App-PigLatin
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How billow-like and boisterously grand! We feel the floods surging
over us, we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters;
sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is about us! But what is
this lesson that the book of Jonah teaches? Shipmates, it is
a two-stranded lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful men,
and a lesson to me as a pilot of the living God. As sinful men,
it is a lesson to us all, because it is a story of the sin,
hard-heartedness, suddenly awakened fears, the swift punishment,
repentance, prayers, and finally the deliverance and joy
of Jonah. As with all sinners among men, the sin of this son
of Amittai was in his wilful disobedience of the command of God--
never mind now what that command was, or how conveyed--
which he found a hard command. But all the things that God
would have us do are hard for us to do--remember that--
and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade.
And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this
disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.
"With this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah still further
flouts at God, by seeking to flee from Him. He thinks
that a ship made by men, will carry him into countries
where God does not reign but only the Captains of this earth.
He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and seeks a ship that's
bound for Tarshish. There lurks, perhaps, a hitherto unheeded
meaning here. By all accounts Tarshish could have been no other
city than the modern Cadiz. That's the opinion of learned men.
And where is Cadiz, shipmates? Cadiz is in Spain; as far by water,
from Joppa, as Jonah could possibly have sailed in those
ancient days, when the Atlantic was an almost unknown sea.
Because Joppa, the modern Jaffa, shipmates, is on the most
easterly coast of the Mediterranean, the Syrian; and Tarshish
or Cadiz more than two thousand miles to the westward from that,
just outside the Straits of Gibraltar. See ye not then, shipmates,
that Jonah sought to flee worldwide from God? Miserable man!
Oh! most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with slouched
hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God; prowling among
the shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas.
So disordered, self-condemning is his look, that had there
been policemen in those days, Jonah, on the mere suspicion
of something wrong, had been arrested ere he touched a deck.
How plainly he's a fugitive! no baggage, not a hat-box, valise,
or carpet-bag,--no friends accompany him to the wharf with
their adieux. At last, after much dodging search, he finds
the Tarshish ship receiving the last items of her cargo;
and as he steps on board to see its Captain in the cabin,
all the sailors for the moment desist from hoisting in the goods,
to mark the stranger's evil eye. Jonah sees this; but in vain
he tries to look all ease and confidence; in vain essays his
wretched smile. Strong intuitions of the man assure the mariners
he can be no innocent. In their gamesome but still serious way,
one whispers to the other--"Jack, he's robbed a widow;"
or, "Joe, do you mark him; he's a bigamist;" or, "Harry lad,
I guess he's the adulterer that broke jail in old Gomorrah,
or belike, one of the missing murderers from Sodom." Another runs
to read the bill that's stuck against the spile upon the wharf
to which the ship is moored, offering five hundred gold coins
for the apprehension of a parricide, and containing a description
of his person. He reads, and looks from Jonah to the bill;
while all his sympathetic shipmates now crowd round Jonah,
prepared to lay their hands upon him. Frighted Jonah trembles.
and summoning all his boldness to his face, only looks so much
the more a coward. He will not confess himself suspected;
but that itself is strong suspicion. So he makes the best of it;
and when the sailors find him not to be the man that is advertised,
they let him pass, and he descends into the cabin.
"'Who's there?' cries the Captain at his busy desk, hurriedly making
out his papers for the Customs--'Who's there?' Oh! how that harmless
question mangles Jonah! For the instant he almost turns to flee again.
But he rallies. 'I seek a passage in this ship to Tarshish;
how soon sail ye, sir?' Thus far the busy Captain had not looked up
to Jonah, though the man now stands before him; but no sooner does
he hear that hollow voice, than he darts a scrutinizing glance.
'We sail with the next coming tide,' at last he slowly answered,
still intently eyeing him. 'No sooner, sir?'--'Soon enough for any
honest man that goes a passenger.' Ha! Jonah, that's another stab.
But he swiftly calls away the Captain from that scent.
'I'll sail with ye,'--he says,--'the passage money how much is that?--
I'll pay now.' For it is particularly written, shipmates, as if it
were a thing not to be overlooked in this history, 'that he paid
the fare thereof' ere the craft did sail. And taken with the context,
this is full of meaning.
"Now Jonah's Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects
crime in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless.
In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel
freely and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper,
is stopped at all frontiers. So Jonah's Captain prepares
to test the length of Jonah's purse, ere he judge him openly.
He charges him thrice the usual sum; and it's assented to.
Then the Captain knows that Jonah is a fugitive; but at the same
time resolves to help a flight that paves its rear with gold.
Yet when Jonah fairly takes out his purse, prudent suspicions still
molest the Captain. He rings every coin to find a counterfeit.
Not a forger, any way, he mutters; and Jonah is put down for his passage.
'Point out my state-room, Sir,' says Jonah now, 'I'm travel-weary;
I need sleep." "Thou look'st like it,' says the Captain,
'there's thy room.' Jonah enters, and would lock the door,
but the lock contains no key. Hearing him foolishly fumbling there,
the Captain laughs lowly to himself, and mutters something about
the doors of convicts' cells being never allowed to be locked within.
All dressed and dusty as he is, Jonah throws himself into his berth,
and finds the little state-room ceiling almost resting on his forehead.
The air is close, and Jonah gasps. Then, in that contracted hole,
sunk, too, beneath the ship's water-line, Jonah feels the heralding
presentiment of that stifling hour, when the whale shall hold him
in the smallest of his bowels' wards.
"Screwed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly
oscillates in Jonah's room; and the ship, heeling over towards the wharf
with the weight of the last bales received, the lamp, flame and all,
though in slight motion, still maintains a permanent obliquity with
reference to the room; though, in truth, infallibly straight itself,
it but made obvious the false, lying levels among which it hung.
The lamp alarms and frightens Jonah; as lying in his berth
his tormented eyes roll round the place, and this thus far
successful fugitive finds no refuge for his restless glance.
But that contradiction in the lamp more and more appals him.
The floor, the ceiling, and the side, are all awry.
'Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!' he groans, "straight upward,
so it burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!'
t/files/moby11.txt view on Meta::CPAN
has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway!
He drooped and fell away from himself for a moment; then lifting
his face to them again, showed a deep joy in his eyes,
as he cried out with a heavenly enthusiasm,--"But oh! shipmates!
on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight;
and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe
is deep. Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low?
Delight is to him--a far, far upward, and inward delight--
who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth,
ever stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him
whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base
treacherous world has gone down beneath him. Delight is to him,
who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys
all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators
and Judges. Delight,--top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges
no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven.
Delight is to him, whom all the waves of the billows of the seas
of the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure Keel
of the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his,
who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath--O Father!--
chiefly known to me by Thy rod--mortal or immortal, here I die.
I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world's, or mine own.
Yet this is nothing: I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man
that he should live out the lifetime of his God?"
He said no more, but slowly waving a benediction, covered his face with
his hands, and so remained kneeling, till all the people had departed,
and he was left alone in the place.
CHAPTER 10
A Bosom Friend
Returning to the Spouter-Inn from the Chapel, I found Queequeg there
quite alone; he having left the Chapel before the benediction some time.
He was sitting on a bench before the fire, with his feet on
the stove hearth, and in one hand was holding close up to his
face that little negro idol of his; peering hard into its face,
and with a jack-knife gently whittling away at its nose,
meanwhile humming to himself in his heathenish way.
But being now interrupted, he put up the image; and pretty soon, going to
the table, took up a large book there, and placing it on his lap began
counting the pages with deliberate regularity; at every fiftieth page--
as I fancied--stopping for a moment, looking vacantly around him,
and giving utterance to a long-drawn gurgling whistle of astonishment.
He would then begin again at the next fifty; seeming to commence at
number one each time, as though he could not count more than fifty,
and it was only by such a large number of fifties being found together,
that his astonishment at the multitude of pages was excited.
With much interest I sat watching him. Savage though he was,
and hideously marred about the face--at least to my taste--
his countenance yet had a something in it which was by no
means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul. Through all his
unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw the traces of a simple
honest heart; and in his large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold,
there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a thousand devils.
And besides all this, there was a certain lofty bearing about
the Pagan, which even his uncouthness could not altogether maim.
He looked like a man who had never cringed and never had had a creditor.
Whether it was, too, that his head being shaved, his forehead was
drawn out in freer and brighter relief, and looked more expansive
than it otherwise would, this I will not venture to decide;
but certain it was his head was phrenologically an excellent one.
It may seem ridiculous, but it reminded me of General Washington's head,
as seen in the popular busts of him. It had the same long regularly
graded retreating slope from above the brows, which were likewise
very projecting, like two long promontories thickly wooded on top.
Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.
Whilst I was thus closely scanning him, half-pretending meanwhile to be
looking out at the storm from the casement, he never heeded my presence,
never troubled himself with so much as a single glance; but appeared
wholly occupied with counting the pages of the marvellous book.
Considering how sociably we had been sleeping together the night previous,
and especially considering the affectionate arm I had found thrown
over me upon waking in the morning, I thought this indifference
of his very strange. But savages are strange beings; at times you
do not know exactly how to take them. At first they are overawing;
their calm self-collectedness of simplicity seems as Socratic wisdom.
I had noticed also that Queequeg never consorted at all, or but very
little, with the other seamen in the inn. He made no advances whatever;
appeared to have no desire to enlarge the circle of his acquaintances.
All this struck me as mighty singular; yet, upon second thoughts,
there was something almost sublime in it. Here was a man some
twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of Cape Horn, that is--
which was the only way he could get there--thrown among people
as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet
he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity;
content with his own companionship; always equal to himself. Surely this
was a touch of fine philosophy; though no doubt he had never heard
there was such a thing as that. But, perhaps, to be true philosophers,
we mortals should not be conscious of so living or so striving.
So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself out for
a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman,
he must have "broken his digester."
As I sat there in that now lonely room; the fire burning low,
in that mild stage when, after its first intensity has warmed the air,
it then only glows to be looked at; the evening shades and phantoms
gathering round the casements, and peering in upon us silent,
solitary twain; the storm booming without in solemn swells;
I began to be sensible of strange feelings. I felt a melting in me.
No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against
the wolfish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it.
There he sat, his very indifference speaking a nature in which
there lurked no civilized hypocrisies and bland deceits.
Wild he was; a very sight of sights to see; yet I began to feel
myself mysteriously drawn towards him. And those same things
that would have repelled most others, they were the very magnets
that thus drew me. I'll try a pagan friend, thought I,
since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy.
I drew my bench near him, and made some friendly signs
and hints, doing my best to talk with him meanwhile.
At first he little noticed these advances; but presently,
upon my referring to his last night's hospitalities,
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a passage to Christian lands. But the ship, having her full
complement of seamen, spurned his suit; and not all the King
his father's influence could prevail. But Queequeg vowed a vow.
Alone in his canoe, he paddled off to a distant strait, which he
knew the ship must pass through when she quitted the island.
On one side was a coral reef; on the other a low tongue of land,
covered with mangrove thickets that grew out into the water.
Hiding his canoe, still afloat, among these thickets, with its
prow seaward, he sat down in the stern, paddle low in hand;
and when the ship was gliding by, like a flash he darted out;
gained her side; with one backward dash of his foot capsized
and sank his canoe; climbed up the chains; and throwing himself
at full length upon the deck, grappled a ring-bolt there,
and swore not to let it go, though hacked in pieces.
In vain the captain threatened to throw him overboard; suspended a
cutlass over his naked wrists; Queequeg was the son of a King,
and Queequeg budged not. Struck by his desperate dauntlessness,
and his wild desire to visit Christendom, the captain at last relented,
and told him he might make himself at home. But this fine young savage--
this sea Prince of Wales, never saw the Captain's cabin.
They put him down among the sailors, and made a whaleman of him.
But like Czar Peter content to toil in the shipyards of foreign cities,
Queequeg disdained no seeming ignominy, if thereby he might
happily gain the power of enlightening his untutored countrymen.
For at bottom--so he told me--he was actuated by a profound
desire to learn among the Christians, the arts whereby to make
his people still happier than they were; and more than that,
still better than they were. But, alas! the practices of whalemen
soon convinced him that even Christians could be both miserable
and wicked; infinitely more so, than all his father's heathens.
Arrived at last in old Sag Harbor; and seeing what the sailors
did there; and then going on to Nantucket, and seeing how they spent
their wages in that place also, poor Queequeg gave it up for lost.
Thought he, it's a wicked world in all meridians; I'll die a pagan.
And thus an old idolator at heart, he yet lived among these Christians,
wore their clothes, and tried to talk their gibberish.
Hence the queer ways about him, though now some time from home.
By hints I asked him whether he did not propose going back,
and having a coronation; since he might now consider his father
dead and gone, he being very old and feeble at the last accounts.
He answered no, not yet; and added that he was fearful Christianity,
or rather Christians, had unfitted him for ascending the pure
and undefiled throne of thirty pagan Kings before him.
But by and by, he said, he would return,--as soon as he felt
himself baptized again. For the nonce, however, he proposed
to sail about, and sow his wild oats in all four oceans.
They had made a harpooneer of him, and that barbed iron was
in lieu of a sceptre now.
I asked him what might be his immediate purpose, touching his
future movements. He answered, to go to sea again, in his old vocation.
Upon this, I told him that whaling was my own design, and informed
him of my intention to sail out of Nantucket, as being the most
promising port for an adventurous whaleman to embark from.
He at once resolved to accompany me to that island, ship aboard
the same vessel, get into the same watch, the same boat,
the same mess with me, in short to share my every hap; with both
my hands in his, boldly dip into the Potluck of both worlds.
To all this I joyously assented; for besides the affection I now
felt for Queequeg, he was an experienced harpooneer, and as such,
could not fail to be of great usefulness to one, who, like me,
was wholly ignorant of the mysteries of whaling, though well
acquainted with the sea, as known to merchant seamen.
His story being ended with his pipe's last dying puff,
Queequeg embraced me, pressed his forehead against mine,
and blowing out the light, we rolled over from each other,
this way and that, and very soon were sleeping.
CHAPTER 13
Wheelbarrow
Next morning, Monday, after disposing of the embalmed head
to a barber, for a block, I settled my own and comrade's bill;
using, however, my comrade's money. The grinning landlord,
as well as the boarders, seemed amazingly tickled at the sudden
friendship which had sprung up between me and Queequeg--
especially as Peter Coffin's cock and bull stories about him
had previously so much alarmed me concerning the very person
whom I now companied with.
We borrowed a wheelbarrow, and embarking our things, including my own poor
carpet-bag, and Queequeg's canvas sack and hammock, away we went down
to "the Moss," the little Nantucket packet schooner moored at the wharf.
As we were going along the people stared; not at Queequeg so much--
for they were used to seeing cannibals like him in their streets,--
but at seeing him and me upon such confidential terms. But we heeded
them not, going along wheeling the barrow by turns, and Queequeg
now and then stopping to adjust the sheath on his harpoon barbs.
I asked him why he carried such a troublesome thing with him ashore,
and whether all whaling ships did not find their own harpoons.
To this, in substance, he replied, that though what I hinted was
true enough, yet he had a particular affection for his own harpoon,
because it was of assured stuff, well tried in many a mortal combat,
and deeply intimate with the hearts of whales. In short, like many
inland reapers and mowers, who go into the farmer's meadows armed
with their own scythes--though in no wise obliged to furnish them--
even so, Queequeg, for his own private reasons, preferred his own harpoon.
Shifting the barrow from my hand to his, he told me a funny
story about the first wheelbarrow he had ever seen.
It was in Sag Harbor. The owners of his ship, it seems, had lent
him one, in which to carry his heavy chest to his boarding house.
Not to seem ignorant about the thing--though in truth he was
entirely so, concerning the precise way in which to manage
the barrow--Queequeg puts his chest upon it; lashes it fast;
and then shoulders the barrow and marches up the wharf.
"Why," said I, "Queequeg, you might have known better than that,
one would think. Didn't the people laugh?"
Upon this, he told me another story. The people of his island
of Rokovoko, it seems, at their wedding feasts express the fragrant
water of young cocoanuts into a large stained calabash like a punchbowl;
and this punchbowl always forms the great central ornament on
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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
when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world,
more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the
landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked
to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer,
out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest,
while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.
CHAPTER 15
Chowder
It was quite late in the evening when the little Moss came snugly
to anchor, and Queequeg and I went ashore; so we could attend
to no business that day, at least none but a supper and a bed.
The landlord of the Spouter-Inn had recommended us to his cousin
Hosea Hussey of the Try Pots, whom he asserted to be the proprietor of one
of the best kept hotels in all Nantucket, and moreover he had assured
us that Cousin Hosea, as he called him, was famous for his chowders.
In short, he plainly hinted that we could not possibly do better
than try pot-luck at the Try Pots. But the directions he had given
us about keeping a yellow warehouse on our starboard hand till we
opened a white church to the larboard, and then keeping that on
the larboard hand till we made a corner three points to the starboard,
and that done, then ask the first man we met where the place was;
these crooked directions of his very much puzzled us at first,
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I thought so. Well then, just step forward there, and take
a peep over the weather bow, and then back to me and tell me
what ye see there."
For a moment I stood a little puzzled by this curious request,
not knowing exactly how to take it, whether humorously or in earnest.
But concentrating all his crow's feet into one scowl, Captain Peleg
started me on the errand.
