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in one hand, and that identical New Zealand head in the other,

the stranger entered the room, and without looking towards

the bed, placed his candle a good way off from me on the floor

in one corner, and then began working away at the knotted cords

of the large bag I before spoke of as being in the room.

I was all eagerness to see his face, but he kept it averted

for some time while employed in unlacing the bag's mouth.

This accomplished, however, he turned round--when, good heavens;

what a sight!  Such a face!  It was of a dark, purplish, yellow color,

here and there stuck over with large blackish looking squares.

Yes, it's just as I thought, he's a terrible bedfellow;

he's been in a fight, got dreadfully cut, and here he is,

just from the surgeon.  But at that moment he chanced to turn

his face so towards the light, that I plainly saw they could not

be sticking-plasters at all, those black squares on his cheeks.

They were stains of some sort or other.  At first I knew not what

to make of this; but soon an inkling of the truth occurred to me.

I remembered a story of a white man--a whaleman too--

who, falling among the cannibals, had been tattooed by them.

I concluded that this harpooneer, in the course of his

distant voyages, must have met with a similar adventure.

And what is it, thought I, after all!  It's only his outside;

a man can be honest in any sort of skin.  But then, what to make of

his unearthly complexion, that part of it, I mean, lying round about,

and completely independent of the squares of tattooing.

To be sure, it might be nothing but a good coat of tropical tanning;

but I never heard of a hot sun's tanning a white man into a

purplish yellow one.  However, I had never been in the South Seas;

and perhaps the sun there produced these extraordinary effects

upon the skin.  Now, while all these ideas were passing

through me like lightning, this harpooneer never noticed me

at all.  But, after some difficulty having opened his bag,

he commenced fumbling in it, and presently pulled out a sort

of tomahawk, and a seal-skin wallet with the hair on.

Placing these on the old chest in the middle of the room,

he then took the New Zealand head--a ghastly thing enough--

and crammed it down into the bag.  He now took off his hat--

a new beaver hat--when I came nigh singing out with fresh surprise.

There was no hair on his head--none to speak of at least--

nothing but a small scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead.  His bald

purplish head now looked for all the world like a mildewed skull.

Had not the stranger stood between me and the door, I would

have bolted out of it quicker than ever I bolted a dinner.



Even as it was, I thought something of slipping out of

the window, but it was the second floor back.  I am no coward,

but what to make of this headpeddling purple rascal altogether

passed my comprehension.  Ignorance is the parent of fear,

and being completely nonplussed and confounded about the stranger,

I confess I was now as much afraid of him as if it was the devil

himself who had thus broken into my room at the dead of night.

In fact, I was so afraid of him that I was not game enough

just then to address him, and demand a satisfactory answer

concerning what seemed inexplicable in him.



Meanwhile, he continued the business of undressing, and at

last showed his chest and arms.  As I live, these covered

parts of him were checkered with the same squares as his face,

his back, too, was all over the same dark squares;

he seemed to have been in a Thirty Years' War, and just

escaped from it with a sticking-plaster shirt.

Still more, his very legs were marked, as if a parcel of dark

green frogs were running up the trunks of young palms.

It was now quite plain that he must be some abominable savage

or other shipped aboard of a whaleman in the South Seas,

and so landed in this Christian country.  I quaked to think of it.

A peddler of heads too--perhaps the heads of his own brothers.

He might take a fancy to mine--heavens! look at that tomahawk!



But there was no time for shuddering, for now the savage went

about something that completely fascinated my attention,

and convinced me that he must indeed be a heathen.

Going to his heavy grego, or wrapall, or dreadnaught,

which he had previously hung on a chair, he fumbled in the pockets,

and produced at length a curious little deformed image with a hunch

on its back, and exactly the color of a three days' old Congo baby.

Remembering the embalmed head, at first I almost thought that this

black manikin was a real baby preserved in some similar manner.

But seeing that it was not at all limber, and that it glistened

a good deal like polished ebony, I concluded that it must

be nothing but a wooden idol, which indeed it proved to be.

For now the savage goes up to the empty fire-place,

and removing the papered fire-board, sets up this little

hunch-backed image, like a tenpin, between the andirons.

The chimney jambs and all the bricks inside were very sooty,

so that I thought this fire-place made a very appropriate little

shrine or chapel for his Congo idol.



I now screwed my eyes hard towards the half hidden image,

feeling but ill at ease meantime--to see what was next to follow.

First he takes about a double handful of shavings out of his grego pocket,

and places them carefully before the idol; then laying a bit of ship

biscuit on top and applying the flame from the lamp, he kindled

the shavings into a sacrificial blaze.  Presently, after many hasty

snatches into the fire, and still hastier withdrawals of his fingers

(whereby he seemed to be scorching them badly), he at last succeeded

in drawing out the biscuit; then blowing off the heat and ashes

a little, he made a polite offer of it to the little negro.

But the little devil did not seem to fancy such dry sort of fare at all;

he never moved his lips.  All these strange antics were accompanied

by still stranger guttural noises from the devotee, who seemed to be

praying in a sing-song or else singing some pagan psalmody or other,

during which his face twitched about in the most unnatural manner.

At last extinguishing the fire, he took the idol up very unceremoniously,

and bagged it again in his grego pocket as carelessly as if he were

a sportsman bagging a dead woodcock.



All these queer proceedings increased my uncomfortableness,

and seeing him now exhibiting strong symptoms of concluding

his business operations, and jumping into bed with me, I thought

it was high time, now or never, before the light was put out,

to break the spell in which I had so long been bound.



But the interval I spent in deliberating what to say, was a fatal one.

Taking up his tomahawk from the table, he examined the head of it

for an instant, and then holding it to the light, with his mouth

at the handle, he puffed out great clouds of tobacco smoke.

The next moment the light was extinguished, and this wild cannibal,

tomahawk between his teeth, sprang into bed with me.  I sang out,

I could not help it now; and giving a sudden grunt of astonishment

he began feeling me.

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we are too much like oysters observing the sun through

the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.

Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.

