noon nap now--

the boy vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells

him of me, of cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep,

but will yet come back to dance him again."



"'Tis my Mary, my Mary herself!  She promised that my boy,

every morning, should be carried to the hill to catch the first

glimpse of his father's sail!  Yes, yes! no more! it is done!

we head for Nantucket!  Come, my Captain, study out the course,

and let us away!  See, see! the boy's face from the window!

the boy's hand on the hill!"



But Ahab's glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook,

and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil.



"What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it;

what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor

commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings,

I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time;

recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart,

I durst not so much as dare?  Is Ahab, Ahab?  Is it I, God, or who,

that lifts this arm?  But if the great sun move not of himself;

but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve,

t/files/moby11.txt  view on Meta::CPAN

the white sea-fowls longingly lingered over the agitated pool

that he left.



With oars apeak, and paddles down, the sheets of their sails adrift,

the three boats now stilly floated, awaiting Moby Dick's reappearance.



"An hour," said Ahab, standing rooted in his boat's stern; and he gazed

beyond the whale's place, towards the dim blue spaces and wide wooing

vacancies to leeward.  It was only an instant; for again his eyes

seemed whirling round in his head as he swept the watery circle.

The breeze now freshened; the sea began to swell.



"The birds!--the birds!" cried Tashtego.



In long Indian file, as when herons take wing, the white birds

were now all flying towards Ahab's boat; and when within a few

yards began fluttering over the water there, wheeling round

and round, with joyous, expectant cries.  Their vision was

keener than man's; Ahab could discover no sign in the sea.

But suddenly as he peered down and down into its depths, he profoundly

saw a white living spot no bigger than a white weasel, with wonderful

celerity uprising, and magnifying as it rose, till it turned,

and then there were plainly revealed two long crooked rows of white,

glistening teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable bottom.

It was Moby Dick's open mouth and scrolled jaw; his vast,

shadowed bulk still half blending with the blue of the sea.

The glittering mouth yawned beneath the boat like an open-doored

marble tomb; and giving one sidelong sweep with his steering oar,

Ahab whirled the craft aside from this tremendous apparition.

Then, calling upon Fedallah to change places with him, went forward

to the bows, and seizing Perth's harpoon, commanded his crew

to grasp their oars and stand by to stern.



Now, by reason of this timely spinning round the boat upon its axis,

its bow, by anticipation, was made to face the whale's head

while yet under water.  But as if perceiving this stratagem,

Moby Dick, with that malicious intelligence ascribed to him,

sidelingly transplanted himself, as it were, in an instant,

shooting his pleated head lengthwise beneath the boat.



Through and through; through every plank and each rib,

it thrilled for an instant, the whale obliquely lying on his back,

in the manner of a biting shark slowly and feelingly taking

its bows full within his mouth, so that the long, narrow,

scrolled lower jaw curled high up into the open air, and one

of the teeth caught in a row-lock. The bluish pearl-white

of the inside of the jaw was within six inches of Ahab's head,

and reached higher than that.  In this attitude the White Whale

now shook the slight cedar as a mildly cruel cat her mouse.

With unastonished eyes Fedallah gazed, and crossed his arms;

but the tiger-yellow crew were tumbling over each other's heads

to gain the uttermost stern.



And now, while both elastic gunwales were springing in and out,

as the whale dallied with the doomed craft in this devilish way;

and from his body being submerged beneath the boat, he could not be

darted at from the bows, for the bows were almost inside of him,

as it were; and while the other boats involuntarily paused,

as before a quick crisis impossible to withstand, then it was that

monomaniac Ahab, furious with this tantalizing vicinity of his foe,

which placed him all alive and helpless in the very jaws he hated;

frenzied with all this, he seized the long bone with his

naked hands, and wildly strove to wrench it from its gripe.

As now he thus vainly strove, the jaw slipped from him;

the frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped,

as both jaws, like an enormous shears, sliding further aft,

bit the craft completely in twain, and locked themselves fast

again in the sea, midway between the two floating wrecks.

These floated aside, the broken ends drooping, the crew at

the stern-wreck clinging to the gunwales, and striving to hold

fast to the oars to lash them across.