Going forward and glancing over the weather bow, I perceived
that the ship swinging to her anchor with the flood-tide, was
now obliquely pointing towards the open ocean. The prospect
was unlimited, but exceedingly monotonous and forbidding;
not the slightest variety that I could see.
"Well, what's the report?" said Peleg when I came back;
"what did ye see?"
"Not much," I replied--"nothing but water; considerable horizon though,
and there's a squall coming up, I think."
"Well, what dost thou think then of seeing the world?
Do ye wish to go round Cape Horn to see any more of it, eh?
Can't ye see the world where you stand?"
I was a little staggered, but go a-whaling I must, and I would;
and the Pequod was as good a ship as any--I thought the best--
and all this I now repeated to Peleg. Seeing me so determined,
he expressed his willingness to ship me.
"And thou mayest as well sign the papers right off,"
he added--"come along with ye." And so saying, he led the way
below deck into the cabin.
Seated on the transom was what seemed to me a most uncommon and
surprising figure. It turned out to be Captain Bildad who along
with Captain Peleg was one of the largest owners of the vessel;
the other shares, as is sometimes the case in these ports,
being held by a crowd of old annuitants; widows, fatherless children,
and chancery wards; each owning about the value of a timber head,
or a foot of plank, or a nail or two in the ship.
People in Nantucket invest their money in whaling vessels,
the same way that you do yours in approved state stocks bringing
in good interest.
Now, Bildad, like Peleg, and indeed many other Nantucketers,
was a Quaker, the island having been originally settled by that sect;
and to this day its inhabitants in general retain in an uncommon
measure the peculiarities of the Quaker, only variously and
anomalously modified by things altogether alien and heterogeneous.
For some of these same Quakers are the most sanguinary
of all sailors and whale-hunters. They are fighting Quakers;
they are Quakers with a vengeance.
So that there are instances among them of men, who, named with
Scripture names--a singularly common fashion on the island--
and in childhood naturally imbibing the stately dramatic thee
and thou of the Quaker idiom; still, from the audacious,
daring, and boundless adventure of their subsequent lives,
strangely blend with these unoutgrown peculiarities, a thousand
bold dashes of character, not unworthy a Scandinavian sea-king,
or a poetical Pagan Roman. And when these things unite
in a man of greatly superior natural force, with a globular
brain and a ponderous heart; who has also by the stillness
and seclusion of many long night-watches in the remotest waters,
and beneath constellations never seen here at the north,
been led to think untraditionally and independently; receiving all
nature's sweet or savage impressions fresh from her own virgin
voluntary and confiding breast, and thereby chiefly, but with some
help from accidental advantages, to learn a bold and nervous
lofty language--that man makes one in a whole nation's census--
a mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies.
Nor will it at all detract from him, dramatically regarded,
if either by birth or other circumstances, he have what seems
a half wilful overruling morbidness at the bottom of his nature.
For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness.
Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is
but disease. But, as yet we have not to do with such an one,
but with quite another; and still a man, who, if indeed peculiar,
it only results again from another phase of the Quaker,
modified by individual circumstances.
Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a well-to-do, retired whaleman.
But unlike Captain Peleg--who cared not a rush for what are called
serious things, and indeed deemed those self-same serious things
the veriest of all trifles--Captain Bildad had not only been originally
educated according to the strictest sect of Nantucket Quakerism,
but all his subsequent ocean life, and the sight of many unclad,
lovely island creatures, round the Horn--all that had not moved this
native born Quaker one single jot, had not so much as altered one angle
of his vest. Still, for all this immutableness, was there some lack
of common consistency about worthy Captain Bildad. Though refusing,
from conscientious scruples, to bear arms against land invaders,
yet himself had illimitably invaded the Atlantic and Pacific;
and though a sworn foe to human bloodshed, yet had he in his
straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns upon tuns of leviathan gore.
How now in the contemplative evening of his days, the pious Bildad
reconciled these things in the reminiscence, I do not know;
but it did not seem to concern him much, and very probably he had
long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man's
religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another.
This world pays dividends. Rising from a little cabin boy
in short clothes of the drabbest drab, to a harpooneer in a broad
shad-bellied waistcoat; from that becoming boat-header, chief mate,
and captain, and finally a shipowner; Bildad, as I hinted before,
had concluded his adventurous career by wholly retiring from active
life at the goodly age of sixty, and dedicating his remaining days
to the quiet receiving of his well-earned income.
Now, Bildad, I am sorry to say, had the reputation of being
an incorrigible old hunks, and in his sea-going days, a bitter,
hard task-master. They told me in Nantucket, though it
certainly seems a curious story, that when he sailed the old
Categut whaleman, his crew, upon arriving home, were mostly all
carried ashore to the hospital, sore exhausted and worn out.
For a pious man, especially for a Quaker, he was certainly
rather hard-hearted, to say the least. He never used to swear,
though, at his men, they said; but somehow he got an inordinate
quantity of cruel, unmitigated hard work out of them.
When Bildad was a chief-mate, to have his drab-colored eye
intently looking at you, made you feel completely nervous,
till you could clutch something--a hammer or a marling-spike,
and go to work like mad, at something or other, never mind what.
Indolence and idleness perished from before him. His own
person was the exact embodiment of his utilitarian character.
On his long, gaunt body, he carried no spare flesh,
no superfluous beard, his chin having a soft, economical nap to it,
like the worn nap of his broad-brimmed hat.
Such, then, was the person that I saw seated on the transom
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made him a little waggish in the matter of whales; he followed
these fish for the fun of it; and a three years' voyage round
Cape Horn was only a jolly joke that lasted that length of time.
As a carpenter's nails are divided into wrought nails and cut nails;
so mankind may be similarly divided. Little Flask was one
of the wrought ones; made to clinch tight and last long.
They called him King-Post on board of the Pequod; because, in form,
he could be well likened to the short, square timber known by that name
in Arctic whalers; and which by the means of many radiating side
timbers inserted into it, serves to brace the ship against the icy
concussions of those battering seas.
Now these three mates--Starbuck, Stubb and Flask, were momentous men.
They it was who by universal prescription commanded three of the Pequod's
boats as headsmen. In that grand order of battle in which Captain Ahab
would probably marshal his forces to descend on the whales, these three
headsmen were as captains of companies. Or, being armed with their
long keen whaling spears, they were as a picked trio of lancers;
even as the harpooneers were flingers of javelins.
And since in this famous fishery, each mate or headsman,
like a Gothic Knight of old, is always accompanied by his
boat-steerer or harpooneer, who in certain conjunctures provides
him with a fresh lance, when the former one has been badly twisted,
or elbowed in the assault; and moreover, as there generally
subsists between the two, a close intimacy and friendliness;
it is therefore but meet, that in this place we set down
who the Pequod's harpooneers were, and to what headsman each
of them belonged.
First of all was Queequeg, whom Starbuck, the chief mate,
had selected for his squire. But Queequeg is already known.
Next was Tashtego, an unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most westerly
promontory of Martha's Vineyard, where there still exists the last
remnant of a village of red men, which has long supplied the neighboring
island of Nantucket with many of her most daring harpooneers.
In the fishery, they usually go by the generic name of
Gay-Headers. Tashtego's long, lean, sable hair, his high cheek bones,
and black rounding eyes--for an Indian, Oriental in their largeness,
but Antarctic in their glittering expression--all this sufficiently
proclaimed him an inheritor of the unvitiated blood of those proud
warrior hunters, who, in quest of the great New England moose,
had scoured, bow in hand, the aboriginal forests of the main.
But no longer snuffing in the trail of the wild beasts of the woodland,
Tashtego now hunted in the wake of the great whales of the sea;
the unerring harpoon of the son fitly replacing the infallible arrow
of the sires. To look at the tawny brawn of his lithe snaky limbs,
you would almost have credited the superstitions of some of the earlier
Puritans and half-believed this wild Indian to be a son of the Prince
of the Powers of the Air. Tashtego was Stubb the second mate's squire.
Third among the harpooneers was Daggoo, a gigantic, coal-black
negro-savage, with a lion-like tread--an Ahasuerus to behold.
Suspended from his ears were two golden hoops, so large that the sailors
called them ringbolts, and would talk of securing the top-sail
halyards to them. In his youth Daggoo had voluntarily shipped
on board of a whaler, lying in a lonely bay on his native coast.
And never having been anywhere in the world but in Africa, Nantucket,
and the pagan harbors most frequented by the whalemen; and having
now led for many years the bold life of the fishery in the ships
of owners uncommonly heedful of what manner of men they shipped;
Daggoo retained all his barbaric virtues, and erect as a giraffe,
moved about the decks in all the pomp of six feet five in his socks.
There was a corporeal humility in looking up at him; and a white man
standing before him seemed a white flag come to beg truce of a fortress.
Curious to tell, this imperial negro, Ahasuerus Daggoo, was the
Squire of little Flask, who looked like a chess-man beside him.
As for the residue of the Pequod's company, be it said,
that at the present day not one in two of the many thousand
men before the mast employed in the American whale fishery,
are Americans born, though pretty nearly all the officers are.
Herein it is the same with the American whale fishery as with the
American army and military and merchant navies, and the engineering
forces employed in the construction of the American Canals
and Railroads. The same, I say, because in all these cases
the native American literally provides the brains, the rest
of the world as generously supplying the muscles. No small number
of these whaling seamen belong to the Azores, where the outward
bound Nantucket whalers frequently touch to augment their crews
from the hardy peasants of those rocky shores. In like manner,
the Greenland whalers sailing out of Hull or London, put in at
the Shetland Islands, to receive the full complement of their crew.
Upon the passage homewards, they drop them there again. How it is,
there is no telling, but Islanders seem to make the best whalemen.
They were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod, Isolatoes too,
I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men,
but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own.
Yet now, federated along one keel, what a set these Isolatoes were!
An Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the isles of the sea,
and all the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab in
the Pequod to lay the world's grievances before that bar from
which not very many of them ever come back. Black Little Pip--
he never did--oh, no! he went before. Poor Alabama boy!
On the grim Pequod's forecastle, ye shall ere long see him,
beating his tambourine; prelusive of the eternal time, when sent for,
to the great quarter-deck on high, he was bid strike in with angels,
and beat his tambourine in glory; called a coward here,
hailed a hero there!
CHAPTER 28
Ahab
For several days after leaving Nantucket, nothing above hatches
was seen of Captain Ahab. The mates regularly relieved each other
at the watches, and for aught that could be seen to the contrary,
they seemed to be the only commanders of the ship; only they
sometimes issued from the cabin with orders so sudden and peremptory,
that after all it was plain they but commanded vicariously.
Yes, their supreme lord and dictator was there, though hitherto
unseen by any eyes not permitted to penetrate into the now sacred
retreat of the cabin.
Every time I ascended to the deck from my watches below,
I instantly gazed aft to mark if any strange face were visible;
for my first vague disquietude touching the unknown captain,
now in the seclusion of the sea became almost a perturbation.
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almost perpetually reigns on the threshold of the eternal August
of the Tropic. The warmly cool, clear, ringing perfumed, overflowing,
redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up--
flaked up, with rose-water snow. The starred and stately nights seemed
haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride,
the memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns!
For sleeping man, 'twas hard to choose between such winsome days and
such seducing nights. But all the witcheries of that unwaning weather
did not merely lend new spells and potencies to the outward world.
Inward they turned upon the soul, especially when the still mild
hours of eve came on; then, memory shot her crystals as the clear ice
most forms of noiseless twilights. And all these subtle agencies,
more and more they wrought on Ahab's texture.
Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life,
the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.
Among sea-commanders, the old greybeards will oftenest
leave their berths to visit the night-cloaked deck.
It was so with Ahab; only that now, of late, he seemed so much
to live in the open air, that truly speaking, his visits
were more to the cabin, than from the cabin to the planks.
"It feels like going down into one's tomb,"--he would mutter
to himself--"for an old captain like me to be descending this
narrow scuttle, to go to my grave-dug berth."
So, almost every twenty-four hours, when the watches of the night
were set, and the band on deck sentinelled the slumbers of the band below;
and when if a rope was to be hauled upon the forecastle, the sailors
flung it not rudely down, as by day, but with some cautiousness dropt it
to its place for fear of disturbing their slumbering shipmates; when this
sort of steady quietude would begin to prevail, habitually, the silent
steersman would watch the cabin-scuttle; and ere long the old man
would emerge, gripping at the iron banister, to help his crippled way.
Some considering touch of humanity was in him; for at times like these,
he usually abstained from patrolling the quarter-deck; because to his
wearied mates, seeking repose within six inches of his ivory heel,
such would have been the reverberating crack and din of that bony step,
that their dreams would have been of the crunching teeth of sharks.
But once, the mood was on him too deep for common regardings;
and as with heavy, lumber-like pace he was measuring the ship from
taffrail to mainmast, Stubb, the old second mate, came up from below,
and with a certain unassured, deprecating humorousness, hinted that if
Captain Ahab was pleased to walk the planks, then, no one could say nay;
but there might be some way of muffling the noise; hinting something
indistinctly and hesitatingly about a globe of tow, and the insertion
into it, of the ivory heel. Ah! Stubb, thou didst not know Ahab then.
"Am I a cannon-ball, Stubb," said Ahab, "that thou wouldst
wad me that fashion? But go thy ways; I had forgot.
Below to thy nightly grave; where such as ye sleep between shrouds,
to use ye to the filling one at last.--Down, dog, and kennel!"
Starting at the unforeseen concluding exclamation of the so suddenly
scornful old man, Stubb was speechless a moment; then said excitedly,
"I am not used to be spoken to that way, sir; I do but less than half
like it, sir."
"Avast! gritted Ahab between his set teeth, and violently moving away,
as if to avoid some passionate temptation.
"No, sir; not yet," said Stubb, emboldened, "I will not tamely
be called a dog, sir."
"Then be called ten times a donkey, and a mule, and an ass,
and begone, or I'll clear the world of thee!"
As he said this, Ahab advanced upon him with such overbearing
terrors in his aspect, that Stubb involuntarily retreated.
"I was never served so before without giving a hard blow for it,"
muttered Stubb, as he found himself descending the cabin-scuttle.
"It's very queer. Stop, Stubb; somehow, now, I don't well
know whether to go back and strike him, or--what's that?--
down here on my knees and pray for him? Yes, that was the thought
coming up in me; but it would be the first time I ever did pray.
It's queer; very queer; and he's queer too; aye, take him fore
and aft, he's about the queerest old man Stubb ever sailed with.
How he flashed at me!--his eyes like powder-pans! is he mad!
Anyway there's something's on his mind, as sure as there
must be something on a deck when it cracks. He aint in his
bed now, either, more than three hours out of the twenty-four;
and he don't sleep then. Didn't that Dough-Boy, the steward,
tell me that of a morning he always finds the old man's hammock
clothes all rumpled and tumbled, and the sheets down at the foot,
and the coverlid almost tied into knots, and the pillow a sort
of frightful hot, as though a baked brick had been on it?
A hot old man! I guess he's got what some folks ashore
call a conscience; it's a kind of Tic-Dolly-row they say--
worse nor a toothache. Well, well; I don't know what it is,
but the Lord keep me from catching it. He's full of riddles;
I wonder what he goes into the after hold for, every night,
as Dough-Boy tells me he suspects; what's that for, I should
like to know? Who's made appointments with him in the hold?
Ain't that queer, now? But there's no telling, it's the old game--
Here goes for a snooze. Damn me, it's worth a fellow's
while to be born into the world, if only to fall right asleep.
And now that I think of it, that's about the first thing
babies do, and that's a sort of queer, too. Damn me,
but all things are queer, come to think of 'em. But that's
against my principles. Think not, is my eleventh commandment;
and sleep when you can, is my twelfth--So here goes again.
But how's that? didn't he call me a dog? blazes! he called me ten
times a donkey, and piled a lot of jackasses on top of that!
He might as well have kicked me, and done with it.
Maybe he did kick me, and I didn't observe it, I was so taken all
aback with his brow, somehow. It flashed like a bleached bone.
What the devil's the matter with me? I don't stand right on my legs.
Coming afoul of that old man has a sort of turned me wrong side out.
By the Lord, I must have been dreaming, though--How? how? how?--
but the only way's to stash it; so here goes to hammock again;
and in the morning, I'll see how this plaguey juggling thinks
over by daylight."
CHAPTER 30
The Pipe
When Stubb had departed, Ahab stood for a while leaning over the bulwarks;
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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.
The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less
is here essayed. Listen to what the best and latest authorities
have laid down.
"No branch of Zoology is so much involved as that which is
entitled Cetology," says Captain Scoresby, A.D. 1820.
"It is not my intention, were it in my power, to enter into the inquiry
as to the true method of dividing the cetacea into groups and
families.... Utter confusion exists among the historians of this animal"
(sperm whale), says Surgeon Beale, A.D. 1839.
"Unfitness to pursue our research in the unfathomable waters."
"Impenetrable veil covering our knowledge of the cetacea."
"A field strewn with thorns." "All these incomplete indications
but serve to torture us naturalists."
Thus speak of the whale, the great Cuvier, and John Hunter, and Lesson,
those lights of zoology and anatomy. Nevertheless, though of real
knowledge there be little, yet of books there are a plenty;
and so in some small degree, with cetology, or the science of whales.
