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"Look you," roared the Captain, "I'll kill-e you, you cannibal,

if you try any more of your tricks aboard here; so mind your eye."



But it so happened just then, that it was high time for the Captain

to mind his own eye.  The prodigious strain upon the main-sail had

parted the weather-sheet, and the tremendous boom was now flying

from side to side, completely sweeping the entire after part

of the deck.  The poor fellow whom Queequeg had handled so roughly,

was swept overboard; all hands were in a panic; and to attempt

snatching at the boom to stay it, seemed madness.  It flew from

right to left, and back again, almost in one ticking of a watch,

and every instant seemed on the point of snapping into splinters.

Nothing was done, and nothing seemed capable of being done;

those on deck rushed toward the bows, and stood eyeing the boom

as if it were the lower jaw of an exasperated whale.  In the midst

of this consternation, Queequeg dropped deftly to his knees,

and crawling under the path of the boom, whipped hold of a rope,

secured one end to the bulwarks, and then flinging the other

like a lasso, caught it round the boom as it swept over his head,

and at the next jerk, the spar was that way trapped, and all was safe.

The schooner was run into the wind, and while the hands were

clearing away the stern boat, Queequeg, stripped to the waist,

darted from the side with a long living arc of a leap.

For three minutes or more he was seen swimming like a dog,

throwing his long arms straight out before him, and by turns

revealing his brawny shoulders through the freezing foam.

I looked at the grand and glorious fellow, but saw no one to be saved.

The greenhorn had gone down.  Shooting himself perpendicularly

from the water, Queequeg, now took an instant's glance around him,

and seeming to see just how matters were, dived down and disappeared.

A few minutes more, and he rose again, one arm still

striking out, and with the other dragging a lifeless form.

The boat soon picked them up.  The poor bumpkin was restored.

All hands voted Queequeg a noble trump; the captain begged his pardon.

From that hour I clove to Queequeg like a barnacle; yea, till poor

Queequeg took his last long dive.



Was there ever such unconsciousness?  He did not seem to think that he at

all deserved a medal from the Humane and Magnanimous Societies.  He only

asked for water--fresh water--something to wipe the brine off;

that done, he put on dry clothes, lighted his pipe, and leaning against

the bulwarks, and mildly eyeing those around him, seemed to be saying

to himself--"It's a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians.

We cannibals must help these Christians."







CHAPTER 14



Nantucket







Nothing more happened on the passage worthy the mentioning;

so, after a fine run, we safely arrived in Nantucket.



Nantucket!  Take out your map and look at it.  See what a real corner

of the world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore,

more lonely than the Eddystone lighthouse.  Look at it--

a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background.

There is more sand there than you would use in twenty years as a

substitute for blotting paper.  Some gamesome wights will tell you

that they have to plant weeds there, they don't grow naturally;

that they import Canada thistles; that they have to send beyond

seas for a spile to stop a leak in an oil cask; that pieces of wood

in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true cross in Rome;

that people there plant toadstools before their houses, to get under

the shade in summer time; that one blade of grass makes an oasis,

three blades in a day's walk a prairie; that they wear quicksand shoes,

something like Laplander snow-shoes; that they are so shut up,

belted about, every way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island

of by the ocean, that to their very chairs and tables small clams

will sometimes be found adhering as to the backs of sea turtles.

But these extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no Illinois.



Look now at the wondrous traditional story of how this

island was settled by the red-men. Thus goes the legend.

In olden times an eagle swooped down upon the New England

coast and carried off an infant Indian in his talons.

With loud lament the parents saw their child borne out of sight over

the wide waters.  They resolved to follow in the same direction.

Setting out in their canoes, after a perilous passage they

discovered the island, and there they found an empty ivory casket,--

the poor little Indian's skeleton.



What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should take

to the sea for a livelihood!  They first caught crabs and quahogs

in the sand; grown bolder, they waded out with nets for mackerel;

more experienced, they pushed off in boats and captured cod;

and at last, launching a navy of great ships on the sea, explored this

watery world; put an incessant belt of circumnavigations round it;

peeped in at Behring's Straits; and in all seasons and all oceans

declared everlasting war with the mightiest animated mass that

has survived the flood; most monstrous and most mountainous!