In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.

And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove

boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul,

Jove himself cannot.







CHAPTER 8



The Pulpit





I had not been seated very long ere a man of a certain venerable

robustness entered; immediately as the storm-pelted door flew

back upon admitting him, a quick regardful eyeing of him by all

the congregation, sufficiently attested that this fine old

man was the chaplain.  Yes, it was the famous Father Mapple,

so called by the whalemen, among whom he was a very great favorite.

He had been a sailor and a harpooneer in his youth, but for

many years past had dedicated his life to the ministry.

At the time I now write of, Father Mapple was in the hardy winter

of a healthy old age; that sort of old age which seems merging into

a second flowering youth, for among all the fissures of his wrinkles,

there shone certain mild gleams of a newly developing bloom--

the spring verdure peeping forth even beneath February's snow.

No one having previously heard his history, could for the first time

behold Father Mapple without the utmost interest, because there

were certain engrafted clerical peculiarities about him,

imputable to that adventurous maritime life he had led.

When he entered I observed that he carried no umbrella,

and certainly had not come in his carriage, for his tarpaulin

hat ran down with melting sleet, and his great pilot cloth

jacket seemed almost to drag him to the floor with the weight

of the water it had absorbed.  However, hat and coat and

overshoes were one by one removed, and hung up in a little

space in an adjacent corner; when, arrayed in a decent suit,

he quietly approached the pulpit.



Like most old fashioned pulpits, it was a very lofty one, and since

a regular stairs to such a height would, by its long angle with

the floor, seriously contract the already small area of the chapel,

the architect, it seemed, had acted upon the hint of Father Mapple,

and finished the pulpit without a stairs, substituting a perpendicular

side ladder, like those used in mounting a ship from a boat at sea.

The wife of a whaling captain had provided the chapel with a handsome

pair of red worsted man-ropes for this ladder, which, being itself

nicely headed, and stained with a mahogany color, the whole contrivance,

considering what manner of chapel it was, seemed by no means

in bad taste.  Halting for an instant at the foot of the ladder,

and with both hands grasping the ornamental knobs of the man-ropes,

Father Mapple cast a look upwards, and then with a truly sailor-like

but still reverential dexterity, hand over hand, mounted the steps

as if ascending the main-top of his vessel.



The perpendicular parts of this side ladder, as is usually the case

with swinging ones, were of cloth-covered rope, only the rounds

were of wood, so that at every step there was a joint.  At my first

glimpse of the pulpit, it had not escaped me that however convenient

for a ship, these joints in the present instance seemed unnecessary.

For I was not prepared to see Father Mapple after gaining the height,

slowly turn round, and stooping over the pulpit, deliberately drag

up the ladder step by step, till the whole was deposited within,

leaving him impregnable in his little Quebec.



I pondered some time without fully comprehending the reason for this.

Father Mapple enjoyed such a wide reputation for sincerity and sanctity,

that I could not suspect him of courting notoriety by any mere

tricks of the stage.  No, thought I, there must be some sober reason

for this thing; furthermore, it must symbolize something unseen.

Can it be, then, that by that act of physical isolation,

he signifies his spiritual withdrawal for the time, from all outward

worldly ties and connexions?  Yes, for replenished with the meat

and wine of the word, to the faithful man of God, this pulpit,

I see, is a self-containing stronghold--a lofty Ehrenbreitstein,

with a perennial well of water within the walls.



But the side ladder was not the only strange feature of the place,

borrowed from the chaplain's former sea-farings. Between the marble

cenotaphs on either hand of the pulpit, the wall which formed its back was

adorned with a large painting representing a gallant ship beating against

a terrible storm off a lee coast of black rocks and snowy breakers.

But high above the flying scud and dark-rolling clouds, there floated

a little isle of sunlight, from which beamed forth an angel's face;

and this bright face shed a distant spot of radiance upon the ship's

tossed deck, something like that silver plate now inserted into

the Victory's plank where Nelson fell.  "Ah, noble ship," the angel

seemed to say, "beat on, beat on, thou noble ship, and bear a hardy helm;

for lo! the sun is breaking through; the clouds are rolling off--

serenest azure is at hand."



Nor was the pulpit itself without a trace of the same

sea-taste that had achieved the ladder and the picture.

Its panelled front was in the likeness of a ship's bluff bows,

and the Holy Bible rested on a projecting piece of scroll work,

fashioned after a ship's fiddle-headed beak.



What could be more full of meaning?--for the pulpit is ever this

earth's foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit

leads the world.  From thence it is the storm of God's quick wrath

is first descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt.

From thence it is the God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked

for favorable winds.  Yes, the world's a ship on its passage out,

and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.







CHAPTER 9



The Sermon





Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of unassuming authority

ordered the scattered people to condense.  "Star board gangway,

there! side away to larboard--larboard gangway to starboard!

Midships! midships!"



There was a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots among the benches,

and a still slighter shuffling of women's shoes, and all was quiet again,

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are pitiful.  For when Jonah, not yet supplicating God for mercy,

since he but too well knew the darkness of his deserts,--

when wretched Jonah cries out to them to take him and cast

him forth into the sea, for he knew that for his sake this

great tempest was upon them; they mercifully turn from him,

and seek by other means to save the ship.  But all in vain;

the indignant gale howls louder; then, with one hand raised

invokingly to God, with the other they not unreluctantly lay

hold of Jonah.



"And now behold Jonah taken up as an anchor and dropped into the sea;

when instantly an oily calmness floats out from the east,

and the sea is still, as Jonah carries down the gale with him,

leaving smooth water behind.  He goes down in the whirling heart of such

a masterless commotion that he scarce heeds the moment when he drops

seething into the yawning jaws awaiting him; and the whale shoots-to

all his ivory teeth, like so many white bolts, upon his prison.

Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord out of the fish's belly.

But observe his prayer, and so many white bolts, upon his prison.

Then Jonah prayed unto learn a weighty lesson.  For sinful

as he is, Jonah does not weep and wail for direct deliverance.