Many are the men, small and great, old and new, landsmen and seamen,
who have at large or in little, written of the whale. Run over a few:--
The Authors of the Bible; Aristotle; Pliny; Aldrovandi; Sir Thomas Browne;
Gesner; Ray; Linnaeus; Rondeletius; Willoughby; Green; Artedi; Sibbald;
Brisson; Marten; Lacepede; Bonneterre; Desmarest; Baron Cuvier; Frederick
Cuvier; John Hunter; Owen; Scoresby; Beale; Bennett; J. Ross Browne;
the Author of Miriam Coffin; Olmstead; and the Rev. T. Cheever. But to
what ultimate generalizing purpose all these have written, the above
cited extracts will show.
Of the names in this list of whale authors only those following Owen ever
saw living whales; and but one of them was a real professional harpooneer
and whaleman. I mean Captain Scoresby. On the separate subject
of the Greenland or right-whale, he is the best existing authority.
But Scoresby knew nothing and says nothing of the great sperm whale,
compared with which the Greenland whale is almost unworthy mentioning.
And here be it said, that the Greenland whale is an usurper upon
the throne of the seas. He is not even by any means the largest
of the whales. Yet, owing to the long priority of his claims,
and the profound ignorance which till some seventy years back,
invested the then fabulous and utterly unknown sperm-whale, and which
ignorance to this present day still reigns in all but some few scientific
retreats and whale-ports; this usurpation has been every way complete.
Reference to nearly all the leviathanic allusions in the great
poets of past days, will satisfy you that the Greenland whale,
without one rival, was to them the monarch of the seas. But the time
has at last come for a new proclamation. This is Charing Cross;
hear ye! good people all,--the Greenland whale is deposed,--
the great sperm whale now reigneth!
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This fin is some three or four feet long, growing vertically
from the hinder part of the back, of an angular shape,
and with a very sharp pointed end. Even if not the slightest
other part of the creature be visible, this isolated fin will,
at times, be seen plainly projecting from the surface.
When the sea is moderately calm, and slightly marked with
spherical ripples, and this gnomon-like fin stands up and casts
shadows upon the wrinkled surface, it may well be supposed
that the watery circle surrounding it somewhat resembles a dial,
with its style and wavy hour-lines graved on it. On that Ahaz-dial
the shadow often goes back. The Fin-Back is not gregarious.
He seems a whale-hater, as some men are man-haters. Very shy;
always going solitary; unexpectedly rising to the surface
in the remotest and most sullen waters; his straight and
single lofty jet rising like a tall misanthropic spear upon
a barren plain; gifted with such wondrous power and velocity
in swimming, as to defy all present pursuit from man;
this leviathan seems the banished and unconquerable Cain
of his race, bearing for his mark that style upon his back.
From having the baleen in his mouth, the Fin-Back is sometimes
included with the right whale, among a theoretic species
denominated Whalebone whales, that is, whales with baleen.
Of these so-called Whalebone whales, there would seem to be
several varieties, most of which, however, are little known.
Broad-nosed whales and beaked whales; pike-headed whales;
bunched whales; under-jawed whales and rostrated whales,
are the fisherman's names for a few sorts.
In connexion with this appellative of "Whalebone whales,"
it is of great importance to mention, that however such a nomenclature
may be convenient in facilitating allusions to some kind of whales,
yet it is in vain to attempt a clear classification of the Leviathan,
founded upon either his baleen, or hump, or fin, or teeth;
notwithstanding that those marked parts or features very obviously
seem better adapted to afford the basis for a regular system
of Cetology than any other detached bodily distinctions,
which the whale, in his kinds, presents. How then?
The baleen, hump, back-fin, and teeth; these are things whose
peculiarities are indiscriminately dispersed among all sorts of whales,
without any regard to what may be the nature of their structure
in other and more essential particulars. Thus, the sperm whale and
the humpbacked whale, each has a hump; but there the similitude ceases.
Then this same humpbacked whale and the Greenland whale,
each of these has baleen; but there again the similitude ceases.
And it is just the same with the other parts above mentioned.
In various sorts of whales, they form such irregular combinations;
or, in the case of any one of them detached, such an irregular isolation;
as utterly to defy all general methodization formed upon such a basis.
On this rock every one of the whale-naturalists has split.
But it may possibly be conceived that, in the internal parts
of the whale, in his anatomy--there, at least, we shall
be able to hit the right classification. Nay; what thing,
for example, is there in the Greenland whale's anatomy more
striking than his baleen? Yet we have seen that by his baleen
it is impossible correctly to classify the Greenland whale.
And if you descend into the bowels of the various leviathans,
why there you will not find distinctions a fiftieth part as available
to the systematizer as those external ones already enumerated.
What then remains? nothing but to take hold of the whales bodily,
in their entire liberal volume, and boldly sort them that way.
And this is the Bibliographical system here adopted;
and it is the only one that can possibly succeed, for it alone
is practicable. To proceed.
BOOK I. (Folio) CHAPTER IV. (Hump Back).--This whale is often seen
on the northern American coast. He has been frequently captured there,
and towed into harbor. He has a great pack on him like a peddler;
or you might call him the Elephant and Castle whale. At any rate,
the popular name for him does not sufficiently distinguish him,
since the sperm whale also has a hump though a smaller one.
His oil is not very valuable. He has baleen. He is the most gamesome
and light-hearted of all the whales, making more gay foam and white
water generally than any other of them.
BOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER V. ( Razor Back).--Of this whale
little is known but his name. I have seen him at a distance
off Cape Horn. Of a retiring nature, he eludes both hunters
and philosophers. Though no coward, he has never yet shown any
part of him but his back, which rises in a long sharp ridge.
Let him go. I know little more of him, nor does anybody else.
BOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER VI. (Sulphur Bottom).--Another retiring
gentleman, with a brimstone belly, doubtless got by scraping along
the Tartarian tiles in some of his profounder divings. He is seldom seen;
at least I have never seen him except in the remoter southern seas,
and then always at too great a distance to study his countenance.
He is never chased; he would run away with rope-walks of line.
Prodigies are told of him. Adieu, Sulphur Bottom! I can say nothing
more that is true of ye, nor can the oldest Nantucketer.
Thus ends BOOK I. (Folio), and now begins BOOK II. (Octavo).
OCTAVOES.* These embrace the whales of middling magnitude,
among which at present may be numbered:--I., the Grampus; II., the
Black Fish; III., the Narwhale; IV., the Thrasher; V., the Killer.
*Why this book of whales is not denominated the Quarto is very plain.
Because, while the whales of this order, though smaller than those
of the former order, nevertheless retain a proportionate likeness
to them in figure, yet the bookbinder's Quarto volume in its
dimensioned form does not preserve the shape of the Folio volume,
but the Octavo volume does.
BOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER I. (Grampus).--Though this fish,
whose loud sonorous breathing, or rather blowing,
has furnished a proverb to landsmen, is so well known a denizen
of the deep, yet is he not popularly classed among whales.
But possessing all the grand distinctive features of
the leviathan, most naturalists have recognised him for one.
He is of moderate octavo size, varying from fifteen to twenty-five
feet in length, and of corresponding dimensions round the waist.
He swims in herds; he is never regularly hunted, though his
oil is considerable in quantity, and pretty good for light.
By some fishermen his approach is regarded as premonitory
of the advance of the great sperm whale.
BOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER II. (Black Fish).--I give the popular
fishermen's names for all these fish, for generally they are the best.
Where any name happens to be vague or inexpressive, I shall say so,
and suggest another. I do so now touching the Black Fish,
so called because blackness is the rule among almost
all whales. So, call him the Hyena Whale, if you please.
His voracity is well known and from the circumstance
that the inner angles of his lips are curved upwards,
he carries an everlasting Mephistophelean grin on his face.
This whale averages some sixteen or eighteen feet in length.
He is found in almost all latitudes. He has a peculiar way
of showing his dorsal hooked fin in swimming, which looks
something like a Roman nose. When not more profitably employed,
the sperm whale hunters sometimes capture the Hyena whale,
to keep up the supply of cheap oil for domestic employment--
as some frugal housekeepers, in the absence of company, and quite
alone by themselves, burn unsavory tallow instead of odorous wax.
Though their blubber is very thin, some of these whales will
yield you upwards of thirty gallons of oil.
BOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER III. (Narwhale), that is, Nostril whale.--
Another instance of a curiously named whale, so named I suppose
from his peculiar horn being originally mistaken for a peaked nose.
The creature is some sixteen feet in length, while its horn averages
five feet, though some exceed ten, and even attain to fifteen feet.
Strictly speaking, this horn is but a lengthened tusk, growing out
from the jaw in a line a little depressed from the horizontal.
But it is only found on the sinister side, which has an ill effect,
giving its owner something analogous to the aspect of a clumsy
left-handed man. What precise purpose this ivory horn or lance answers,
it would be hard to say. It does not seem to be used like the blade
of the sword-fish and bill-fish; though some sailors tell me that
the Narwhale employs it for a rake in turning over the bottom of
the sea for food. Charley Coffin said it was used for an ice-piercer;
for the Narwhale, rising to the surface of the Polar Sea, and finding
it sheeted with ice, thrusts his horn up, and so breaks through.
But you cannot prove either of these surmises to be correct.
My own opinion is, that however this one-sided horn may really
be used by the Narwhale--however that may be--it would certainly
be very convenient to him for a folder in reading pamphlets.
The Narwhale I have heard called the Tusked whale, the Horned whale,
and the Unicorn whale. He is certainly a curious example of the
Unicornism to be found in almost every kingdom of animated nature.
From certain cloistered old authors I have gathered that this same
sea-unicorn's horn was in ancient days regarded as the great antidote
against poison, and as such, preparations of it brought immense prices.
It was also distilled to a volatile salts for fainting ladies the same
way that the horns of the male deer are manufactured into hartshorn.
Originally it was in itself accounted an object of great curiosity.
Black Letter tells me that Sir Martin Frobisher on his return from that
voyage, when Queen Bess did gallantly wave her jewelled hand to him from
a window of Greenwich Palace, as his bold ship sailed down the Thames;
"when Sir Martin returned from that voyage," saith Black Letter,
"on bended knees he presented to her highness a prodigious long horn
of the Narwhale, which for a long period after hung in the castle
at Windsor." An Irish author avers that the Earl of Leicester,
on bended knees, did likewise present to her highness another horn,
pertaining to a land beast of the unicorn nature.
The Narwhale has a very picturesque, leopard-like look, being of a
milk-white ground color, dotted with round and oblong spots of black.
His oil is very superior, clear and fine; but there is little of it,
and he is seldom hunted. He is mostly found in the circumpolar seas.
BOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER IV. (Killer).--Of this whale
little is precisely known to the Nantucketer, and nothing
at all to the professed naturalists. From what I have seen
of him at a distance, I should say that he was about the bigness
of a grampus. He is very savage--a sort of Feegee fish.
He sometimes takes the great Folio whales by the lip, and hangs
there like a leech, till the mighty brute is worried to death.
The Killer is never hunted. I never heard what sort of oil he has.
Exception might be taken to the name bestowed upon this whale,
on the ground of its indistinctness. For we are all killers,
on land and on sea; Bonapartes and Sharks included.
BOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER V. (Thrasher).--This gentleman is famous for
his tail which he uses for a ferule in thrashing his foes. He mounts the
Folio whale's back, and as he swims, he works his passage by flogging him;
as some schoolmasters get along in the world by a similar process.
Still less is known of the Thrasher than of the Killer. Both are outlaws,
even in the lawless seas.
Thus ends BOOK II. (Octavo), and begins BOOK III, (Duodecimo.)
DUODECIMOES.--These include the smaller whales. I. The Huzza Porpoise.
II. The Algerine Porpoise. III. The Mealy-mouthed Porpoise.
To those who have not chanced specially to study the subject,
it may possibly seem strange, that fishes not commonly exceeding
four or five feet should be marshalled among WHALES--a word,
which, in the popular sense, always conveys an idea of hugeness.
But the creatures set down above as Duodecimoes are infallibly whales,
by the terms of my definition of what a whale is--i.e. a spouting fish,
with a horizontal tail.
BOOK III. (Duodecimo), CHAPTER 1. (Huzza Porpoise).--This is
the common porpoise found almost all over the globe. The name is
of my own bestowal; for there are more than one sort of porpoises,
and something must be done to distinguish them. I call him thus,
because he always swims in hilarious shoals, which upon the broad sea
keep tossing themselves to heaven like caps in a Fourth-of-July crowd.
Their appearance is generally hailed with delight by the mariner.
Full of fine spirits, they invariably come from the breezy billows
to windward. They are the lads that always live before the wind.
They are accounted a lucky omen. If you yourself can withstand
three cheers at beholding these vivacious fish, then heaven help ye;
the spirit of godly gamesomeness is not in ye. A well-fed, plump
Huzza Porpoise will yield you one good gallon of good oil.
But the fine and delicate fluid extracted from his jaws is
exceedingly valuable. It is in request among jewellers and watchmakers.
Sailors put it on their hones. Porpoise meat is good eating, you know.
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extreme political superstitions invest them, that in some royal
instances even to idiot imbecility they have imparted potency.
But when, as in the case of Nicholas the Czar, the ringed crown
of geographical empire encircles an imperial brain; then, the plebeian
herds crouch abased before the tremendous centralization.
Nor, will the tragic dramatist who would depict mortal indomitableness
in its fullest sweep and direct swing, ever forget a hint,
incidentally so important in his art, as the one now alluded to.
But Ahab, my Captain, still moves before me in all his Nantucket
grimness and shagginess; and in this episode touching Emperors
and Kings, I must not conceal that I have only to do with a poor old
whale-hunter like him; and, therefore, all outward majestical trappings
and housings are denied me. Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee,
it must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep,
and featured in the unbodied air!
CHAPTER 34
The Cabin-Table
It is noon; and Dough-Boy, the steward, thrusting his pale loaf-of-bread
face from the cabin-scuttle, announces dinner to his lord and master who,
sitting in the lee quarter-boat, has just been taking an observation
of the sun; and is now mutely reckoning the latitude on the smooth,
medallion-shaped tablet, reserved for that daily purpose on the upper
part of his ivory leg. From his complete inattention to the tidings,
you would think that moody Ahab had not heard his menial. But presently,
catching hold of the mizen shrouds, he swings himself to the deck,
and in an even, unexhilarated voice, saying, "Dinner, Mr. Starbuck,"
disappears into the cabin.
When the last echo of his sultan's step has died away, and Starbuck,
the first Emir, has every reason to suppose that he is seated,
then Starbuck rouses from his quietude, takes a few turns along
the planks, and, after a grave peep into the binnacle, says, with some
touch of pleasantness, "Dinner, Mr. Stubb," and descends the scuttle.
The second Emir lounges about the rigging awhile, and then slightly
shaking the main brace, to see whether it will be all right with that
important rope, he likewise takes up the old burden, and with a rapid
"Dinner, Mr. Flask," follows after his predecessors.
But the third Emir, now seeing himself all alone on the quarter-deck,
seems to feel relieved from some curious restraint; for, tipping all
sorts of knowing winks in all sorts of directions, and kicking off
his shoes, he strikes into a sharp but noiseless squall of a hornpipe
right over the Grand Turk's head; and then, by a dexterous sleight,
pitching his cap up into the mizentop for a shelf, he goes down
rollicking so far at least as he remains visible from the deck,
reversing all other processions, by bringing up the rear with music.
But ere stepping into the cabin doorway below, he pauses,
ships a new face altogether, and, then, independent, hilarious little
Flask enters King Ahab's presence, in the character of Abjectus,
or the Slave.
It is not the least among the strange things bred by the intense
artificialness of sea-usages, that while in the open air of the deck
some officers will, upon provocation, bear themselves boldly
and defyingly enough towards their commander; yet, ten to one,
let those very officers the next moment go down to their
customary dinner in that same commander's cabin, and straightway
their inoffensive, not to say deprecatory and humble air towards him,
as he sits at the head of the table; this is marvellous,
sometimes most comical. Wherefore this difference? A problem?
Perhaps not. To have been Belshazzar, King of Babylon;
and to have been Belshazzar, not haughtily but courteously,
therein certainly must have been some touch of mundane grandeur.
But he who in the rightly regal and intelligent spirit presides
over his own private dinner-table of invited guests, that man's
unchallenged power and dominion of individual influence for the time;
that man's royalty of state transcends Belshazzar's, for Belshazzar
was not the greatest. Who has but once dined his friends, has tasted
what it is to be Caesar. It is a witchery of social czarship
which there is no withstanding. Now, if to this consideration
you super-add the official supremacy of a ship-master, then,
by inference, you will derive the cause of that peculiarity
of sea-life just mentioned.
Over his ivory-inlaid table, Ahab presided like a mute, maned sea-lion
on the white coral beach, surrounded by his war-like but still
deferential cubs. In his own proper turn, each officer waited
to be served. They were as little children before Ahab; and yet,
in Ahab, there seemed not to lurk the smallest social arrogance.
With one mind, their intent eyes all fastened upon the old man's knife,
as he carved the chief dish before him. I do not suppose that for the
world they would have profaned that moment with the slightest observation,
even upon so neutral a topic as the weather. No! And when reaching
out his knife and fork, between which the slice of beef was locked,
Ahab thereby motioned Starbuck's plate towards him, the mate
received his meat as though receiving alms; and cut it tenderly;
and a little started if, perchance, the knife grazed against the plate;
and chewed it noiselessly; and swallowed it, not without circumspection.