That Himmalehan, salt-sea, Mastodon, clothed with such portentousness

of unconscious power, that his very panics are more to be dreaded

than his most fearless and malicious assaults!



And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits,

issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered

the watery world like so many Alexanders; parcelling out among

them the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, as the three

pirate powers did Poland.  Let America add Mexico to Texas,

and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India,

and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this

terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's. For the sea is his;

he owns it, as Emperors own empires; other seamen having but a right

of way through it.  Merchant ships are but extension bridges;

armed ones but floating forts; even pirates and privateers,

though following the sea as highwaymen the road.  they but plunder

other ships, other fragments of the land like themselves,

without seeking to draw their living from the bottomless deep itself.

The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea;

he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships;

to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation.

There is his home; there lies his business which a Noah's flood

would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions

in China.  He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie;

he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters

climb the Alps.  For years he knows not the land; so that

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the skeleton of a sperm whale.  Now, as a vessel of war readily passes

through the Dardanelles, hence a sperm whale could, by the same route,

pass out of the Mediterranean into the Propontis.



In the Propontis, as far as I can learn, none of that peculiar

substance called brit is to be found, the aliment of the right whale.

But I have every reason to believe that the food of the sperm whale--

squid or cuttle-fish--lurks at the bottom of that sea,

because large creatures, but by no means the largest of that sort,

have been found at its surface.  If, then, you properly

put these statements together, and reason upon them a bit,

you will clearly perceive that, according to all human reasoning,

Procopius's sea-monster, that for half a century stove the ships

of a Roman Emperor, must in all probability have been a sperm whale.







CHAPTER 46



Surmises





Though, consumed with the hot fire of his purpose, Ahab in all his

thoughts and actions ever had in view the ultimate capture of Moby Dick;

though he seemed ready to sacrifice all mortal interests to that

one passion; nevertheless it may have been that he was by nature

and long habituation far too wedded to a fiery whaleman's ways,

altogether to abandon the collateral prosecution of the voyage.

Or at least if this were otherwise, there were not wanting other

motives much more influential with him.  It would be refining

too much, perhaps, even considering his monomania, to hint that his

vindictiveness towards the White Whale might have possibly extended

itself in some degree to all sperm whales, and that the more monsters

he slew by so much the more he multiplied the chances that each

subsequently encountered whale would prove to be the hated one he hunted.

But if such an hypothesis be indeed exceptionable, there were still

additional considerations which, though not so strictly according

with the wildness of his ruling passion, yet were by no means

incapable of swaying him.



To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used

in the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order.

He knew, for example, that however magnetic his ascendency in some

respects was over Starbuck, yet that ascendency did not cover

the complete spiritual man any more than mere corporeal superiority

involves intellectual mastership; for to the purely spiritual,

the intellectual but stand in a sort of corporeal relation.

Starbuck's body and Starbuck's coerced will were Ahab's, so long as Ahab

kept his magnet at Starbuck's brain; still he knew that for all this

the chief mate, in his soul, abhorred his captain's quest, and could he,

would joyfully disintegrate himself from it, or even frustrate it.

It might be that a long interval would elapse ere the White Whale

was seen.  During that long interval Starbuck would ever be apt to fall

into open relapses of rebellion against his captain's leadership,

unless some ordinary, prudential, circumstantial influences were brought

to bear upon him.  Not only that, but the subtle insanity of Ahab

respecting Moby Dick was noways more significantly manifested than in his

superlative sense and shrewdness in foreseeing that, for the present,

the hunt should in some way be stripped of that strange imaginative

impiousness which naturally invested it; that the full terror of the

voyage must be kept withdrawn into the obscure background (for few men's

courage is proof against protracted meditation unrelieved by action);

that when they stood their long night watches, his officers and men must

have some nearer things to think of than Moby Dick.  For however eagerly

and impetuously the savage crew had hailed the announcement of his quest;

yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable--

they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness--

and when retained for any object remote and blank in the pursuit,

however promissory of life and passion in the end, it is above all things

requisite that temporary interests and employments should intervene

and hold them healthily suspended for the final dash.