At that preluding moment, ere the boat was yet snapped, Ahab, the first

to perceive the whale's intent, by the crafty upraising of his head,

a movement that loosed his hold for the time; at that moment his

hand had made one final effort to push the boat out of the bite.

But only slipping further into the whale's mouth, and tilting over

sideways as it slipped, the boat had shaken off his hold on the jaw;

spilled him out of it, as he leaned to the push; and so he fell

flat-faced upon the sea.



Ripplingly withdrawing from his prey, Moby Dick now lay at a

little distance, vertically thrusting his oblong white head up

and down in the billows; and at the same time slowly revolving his

whole spindled body; so that when his vast wrinkled forehead rose--

some twenty or more feet out of the water--the now rising swells,

with all their confluent waves, dazzlingly broke against it;

vindictively tossing their shivered spray still higher into

the air.* So, in a gale, the but half baffled Channel billows only

recoil from the base of the Eddystone, triumphantly to overleap

its summit with their scud.





*This motion is peculiar to the sperm whale.  It receives its designation

(pitchpoling) from its being likened to that preliminary up-and-down

poise of the whale-lance, in the exercise called pitchpoling,

previously described.  By this motion the whale must best and most

comprehensively view whatever objects may be encircling him.





But soon resuming his horizontal attitude, Moby Dick swam swiftly

round and round the wrecked crew; sideways churning the water in his

vengeful wake, as if lashing himself up to still another and more

deadly assault.  The sight of the splintered boat seemed to madden him,

as the blood of grapes and mulberries cast before Antiochus's

elephants in the book of Maccabees.  Meanwhile Ahab half smothered

in the foam of the whale's insolent tail, and too much of a cripple

to swim,--though he could still keep afloat, even in the heart

of such a whirlpool as that; helpless Ahab's head was seen,

like a tossed bubble which the least chance shock might burst.

From the boat's fragmentary stern, Fedallah incuriously and mildly

eyed him; the clinging crew, at the other drifting end, could not

succor him; more than enough was it for them to look to themselves.

For so revolvingly appalling was the White Whale's aspect,

and so planetarily swift the ever-contracting circles

he made, that he seemed horizontally swooping upon them.

And though the other boats, unharmed, still hovered hard by;

still they dared not pull into the eddy to strike, lest that should be

the signal for the instant destruction of the jeopardized castaways,

Ahab and all; nor in that case could they themselves hope to escape.

With straining eyes, then, they remained on the outer edge of

t/files/moby11.txt  view on Meta::CPAN

that thou didst promise.  But I hold thee to the last letter of thy word.

Where is the second hearse?  Away, mates, to the ship! those boats

are useless now; repair them if ye can in time, and return to me;

if not, Ahab is enough to die--Down, men! the first thing that but

offers to jump from this boat I stand in, that thing I harpoon.

Ye are not other men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey me.--

Where's the whale? gone down again?"



But he looked too nigh the boat; for as if bent upon escaping

with the corpse he bore, and as if the particular place of the last

encounter had been but a stage in his leeward voyage, Moby Dick

was now again steadily swimming forward; and had almost passed

the ship,--which thus far had been sailing in the contrary direction

to him, though for the present her headway had been stopped.

He seemed swimming with his utmost velocity, and now only intent

upon pursuing his own straight path in the sea.



"Oh!  Ahab," cried Starbuck, "not too late is it, even now,

the third day, to desist.  See!  Moby Dick seeks thee not.

It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!"



Setting sail to the rising wind, the lonely boat was

swiftly impelled to leeward, by both oars and canvas.

And at last when Ahab was sliding by the vessel, so near

as plainly to distinguish Starbuck's face as he leaned

over the rail, he hailed him to turn the vessel about,

and follow him, not too swiftly, at a judicious interval.

Glancing upwards he saw Tashtego, Queequeg, and Daggoo,

eagerly mounting to the three mast-heads; while the oarsmen

were rocking in the two staved boats which had but just been

hoisted to the side, and were busily at work in repairing them.