For, like the Coronation banquet at Frankfort, where the German Emperor
profoundly dines with the seven Imperial Electors, so these cabin
meals were somehow solemn meals, eaten in awful silence; and yet at
table old Ahab forbade not conversation; only he himself was dumb.
What a relief it was to choking Stubb, when a rat made a sudden
racket in the hold below. And poor little Flask, he was
the youngest son, and little boy of this weary family party.
His were the shin-bones of the saline beef; his would have been
the drumsticks. For Flask to have presumed to help himself,
this must have seemed to him tantamount to larceny in the first degree.
Had he helped himself at that table, doubtless, never more would
he have been able to hold his head up in this honest world;
nevertheless, strange to say, Ahab never forbade him. And had Flask
helped himself, the chances were Ahab had never so much as noticed it.
Least of all, did Flask presume to help himself to butter.
Whether he thought the owners of the ship denied it to him,
on account of its clotting his clear, sunny complexion; or whether
he deemed that, on so long a voyage in such marketless waters,
butter was at a premium, and therefore was not for him, a subaltern;
however it was, Flask, alas! was a butterless man!
Another thing. Flask was the last person down at the dinner,
and Flask is the first man up. Consider! For hereby Flask's
dinner was badly jammed in point of time. Starbuck and Stubb
both had the start of him; and yet they also have the privilege
of lounging in the rear. If Stubb even, who is but a peg higher
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Ha! ha! ha! ha! hem! clear my throat!--I've been thinking
over it ever since, and that ha, ha's the final consequence.
Why so? Because a laugh's the wisest, easiest answer to all
that's queer; and come what will, one comfort's always left--
that unfailing comfort is, it's all predestinated.
I heard not all his talk with Starbuck; but to my poor eye
Starbuck then looked something as I the other evening felt.
Be sure the old Mogul has fixed him, too. I twigged it, knew it;
had had the gift, might readily have prophesied it--for when I
clapped my eye upon his skull I saw it. Well, Stubb, wise Stubb--
that's my title--well, Stubb, what of it, Stubb? Here's a carcase.
I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will,
I'll go to it laughing. Such a waggish leering as lurks
in all your horribles! I feel funny. Fa, la! lirra, skirra!
What's my juicy little pear at home doing now? Crying its eyes out?--
Giving a party to the last arrived harpooneers, I dare say,
gay as a frigate's pennant, and so am I--fa, la! lirra, skirra! Oh--
We'll drink to-night with hearts as light,
To love, as gay and fleeting
As bubbles that swim, on the beaker's brim,
And break on the lips while meeting.
A brave stave that--who calls? Mr. Starbuck? Aye, aye, sir--
(Aside) he's my superior, he has his too, if I'm not mistaken.--
Aye, aye, sir, just through with this job--coming.
CHAPTER 40
Midnight, Forecastle
HARPOONEERS AND SAILORS
(Foresail rises and discovers the watch standing, lounging, leaning,
and lying in various attitudes, all singing in chorus.)
Farewell and adieu to you, Spanish ladies!
Farewell and adieu to you, ladies of Spain!
Our captain's commanded.--
1ST NANTUCKET SAILOR
Oh, boys, don't be sentimental. it's bad for the digestion!
Take a tonic, follow me! (Sings, and all follow)
Our captain stood upon the deck,
A spy-glass in his hand,
A viewing of those gallant whales
That blew at every strand.
Oh, your tubs in your boats, my boys,
And by your braces stand,
And we'll have one of those fine whales,
Hand, boys, over hand!
So, be cheery, my lads! may your hearts never fail!
While the bold harpooneer is striking the whale!
MATE'S VOICE FROM THE QUARTER-DECK
Eight bells there, forward!
2ND NANTUCKET SAILOR
Avast the chorus! Eight bells there! d'ye hear, bell-boy? Strike
the bell eight, thou Pip! thou blackling! and let me call the watch.
I've the sort of mouth for that--the hogshead mouth. So, so,
(thrusts his head down the scuttle,) Star-bo-l-e-e-n-s, a-h-o-y!
Eight bells there below! Tumble up!
DUTCH SAILOR
Grand snoozing to-night, maty; fat night for that. I mark this in our old
Mogul's wine; it's quite as deadening to some as filliping to others.
We sing; they sleep--aye, lie down there, like ground-tier butts.
At 'em again! There, take this copper-pump, and hail 'em through it.
Tell 'em to avast dreaming of their lassies. Tell 'em it's
the resurrection; they must kiss their last, and come to judgment.
That's the way--that's it; thy throat ain't spoiled with
eating Amsterdam butter.
FRENCH SAILOR
Hist, boys! let's have a jig or two before we ride to anchor
in Blanket Bay. What say ye? There comes the other watch.
Stand by all legs! Pip! little Pip! hurrah with your tambourine!
PIP (Sulky and sleepy)
Don't know where it is.
FRENCH SAILOR
Beat thy belly, then, and wag thy ears. Jig it, men, I say;
merry's the word; hurrah! Damn me, won't you dance?
Form, now, Indian-file, and gallop into the double-shuffle?
Throw yourselves! Legs! legs!
ICELAND SAILOR
I don't like your floor, maty; it's too springy to my taste.
I'm used to ice-floors. I'm sorry to throw cold water on the subject;
but excuse me.
MALTESE SAILOR
Me too; where's your girls? Who but a fool would take his left hand
by his right, and say to himself, how d'ye do? Partners! I must
have partners!
SICILIAN SAILOR
Aye; girls and a green!--then I'll hop with ye; yea, turn grasshopper!
LONG-ISLAND SAILOR
Well, well, ye sulkies, there's plenty more of us.
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Jimmini, what a squall! But those chaps there are worse yet--
they are your white squalls, they. White squalls? white whale,
shirr! shirr! Here have I heard all their chat just now,
and the white whale--shirr! shirr!--but spoken of once! and only
this evening--it makes me jingle all over like my tambourine--
that anaconda of an old man swore 'em in to hunt him!
Oh! thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness,
have mercy on this small black boy down here; preserve him
from all men that have no bowels to feel fear!
CHAPTER 41
Moby Dick
I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest;
my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more
did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul.
A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab's quenchless
feud seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that
murderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths
of violence and revenge.
For some time past, though at intervals only, the unaccompanied,
secluded White Whale had haunted those uncivilized seas mostly
frequented by the Sperm Whale fishermen. But not all of them
knew of his existence; only a few of them, comparatively,
had knowingly seen him; while the number who as yet had
actually and knowingly given battle to him, was small indeed.
For, owing to the large number of whale-cruisers; the disorderly
way they were sprinkled over the entire watery circumference,
many of them adventurously pushing their quest along
solitary latitudes, so as seldom or never for a whole twelvemonth
or more on a stretch, to encounter a single news-telling sail
of any sort; the inordinate length of each separate voyage;
the irregularity of the times of sailing from home; all these,
with other circumstances, direct and indirect, long obstructed
the spread through the whole world-wide whaling-fleet of the special
individualizing tidings concerning Moby Dick. It was hardly
to be doubted, that several vessels reported to have encountered,
at such or such a time, or on such or such a meridian,
a Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude and malignity, which whale,
after doing great mischief to his assailants, has completely
escaped them; to some minds it was not an unfair presumption,
I say, that the whale in question must have been no other than
Moby Dick. Yet as of late the Sperm Whale fishery had been
marked by various and not unfrequent instances of great ferocity,
cunning, and malice in the monster attacked; therefore it was,
that those who by accident ignorantly gave battle to Moby Dick;
such hunters, perhaps, for the most part, were content to ascribe
the peculiar terror he bred, more, as it were, to the perils
of the Sperm Whale fishery at large, than to the individual cause.
In that way, mostly, the disastrous encounter between Ahab
and the whale had hitherto been popularly regarded.
And as for those who, previously hearing of the White Whale,
by chance caught sight of him; in the beginning of the thing
they had every one of them, almost, as boldly and fearlessly
lowered for him, as for any other whale of that species.
But at length, such calamities did ensue in these assaults--
not restricted to sprained wrists and ankles, broken limbs,
or devouring amputations--but fatal to the last degree of fatality;
those repeated disastrous repulses, all accumulating and piling
their terrors upon Moby Dick; those things had gone far to
shake the fortitude of many brave hunters, to whom the story
of the White Whale had eventually come.
Nor did wild rumors of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and still
the more horrify the true histories of these deadly encounters.
For not only do fabulous rumors naturally grow out of the very body
of all surprising terrible events,--as the smitten tree gives birth
to its fungi; but, in maritime life, far more than in that of terra firma,
wild rumors abound, wherever there is any adequate reality for them
to cling to. And as the sea surpasses the land in this matter,
so the whale fishery surpasses every other sort of maritime life,
in the wonderfulness and fearfulness of the rumors which sometimes
circulate there. For not only are whalemen as a body unexempt
from that ignorance and superstitiousness hereditary to all sailors;
but of all sailors, they are by all odds the most directly brought
into contact with whatever is appallingly astonishing in the sea;
face to face they not only eye its greatest marvels, but, hand to jaw,
give battle to them. Alone, in such remotest waters, that though
you sailed a thousand miles, and passed a thousand shores, you would
not come to any chiselled hearth-stone, or aught hospitable beneath
that part of the sun; in such latitudes and longitudes, pursuing too
such a calling as he does, the whaleman is wrapped by influences
all tending to make his fancy pregnant with many a mighty birth.
No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit
over the wildest watery spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Whale
did in the end incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints,
and half-formed foetal suggestions of supernatural agencies,
which eventually invested Moby Dick with new terrors unborrowed from
anything that visibly appears. So that in many cases such a panic
did he finally strike, that few who by those rumors, at least,
had heard of the White Whale, few of those hunters were willing
to encounter the perils of his jaw.
But there were still other and more vital practical influences at work.
Nor even at the present day has the original prestige of the
Sperm Whale, as fearfully distinguished from all other species
of the leviathan, died out of the minds of the whalemen as a body.
There are those this day among them, who, though intelligent and
courageous enough in offering battle to the Greenland or Right whale,
would perhaps--either from professional inexperience, or incompetency,
or timidity, decline a contest with the Sperm Whale; at any rate,
there are plenty of whalemen, especially among those whaling nations
not sailing under the American flag, who have never hostilely
encountered the Sperm Whale, but whose sole knowledge of the leviathan
is restricted to the ignoble monster primitively pursued in the North;
seated on their hatches, these men will hearken with a childish fireside
interest and awe, to the wild, strange tales of Southern whaling.
Nor is the preeminent tremendousness of the great Sperm Whale
anywhere more feelingly comprehended, than on board of those prows
which stem him.
And as if the now tested reality of his might had in former legendary
times thrown its shadow before it; we find some book naturalists--
Olassen and Povelson--declaring the Sperm Whale not only to be
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"Ere the cry could go aft Steelkilt was shaking one of the backstays
leading far aloft to where two of his comrades were standing
their mastheads. They were both Canallers.
"'Canallers!' cried Don Pedro. 'We have seen many whaleships
in our harbors, but never heard of your Canallers. Pardon: who and
what are they?'
"'Canallers, Don, are the boatmen belonging to our grand
Erie Canal. You must have heard of it.'
"'Nay, Senor; hereabouts in this dull, warm, most lazy,
and hereditary land, we know but little of your vigorous North.'
"'Aye? Well then, Don, refill my cup. Your chicha's very fine;
and ere proceeding further I will tell ye what our Canallers are;
for such information may throw side-light upon my story.'
"For three hundred and sixty miles, gentlemen, through the entire breadth
of the state of New York; through numerous populous cities and most
thriving villages; through long, dismal, uninhabited swamps, and affluent,
cultivated fields, unrivalled for fertility; by billiard-room
and bar-room; through the holy-of-holies of great forests; on Roman arches
over Indian rivers; through sun and shade; by happy hearts or broken;
through all the wide contrasting scenery of those noble Mohawk counties;
and especially, by rows of snow-white chapels, whose spires stand
almost like milestones, flows one continual stream of Venetianly
corrupt and often lawless life. There's your true Ashantee, gentlemen;
there howl your pagans; where you ever find them, next door to you;
under the long-flung shadow, and the snug patronizing lee of churches.
For by some curious fatality, as it is often noted of your metropolitan
freebooters that they ever encamp around the halls of justice,
so sinners, gentlemen, most abound in holiest vicinities.
"'Is that a friar passing?' said Don Pedro, looking downwards
into the crowded plazza, with humorous concern.
"'Well for our northern friend, Dame Isabella's Inquisition wanes
in Lima,' laughed Don Sebastian. 'Proceed, Senor.'
"'A moment! Pardon!' cried another of the company. 'In the name
of all us Limeese, I but desire to express to you, sir sailor,
that we have by no means overlooked your delicacy in not substituting
present Lima for distant Venice in your corrupt comparison.
Oh! do not bow and look surprised: you know the proverb all along
this coast--"Corrupt as Lima." It but bears out your saying, too;
churches more plentiful than billiard-tables, and for ever open-and
"Corrupt as Lima." So, too, Venice; I have been there; the holy
city of the blessed evangelist, St. Mark!--St. Dominic, purge it!
Your cup! Thanks: here I refill; now, you pour out again.'
"Freely depicted in his own vocation, gentlemen, the Canaller
would make a fine dramatic hero, so abundantly and picturesquely
wicked is he. Like Mark Antony, for days and days along his
green-turfed, flowery Nile, he indolently floats, openly toying
with his red-cheeked Cleopatra, ripening his apricot thigh upon
the sunny deck. But ashore, all this effeminacy is dashed.
The brigandish guise which the Canaller so proudly sports;
his slouched and gaily-ribboned hat betoken his grand features.
A terror to the smiling innocence of the villages through which he floats;
his swart visage and bold swagger are not unshunned in cities.
Once a vagabond on his own canal, I have received good turns
from one of these Canallers; I thank him heartily; would fain be
not ungrateful; but it is often one of the prime redeeming qualities
of your man of violence, that at times he has as stiff an arm
to back a poor stranger in a strait, as to plunder a wealthy one.
In sum, gentlemen, what the wildness of this canal life is,
is emphatically evinced by this; that our wild whale-fishery contains so
many of its most finished graduates, and that scarce any race of mankind,
except Sydney men, are so much distrusted by our whaling captains.
Nor does it at all diminish the curiousness of this matter, that to
many thousands of our rural boys and young men born along its line,
the probationary life of the Grand Canal furnishes the sole transition
between quietly reaping in a Christian corn-field, and recklessly
ploughing the waters of the most barbaric seas.
"'I see! I see!' impetuously exclaimed Don Pedro, spilling his
chicha upon his silvery ruffles. 'No need to travel!
The world's one Lima. I had thought, now, that at your temperate
North the generations were cold and holy as the hills.--
But the story.'
"I had left off, gentlemen, where the Lakeman shook the backstay.
Hardly had he done so, when he was surrounded by the three junior
mates and the four harpooneers, who all crowded him to the deck.
But sliding down the ropes like baleful comets, the two Canallers
rushed into the uproar, and sought to drag their man out of it towards
the forecastle. Others of the sailors joined with them in this attempt,
and a twisted turmoil ensued; while standing out of harm's way,
the valiant captain danced up and down with a whale-pike, calling
upon his officers to manhandle that atrocious scoundrel, and smoke
him along to the quarter-deck. At intervals, he ran close up to
the revolving border of the confusion, and prying into the heart of it
with his pike, sought to prick out the object of his resentment.
But Steelkilt and his desperadoes were too much for them all;
they succeeded in gaining the forecastle deck, where, hastily slewing
about three or four large casks in a line with the windlass,
these sea-Parisians entrenched themselves behind the barricade.
"'Come out of that, ye pirates!' roared the captain, now menacing
them with a pistol in each hand, just brought to him by the steward.
'Come out of that, ye cut-throats!'
"Steelkilt leaped on the barricade, and striding up and down there,
defied the worst the pistols could do; but gave the captain
to understand distinctly, that his (Steelkilt's) death would
be the signal for a murderous mutiny on the part of all hands.
Fearing in his heart lest this might prove but too true,
the captain a little desisted, but still commanded the insurgents
instantly to return to their duty.
"'Will you promise not to touch us, if we do?' demanded their ringleader.
"'Turn to! turn to!--I make no promise; to your duty!
Do you want to sink the ship, by knocking off at a time like this?
Turn to!' and he once more raised a pistol.
"'Sink the ship?' cried Steelkilt. 'Aye, let her sink.
Not a man of us turns to, unless you swear not to raise a rope-yarn
against us. What say ye, men?' turning to his comrades.
A fierce cheer was their response.
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men? look to those handspikes, my hearties. Captain, by God,
look to yourself; say the word; don't be a fool; forget it all;
we are ready to turn to; treat us decently, and we're your men;
but we won't be flogged.'
"'Turn to! I make no promises, turn to, I say!'
"'Look ye, now,' cried the Lakeman, flinging out his arm towards him,
'there are a few of us here (and I am one of them) who have shipped
for the cruise, d'ye see; now as you well know, sir, we can claim
our discharge as soon as the anchor is down; so we don't want a row;
it's not our interest; we want to be peaceable; we are ready to work,
but we won't be flogged.'
"'Turn to!' roared the Captain.