He feels that his dreadful punishment is just.  He leaves all his

deliverance to God, contenting himself with this, that spite of all

his pains and pangs, he will still look towards His holy temple.

And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance;

not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment.

And how pleasing to God was this conduct in Jonah, is shown

in the eventual deliverance of him from the sea and the whale.

Shipmates, I do not place Jonah before you to be copied for his

sin but I do place him before you as a model for repentance.

Sin not; but if you do, take heed to repent of it like Jonah."



While he was speaking these words, the howling of the shrieking,

slanting storm without seemed to add new power to the preacher, who,

when describing Jonah's sea-storm, seemed tossed by a storm himself.

His deep chest heaved as with a ground-swell; his tossed arms

seemed the warring elements at work; and the thunders that rolled

away from off his swarthy brow, and the light leaping from his eye,

made all his simple hearers look on him with a quick fear that was

strange to them.



There now came a lull in his look, as he silently turned over

the leaves of the Book once more; and, at last, standing motionless,

with closed eyes, for the moment, seemed communing with God and himself.



But again he leaned over towards the people, and bowing his

head lowly, with an aspect of the deepest yet manliest humility,

he spake these words:



"Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon you; both his hands

press upon me.  I have read ye by what murky light may be mine

the lesson that Jonah teaches to all sinners; and therefore to ye,

and still more to me, for I am a greater sinner than ye.

And now how gladly would I come down from this mast-head and sit

on the hatches there where you sit, and listen as you listen,

while some one of you reads me that other and more awful lesson

which Jonah teaches to me, as a pilot of the living God.  How being

an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of true things and bidden

by the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of a

wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise,

fled from his mission, and sought to escape his duty and his God by taking

ship at Joppa.  But God is everywhere; Tarshish he never reached.

As we have seen, God came upon him in the whale, and swallowed

him down to living gulfs of doom, and with swift slantings tore

him along 'into the midst of the seas,' where the eddying depths

sucked him ten thousand fathoms down, and 'the weeds were wrapped

about his head,' and all the watery world of woe bowled over him.

Yet even then beyond the reach of any plummet--'out of the belly

of hell'--when the whale grounded upon the ocean's utmost bones,

even then, God heard the engulphed, repenting prophet when he cried.

Then God spake unto the fish; and from the shuddering cold

and blackness of the sea, the whale came breeching up towards

the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air and earth;

and 'vomited out Jonah upon the dry land;' when the word of the Lord

came a second time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten--his ears,

like two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean--

Jonah did the Almighty's bidding.  And what was that, shipmates?

To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood!  That was it!



"This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to that

pilot of the living God who slights it.  Woe to him whom this

world charms from Gospel duty!  Woe to him who seeks to pour

oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale!

Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal!

Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness!

Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor!

Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false

were salvation!  Yea, woe to him who as the great Pilot Paul

has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway!



He 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

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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.

It may never have occurred to you that a porpoise spouts.

Indeed, his spout is so small that it is not very readily discernible.

But the next time you have a chance, watch him; and you will then

see the great Sperm whale himself in miniature.



BOOK III.  (Duodecimo), CHAPTER II.  (Algerine Porpoise).--A pirate.

Very savage.  He is only found, I think, in the Pacific.  He is somewhat

larger than the Huzza Porpoise, but much of the same general make.

Provoke him, and he will buckle to a shark.  I have lowered for him

many times, but never yet saw him captured.



BOOK III.  (Duodecimo), CHAPTER III.  (Mealy-mouthed Porpoise).--The

largest kind of Porpoise; and only found in the Pacific, so far

as it is known.  The only English name, by which he has hitherto

been designated, is that of the fisher--Right-Whale Porpoise,

from the circumstance that he is chiefly found in the vicinity of

that Folio.  In shape, he differs in some degree from the Huzza Porpoise,

being of a less rotund and jolly girth; indeed, he is of quite

a neat and gentleman-like figure.  He has no fins on his back

(most other porpoises have), he has a lovely tail, and sentimental

Indian eyes of a hazel hue.  But his mealy-mouth spoils all.

Though his entire back down to his side fins is of a deep sable,

yet a boundary line, distinct as the mark in a ship's hull,

called the "bright waist," that line streaks him from stem

to stern, with two separate colors, black above and white below.

The white comprises part of his head, and the whole of his mouth,

which makes him look as if he had just escaped from a

felonious visit to a meal-bag. A most mean and mealy aspect!

His oil is much like that of the common porpoise.





Beyond the DUODECIMO, this system does not proceed,

inasmuch as the Porpoise is the smallest of the whales.

Above, you have all the Leviathans of note.  But there are a rabble

of uncertain, fugitive, half-fabulous whales, which, as an

American whaleman, I know by reputation, but not personally.

I shall enumerate them by their fore-castle appellations;

for possibly such a list may be valuable to future investigators,

who may complete what I have here but begun.  If any of

the following whales, shall hereafter be caught and marked,

then he can readily be incorporated into this System,

according to his Folio, Octavo, or Duodecimo magnitude:--

The Bottle-Nose Whale; the Junk Whale; the Pudding-Headed Whale;

the Cape Whale; the Leading Whale; the Cannon Whale; the Scragg Whale;

the Coppered Whale; the Elephant Whale; the Iceberg Whale;

the Quog Whale; the Blue Whale; &c. From Icelandic, Dutch,

and old English authorities, there might be quoted other lists

of uncertain whales, blessed with all manner of uncouth names.

But I omit them as altogether obsolete; and can hardly help

suspecting them for mere sounds, full of Leviathanism,

but signifying nothing.



Finally:  It was stated at the outset, that this system would not

be here, and at once, perfected.  You cannot but plainly see that I

have kept my word.  But I now leave my cetological System standing

thus unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left,

with the cranes still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower.

For small erections may be finished by their first architects;

grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity.

God keep me from ever completing anything.  This whole

book is but a draught--nay, but the draught of a draught.

Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!