One after the other, through the port-holes, as he sped,

he also caught flying glimpses of Stubb and Flask,

busying themselves on deck among bundles of new irons and lances.

As he saw all this; as he heard the hammers in the broken boats;

far other hammers seemed driving a nail into his heart.

But he rallied.  And now marking that the vane or flag

was gone from the main-mast-head, he shouted to Tashtego,

who had just gained that perch, to descend again for another flag,

and a hammer and nails, and so nail it to the mast.



Whether fagged by the three days' running chase, and the

resistance to his swimming in the knotted hamper he bore;

or whether it was some latent deceitfulness and malice in him:

whichever was true, the White Whale's way now began to abate,

as it seemed, from the boat so rapidly nearing him once more;

though indeed the whale's last start had not been so long a one

as before.  And still as Ahab glided over the waves the unpitying

sharks accompanied him; and so pertinaciously stuck to the boat;

and so continually bit at the plying oars, that the blades

became jagged and crunched, and left small splinters in the sea,

at almost every dip.



"Heed them not! those teeth but give new rowlocks to your oars.

Pull on! 'tis the better rest, the sharks' jaw than the yielding water."



"But at every bite, sir, the thin blades grow smaller and smaller!"



"They will last long enough! pull on!--But who can tell"--

he muttered--"whether these sharks swim to feast on the whale

or on Ahab?--But pull on!  Aye, all alive, now--we near him.

The helm! take the helm! let me pass,"--and so saying two of the

oarsmen helped him forward to the bows of the still flying boat.



At length as the craft was cast to one side, and ran ranging

along with the White Whale's flank, he seemed strangely

oblivious of its advance--as the whale sometimes will--and Ahab

was fairly within the smoky mountain mist, which, thrown off

from the whale's spout, curled round his great Monadnock hump;

he was even thus close to him; when, with body arched back,

and both arms lengthwise high-lifted to the poise, he darted

his fierce iron, and his far fiercer curse into the hated whale.

As both steel and curse sank to the socket, as if sucked into

a morass, Moby Dick sideways writhed; spasmodically rolled

his nigh flank against the bow, and, without staving a hole

in it, so suddenly canted the boat over, that had it not been

for the elevated part of the gunwale to which he then clung,

Ahab would once more have been tossed into the sea.

As it was, three of the oarsmen--who foreknew not the precise

instant of the dart, and were therefore unprepared for its effects--

these were flung out; but so fell, that, in an instant two

of them clutched the gunwale again, and rising to its level on

a combing wave, hurled themselves bodily inboard again; the third

man helplessly dropping astern, but still afloat and swimming.



Almost simultaneously, with a mighty volition of ungraduated,

instantaneous swiftness, the White Whale darted through the

weltering sea.  But when Ahab cried out to the steersman to take

new turns with the line, and hold it so; and commanded the crew

to turn round on their seats, and tow the boat up to the mark;

the moment the treacherous line felt that double strain and tug,

it snapped in the empty air!



"What breaks in me?  Some sinew cracks!--'tis whole again; oars! oars!

Burst in upon him!"



Hearing the tremendous rush of the sea-crashing boat, the whale

wheeled round to present his blank forehead at bay; but in

that evolution, catching sight of the nearing black hull of the ship;

seemingly seeing in it the source of all his persecutions;

bethinking it--it may be--a larger and nobler foe; of a sudden,

he bore down upon its advancing prow, smiting his jaws amid fiery

showers of foam.



Ahab staggered; his hand smote his forehead.  "I grow blind;

hands! stretch out before me that I may yet grope my way.

Is't night?"



"The whale!  The ship!" cried the cringing oarsmen.



"Oars! oars!  Slope downwards to thy depths, O sea that ere

it be for ever too late, Ahab may slide this last, last time

upon his mark!  I see:  the ship! the ship!  Dash on, my men!

Will ye not save my ship?"



But as the oarsmen violently forced their boat through

the sledge-hammering seas, the before whale-smitten bow-ends

of two planks burst through, and in an instant almost,

the temporarily disabled boat lay nearly level with the waves;

its half-wading, splashing crew, trying hard to stop the gap

and bale out the pouring water.