"Steelkilt glanced round him a moment, and then said:--'I tell
you what it is now, Captain, rather than kill ye, and be hung
for such a shabby rascal, we won't lift a hand against ye unless
ye attack us; but till you say the word about not flogging us,
we don't do a hand's turn.'
"'Down into the forecastle then, down with ye, I'll keep ye there
till ye're sick of it. Down ye go.'
"'Shall we?' cried the ringleader to his men. Most of them
were against it; but at length, in obedience to Steelkilt,
they preceded him down into their dark den, growlingly disappearing,
like bears into a cave.
"As the Lakeman's bare head was just level with the planks,
the Captain and his posse leaped the barricade, and rapidly drawing
over the slide of the scuttle, planted their group of hands upon it,
and loudly called for the steward to bring the heavy brass padlock
belonging to the companionway.
Then opening the slide a little, the Captain whispered something down
the crack, closed it, and turned the key upon them--ten in number--
leaving on deck some twenty or more, who thus far had remained neutral.
"All night a wide-awake watch was kept by all the officers,
forward and aft, especially about the forecastle scuttle and
fore hatchway; at which last place it was feared the insurgents
might emerge, after breaking through the bulkhead below.
But the hours of darkness passed in peace; the men who still
remained at their duty toiling hard at the pumps, whose clinking
and clanking at intervals through the dreary night dismally
resounded through the ship.
"At sunrise the Captain went forward, and knocking on the deck,
summoned the prisoners to work; but with a yell they refused.
Water was then lowered down to them, and a couple of handfuls
of biscuit were tossed after it; when again turning the key upon
them and pocketing it, the Captain returned to the quarter-deck.
Twice every day for three days this was repeated; but on the fourth
morning a confused wrangling, and then a scuffling was heard,
as the customary summons was delivered; and suddenly four men
burst up from the forecastle, saying they were ready to turn to.
The fetid closeness of the air, and a famishing diet, united perhaps
to some fears of ultimate retribution, had constrained them to
surrender at discretion. Emboldened by this, the Captain reiterated
his demand to the rest, but Steelkilt shouted up to him a terrific
hint to stop his babbling and betake himself where he belonged.
On the fifth morning three others of the mutineers bolted up into
the air from the desperate arms below that sought to restrain them.
Only three were left.
"'Better turn to, now?' said the Captain with a heartless jeer.
"'Shut us up again, will ye!' cried Steelkilt.
"Oh! certainly," said the Captain, and the key clicked.
"It was at this point, gentlemen, that enraged by the defection
of seven of his former associates, and stung by the mocking voice
that had last hailed him, and maddened by his long entombment in a place
as black as the bowels of despair; it was then that Steelkilt proposed
to the two Canallers, thus far apparently of one mind with him, to burst
out of their hole at the next summoning of the garrison; and armed
with their keen mincing knives (long, crescentic, heavy implements
with a handle at each end) run amuck from the bowsprit to the taffrail;
and if by any devilishness of desperation possible, seize the ship.
For himself, he would do this, he said, whether they joined him
or not. That was the last night he should spend in that den.
But the scheme met with no opposition on the part of the other two;
they swore they were ready for that, or for any other mad thing,
for anything in short but a surrender. And what was more, they each
insisted upon being the first man on deck, when the time to make
the rush should come. But to this their leader as fiercely objected,
reserving that priority for himself; particularly as his two comrades
would not yield, the one to the other, in the matter; and both of them
could not be first, for the ladder would but admit one man at a time.
And here, gentlemen, the foul play of these miscreants must come out.
"Upon hearing the frantic project of their leader, each in his own
separate soul had suddenly lighted, it would seem, upon the same
piece of treachery, namely: to be the foremost in breaking out,
in order to be the first of the three, though the last of the ten,
to surrender; and thereby secure whatever small chance of pardon
such conduct might merit. But when Steelkilt made known his
determination still to lead them to the last, they in some way,
by some subtle chemistry of villany, mixed their before secret
treacheries together; and when their leader fell into a doze,
verbally opened their souls to each other in three sentences;
and bound the sleeper with cords, and gagged him with cords;
and shrieked out for the Captain at midnight.
"Thinking murder at hand, and smelling in the dark for the blood,
he and all his armed mates and harpooneers rushed for the forecastle.
In a few minutes the scuttle was opened, and, bound hand and foot,
the still struggling ringleader was shoved up into the air
by his perfidious allies, who at once claimed the honor
of securing a man who had been fully ripe for murder.
But all these were collared, and dragged along the deck like
dead cattle; and, side by side, were seized up into the mizzen rigging,
like three quarters of meat, and there they hung till morning.
'Damn ye,' cried the Captain, pacing to and fro before them,
'the vultures would not touch ye, ye villains!'
"At sunrise he summoned all hands; and separating those who had rebelled
from those who had taken no part in the mutiny, he told the former
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"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,
affording Queequeg a fair chance for performing his agile obstetrics
on the run, as you may say. Yes, it was a running delivery,
so it was.
Now, had Tashtego perished in that head, it had been a very
precious perishing; smothered in the very whitest and daintiest
of fragrant spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in
the secret inner chamber and sanctum sanctorum of the whale.
Only one sweeter end can readily be recalled--the delicious
death of an Ohio honey-hunter, who seeking honey in the crotch
of a hollow tree, found such exceeding store of it, that leaning
too far over, it sucked him in, so that he died embalmed.
How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato's honey head,
and sweetly perished there?
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that the submerged ends could not be at all approached, while every
moment whole tons of ponderosity seemed added to the sinking bulk,
and the ship seemed on the point of going over.
"Hold on, hold on, won't ye?" cried Stubb to the body,
"don't be in such a devil of a hurry to sink!
By thunder, men, we must do something or go for it.
No use prying there; avast, I say with your handspikes,
and run one of ye for a prayer book and a pen-knife, and cut
the big chains."
"Knife? Aye, aye," cried Queequeg, and seizing the carpenter's
heavy hatchet, he leaned out of a porthole, and steel to iron,
began slashing at the largest fluke-chains. But a few strokes,
full of sparks, were given, when the exceeding strain effected the rest.
With a terrific snap, every fastening went adrift; the ship righted,
the carcase sank.
Now, this occasional inevitable sinking of the recently killed
Sperm Whale is a very curious thing; nor has any fisherman yet
adequately accounted for it. Usually the dead Sperm Whale
floats with great buoyancy, with its side or belly considerably
elevated above the surface. If the only whales that thus sank
were old, meagre, and broken-hearted creatures, their pads
of lard diminished and all their bones heavy and rheumatic;
then you might with some reason assert that this sinking is
caused by an uncommon specific gravity in the fish so sinking,
consequent upon this absence of buoyant matter in him.
But it is not so. For young whales, in the highest health,
and swelling with noble aspirations, prematurely cut off
in the warm flush and May of life, with all their panting lard
about them! even these brawny, buoyant heroes do sometimes sink.
Be it said, however, that the Sperm Whale is far less
liable to this accident than any other species.
Where one of that sort go down, twenty Right Whales do.
This difference in the species is no doubt imputable in no small
degree to the greater quantity of bone in the Right Whale;
his Venetian blinds alone sometimes weighing more than a ton;
from this incumbrance the Sperm Whale is wholly free. But there
are instances where, after the lapse of many hours or several days,
the sunken whale again rises, more buoyant than in life.
But the reason of this is obvious. Gases are generated in him;
he swells to a prodigious magnitude; becomes a sort of animal balloon.
A line-of-battle ship could hardly keep him under then.
In the Shore Whaling, on soundings, among the Bays of New Zealand,
when a Right Whale gives token of sinking, they fasten buoys
to him, with plenty of rope; so that when the body has gone down,
they know where to look for it when it shall have ascended again.
It was not long after the sinking of the body that a cry
was heard from the Pequod's mast-heads, announcing that the
Jungfrau was again lowering her boats; though the only spout
in sight was that of a Fin-Back, belonging to the species of
uncapturable whales, because of its incredible power of swimming.
Nevertheless, the Fin-Back's spout is so similar to the Sperm Whale's,
that by unskilful fishermen it is often mistaken for it.
And consequently Derick and all his host were now in valiant
chase of this unnearable brute. The Virgin crowding all sail,
made after her four young keels, and thus they all disappeared
far to leeward, still in bold, hopeful chase.
Oh! many are the Fin-Backs, and many are the Dericks, my friend.
CHAPTER 82
The Honor and Glory of Whaling
There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
is the true method.
The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches
up to the very spring-head of it so much the more am I impressed
with its great honorableness and antiquity; and especially when I
find so many great demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts,
who one way or other have shed distinction upon it, I am transported
with the reflection that I myself belong, though but subordinately,
to so emblazoned a fraternity.
The gallant Perseus, a son of Jupiter, was the first whaleman;
and to the eternal honor of our calling be it said, that the first
whale attacked by our brotherhood was not killed with any
sordid intent. Those were the knightly days of our profession,
when we only bore arms to succor the distressed, and not to fill
men's lamp-feeders. Every one knows the fine story of Perseus
and Andromeda; how the lovely Andromeda, the daughter of a king,
was tied to a rock on the sea-coast, and as Leviathan was in
the very act of carrying her off, Perseus, the prince of whalemen,
intrepidly advancing, harpooned the monster, and delivered
and married the maid. It was an admirable artistic exploit,
rarely achieved by the best harpooneers of the present day;
inasmuch as this Leviathan was slain at the very first dart.
And let no man doubt this Arkite story; for in the ancient Joppa,
now Jaffa, on the Syrian coast, in one of the Pagan temples,
there stood for many ages the vast skeleton of a whale,
which the city's legends and all the inhabitants asserted
to be the identical bones of the monster that Perseus slew.
When the Romans took Joppa, the same skeleton was carried to Italy
in triumph. What seems most singular and suggestively important
in this story, is this: it was from Joppa that Jonah set sail.
Akin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda--indeed, by some
supposed to be indirectly derived from it--is that famous story
of St. George and the Dragon; which dragon I maintain to have
been a whale; for in many old chronicles whales and dragons
are strangely jumbled together, and often stand for each other.
"Thou art as a lion of the waters, and as a dragon of
the sea," said Ezekiel; hereby, plainly meaning a whale;
in truth, some versions of the Bible use that word itself.
Besides, it would much subtract from the glory of the exploit
had St. George but encountered a crawling reptile of the land,
instead of doing battle with the great monster of the deep.
Any man may kill a snake, but only a Perseus, a St. George,
a Coffin, have the heart in them to march boldly up to a whale.
Let not the modern paintings of this scene mislead us;
for though the creature encountered by that valiant whaleman
of old is vaguely represented of a griffin-like shape,
and though the battle is depicted on land and the saint
on horseback, yet considering the great ignorance of those times,
when the true form of the whale was unknown to artists;
and considering that as in Perseus' case, St. George's
whale might have crawled up out of the sea on the beach;
and considering that the animal ridden by St. George might have
been only a large seal, or sea-horse; bearing all this in mind,
it will not appear altogether incompatible with the sacred
legend and the ancientest draughts of the scene, to hold this
so-called dragon no other than the great Leviathan himself.
In fact, placed before the strict and piercing truth,
this whole story will fare like that fish, flesh, and fowl
idol of the Philistines, Dagon by name; who being planted
before the ark of Israel, his horse's head and both the palms
of his hands fell off from him, and only the stump or fishy
part of him remained. Thus, then, one of our own noble stamp,
even a whaleman, is the tutelary guardian of England;
and by good rights, we harpooneers of Nantucket should be
enrolled in the most noble order of St. George. And therefore,
let not the knights of that honorable company (none of whom,
I venture to say, have ever had to do with a whale like their
great patron), let them never eye a Nantucketer with disdain,
since even in our woollen frocks and tarred trowsers we are much
better entitled to St. George's decoration than they.
Whether to admit Hercules among us or not, concerning this I long
remained dubious: for though according to the Greek mythologies,
that antique Crockett and Kit Carson--that brawny doer
of rejoicing good deeds, was swallowed down and thrown up
by a whale; still, whether that strictly makes a whaleman
of him, that might be mooted. It nowhere appears that he ever
actually harpooned his fish, unless, indeed, from the inside.
Nevertheless, he may be deemed a sort of involuntary whaleman;
at any rate the whale caught him, if he did not the whale.
I claim him for one of our clan.
But, by the best contradictory authorities, this Grecian story
of Hercules and the whale is considered to be derived from the still
more ancient Hebrew story of Jonah and the whale; and vice versa;
certainly they are very similar. If I claim the demigod then,
why not the prophet?
Nor do heroes, saints, demigods, and prophets alone comprise
the whole roll of our order. Our grand master is still to be named;
for like royal kings of old times, we find the head-waters
of our fraternity in nothing short of the great gods themselves.
That wondrous oriental story is now to be rehearsed from the Shaster,
which gives us the dread Vishnoo, one of the three persons
in the godhead of the Hindoos; gives us this divine Vishnoo
himself for our Lord;--Vishnoo, who, by the first of his ten
earthly incarnations, has for ever set apart and sanctified the whale.
When Brahma, or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster, resolved to
recreate the world after one of its periodical dissolutions,
he gave birth to Vishnoo, to preside over the work; but the Vedas,
or mystical books, whose perusal would seem to have been indispensable
to Vishnoo before beginning the creation, and which therefore
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hailed the morning with their trunks uplifted in the profoundest silence.
The chance comparison in this chapter, between the whale and the elephant,
so far as some aspects of the tail of the one and the trunk of the other
are concerned, should not tend to place those two opposite organs on
an equality, much less the creatures to which they respectively belong.
For as the mightiest elephant is but a terrier to Leviathan, so,
compared with Leviathan's tail, his trunk is but the stalk of a lily.
The most direful blow from the elephant's trunk were as the playful tap
of a fan, compared with the measureless crush and crash of the sperm
whale's ponderous flukes, which in repeated instances have one after
the other hurled entire boats with all their oars and crews into the air,
very much as an Indian juggler tosses his balls.*
*Though all comparison in the way of general bulk between the whale
and the elephant is preposterous, inasmuch as in that particular
the elephant stands in much the same respect to the whale that
a dog does to the elephant; nevertheless, there are not wanting
some points of curious similitude; among these is the spout.
It is well known that the elephant will often draw up water or dust
in his trunk, and then elevating it, jet it forth in a stream.
The more I consider this mighty tail, the more do I deplore my inability
to express it. At times there are gestures in it, which, though they
would well grace the hand of man, remain wholly inexplicable.
In an extensive herd, so remarkable, occasionally, are these
mystic gestures, that I have heard hunters who have declared them akin
to Free-Mason signs and symbols; that the whale, indeed, by these
methods intelligently conversed with the world. Nor are there wanting
other motions of the whale in his general body, full of strangeness,
and unaccountable to his most experienced assailant. Dissect him
how I may, then, I but go skin deep. I know him not, and never will.
But if I know not even the tail of this whale, how understand his
head? much more, how comprehend his face, when face he has none?
Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face
shall not be seen. But I cannot completely make out his back parts;
and hint what he will about his face, I say again he has no face.
CHAPTER 87
The Grand Armada
The long and narrow peninsula of Malacca, extending south-eastward
from the territories of Birmah, forms the most southerly point of
all Asia. In a continuous line from that peninsula stretch the long
islands of Sumatra, Java, Bally, and Timor; which, with many others,
form a vast mole, or rampart, lengthwise connecting Asia with Australia,
and dividing the long unbroken Indian ocean from the thickly studded
oriental archipelagoes. This rampart is pierced by several sally-ports
for the convenience of ships and whales; conspicuous among which are
the straits of Sunda and Malacca. By the straits of Sunda, chiefly,
vessels bound to China from the west, emerge into the China seas.
Those narrow straits of Sunda divide Sumatra from Java; and standing
midway in that vast rampart of islands, buttressed by that bold
green promontory, known to seamen as Java Head; they not a little
correspond to the central gateway opening into some vast walled empire:
and considering the inexhaustible wealth of spices, and silks,
and jewels, and gold, and ivory, with which the thousand islands
of that oriental sea are enriched, it seems a significant provision
of nature, that such treasures, by the very formation of the land,
should at least bear the appearance, however ineffectual,
of being guarded from the all-grasping western world. The shores
of the Straits of Sunda are unsupplied with those domineering
fortresses which guard the entrances to the Mediterranean, the Baltic,
and the Propontis. Unlike the Danes, these Orientals do not demand
the obsequious homage of lowered top-sails from the endless
procession of ships before the wind, which for centuries past,
by night and by day, have passed between the islands of Sumatra
and Java, freighted with the costliest cargoes of the east.
But while they freely waive a ceremonial like this, they do by no
means renounce their claim to more solid tribute.
Time out of mind the piratical proas of the Malays,
lurking among the low shaded coves and islets of Sumatra,
have sallied out upon the vessels sailing through the straits,
fiercely demanding tribute at the point of their spears.
Though by the repeated bloody chastisements they have received
at the hands of European cruisers, the audacity of these corsairs
has of late been somewhat repressed; yet, even at the present day,
we occasionally hear of English and American vessels, which,
in those waters, have been remorselessly boarded and pillaged.
With a fair, fresh wind, the Pequod was now drawing nigh to these straits;
Ahab purposing to pass through them into the Java sea, and thence,
cruising northwards, over waters known to be frequented here and there
by the Sperm Whale, sweep inshore by the Philippine Islands, and gain
the far coast of Japan, in time for the great whaling season there.