Nor was Ahab unmindful of another thing.  In times of strong emotion

mankind disdain all base considerations; but such times are evanescent.

The permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man,

thought Ahab, is sordidness.  Granting that the White Whale fully

incites the hearts of this my savage crew, and playing round

their savageness even breeds a certain generous knight-errantism

in them, still, while for the love of it they give chase to Moby Dick,

they must also have food for their more common, daily appetites.

For even the high lifted and chivalric Crusaders of old times

were not content to traverse two thousand miles of land to fight

for their holy sepulchre, without committing burglaries,

picking pockets, and gaining other pious perquisites by the way.

Had they been strictly held to their one final and romantic object--

that final and romantic object, too many would have turned

from in disgust.  I will not strip these men, thought Ahab,

of all hopes of cash--aye, cash.  They may scorn cash now;

but let some months go by, and no perspective promise of it to them,

and then this same quiescent cash all at once mutinying in them,

this same cash would soon cashier Ahab.



Nor was there wanting still another precautionary motive more

related to Ahab personally.  Having impulsively, it is probable,

and perhaps somewhat prematurely revealed the prime but private

purpose of the Pequod's voyage, Ahab was now entirely conscious that,

in so doing, he had indirectly laid himself open to the unanswerable

charge of usurpation; and with perfect impunity, both moral and legal,

his crew if so disposed, and to that end competent, could refuse all

further obedience to him, and even violently wrest from him the command.

From even the barely hinted imputation of usurpation, and the possible

consequences of such a suppressed impression gaining ground,

Ahab must of course have been most anxious to protect himself.

That protection could only consist in his own predominating brain

and heart and hand, backed by a heedful, closely calculating attention

to every minute atmospheric influence which it was possible for his

crew to be subjected to.



For all these reasons then, and others perhaps too analytic to be verbally

developed here, Ahab plainly saw that he must still in a good degree

continue true to the natural, nominal purpose of the Pequod's voyage;

observe all customary usages; and not only that, but force himself

to evince all his well known passionate interest in the general pursuit

of his profession.



Be all this as it may, his voice was now often heard

hailing the three mastheads and admonishing them to keep

a bright look-out, and not omit reporting even a porpoise.

This vigilance was not long without reward.

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

his black weedy bulk in the sea like some mossy rock-slide from

the Patagonian cliffs.  His jets are erect, full, and black like soot;

so that from so abounding a smoke in the chimney, you would think

there must be a brave supper cooking in the great bowels below.

Sea fowls are pecking at the small crabs, shell-fish, and other sea

candies and maccaroni, which the Right Whale sometimes carries on

his pestilent back.  And all the while the thick-lipped leviathan

is rushing through the deep, leaving tons of tumultuous white curds

in his wake, and causing the slight boat to rock in the swells

like a skiff caught nigh the paddle-wheels of an ocean steamer.

Thus, the fore-ground is all raging commotion; but behind,

in admirable artistic contrast, is the glassy level of a sea becalmed,

the drooping unstarched sails of the powerless ship, and the inert

mass of a dead whale, a conquered fortress, with the flag of capture

lazily hanging from the whale-pole inserted into his spout-hole.



Who Garnery the painter is, or was, I know not.  But my life

for it he was either practically conversant with his subject,

or else marvellously tutored by some experienced whaleman.

The French are the lads for painting action.  Go and gaze upon

all the paintings in Europe, and where will you find such a

gallery of living and breathing commotion on canvas, as in that

triumphal hall at Versailles; where the beholder fights his way,

pell-mell, through the consecutive great battles of France;

where every sword seems a flash of the Northern Lights,

and the successive armed kings and Emperors dash by, like a

charge of crowned centaurs?  Not wholly unworthy of a place

in that gallery, are these sea battle-pieces of Garnery.



The natural aptitude of the French for seizing the picturesqueness

of things seems to be peculiarly evinced in what paintings

and engravings they have of their whaling scenes.