CHAPTER 33



The Specksynder







Concerning the officers of the whale-craft, this seems as good a place

as any to set down a little domestic peculiarity on ship-board,

arising from the existence of the harpooneer class of officers,

a class unknown of course in any other marine than the whale-fleet.



The large importance attached to the harpooneer's vocation is

evinced by the fact, that originally in the old Dutch Fishery,

two centuries and more ago, the command of a whale-ship was not

wholly lodged in the person now called the captain, but was divided

between him and an officer called the Specksynder.  Literally this

word means Fat-Cutter; usage, however, in time made it equivalent

to Chief Harpooneer.  In those days, the captain's authority was

restricted to the navigation and general management of the vessel;

while over the whale-hunting department and all its concerns,

the Specksynder or Chief Harpooneer reigned supreme.

In the British Greenland Fishery, under the corrupted title

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Another thing.  Flask was the last person down at the dinner,

and Flask is the first man up.  Consider!  For hereby Flask's

dinner was badly jammed in point of time.  Starbuck and Stubb

both had the start of him; and yet they also have the privilege

of lounging in the rear.  If Stubb even, who is but a peg higher

than Flask, happens to have but a small appetite, and soon shows

symptoms of concluding his repast, then Flask must bestir himself,

he will not get more than three mouthfuls that day; for it

is against holy usage for Stubb to precede Flask to the deck.

Therefore it was that Flask once admitted in private,

that ever since he had arisen to the dignity of an officer,

from that moment he had never known what it was to be otherwise

than hungry, more or less.  For what he ate did not so much relieve

his hunger, as keep it immortal in him.  Peace and satisfaction,

thought Flask, have for ever departed from my stomach.

I am an officer; but, how I wish I could fist a bit of old-fashioned

beef in the fore-castle, as I used to when I was before the mast.

There's the fruits of promotion now; there's the vanity of glory:

there's the insanity of life!  Besides, if it were so that

any mere sailor of the Pequod had a grudge against Flask

in Flask's official capacity, all that sailor had to do,

in order to obtain ample vengeance, was to go aft at dinnertime,

and get a peep at Flask through the cabin sky-light, sitting

silly and dumfoundered before awful Ahab.



Now, Ahab and his three mates formed what may be called the first

table in the Pequod's cabin.  After their departure, taking place

in inverted order to their arrival, the canvas cloth was cleared,

or rather was restored to some hurried order by the pallid steward.

And then the three harpooneers were bidden to the feast, they being

its residuary legatees.  They made a sort of temporary servants'

hall of the high and mighty cabin.



In strange contrast to the hardly tolerable constraint

and nameless invisible domineerings of the captain's table,

was the entire care-free license and ease, the almost frantic

democracy of those inferior fellows the harpooneers.

While their masters, the mates, seemed afraid of the sound

of the hinges of their own jaws, the harpooneers chewed

their food with such a relish that there was a report to it.

They dined like lords; they filled their bellies like Indian

ships all day loading with spices.  Such portentous appetites

had Queequeg and Tashtego, that to fill out the vacancies made

by the previous repast, often the pale Dough-Boy was fain to bring

on a great baron of salt-junk, seemingly quarried out of the solid ox.

And if he were not lively about it, if he did not go with a

nimble hop-skip-and-jump, then Tashtego had an ungentlemanly

way of accelerating him by darting a fork at his back,

harpoon-wise. And once Daggoo, seized with a sudden humor,

assisted Dough-Boy's memory by snatching him up bodily,

and thrusting his head into a great empty wooden trencher,

while Tashtego, knife in hand, began laying out the circle

preliminary to scalping him.  He was naturally a very nervous,

shuddering sort of little fellow, this bread-faced steward;

the progeny of a bankrupt baker and a hospital nurse.

And what with the standing spectacle of the black terrific Ahab,

and the periodical tumultuous visitations of these three savages,

Dough-Boy's whole life was one continual lip-quiver. Commonly,

after seeing the harpooneers furnished with all things they demanded,

he would escape from their clutches into his little pantry adjoining,

and fearfully peep out at them through the blinds of its door,

till all was over.



It was a sight to see Queequeg seated over against Tashtego,

opposing his filed teeth to the Indian's; crosswise to them,

Daggoo seated on the floor, for a bench would have brought

his hearse-plumed head to the low carlines; at every motion

of his colossal limbs, making the low cabin framework to shake,

as when an African elephant goes passenger in a ship.

But for all this, the great negro was wonderfully abstemious,

not to say dainty.  It seemed hardly possible that by such

comparatively small mouthfuls he could keep up the vitality

diffused through so broad, baronial, and superb a person.

But, doubtless, this noble savage fed strong and drank deep

of the abounding element of air; and through his dilated

nostrils snuffed in the sublime life of the worlds.

Not by beef or by bread, are giants made or nourished.

But Queequeg, he had a mortal, barbaric smack of the lip in eating--

an ugly sound enough--so much so, that the trembling Dough-Boy

almost looked to see whether any marks of teeth lurked in his

own lean arms.  And when he would hear Tashtego singing out

for him to produce himself, that his bones might be picked,

the simple-witted Steward all but shattered the crockery hanging

round him in the pantry, by his sudden fits of the palsy.

Nor did the whetstone which the harpooneers carried in their pockets,

for their lances and other weapons; and with which whetstones,

at dinner, they would ostentatiously sharpen their knives;

that grating sound did not at all tend to tranquillize poor

Dough-Boy. How could he forget that in his Island days, Queequeg,

for one, must certainly have been guilty of some murderous,

convivial indiscretion.  Alas!  Dough-Boy! hard fares the white waiter

who waits upon cannibals.  Not a napkin should he carry on his arm,

but a buckler.  In good time, though, to his great delight,

the three salt-sea warriors would rise and depart; to his credulous,

fable-mongering ears, all their martial bones jingling in them

at every step, like Moorish scimetars in scabbards.



But, though these barbarians dined in the cabin, and nominally

lived there; still, being anything but sedentary in their habits,

they were scarcely ever in it except at mealtimes, and just

before sleeping-time, when they passed through it to their

own peculiar quarters.