By these means, the circumnavigating Pequod would sweep almost all the
known Sperm Whale cruising grounds of the world, previous to descending
upon the Line in the Pacific; where Ahab, though everywhere else
foiled in his pursuit, firmly counted upon giving battle to Moby Dick,
in the sea he was most known to frequent; and at a season when he might
most reasonably be presumed to be haunting it.
But how now? in this zoned quest, does Ahab touch no land? does
his crew drink air? Surely, he will stop for water. Nay. For a
long time, now, the circus-running sun has raced within his
fiery ring, and needs no sustenance but what's in himself.
So Ahab. Mark this, too, in the whaler. While other
hulls are loaded down with alien stuff, to be transferred
to foreign wharves; the world-wandering whale-ship carries
no cargo but herself and crew, their weapons and their wants.
She has a whole lake's contents bottled in her ample hold.
She is ballasted with utilities; not altogether with unusable
pig-lead and kentledge. She carries years' water in her.
Clear old prime Nantucket water; which, when three years afloat,
the Nantucketer, in the Pacific, prefers to drink before
the brackish fluid, but yesterday rafted off in casks,
from the Peruvian or Indian streams. Hence it is, that,
while other ships may have gone to China from New York,
and back again, touching at a score of ports, the whale-ship,
in all that interval, may not have sighted one grain of soil;
her crew having seen no man but floating seamen like themselves.
So that did you carry them the news that another flood had come;
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What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but
Loose-Fish? What all men's minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What
is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What
to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers
but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And
what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?
CHAPTER 90
Heads or Tails
"De balena vero sufficit, si rex habeat caput, et regina caudam."
BRACTON, L. 3, C. 3.
Latin from the books of the Laws of England, which taken along with
the context, means, that of all whales captured by anybody on the coast
of that land, the King, as Honorary Grand Harpooneer, must have
the head, and the Queen be respectfully presented with the tail.
A division which, in the whale, is much like halving an apple; there is
no intermediate remainder. Now as this law, under a modified form,
is to this day in force in England; and as it offers in various respects
a strange anomaly touching the general law of Fast--and Loose-Fish,
it is here treated of in a separate chapter, on the same courteous
principle that prompts the English railways to be at the expense of a
separate car, specially reserved for the accommodation of royalty.
In the first place, in curious proof of the fact that the above-mentioned
law is still in force, I proceed to lay before you a circumstance-that
happened within the last two years.
It seems that some honest mariners of Dover, or Sandwich,
or some one of the Cinque Ports, had after a hard chase succeeded
in killing and beaching a fine whale which they had originally
descried afar off from the shore. Now the Cinque Ports are
partially or somehow under the jurisdiction of a sort of policeman
or beadle, called a Lord Warden. Holding the office directly
from the crown, I believe, all the royal emoluments incident
to the Cinque Port territories become by assignment his.
By some writers this office is called a sinecure. But not so.
Because the Lord Warden is busily employed at times in fobbing
his perquisites; which are his chiefly by virtue of that same
fobbing of them.
Now when these poor sun-burnt mariners, bare-footed, and with their
trowsers rolled high up on their eely legs, had wearily hauled
their fat fish high and dry, promising themselves a good 150 pounds
from the precious oil and bone; and in fantasy sipping rare tea
with their wives, and good ale with their cronies, upon the strength
of their respective shares; up steps a very learned and most Christian
and charitable gentleman, with a copy of Blackstone under his arm;
and laying it upon the whale's head, he says--"Hands off! this fish,
my masters, is a Fast-Fish. I seize it as the Lord Warden's." Upon this
the poor mariners in their respectful consternation--so truly English--
knowing not what to say, fall to vigorously scratching their heads
all round; meanwhile ruefully glancing from the whale to the stranger.
But that did in nowise mend the matter, or at all soften the hard heart
of the learned gentleman with the copy of Blackstone. At length one
of them, after long scratching about for his ideas, made bold to speak,
"Please, sir, who is the Lord Warden?"
"The Duke."
"But the duke had nothing to do with taking this fish?"
"It is his."
"We have been at great trouble, and peril, and some expense,
and is all that to go to the Duke's benefit; we getting nothing
at all for our pains but our blisters?"
"It is his."
"Is the Duke so very poor as to be forced to this desperate mode
of getting a livelihood?"
"It is his."
"I thought to relieve my old bed-ridden mother by part of my share
of this whale."
"It is his."
"Won't the Duke be content with a quarter or a half?"
"It is his."
In a word, the whale was seized and sold, and his Grace the Duke of
Wellington received the money. Thinking that viewed in some particular
lights, the case might by a bare possibility in some small degree
be deemed, under the circumstances, a rather hard one, an honest clergyman
of the town respectfully addressed a note to his Grace, begging him
to take the case of those unfortunate mariners into full consideration.
To which my Lord Duke in substance replied (both letters were published)
that he had already done so, and received the money, and would be obliged
to the reverend gentleman if for the future he (the reverend gentleman)
would decline meddling with other people's business. Is this the still
militant old man, standing at the corners of the three kingdoms,
on all hands coercing alms of beggars?
It will readily be seen that in this case the alleged right of the Duke
to the whale was a delegated one from the Sovereign. We must needs
inquire then on what principle the Sovereign is originally invested
with that right. The law itself has already been set forth.
But Plowdon gives us the reason for it. Says Plowdon, the whale so caught
belongs to the King and Queen, "because of its superior excellence."
And by the soundest commentators this has ever been held a cogent
argument in such matters.
But why should the King have the head, and the Queen the tail?
A reason for that, ye lawyers!
In his treatise on "Queen-Gold," or Queen-pin-money, an old
King's Bench author, one William Prynne, thus discourseth:
"Ye tail is ye Queen's, that ye Queen's wardrobe may be supplied
with ye whalebone." Now this was written at a time when the black
limber bone of the Greenland or Right whale was largely used
in ladies' bodices. But this same bone is not in the tail;
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but the masonry is firmly secured to the surface by ponderous
knees of iron bracing it on all sides, and screwing it down
to the timbers. On the flanks it is cased with wood, and at top
completely covered by a large, sloping, battened hatchway.
Removing this hatch we expose the great try-pots, two in number,
and each of several barrels' capacity. When not in use,
they are kept remarkably clean. Sometimes they are polished with
soapstone and sand, till they shine within like silver punchbowls.
During the night-watches some cynical old sailors will
crawl into them and coil themselves away there for a nap.
While employed in polishing them--one man in each pot, side by side--
many confidential communications are carried on, over the iron lips.
It is a place also for profound mathematical meditation.
It was in the left hand try-pot of the Pequod, with the soapstone
diligently circling round me, that I was first indirectly struck
by the remarkable fact, that in geometry all bodies gliding
along the cycloid, my soapstone for example, will descend
from any point in precisely the same time.
Removing the fire-board from the front of the try-works,
the bare masonry of that side is exposed, penetrated by the two
iron mouths of the furnaces, directly underneath the pots.
These mouths are fitted with heavy doors of iron. The intense heat
of the fire is prevented from communicating itself to the deck,
by means of a shallow reservoir extending under the entire
inclosed surface of the works. By a tunnel inserted at the rear,
this reservoir is kept replenished with water as fast as it evaporates.
There are no external chimneys; they open direct from the rear wall.
And here let us go back for a moment.
It was about nine o'clock at night that the Pequod's
try-works were first started on this present voyage.
It belonged to Stubb to oversee the business.
"All ready there? Off hatch, then, and start her. You cook,
fire the works." This was an easy thing, for the carpenter had been
thrusting his shavings into the furnace throughout the passage.
Here be it said that in a whaling voyage the first fire in the
try-works has to be fed for a time with wood. After that no wood
is used, except as a means of quick ignition to the staple fuel.
In a word, after being tried out, the crisp, shrivelled blubber,
now called scraps or fritters, still contains considerable
of its unctuous properties. These fritters feed the flames.
Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope,
once ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body.
Would that he consumed his own smoke! for his smoke is horrible
to inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you must
live in it for the time. It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor
about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres.
It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument
for the pit.
By midnight the works were in full operation.
We were clear from the carcass; sail had been made;
the wind was freshening; the wild ocean darkness was intense.
But that darkness was licked up by the fierce flames, which at
intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and illuminated
every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire.
The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned
to some vengeful deed. So the pitch and sulphur-freighted brigs
of the bold Hydriote, Canaris, issuing from their midnight harbors,
with broad sheets of flame for sails, bore down upon
the Turkish frigates, and folded them in conflagrations.
The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide
hearth in front of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean
shapes of the pagan harpooneers, always the whale-ship's stokers.
With huge pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into
the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky
flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet.
The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship
there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness
to leap into their faces. Opposite the mouth of the works,
on the further side of the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass.
This served for a sea-sofa. Here lounged the watch, when not
otherwise employed, looking into the red heat of the fire,
till their eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their tawny features,
now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards,
and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were
strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works.
As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales
of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter
forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace;
as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated
with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on,
and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly
shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea
and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth,
and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod,
freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse,
and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material
counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul.
So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long
hours silently guided the way of this fire-ship on the sea.
Wrapped, for that interval, in darkness myself, I but the better
saw the redness, the madness, the ghastliness of others.
The continual sight of the fiend shapes before me, capering half
in smoke and half in fire, these at last begat kindred visions
in my soul, so soon as I began to yield to that unaccountable
drowsiness which ever would come over me at a midnight helm.
But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since inexplicable)
thing occurred to me. Starting from a brief standing sleep,
I was horribly conscious of something fatally wrong.
The jaw-bone tiller smote my side, which leaned against it; in my
ears was the low hum of sails, just beginning to shake in the wind;
I thought my eyes were open; I was half conscious of putting
my fingers to the lids and mechanically stretching them still
further apart. But, spite of all this, I could see no compass
before me to steer by; though it seemed but a minute since I had been
watching the card, by the steady binnacle lamp illuminating it.
Nothing seemed before me but a jet gloom, now and then made
ghastly by flashes of redness. Uppermost was the impression,
that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much
bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern.
A stark, bewildered feeling, as of death, came over me.
Convulsively my hands grasped the tiller, but with the crazy conceit
that the tiller was, somehow, in some enchanted way, inverted.
My God! what is the matter with me? thought I. Lo! in my
brief sleep I had turned myself about, and was fronting
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him then; but not to another one. No more White Whales for me;
I've lowered for him once, and that has satisfied me.
There would be great glory in killing him, I know that;
and there is a ship-load of precious sperm in him, but, hark ye,
he's best let alone; don't you think so, Captain?"--glancing at
the ivory leg.
"He is. But he will still be hunted, for all that. What is best
let alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures.
He's all a magnet! How long since thou saw'st him last?
Which way heading?"
"Bless my soul, and curse the foul fiend's," cried Bunger,
stoopingly walking round Ahab, and like a dog, strangely snuffing;
"this man's blood--bring the thermometer!--it's at the boiling point!--
his pulse makes these planks beat!--sir!"--taking a lancet from
his pocket, and drawing near to Ahab's arm.
"Avast!" roared Ahab, dashing him against the bulwarks--"Man the boat!
Which way heading?"
"Good God!" cried the English Captain, to whom the question was put.
"What's the matter? He was heading east, I think.--Is your
Captain crazy?" whispering Fedallah.
But Fedallah, putting a finger on his lip, slid over the bulwarks
to take the boat's steering oar, and Ahab, swinging the cutting-tackle
towards him commanded the ship's sailors to stand by to lower.
In a moment he was standing in the boat's stern, and the Manilla men
were springing to their oars. In vain the English Captain hailed him.
With back to the stranger ship, and face set like a flint to his own,
Ahab stood upright till alongside of the Pequod.
CHAPTER 101
The Decanter
Ere the English ship fades from sight be it set down here, that she
hailed from London, and was named after the late Samuel Enderby,
merchant of that city, the original of the famous whaling house
of enderby and sons; a house which in my poor whaleman's opinion,
comes not far behind the united royal houses of the Tudors and Bourbons,
in point of real historical interest. How long, prior to the year
of our Lord 1775, this great whaling house was in existence,
my numerous fish-documents do not make plain; but in that year
(1775) it fitted out the first English ships that ever regularly
hunted the Sperm Whale; though for some score of years previous
(ever since 1726) our valiant Coffins and Maceys of Nantucket
and the Vineyard had in large fleets pursued the Leviathan,
but only in the North and South Atlantic: not elsewhere.
Be it distinctly recorded here, that the Nantucketers were the first
among mankind to harpoon with civilized steel the great Sperm Whale;
and that for half a century they were the only people of the whole
globe who so harpooned him.
In 1778, a fine ship, the Amelia, fitted out for the express purpose,
and at the sole charge of the vigorous Enderbys, boldly rounded
Cape Horn, and was the first among the nations to lower a whale-boat
of any sort in the great South Sea. The voyage was a skilful
and lucky one; and returning to her berth with her hold full
of the precious sperm, the Amelia's example was soon followed
by other ships, English and American, and thus the vast Sperm Whale
grounds of the Pacific were thrown open. But not content with this
good deed, the indefatigable house again bestirred itself:
Samuel and all his Sons--how many, their mother only knows--and under
their immediate auspices, and partly, I think, at their expense,
the British government was induced to send the sloop-of-war Rattler
on a whaling voyage of discovery into the South Sea. Commanded by
a naval Post-Captain, the Rattler made a rattling voyage of it,
and did some service; how much does not appear. But this is not all.
In 1819, the same house fitted out a discovery whale ship of their own,
to go on a tasting cruise to the remote waters of Japan. That ship--
well called the "Syren"--made a noble experimental cruise;
and it was thus that the great Japanese Whaling Ground first became
generally known. The Syren in this famous voyage was commanded
by a Captain Coffin, a Nantucketer.
All honor to the Enderbies, therefore, whose house, I think,
exists to the present day; though doubtless the original Samuel
must long ago have slipped his cable for the great South Sea
of the other world.
The ship named after him was worthy of the honor, being a very fast sailer
and a noble craft every way. I boarded her once at midnight somewhere
off the Patagonian coast, and drank good flip down in the forecastle.
It was a fine gam we had, and they were all trumps--every soul on board.
A short life to them, and a jolly death. And that fine gam I had--
long, very long after old Ahab touched her planks with his ivory heel--
it minds me of the noble, solid, Saxon hospitality of that ship;
and may my parson forget me, and the devil remember me, if I ever
lose sight of it. Flip? Did I say we had flip? Yes, and we flipped
it at the rate of ten gallons the hour; and when the squall came
(for it's squally off there by Patagonia), and all hands--
visitors and all--were called to reef topsails, we were so top-heavy
that we had to swing each other aloft in bowlines; and we ignorantly
furled the skirts of our jackets into the sails, so that we hung there,
reefed fast in the howling gale, a warning example to all drunken tars.
However, the masts did not go overboard; and by and by we scrambled down,
so sober, that we had to pass the flip again, though the savage salt
spray bursting down the forecastle scuttle, rather too much diluted
and pickled it for my taste.
The beef was fine--tough, but with body in it.
They said it was bullbeef; others, that it was dromedary beef;
but I do not know, for certain, how that was. They had
dumplings too; small, but substantial, symmetrically globular,
and indestructible dumplings. I fancied that you could feel them,
and roll them about in you after they were swallowed.
If you stooped over too far forward, you risked their
pitching out of you like billiard-balls. The bread--
but that couldn't be helped; besides, it was an anti-scorbutic,
in short, the bread contained the only fresh fare they had.
But the forecastle was not very light, and it was very easy
to step over into a dark corner when you ate it. But all in all,
taking her from truck to helm, considering the dimensions
of the cook's boilers, including his own live parchment boilers;
fore and aft, I say, the Samuel Enderby was a jolly ship;
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which lying upon the Ground with its convex part uppermost,
makes an Arch, the Head of which cannot be reached
by a Man upon a Camel's Back. This Rib (says John Leo)
is said to have layn there a hundred Years before I saw it.
Their Historians affirm, that a Prophet who prophesy'd of Mahomet,
came from this Temple, and some do not stand to assert,
that the Prophet Jonas was cast forth by the Whale at the Base
of the Temple."
In this Afric Temple of the Whale I leave you, reader, and if you
be a Nantucketer, and a whaleman, you will silently worship there.
CHAPTER 105
Does the Whale's Magnitude Diminish? - Will He Perish?
Inasmuch, then, as this Leviathan comes floundering down
upon us from the head-waters of the Eternities, it may be
fitly inquired, whether, in the long course of his generations,
he has not degenerated from the original bulk of his sires.
But upon investigation we find, that not only are the whales
of the present day superior in magnitude to those whose fossil
remains are found in the Tertiary system (embracing a distinct
geological period prior to man), but of the whales found in
that Tertiary system, those belonging to its latter formations
exceed in size those of its earlier ones.
Of all the pre-adamite whales yet exhumed, by far the largest
is the Alabama one mentioned in the last chapter, and that
was less than seventy feet in length in the skeleton.
Whereas, we have already seen, that the tape-measure gives
seventy-two feet for the skeleton of a large sized modern whale.
And I have heard, on whalemen's authority, that Sperm Whales have
been captured near a hundred feet long at the time of capture.
But may it not be, that while the whales of the present hour are an
advance in magnitude upon those of all previous geological periods;
may it not be, that since Adam's time they have degenerated?