With not one tenth of England's experience in the fishery,

and not the thousandth part of that of the Americans, they have

nevertheless furnished both nations with the only finished sketches

at all capable of conveying the real spirit of the whale hunt.

For the most part, the English and American whale draughtsmen

seem entirely content with presenting the mechanical

outline of things, such as the vacant profile of the whale;

which, so far as picturesqueness of effect is concerned,

is about tantamount to sketching the profile of a pyramid.

Even Scoresby, the justly renowned Right whaleman,

after giving us a stiff full length of the Greenland whale,

and three or four delicate miniatures of narwhales and porpoises,

treats us to a series of classical engravings of boat hooks,

chopping knives, and grapnels; and with the microscopic diligence

of a Leuwenhoeck submits to the inspection of a shivering world

ninety-six fac-similes of magnified Arctic snow crystals.

I mean no disparagement to the excellent voyager (I honor him

for a veteran), but in so important a matter it was certainly

an oversight not to have procured for every crystal a sworn

affidavit taken before a Greenland Justice of the Peace.



In addition to those fine engravings from Garnery, there are two

other French engravings worthy of note, by some one who subscribes

himself "H. Durand."  One of them, though not precisely adapted to our

present purpose, nevertheless deserves mention on other accounts.

It is a quiet noon-scene among the isles of the Pacific; a French

whaler anchored, inshore, in a calm, and lazily taking water on board;

the loosened sails of the ship, and the long leaves of the palms

in the background, both drooping together in the breezeless air.

The effect is very fine, when considered with reference to its

presenting the hardy fishermen under one of their few aspects of

oriental repose.  The other engraving is quite a different affair:

the ship hove-to upon the open sea, and in the very heart of

the Leviathanic life, with a Right Whale alongside; the vessel

(in the act of cutting-in) hove over to the monster as if to a quay;

and a boat, hurriedly pushing off from this scene of activity,

is about giving chase to whales in the distance.  The harpoons

and lances lie levelled for use; three oarsmen are just setting

the mast in its hole; while from a sudden roll of the sea, the little

craft stands half-erect out of the water, like a rearing horse.

From the ship, the smoke of the torments of the boiling whale is

going up like the smoke over a village of smithies; and to windward,

a black cloud, rising up with earnest of squalls and rains,

seems to quicken the activity of the excited seamen.







CHAPTER 57



Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone;

in Mountains; in Stars





On Tower-hill, as you go down to the London docks, you may have seen

a crippled beggar (or kedger, as the sailors say) holding a painted board

before him, representing the tragic scene in which he lost his leg.

There are three whales and three boats; and one of the boats

(presumed to contain the missing leg in all its original integrity)

is being crunched by the jaws of the foremost whale.

Any time these ten years, they tell me, has that man held up

that picture, and exhibited that stump to an incredulous world.

But the time of his justification has now come.  His three whales

are as good whales as were ever published in Wapping, at any rate;

and his stump as unquestionable a stump as any you will find in

the western clearings.  But, though for ever mounted on that stump,

never a stump-speech does the poor whaleman make; but, with downcast eyes,

stands ruefully contemplating his own amputation.



Throughout the Pacific, and also in Nantucket, and New Bedford,

and Sag Harbor, you will come across lively sketches of whales

and whaling-scenes, graven by the fishermen themselves on

Sperm Whale-teeth, or ladies' busks wrought out of the Right Whale-bone,

and other like skrimshander articles, as the whalemen call

the numerous little ingenious contrivances they elaborately carve

out of the rough material, in their hours of ocean leisure.

Some of them have little boxes of dentistical-looking implements,

specially intended for the skrimshandering business.  But, in general,

they toil with their jack-knives alone; and, with that almost

omnipotent tool of the sailor, they will turn you out anything

you please, in the way of a mariner's fancy.



Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man

to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery.

Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois.  I myself

am a savage, owning no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals;

and ready at any moment to rebel against him.



Now, one of the peculiar characteristics of the savage in

his domestic hours, is his wonderful patience of industry.