In this one matter, Ahab seemed no exception to most American

whale captains, who, as a set, rather incline to the opinion

that by rights the ship's cabin belongs to them; and that it is by

courtesy alone that anybody else is, at any time, permitted there.

So that, in real truth, the mates and harpooneers of the Pequod might

more properly be said to have lived out of the cabin than in it.

For when they did enter it, it was something as a streetdoor

enters a house; turning inwards for a moment, only to be turned

out the next; and, as a permanent thing, residing in the open air.

Nor did they lose much hereby; in the cabin was no companionship;

socially, Ahab was inaccessible.  Though nominally included

in the census of Christendom, he was still an alien to it.

He lived in the world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived

in settled Missouri.  And as when Spring and Summer had departed,

that wild Logan of the woods, burying himself in the hollow of a tree,

lived out the winter there, sucking his own paws; so, in his inclement,

howling old age, Ahab's soul, shut up in the caved trunk of his body,

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ALL



The squall! the squall! jump, my jollies!  (They scatter.)





PIP (Shrinking under the windlass)



Jollies?  Lord help such jollies!  Crish, crash! there goes

the jib-stay! Blang-whang! God!  Duck lower, Pip, here comes

the royal yard!  It's worse than being in the whirled woods,

the last day of the year!  Who'd go climbing after chestnuts now?

But there they go, all cursing, and here I don't. Fine prospects

to 'em; they're on the road to heaven.  Hold on hard!

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,

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And however the general experiences in the fishery may amend

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

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

in some vicissitudes of their vocation, revived in the minds

of the hunters.



So that overawed by the rumors and portents concerning him,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

details of any certain calamity, and without superstitious accompaniments

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



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

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

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

actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same

instant of time.



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

altogether without some faint show of superstitious probability.

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

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

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

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

the most curious and contradictory speculations regarding them,

especially concerning the mystic modes whereby, after sounding

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

to the most widely distant points.



It is a thing well known to both American and English

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

record years ago by Scoresby, that some whales have been

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

found the barbs of harpoons darted in the Greenland seas.

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

been declared that the interval of time between the two assaults

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

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

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

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

the prodigies related in old times of the inland Strello mountain

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

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

more wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain near Syracuse

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

by an underground passage); these fabulous narrations are almost

fully equalled by the realities of the whalemen.



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

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

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

some whalemen should go still further in their superstitions;

declaring Moby Dick not only ubiquitous, but immortal

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

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

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

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

for again in unensanguined billows hundreds of leagues away,

his unsullied jet would once more be seen.



But even stripped of these supernatural surmisings, there was enough

in the earthly make and incontestable character of the monster

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

so much his uncommon bulk that so much distinguished him from

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

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

These were his prominent features; the tokens whereby,

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

at a long distance, to those who knew him.



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

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

he had gained his distinctive appellation of the White Whale;

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

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

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

with golden gleamings.



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

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

as that unexampled, intelligent malignity which, according to

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

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

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

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

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

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



Already several fatalities had attended his chase.

But though similar disasters, however little bruited ashore,

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

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

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

regarded as having been inflicted by an unintelligent agent.



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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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only rises from the circumstance, that the irresponsible ferociousness

of the creature stands invested in the fleece of celestial innocence

and love; and hence, by bringing together two such opposite emotions

in our minds, the Polar bear frightens us with so unnatural a contrast.

But even assuming all this to be true; yet, were it not for the whiteness,

you would not have that intensified terror.



As for the white shark, the white gliding ghostliness of repose

in that creature, when beheld in his ordinary moods, strangely tallies

with the same quality in the Polar quadruped.  This peculiarity is most

vividly hit by the French in the name they bestow upon that fish.

The Romish mass for the dead begins with "Requiem eternam"

(eternal rest), whence Requiem denominating the mass itself,

and any other funeral music.  Now, in allusion to the white,

silent stillness of death in this shark, and the mild deadliness

of his habits, the French call him Requin.





Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those clouds of spiritual

wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails

in all imaginations?  Not Coleridge first threw that spell;

but God's great, unflattering laureate, Nature.*





*I remember the first albatross I ever saw.  It was during

a prolonged gale, in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas.

From my forenoon watch below, I ascended to the overclouded deck;

and there, dashed upon the main hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing

of unspotted whiteness, and with a hooked, Roman bill sublime.

At intervals, it arched forth its vast archangel wings, as if to

embrace some holy ark.  Wondrous flutterings and throbbings shook it.

Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some king's ghost

in supernatural distress.  Through its inexpressible, strange eyes,

methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God.  As Abraham

before the angels, I bowed myself; the white thing was so white,

its wings so wide, and in those for ever exiled waters, I had

lost the miserable warping memories of traditions and of towns.

Long I gazed at that prodigy of plumage.  I cannot tell,

can only hint, the things that darted through me then.

But at last I awoke; and turning, asked a sailor what bird was this.

A goney, he replied.  Goney! never had heard that name before;

is it conceivable that this glorious thing is utterly unknown

to men ashore! never!  But some time after, I learned that goney

was some seaman's name for albatross.  So that by no possibility

could Coleridge's wild Rhyme have had aught to do with those mystical

impressions which were mine, when I saw that bird upon our deck.

For neither had I then read the Rhyme, nor knew the bird to be

an albatross.  Yet, in saying this, I do but indirectly burnish

a little brighter the noble merit of the poem and the poet.



I assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird

chiefly lurks the secret of the spell; a truth the more evinced in this,

that by a solecism of terms there are birds called grey albatrosses;

and these I have frequently seen, but never with such emotions as when I

beheld the Antarctic fowl.



But how had the mystic thing been caught?  Whisper it not,

and I will tell; with a treacherous hook and line, as the fowl

floated on the sea.  At last the Captain made a postman of it;

tying a lettered, leathern tally round its neck, with the ship's

time and place; and then letting it escape.  But I doubt not,

that leathern tally, meant for man, was taken off in Heaven,

when the white fowl flew to join the wing-folding, the invoking,

and adoring cherubim!





Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that of

the White Steed of the Prairies; a magnificent milk-white charger,

large-eyed, small-headed, bluff-chested, and with the dignity

of a thousand monarchs in his lofty, overscorning carriage.

He was the elected Xerxes of vast herds of wild horses,

whose pastures in those days were only fenced by the Rocky Mountains

and the Alleghanies.  At their flaming head he westward

trooped it like that chosen star which every evening leads

on the hosts of light.  The flashing cascade of his mane,

the curving comet of his tail, invested him with housings more

resplendent than gold and silver-beaters could have furnished him.

A most imperial and archangelical apparition of that unfallen,

western world, which to the eyes of the old trappers and hunters

revived the glories of those primeval times when Adam walked

majestic as a god, bluff-bowed and fearless as this mighty steed.

Whether marching amid his aides and marshals in the van of

countless cohorts that endlessly streamed it over the plains,

like an Ohio; or whether with his circumambient subjects browsing

all around at the horizon, the White Steed gallopingly reviewed

them with warm nostrils reddening through his cool milkiness;

in whatever aspect he presented himself, always to the bravest

Indians he was the object of trembling reverence and awe.

Nor can it be questioned from what stands on legendary record

of this noble horse, that it was his spiritual whiteness chiefly,

which so clothed him with divineness; and that this divineness

had that in it which, though commanding worship, at the same

time enforced a certain nameless terror.



But there are other instances where this whiteness loses

all that accessory and strange glory which invests it in

the White Steed and Albatross.



What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks

the eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin!

It is that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed

by the name he bears.  The Albino is as well made as other men--

has no substantive deformity--and yet this mere aspect of all-pervading

whiteness makes him more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion.

Why should this be so?



Nor, in quite other aspects, does Nature in her least

palpable but not the less malicious agencies, fail to enlist

among her forces this crowning attribute of the terrible.

From its snowy aspect, the gauntleted ghost of the Southern Seas has

been denominated the White Squall.  Nor, in some historic instances,

has the art of human malice omitted so potent an auxiliary.

How wildly it heightens the effect of that passage in Froissart,

when, masked in the snowy symbol of their faction, the desperate

White Hoods of Ghent murder their bailiff in the market-place!



Nor, in some things, does the common, hereditary experience of all

mankind fail to bear witness to the supernaturalism of this hue.

It cannot well be doubted, that the one visible quality in the aspect

of the dead which most appals the gazer, is the marble pallor

lingering there; as if indeed that pallor were as much like the badge

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aged sperm whales.  So that though Moby Dick had in a former

year been seen, for example, on what is called the Seychelle

ground in the Indian ocean, or Volcano Bay on the Japanese Coast;

yet it did not follow that were the Pequod to visit either

of those spots at any subsequent corresponding season,

she would infallibly encounter him there.  So, too, with some

other feeding-grounds, where he had at times revealed himself.

But all these seemed only his casual stopping-places and

ocean-inns, so to speak, not his places of prolonged abode.

And where Ahab's chances of accomplishing his object

have hitherto been spoken of, allusion has only been made

to whatever way-side, antecedent, extra prospects were his,

ere a particular set time or place were attained, when all

possibilities would become probabilities, and, as Ahab

fondly thought, every possibility the next thing to a certainty.

That particular set time and place were conjoined in the one

technical phrase--the Season-on-the-Line. For there and then,

for several consecutive years, Moby Dick had been periodically

descried, lingering in those waters for awhile, as the sun,

in its annual round, loiters for a predicted interval in any

one sign of the Zodiac.  There it was, too, that most of

the deadly encounters with the white whale had taken place;

there the waves were storied with his deeds; there also was

that tragic spot where the monomaniac old man had found

the awful motive to his vengeance.  But in the cautious

comprehensiveness and unloitering vigilance with which Ahab

threw his brooding soul into this unfaltering hunt, he would not

permit himself to rest all his hopes upon the one crowning fact

above mentioned, however flattering it might be to those hopes;

nor in the sleeplessness of his vow could he so tranquillize

his unquiet heart as to postpone all intervening quest.



Now, the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginning

of the Season-on-the-Line. No possible endeavor then could

enable her commander to make the great passage southwards,

double Cape Horn, and then running down sixty degrees of latitude

arrive in the equatorial Pacific in time to cruise there.

Therefore, he must wait for the next ensuing season.

Yet the premature hour of the Pequod's sailing had, perhaps,

been correctly selected by Ahab, with a view to this very complexion

of things.  Because, an interval of three hundred and sixty-five

days and nights was before him; an interval which, instead of

impatiently enduring ashore, he would spend in a miscellaneous hunt;

if by chance the White Whale, spending his vacation in seas

far remote from his periodical feeding-grounds, should turn up

his wrinkled brow off the Persian Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay,

or China Seas, or in any other waters haunted by his race.

So that Monsoons, Pampas, Nor-Westers, Harmattans, Trades; any wind

but the Levanter and Simoon, might blow Moby Dick into the devious

zig-zag world-circle of the Pequod's circumnavigating wake.



But granting all this; yet, regarded discreetly and coolly,

seems it not but a mad idea, this; that in the broad

boundless ocean, one solitary whale, even if encountered,

should be thought capable of individual recognition from his hunter,

even as a white-bearded Mufti in the thronged thoroughfares

of Constantinople?  Yes.  For the peculiar snow-white brow of

Moby Dick, and his snow-white hump, could not but be unmistakable.

And have I not tallied the whale, Ahab would mutter to himself,

as after poring over his charts till long after midnight he would

throw himself back in reveries--tallied him, and shall he escape?

His broad fins are bored, and scalloped out like a lost sheep's ear!

And here, his mad mind would run on in a breathless race;

till a weariness and faintness of pondering came over him!

and in the open air of the deck he would seek to recover

his strength.  Ah, God! what trances of torments does that man

endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire.

He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody

nails in his palms.



Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably

vivid dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts

through the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies,

and whirled them round and round and round in his blazing brain,

till the very throbbing of his life-spot became insufferable anguish;

and when, as was sometimes the case, these spiritual throes in him

heaved his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him,

from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends

beckoned him to leap down among them; when this hell in himself

yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship;

and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though

escaping from a bed that was on fire.  Yet these, perhaps, instead of

being the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent weakness, or fright

at his own resolve, were but the plainest tokens of its intensity.

For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast

hunter of the white whale; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock,

was not the agent that so caused him to burst from it in horror again.

The latter was the eternal, living principle or soul in him;

and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the characterizing mind,

which at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or agent,

it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching contiguity of the

frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no longer an integral.

But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it

must have been that, in Ahab's case, yielding up all his thoughts

and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer

inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind

of self-assumed, independent being of its own.  Nay, could grimly

live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was conjoined,

fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth.

Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what

seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing,

a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure,

but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness in itself.

God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee;

and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus;

a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very

creature he creates.







CHAPTER 45



The Affidavit





So far as what there may be of a narrative in this book; and, indeed,

as indirectly touching one or two very interesting and curious

particulars in the habits of sperm whales, the foregoing chapter, in its

earlier part, is as important a one as will be found in this volume;

but the leading matter of it requires to be still further and more

familiarly enlarged upon, in order to be adequately understood,

and moreover to take away any incredulity which a profound ignorance

of the entire subject may induce in some minds, as to the natural

verity of the main points of this affair.



I care not to perform this part of my task methodically;

but shall be content to produce the desired impression

by separate citations of items, practically or reliably known

to me as a whaleman; and from these citations, I take it--

the conclusion aimed at will naturally follow of itself.



First:  I have personally known three instances where a whale,

after receiving a harpoon, has effected a complete escape;

and, after an interval (in one instance of three years), has been

again struck by the same hand, and slain; when the two irons,

both marked by the same private cypher, have been taken from the body.

In the instance where three years intervened between the flinging

of the two harpoons; and I think it may have been something more

than that; the man who darted them happening, in the interval,

to go in a trading ship on a voyage to Africa, went ashore there,

joined a discovery party, and penetrated far into the interior,

where he travelled for a period of nearly two years, often endangered

by serpents, savages, tigers, poisonous miasmas, with all the other

common perils incident to wandering in the heart of unknown regions.

Meanwhile, the whale he had struck must also have been on its travels;

no doubt it had thrice circumnavigated the globe, brushing with its

flanks all the coasts of Africa; but to no purpose.  This man and

this whale again came together, and the one vanquished the other.

I say I, myself, have known three instances similar to this;

that is in two of them I saw the whales struck; and, upon the second

attack, saw the two irons with the respective marks cut in them,

afterwards taken from the dead fish.  In the three-year instance,

it so fell out that I was in the boat both times, first and last,

and the last time distinctly recognized a peculiar sort of huge mole

under the whale's eye, which I had observed there three years previous.

I say three years, but I am pretty sure it was more than that.

Here are three instances, then, which I personally know the truth of;

but I have heard of many other instances from persons whose veracity

in the matter there is no good ground to impeach.



Secondly:  It is well known in the Sperm Whale Fishery, however ignorant

the world ashore may be of it, that there have been several

memorable historical instances where a particular whale in the ocean

has been at distant times and places popularly cognisable.

Why such a whale became thus marked was not altogether and originally

owing to his bodily peculiarities as distinguished from other whales;

for however peculiar in that respect any chance whale may be,

they soon put an end to his peculiarities by killing him, and boiling

him down into a peculiarly valuable oil.  No:  the reason was this:

that from the fatal experiences of the fishery there hung

a terrible prestige of perilousness about such a whale as there

did about Rinaldo Rinaldini, insomuch that most fishermen were

content to recognise him by merely touching their tarpaulins

when he would be discovered lounging by them on the sea,

without seeking to cultivate a more intimate acquaintance.

Like some poor devils ashore that happen to known an irascible

great man, they make distant unobtrusive salutations to him

in the street, lest if they pursued the acquaintance further,

they might receive a summary thump for their presumption.



But not only did each of these famous whales enjoy great

individual celebrity--nay, you may call it an oceanwide renown;

not only was he famous in life and now is immortal in

forecastle stories after death, but he was admitted into

all the rights, privileges, and distinctions of a name;

had as much a name indeed as Cambyses or Caesar.  Was it not so,

O Timor Tom! thou famed leviathan, scarred like an iceberg,

who so long did'st lurk in the Oriental straits of that name,

whose spout was oft seen from the palmy beach of Ombay?  Was it

not so, O New Zealand Jack! thou terror of all cruisers that crossed

their wakes in the vicinity of the Tattoo Land?  Was it not so,

O Morquan!  King of Japan, whose lofty jet they say at times

assumed the semblance of a snow-white cross against the sky?

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forswearing the sea, he has never attempted it since.

At this day Captain Pollard is a resident of Nantucket.  I have

seen Owen Chace, who was chief mate of the Essex at the time

of the tragedy; I have read his plain and faithful narrative;

I have conversed with his son; and all this within a few miles

of the scene of the catastrophe.*





*The following are extracts from Chace's narrative:

"Every fact seemed to warrant me in concluding that it was

anything but chance which directed his operations; he made two

several attacks upon the ship, at a short interval between them,

both of this catastrophe I have never chanced to their direction,

were calculated to do us the whale hunters I have now and then

heard casual allusions to it.



Thirdly:  Some eighteen or twenty years ago Commodore J---then commanding

an American sloop-of-war of the first class, happened to be dining

with a party of whaling captains, on board a Nantucket ship in the

harbor of Oahu, Sandwich Islands.  Conversation turning upon whales,

the Commodore was pleased to be sceptical touching the amazing

strength ascribed to them by the professional gentlemen present.

He peremptorily denied for example, that any whale could

so smite his stout sloop-of-war as to cause her to leak so much

as a thimbleful.  Very good; but there is more coming.