Assuredly, we must conclude so, if we are to credit the accounts
of such gentlemen as Pliny, and the ancient naturalists generally.
For Pliny tells us of Whales that embraced acres of living bulk,
and Aldrovandus of others which measured eight hundred feet in length--
Rope Walks and Thames Tunnels of Whales! And even in the days
of Banks and Solander, Cooke's naturalists, we find a Danish member
of the Academy of Sciences setting down certain Iceland Whales
(reydan-siskur, or Wrinkled Bellies) at one hundred and twenty yards;
that is, three hundred and sixty feet. And Lacepede,
the French naturalist, in his elaborate history of whales,
in the very beginning of his work (page 3), sets down the Right Whale
at one hundred metres, three hundred and twenty-eight feet.
And this work was published so late as A.D. 1825.
But will any whaleman believe these stories? No. The whale
of to-day is as big as his ancestors in Pliny's time.
And if ever I go where Pliny is, I, a whaleman (more than he was),
will make bold to tell him so. Because I cannot understand
how it is, that while the Egyptian mummies that were buried
thousands of years before even Pliny was born, do not measure
so much in their coffins as a modern Kentuckian in his socks;
and while the cattle and other animals sculptured on the oldest
Egyptian and Nineveh tablets, by the relative proportions in
which they are drawn, just as plainly prove that the high-bred,
stall-fed, prize cattle of Smithfield, not only equal,
but far exceed in magnitude the fattest of Pharaoh's fat kine;
in the face of all this, I will not admit that of all animals
the whale alone should have degenerated.
But still another inquiry remains; one often agitated by the more
recondite Nantucketers. Whether owing to the almost omniscient
look-outs at the mast-heads of the whaleships, now penetrating
even through Behring's straits, and into the remotest secret drawers
and lockers of the world; and the thousand harpoons and lances darted
along all continental coasts; the moot point is, whether Leviathan
can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc;
whether he must not at last be exterminated from the waters,
and the last whale, like the last man, smoke his last pipe,
and then himself evaporate in the final puff.
Comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo,
which, not forty years ago, overspread by tens of thousands the prairies
of Illinois and Missouri, and shook their iron manes and scowled with
their thunder-clotted brows upon the sites of populous river-capitals,
where now the polite broker sells you land at a dollar an inch;
in such a comparison an irresistible argument would seem furnished,
to show that the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy extinction.
But you must look at this matter in every light. Though so short
a period ago--not a good lifetime--the census of the buffalo in Illinois
exceeded the census of men now in London, and though at the present
day not one horn or hoof of them remains in all that region;
and though the cause of this wondrous extermination was the spear
of man; yet the far different nature of the whale-hunt peremptorily
forbids so inglorious an end to the Leviathan. Forty men in one
ship hunting the Sperm Whales for forty-eight months think they
have done extremely well, and thank God, if at last they carry home
the oil of forty fish. Whereas, in the days of the old Canadian
and Indian hunters and trappers of the West, when the far west
(in whose sunset suns still rise) was a wilderness and a virgin,
the same number of moccasined men, for the same number of months,
mounted on horse instead of sailing in ships, would have slain
not forty, but forty thousand and more buffaloes; a fact that,
if need were, could be statistically stated.
Nor, considered aright, does it seem any argument in 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
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for they were slack--because some play to the tiller was indispensable.
In a severe gale like this, while the ship is but a tossed
shuttlecock to the blast, it is by no means uncommon to see
the needles in the compasses, at intervals, go round and round.
It was thus with the Pequod's; at almost every shock the helmsman
had not failed to notice the whirling velocity with which they
revolved upon the cards; it is a sight that hardly anyone can
behold without some sort of unwonted emotion.
Some hours after midnight, the Typhoon abated so much,
that through the strenuous exertions of Starbuck and Stubb--
one engaged forward and the other aft--the shivered remnants of
the jib and fore and main-top-sails were cut adrift from the spars,
and went eddying away to leeward, like the feathers of an albatross,
which sometimes are cast to the winds when that storm-tossed bird
is on the wing.
The three corresponding new sails were now bent and reefed,
and a storm-trysail was set further aft; so that the ship soon
went through the water with some precision again; and the course--
for the present, East-south-east--which he was to steer, if practicable,
was once more given to the helmsman. For during the violence
of the gale, he had only steered according to its vicissitudes.
But as he was now bringing the ship as near her course as possible,
watching the compass meanwhile, lo! a good sign! the wind seemed
coming round astern; aye, the foul breeze became fair!
Instantly the yards were squared, to the lively song of "Ho!
the fair wind! oh-ye-ho cheerly, men!" the crew singing for joy,
that so promising an event should so soon have falsified the evil
portents preceding it.
In compliance with the standing order of his commander--
to report immediately, and at any one of the twenty-four hours,
any decided change in the affairs of the deck,--Starbuck had
no sooner trimmed the yards to the breeze--however reluctantly
and gloomily,--than he mechanically went below to apprise
Captain Ahab of the circumstance.
Ere knocking at his state-room, he involuntarily paused before it
a moment. The cabin lamp--taking long swings this way and that--
was burning fitfully, and casting fitful shadows upon the old
man's bolted door,--a thin one, with fixed blinds inserted,
in place of upper panels. The isolated subterraneousness
of the cabin made a certain humming silence to reign there,
though it was hooped round by all the roar of the elements.
The loaded muskets in the rack were shiningly revealed,
as they stood upright against the forward bulkhead.
Starbuck was an honest, upright man; but out of Starbuck's heart,
at that instant when he saw the muskets, there strangely
evolved an evil thought; but so blent with its neutral or good
accompaniments that for the instant he hardly knew it for itself.
"He would have shot me once," he murmured, "yes, there's the very
musket that he pointed at me;--that one with the studded stock;
let me touch it--lift it. Strange, that I, who have
handled so many deadly lances, strange, that I should shake
so now. Loaded? I must see. Aye, aye; and powder in the pan;--
that's not good. Best spill it?--wait. I'll cure myself of this.
I'll hold the musket boldly while I think.--I come to report
a fair wind to him. But how fair? Fair for death and doom,--
that's fair for Moby Dick. It's a fair wind that's only fair for
that accursed fish.--The very tube he pointed at me!--the very one;
this one--I hold it here; he would have killed me with the very
thing I handle now.--Aye and he would fain kill all his crew.
Does he not say he will not strike his spars to any gale?
Has he not dashed his heavenly quadrant? and in these same
perilous seas, gropes he not his way by mere dead reckoning
of the error-abounding log? and in this very Typhoon, did he not
swear that he would have no lightning-rods? But shall this crazed
old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship's company down
to doom with him?--Yes, it would make him the wilful murderer
of thirty men and more, if this ship come to any deadly harm;
and come to deadly harm, my soul swears this ship will,
if Ahab have his way. If, then, he were this instant--
put aside, that crime would not be his. Ha! is he muttering
in his sleep? Yes, just there,--in there, he's sleeping.
Sleeping? aye, but still alive, and soon awake again.
I can't withstand thee, then, old man. Not reasoning;
not remonstrance; not entreaty wilt thou hearken to;
all this thou scornest. Flat obedience to thy own flat commands,
this is all thou breathest. Aye, and say'st the men have vow'd
thy vow; say'st all of us are Ahabs. Great God forbid!--
But is there no other way? no lawful way?--Make him a prisoner
to be taken home? What! hope to wrest this old man's living
power from his own living hands? Only a fool would try it.
Say he were pinioned even; knotted all over with ropes
and hawsers; chained down to ring-bolts on this cabin floor;
he would be more hideous than a caged tiger, then. I could
not endure the sight; could not possibly fly his howlings;
all comfort, sleep itself, inestimable reason would leave me
on the long intolerable voyage. What, then, remains? The land
is hundreds of leagues away, and locked Japan the nearest.
I stand alone here upon an open sea, with two oceans and a
whole continent between me and law.--Aye, aye, 'tis so.--
Is heaven a murderer when its lightning strikes a would-be
murderer in his bed, tindering sheets and skin together?--
And would I be a murderer, then, if"--and slowly, stealthily,
and half sideways looking, he placed the loaded musket's end
against the door.
"On this level, Ahab's hammock swings within; his head this way.
A touch, and Starbuck may survive to hug his wife and child again.--
Oh Mary! Mary!--boy! boy! boy!--But if I wake thee not to death,
old man, who can tell to what unsounded deeps Starbuck's body this day
week may sink, with all the crew! Great God, where art Thou? Shall I?
shall I?--The wind has gone down and shifted, sir; the fore and main
topsails are reefed and set! she heads her course."
"Stern all! Oh Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart at last!"
Such were the sounds that now came hurtling from out the old man's
tormented sleep, as if Starbuck's voice had caused the long dumb
dream to speak.
The yet levelled musket shook like a drunkard's arm against the panel;
Starbuck seemed wrestling with an angel, but turning from the door,
he placed the death-tube in its rack, and left the place.
"He's too sound asleep, Mr. Stubb; go thou down, and wake him,
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he called for linen thread; and moving to the binnacle, slipped out
the two reversed needles there, and horizontally suspended the
sail-needle by its middle, over one of the compass cards. At first,
the steel went round and round, quivering and vibrating at either end;
but at last it settled to its place, when Ahab, who had been intently
watching for this result, stepped frankly back from the binnacle,
and pointing his stretched arm towards it, exclaimed,--"Look ye,
for yourselves, if Ahab be not the lord of the level loadstone!
The sun is East, and that compass swears it!"
One after another they peered in, for nothing but their own eyes
could persuade such ignorance as theirs, and one after another
they slunk away.
In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab
in all his fatal pride.
CHAPTER 125
The Log and Line
While now the fated Pequod had been so long afloat this voyage,
the log and line had but very seldom been in use.
Owing to a confident reliance upon other means of determining
the vessel's place, some merchantmen, and many whalemen,
especially when cruising, wholly neglect to heave the log;
though at the same time, and frequently more for form's sake
than anything else, regularly putting down upon the customary
slate the course steered by the ship, as well as the presumed
average rate of progression every hour. It had been thus
with the Pequod. The wooden reel and angular log attached hung,
long untouched, just beneath the railing of the after bulwarks.
Rains and spray had damped it; the sun and wind had warped it;
all the elements had combined to rot a thing that hung so idly.
But heedless of all this, his mood seized Ahab, as he happened
to glance upon the reel, not many hours after the magnet scene,
and he remembered how his quadrant was no more, and recalled
his frantic oath about the level log and line. The ship was
sailing plungingly; astern the billows rolled in riots.
"Forward, there! Heave the log!"
Two seamen came. The golden-hued Tahitian and the grizzly Manxman.
"Take the reel, one of ye, I'll heave."
They went towards the extreme stern, on the ship's lee side,
where the deck, with the oblique energy of the wind, was now
almost dipping into the creamy, sidelong-rushing sea.
The Manxman took the reel, and holding it high up, by the projecting
handle-ends of the spindle, round which the spool of line revolved,
so stood with the angular log hanging downwards, till Ahab
advanced to him.
Ahab stood before him, and was lightly unwinding some thirty
or forty turns to form a preliminary hand-coil to toss overboard,
when the old Manxman, who was intently eyeing both him and the line,
made bold to speak.
"Sir, I mistrust it; this line looks far gone, long heat and wet
have spoiled it."
"'Twill hold, old gentleman. Long heat and wet, have they spoiled thee?
Thou seem'st to hold. Or, truer perhaps, life holds thee; not thou it."
"I hold the spool, sir. But just as my captain says.
With these grey hairs of mine 'tis not worth while disputing,
'specially with a superior, who'll ne'er confess."
"What's that? There now's a patched professor in Queen Nature's
granite-founded College; but methinks he's too subservient.
Where wert thou born?"
"In the little rocky Isle of Man, sir."
"Excellent! Thou'st hit the world by that."
"I know not, sir, but I was born there."
"In the Isle of Man, hey? Well, the other way, it's good.
Here's a man from Man; a man born in once independent Man, and now
unmanned of Man; which is sucked in--by what? Up with the reel!
The dead, blind wall butts all inquiring heads at last.
Up with it! So."
The log was heaved. The loose coils rapidly straightened out in a long
dragging line astern, and then, instantly, the reel began to whirl.
In turn, jerkingly raised and lowered by the rolling billows, the towing
resistance of the log caused the old reelman to stagger strangely.
"Hold hard!"
Snap! the overstrained line sagged down in one long festoon;
the tugging log was gone.
"I crush the quadrant, the thunder turns the needles,
and now the mad sea parts the log-line. But Ahab can mend all.
Haul in here, Tahitian; reel up, Manxman. And look ye,
let the carpenter make another log, and mend thou the line.
See to it."
"There he goes now; to him nothing's happened; but to me,
the skewer seems loosening out of the middle of the world.
Haul in, haul in, Tahitian! These lines run whole, and whirling out:
come in broken, and dragging slow. Ha, Pip? come to help; eh, Pip?"
"Pip? whom call ye Pip? Pip jumped from the whaleboat.
Pip's missing. Let's see now if ye haven't fished him
up here, fisherman. It drags hard; I guess he's holding on.
Jerk him, Tahiti! Jerk him off we haul in no cowards here.
Ho! there's his arm just breaking water. A hatchet! a hatchet!
cut it off--we haul in no cowards here. Captain Ahab! sir,
sir! here's Pip, trying to get on board again."
"Peace, thou crazy loon," cried the Manxman, seizing him by the arm.
"Away from the quarter-deck!"
"The greater idiot ever scolds the lesser," muttered Ahab, advancing.
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"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
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down there, tied by head and tail."
He gave the word; and still gazing round him, was steadily lowered
through the cloven blue air to the deck.
In due time the boats were lowered; but as standing in his
shallop's stern, Ahab just hovered upon the point of the descent,
he waved to the mate,--who held one of the tackle--ropes on deck--
and bade him pause.
"Starbuck!"
"Sir?"
"For the third time my soul's ship starts upon this voyage, Starbuck."
"Aye, sir, thou wilt have it so."
"Some ships sail from their ports, and ever afterwards
are missing, Starbuck!"
"Truth, sir: saddest truth."
"Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full
of the flood;--and I feel now like a billow that's all one
crested comb, Starbuck. I am old;--shake hands with me, man."
Their hands met; their eyes fastened; Starbuck's tears the glue.
"Oh, my captain, my captain!--noble heart--go not--go not!--see, it's a
brave man that weeps; how great the agony of the persuasion then!"
"Lower away!"-cried Ahab, tossing the mate's arm from him.
"Stand by for the crew!"
In an instant the boat was pulling round close under the stern.
"The sharks! the sharks!" cried a voice from the low cabin-window there;
"O master, my master, come back!"
But Ahab heard nothing; for his own voice was high-lifted then;
and the boat leaped on.
Yet the voice spake true; for scarce had he pushed from the ship,
when numbers of sharks, seemingly rising from out the dark waters
beneath the hull, maliciously snapped at the blades of the oars,
every time they dipped in the water; and in this way accompanied
the boat with their bites. It is a thing not uncommonly happening
to the whale-boats in those swarming seas; the sharks at times
apparently following them in the same prescient way that vultures
hover over the banners of marching regiments in the east.
But these were the first sharks that had been observed by the Pequod
since the White Whale had been first descried; and whether it
was that Ahab's crew were all such tiger-yellow barbarians,
and therefore their flesh more musky to the senses of the sharks--
a matter sometimes well known to affect them,--however it was,
they seemed to follow that one boat without molesting the others.
"Heart of wrought steel!" murmured Starbuck gazing over the side,
and following with his eyes the receding boat--"canst thou
yet ring boldly to that sight?--lowering thy keel among
ravening sharks, and followed by them, open-mouthed to the chase;
and this the critical third day?--For when three days
flow together in one continuous intense pursuit; be sure
the first is the morning, the second the noon, and the third
the evening and the end of that thing--be that end what it may.
Oh! my God! what is this that shoots through me, and leaves me
so deadly calm, yet expectant,--fixed at the top of a shudder!
Future things swim before me, as in empty outlines and skeletons;
all the past is somehow grown dim. Mary, girl; thou fadest
in pale glories behind me; boy! I seem to see but thy eyes
grown wondrous blue. Strangest problems of life seem clearing;
but clouds sweep between--Is my journey's end coming?
My legs feel faint; like his who has footed it all day.
Feel thy heart,--beats it yet? Stir thyself, Starbuck!--
stave it off--move, move! speak aloud!--Mast-head there!
See ye my boy's hand on the hill?--Crazed; aloft there!--
keep thy keenest eye upon the boats:--mark well the whale!--
Ho! again!--drive off that hawk! see! he pecks--he tears the vane"--
pointing to the red flag flying at the main-truck--"Ha, he soars
away with it!--Where's the old man now? see'st thou that sight,
oh Ahab!--shudder, shudder!"
The boats had not gone very far, when by a signal from the mast-heads--
a downward pointed arm, Ahab knew that the whale had sounded;
but intending to be near him at the next rising, he held on his way
a little sideways from the vessel; the becharmed crew maintaining
the profoundest silence, as the head-bent waves hammered and hammered
against the opposing bow.
"Drive, drive in your nails, oh ye waves! to their uttermost
heads drive them in! ye but strike a thing without a lid;
and no coffin and no hearse can be mine:--and hemp only can
kill me! Ha! ha!"
Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles;
then quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged
berg of ice, swiftly rising to the surface. A low rumbling sound
was heard; a subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths;
as bedraggled with trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances,
a vast form shot lengthwise, but obliquely from the sea.
Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it hovered for a moment
in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back into the deep.
Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for an instant
like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of flakes,
leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble
trunk of the whale.
"Give way!" cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to
the attack; but maddened by yesterday's fresh irons that corroded in him,
Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell
from heaven. The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad
white forehead, beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted together;
as head on, he came churning his tail among the boats; and once more
flailed them apart; spilling out the irons and lances from the two mates'
boats, and dashing in one side of the upper part of their bows,
but leaving Ahab's almost without a scar.
While Daggoo and Queequeg were stopping the strained planks;
and as the whale swimming out from them, turned, and showed
one entire flank as he shot by them again; at that moment
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straight out from him, as his own forward-flowing heart;
while Starbuck and Stubb, standing upon the bowsprit beneath,
caught sight of the down-coming monster just as soon as he.
"The whale, the whale! Up helm, up helm! Oh, all ye sweet powers
of air, now hug me close! Let not Starbuck die, if die he must,
in a woman's fainting fit. Up helm, I say--ye fools, the jaw! the jaw!
Is this the end of all my bursting prayers? all my life-long fidelities?
Oh, Ahab, Ahab, lo, thy work. Steady! helmsman, steady. Nay, nay!
Up helm again! He turns to meet us! Oh, his unappeasable brow
drives on towards one, whose duty tells him he cannot depart.
My God, stand by me now!"
"Stand not by me, but stand under me, whoever you are that will
now help Stubb; for Stubb, too, sticks here. I grin at thee,
thou grinning whale! Who ever helped Stubb, or kept Stubb awake,
but Stubb's own unwinking eye? And now poor Stubb goes to bed upon
a mattrass that is all too soft; would it were stuffed with brushwood!
I grin at thee, thou grinning whale! Look ye, sun, moon, and stars!
I call ye assassins of as good a fellow as ever spouted up his ghost.
For all that, I would yet ring glasses with ye, would ye but hand
the cup! Oh, oh! oh, oh! thou grinning whale, but there'll be
plenty of gulping soon! Why fly ye not, O Ahab! For me, off shoes
and jacket to it; let Stubb die in his drawers! A most mouldy
and over salted death, though;--cherries! cherries! cherries!
Oh, Flask, for one red cherry ere we die!"
"Cherries? I only wish that we were where they grow.
Oh, Stubb, I hope my poor mother's drawn my part-pay ere this;
if not, few coppers will now come to her, for the voyage is up."
From the ship's bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive;
hammers, bits of plank, lances, and harpoons, mechanically retained
in their hands, just as they had darted from their various employments;
all their enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which from side
to side strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad
band of overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed.
Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect,
and spite of all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his
forehead smote the ship's starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled.
Some fell flat upon their faces. Like dislodged trucks,
the heads of the harpooneers aloft shook on their bull-like necks.
Through the breach, they heard the waters pour, as mountain torrents
down a flume.
"The ship! The hearse!--the second hearse!" cried Ahab from the boat;
"its wood could only be American!"
Diving beneath the settling ship, the whale ran quivering along its keel;
but turning under water, swiftly shot to the surface again, far off
the other bow, but within a few yards of Ahab's boat, where, for a time,
he lay quiescent.
"I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! Let me
hear thy hammer. Oh! ye three unsurrendered spires of mine;
thou uncracked keel; and only god-bullied hull; thou firm deck,
and haughty helm, and Pole-pointed prow,--death--glorious ship! must
ye then perish, and without me? Am I cut off from the last fond pride
of meanest shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely death on lonely life!
Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief.
Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows
of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death!
Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale;
to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee;
for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins
and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine,
let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied
to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!"
The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward;
with igniting velocity the line ran through the grooves;--ran foul.
Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him
round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim,
he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone.
Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope's final end flew out
of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea,
disappeared in its depths.
For an instant, the tranced boat's crew stood still; then turned.
"The ship? Great God, where is the ship?" Soon they through dim,
bewildering mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous
Fata Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed
by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches,
the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking look-outs on
the sea. And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself,
and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lancepole,
and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex,
carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight.
But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over
the sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches
of the erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards
of the flag, which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings,
over the destroying billows they almost touched;--at that instant, a red
arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act
of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar.
A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards
from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag,
and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept
its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood;
and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged
savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there;
and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial
beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag
of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink
to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her,
and helmeted herself with it.
Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf;
a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed,
and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five
thousand years ago.
Epilogue
"AND I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE"
Job.
The drama's done. Why then here does any one step forth?--
Because one did survive the wreck.
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One of our harpooneers told me that he caught once a whale in
Spitzbergen that was white all over."
--A VOYAGE TO GREENLAND, A.D. 1671 HARRIS COLL.
"Several whales have come in upon this coast (Fife) Anno 1652, one
eighty feet in length of the whale-bone kind came in, which (as I
was informed), besides a vast quantity of oil, did afford 500 weight
of baleen. The jaws of it stand for a gate in the garden of
Pitferren."
--SIBBALD'S FIFE AND KINROSS.
"Myself have agreed to try whether I can master and kill this
Sperma-ceti whale, for I could never hear of any of that sort that was
killed by any man, such is his fierceness and swiftness."
--RICHARD STRAFFORD'S LETTER FROM THE BERMUDAS. PHIL. TRANS. A.D. 1668.
"Whales in the sea
God's voice obey."
--N. E. PRIMER.
"We saw also abundance of large whales, there being more in those
southern seas, as I may say, by a hundred to one; than we have to
the northward of us."
--CAPTAIN COWLEY'S VOYAGE ROUND THE GLOBE, A.D. 1729.
"... and the breath of the whale is frequendy attended with
such an insupportable smell, as to bring on a disorder of the brain."
--ULLOA'S SOUTH AMERICA.
"To fifty chosen sylphs of special note,
We trust the important charge, the petticoat.
Oft have we known that seven-fold fence to fail,
Tho' stuffed with hoops and armed with ribs of whale."
--RAPE OF THE LOCK.
"If we compare land animals in respect to magnitude, with those that
take up their abode in the deep, we shall find they will appear
contemptible in the comparison. The whale is doubtless the largest
animal in creation."
--GOLDSMITH, NAT. HIST.
"If you should write a fable for little fishes, you would make
them speak like great wales."
--GOLDSMITH TO JOHNSON.
"In the afternoon we saw what was supposed to be a rock, but it
was found to be a dead whale, which some Asiatics had killed, and were
then towing ashore. They seemed to endeavor to conceal themselves
behind the whale, in order to avoid being seen by us."
--COOK'S VOYAGES.
"The larger whales, they seldom venture to attack. They stand in
so great dread of some of them, that when out at sea they are afraid
to mention even their names, and carry dung, lime-stone, juniper-wood,
and some other articles of the same nature in their boats, in order to
terrify and prevent their too near approach."
--UNO VON TROIL'S LETTERS ON BANKS'S AND SOLANDER'S
VOYAGE TO ICELAND IN 1772.
"The Spermacetti Whale found by the Nantuckois, is an active, fierce
animal, and requires vast address and boldness in the fishermen."
--THOMAS JEFFERSON'S WHALE MEMORIAL TO THE FRENCH MINISTER IN 1778.
"And pray, sir, what in the world is equal to it?"
--EDMUND BURKE'S REFERENCE IN PARLIAMENT TO THE NANTUCKET WHALE-FISHERY.
"Spain--a great whale stranded on the shores of Europe."
--EDMUND BURKE. (SOMEWHERE.)
"A tenth branch of the king's ordinary revenue, said to be
grounded on the consideration of his guarding and protecting the
seas from pirates and robbers, is the right to royal fish, which are
whale and sturgeon. And these, when either thrown ashore or caught
near the coast, are the property of the king."
--BLACKSTONE.
"Soon to the sport of death the crews repair:
Rodmond unerring o'er his head suspends
The barbed steel, and every turn attends."
--FALCONER'S SHIPWRECK.
"Bright shone the roofs, the domes, the spires,
And rockets blew self driven,
To hang their momentary fire
Around the vault of heaven.
"So fire with water to compare,
The ocean serves on high,
Up-spouted by a whale in air,
To express unwieldy joy."
--COWPER, ON THE QUEEN'S VISIT TO LONDON.
"Ten or fifteen gallons of blood are thrown out of the heart at a
stroke, with immense velocity."
--JOHN HUNTER'S ACCOUNT OF THE DISSECTION OF A WHALE. (A SMALL SIZED ONE.)
"The aorta of a whale is larger in the bore than the main pipe of
the water-works at London Bridge, and the water roaring in its passage
through that pipe is inferior in impetus and velocity to the blood
gushing from the whale's heart."
--PALEY'S THEOLOGY.
"The whale is a mammiferous animal without hind feet."
--BARON CUVIER.
"In 40 degrees south, we saw Spermacetti Whales, but did not take
any till the first of May, the sea being then covered with them."
--COLNETT'S VOYAGE FOR THE PURPOSE OF EXTENDING THE SPERMACETI
WHALE FISHERY.
"In the free element beneath me swam,
Floundered and dived, in play, in chace, in battle,
Fishes of every color, form, and kind;
Which language cannot paint, and mariner
Had never seen; from dread Leviathan
To insect millions peopling every wave:
Gather'd in shoals immense, like floating islands,
Led by mysterious instincts through that waste
And trackless region, though on every side
Assaulted by voracious enemies,
Whales, sharks, and monsters, arm'd in front or jaw,
t/files/moby11.txt view on Meta::CPAN
"I built a cottage for Susan and myself and made a gateway in the
form of a Gothic Arch, by setting up a whale's jaw bones."
--HAWTHORNE'S TWICE TOLD TALES.
"She came to bespeak a monument for her first love, who had been
killed by a whale in the Pacific ocean, no less than forty years ago."
--IBID.
"No, Sir, 'tis a Right Whale," answered Tom; "I saw his sprout; he
threw up a pair of as pretty rainbows as a Christian would wish to
look at. He's a raal oil-butt, that fellow!"
--COOPER'S PILOT.
"The papers were brought in, and we saw in the Berlin Gazette that
whales had been introduced on the stage there."
--ECKERMANN'S CONVERSATIONS WITH GOETHE.
"My God! Mr. Chace, what is the matter?" I answered, "we have been
stove by a whale."
--"NARRATIVE OF THE SHIPWRECK OF THE WHALE SHIP ESSEX OF
NANTUCKET, WHICH WAS ATTACKED AND FINALLY DESTROYED BY
A LARGE SPERM WHALE IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN." BY OWEN
CHACE OF NANTUCKET, FIRST MATE OF SAID VESSEL. NEW
YORK, 1821.
"A mariner sat in the shrouds one night,
The wind was piping free;
Now bright, now dimmed, was the moonlight pale,
And the phospher gleamed in the wake of the whale,
As it floundered in the sea."
--ELIZABETH OAKES SMITH.
"The quantity of line withdrawn from the boats engaged in the
capture of this one whale, amounted altogether to 10,440 yards or
nearly six English miles. ...
"Sometimes the whale shakes its tremendous tail in the air, which,
cracking like a whip, resounds to the distance of three or four
miles."
--SCORESBY.
"Mad with the agonies he endures from these fresh attacks, the
infuriated Sperm Whale rolls over and over; he rears his enormous
head, and with wide expanded jaws snaps at everything around him; he
rushes at the boats with his head; they are propelled before him
with vast swiftness, and sometimes utterly destroyed.
... It is a matter of great astonishment that the consideration of
the habits of so interesting, and, in a commercial point of view, so
important an animal (as the Sperm Whale) should have been so
entirely neglected, or should have excited so little curiosity among
the numerous, and many of them competent observers, that of late
years, must have possessed the most abundant and the most convenient
opportunities of witnessing their habitudes."
--THOMAS BEALE'S HISTORY OF THE SPERM WHALE, 1839.
"The Cachalot" (Sperm Whale) "is not only better armed than the True
Whale" (Greenland or Right Whale) "in possessing a formidable weapon
at either extremity of its body, but also more frequently displays a
disposition to employ these weapons offensively and in manner at
once so artful, bold, and mischievous, as to lead to its being
regarded as the most dangerous to attack of all the known species of
the whale tribe."
--FREDERICK DEBELL BENNETT'S WHALING VOYAGE ROUND THE GLOBE, 1840.
October 13. "There she blows," was sung out from the mast-head.
"Where away?" demanded the captain.
"Three points off the lee bow, sir."
"Raise up your wheel. Steady!"
"Steady, sir."
"Mast-head ahoy! Do you see that whale now?"
"Ay ay, sir! A shoal of Sperm Whales! There she blows! There she
breaches!"
"Sing out! sing out every time!"
"Ay Ay, sir! There she blows! there--there--thar she blows -bowes
-bo-o-os!"
"How far off?"
"Two miles and a half."
"Thunder and lightning! so near! Call all hands."
--J. ROSS BROWNE'S ETCHINGS OF A WHALING CRUIZE. 1846.
"The Whale-ship Globe, on board of which vessel occurred the
horrid transactions we are about to relate, belonged to the island
of Nantucket."
--"NARRATIVE OF THE GLOBE," BY LAY AND HUSSEY SURVIVORS. A.D. 1828.
Being once pursued by a whale which he had wounded, he parried the
assault for some time with a lance; but the furious monster at
length rushed on the boat; himself and comrades only being preserved
by leaping into the water when they saw the onset was inevitable."
--MISSIONARY JOURNAL OF TYERMAN AND BENNETT.
"Nantucket itself," said Mr. Webster, "is a very striking and
peculiar portion of the National interest. There is a population of
eight or nine thousand persons living here in the sea, adding
largely every year to the National wealth by the boldest and most
persevering industry."
--REPORT OF DANIEL WEBSTER'S SPEECH IN THE U. S. SENATE,
ON THE APPLICATION FOR THE ERECTION OF A BREAKWATER AT NANTUCKET. 1828.
"The whale fell directly over him, and probably killed him in a
moment."
--"THE WHALE AND HIS CAPTORS, OR THE WHALEMAN'S
ADVENTURES AND THE WHALE'S BIOGRAPHY, GATHERED ON THE
HOMEWARD CRUISE OF THE COMMODORE PREBLE."
BY REV. HENRY T. CHEEVER.
"If you make the least damn bit of noise," replied Samuel, "I will
send you to hell."
--LIFE OF SAMUEL COMSTOCK (THE MUTINEER), BY HIS
BROTHER, WILLIAM COMSTOCK. ANOTHER VERSION OF THE
WHALE-SHIP GLOBE NARRATIVE.
"The voyages of the Dutch and English to the Northern Ocean, in
order, if possible, to discover a passage through it to India,
though they failed of their main object, laid-open the haunts of the
whale."
--MCCULLOCH'S COMMERCIAL DICTIONARY.
"These things are reciprocal; the ball rebounds, only to bound
forward again; for now in laying open the haunts of the whale, the
whalemen seem to have indirectly hit upon new clews to that same
mystic North-West Passage."
--FROM "SOMETHING" UNPUBLISHED.
"It is impossible to meet a whale-ship on the ocean without being
struck by her near appearance. The vessel under short sail, with
look-outs at the mast-heads, eagerly scanning the wide expanse
around them, has a totally different air from those engaged in regular
voyage."
--CURRENTS AND WHALING. U. S. EX. EX.
"Pedestrians in the vicinity of London and elsewhere may recollect
having seen large curved bones set upright in the earth, either to
form arches over gateways, or entrances to alcoves, and they may
perhaps have been told that these were the ribs of whales."
--TALES OF A WHALE VOYAGER TO THE ARCTIC OCEAN.
"It was not till the boats returned from the pursuit of these
whales, that the whites saw their ship in bloody possession of the
savages enrolled among the crew."
--NEWSPAPER ACCOUNT OF THE TAKING AND RETAKING OF THE WHALE-SHIP HOBOMACK.
"It is generally well known that out of the crews of Whaling vessels
(American) few ever return in the ships on board of which they
departed."
--CRUISE IN A WHALE BOAT.
"Suddenly a mighty mass emerged from the water, and shot up
perpendicularly into the air. It was the while."
--MIRIAM COFFIN OR THE WHALE FISHERMAN.
"The Whale is harpooned to be sure; but bethink you, how you would
manage a powerful unbroken colt, with the mere appliance of a rope
tied to the root of his tail."
--A CHAPTER ON WHALING IN RIBS AND TRUCKS.
"On one occasion I saw two of these monsters (whales) probably
male and female, slowly swimming, one after the other, within less
than a stone's throw of the shore" (Terra Del Fuego), "over which
the beech tree extended its branches."
--DARWIN'S VOYAGE OF A NATURALIST.
"'Stern all!' exclaimed the mate, as upon turning his head, he saw
the distended jaws of a large Sperm Whale close to the head of the
boat, threatening it with instant destruction;--'Stern all, for your
lives!'"
--WHARTON THE WHALE KILLER.
"So be cheery, my lads, let your hearts never fail,
While the bold harpooneer is striking the whale!"
--NANTUCKET SONG.
"Oh, the rare old Whale, mid storm and gale
In his ocean home will be
A giant in might, where might is right,
And King of the boundless sea."
--WHALE SONG.
End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
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