Some weeks later, the Commodore set sail in this impregnable craft

for Valparaiso.  But he was stopped on the way by a portly sperm whale,

that begged a few moments' confidential business with him.

That business consisted in fetching the Commodore's craft such a thwack,

that with all his pumps going he made straight for the nearest

port to heave down and repair.  I am not superstitious, but I

consider the Commodore's interview with that whale as providential.

Was not Saul of Tarsus converted from unbelief by a similar fright?

I tell you, the sperm whale will stand no nonsense.



I will now refer you to Langsdorff's Voyages for a little circumstance

in point, peculiarly interesting to the writer hereof.  Langsdorff, you

must know by the way, was attached to the Russian Admiral Krusenstern's

famous Discovery Expedition in the beginning of the present century.

Captain Langsdorff thus begins his seventeenth chapter:



"By the thirteenth of May our ship was ready to sail,

and the next day we were out in the open sea, on our way

to Ochotsh.  The weather was very clear and fine, but so intolerably

cold that we were obliged to keep on our fur clothing.

For some days we had very little wind; it was not till

the nineteenth that a brisk gale from the northwest sprang up.

An uncommonly large whale, the body of which was larger

than the ship itself, lay almost at the surface of the water,

but was not perceived by any one on board till the moment

when the ship, which was in full sail, was almost upon him,

so that it was impossible to prevent its striking against him.

We were thus placed in the most imminent danger, as this gigantic

creature, setting up its back, raised the ship three feet at least

out of the water.  The masts reeled, and the sails fell altogether,

while we who were below all sprang instantly upon the deck,

concluding that we had struck upon some rock; instead of this we

saw the monster sailing off with the utmost gravity and solemnity.

Captain D'Wolf applied immediately to the pumps to examine

whether or not the vessel had received any damage from the shock,

but we found that very happily it had escaped entirely uninjured."



Now, the Captain D'Wolf here alluded to as commanding the ship

in question, is a New Englander, who, after a long life of unusual

adventures as a sea-captain, this day resides in the village

of Dorchester near Boston.  I have the honor of being a nephew

of his.  I have particularly questioned him concerning

this passage in Langsdorff.  He substantiates every word.

The ship, however, was by no means a large one:  a Russian

craft built on the Siberian coast, and purchased by my uncle

after bartering away the vessel in which he sailed from home.



In that up and down manly book of old-fashioned adventure,

so full, too, of honest wonders--the voyage of Lionel Wafer,

one of ancient Dampier's old chums--I found a little matter

set down so like that just quoted from Langsdorff, that I

cannot forbear inserting it here for a corroborative example,

if such be needed.



Lionel, it seems, was on his way to "John Ferdinando,"

as he calls the modern Juan Fernandes.  "In our way thither,"

he says, "about four o'clock in the morning, when we were about

one hundred and fifty leagues from the Main of America, our ship

felt a terrible shock, which put our men in such consternation

that they could hardly tell where they were or what to think;

but every one began to prepare for death.  And, indeed, the shock

was so sudden and violent, that we took it for granted the ship

had struck against a rock; but when the amazement was a little over,

we cast the lead, and sounded, but found no ground.  ... The

suddenness of the shock made the guns leap in their carriages,

and several of the men were shaken out of their hammocks.

Captain Davis, who lay with his head on a gun, was thrown

out of his cabin!"  Lionel then goes on to impute the shock

to an earthquake, and seems to substantiate the imputation

by stating that a great earthquake, somewhere about that time,

did actually do great mischief along the Spanish land.

But I should not much wonder if, in the darkness of that early

hour of the morning, the shock was after all caused by an unseen

whale vertically bumping the hull from beneath.



I might proceed with several more examples, one way or another known

to me, of the great power and malice at times of the sperm whale.

In more than one instance, he has been known, not only to chase

the assailing boats back to their ships, but to pursue the ship itself,

and long withstand all the lances hurled at him from its decks.

The English ship Pusie Hall can tell a story on that head;

and, as for his strength, let me say, that there have been examples

where the lines attached to a running sperm whale have, in a calm,

been transferred to the ship, and secured there! the whale towing

her great hull through the water, as a horse walks off with a cart.

Again, it is very often observed that, if the sperm whale, once struck,

is allowed time to rally, he then acts, not so often with blind rage,

as with wilful, deliberate designs of destruction to his pursuers;

nor is it without conveying some eloquent indication of his character,

that upon being attacked he will frequently open his mouth,

and retain it in that dread expansion for several consecutive minutes.

But I must be content with only one more and a concluding illustration;

a remarkable and most significant one, by which you will not fail

to see, that not only is the most marvellous event in this book

corroborated by plain facts of the present day, but that these marvels

(like all marvels) are mere repetitions of the ages; so that for

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



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

unlighted short pipe, mechanically retained between his teeth,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

livers and lungs!"



But what it was that inscrutable Ahab said to that

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

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

Only the infidel sharks in the audacious seas may give ear

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

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



Meanwhile, all the boats tore on.  The repeated specific

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

monster which he declared to be incessantly tantalizing

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

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

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

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

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

usages announcing that they must have no organs but ears;

and no limbs but arms, in these critical moments.



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

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

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

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

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

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

the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and hollows;

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

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

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

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

Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails,

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

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

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

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

neither of these can feel stranger and stronger emotions than

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

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



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

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

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

but tilted everywhere to right and left; the whales seemed

separating their wakes.  The boats were pulled more apart;

Starbuck giving chase to three whales running dead to leeward.

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

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

oars could scarcely be worked rapidly enough to escape being torn

from the row-locks.



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

neither ship nor boat to be seen.



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

of his sail; "there is time to kill a fish yet before the squall comes.

There's white water again!--close to!  Spring!"



Soon after, two cries in quick succession on each side of us denoted

that the other boats had got fast; but hardly were they overheard,

when with a lightning-like hurtling whisper Starbuck said:

"Stand up!" and Queequeg, harpoon in hand, sprang to his feet.



Though not one of the oarsmen was then facing the life and death

peril so close to them ahead, yet with their eyes on the intense

countenance of the mate in the stern of the boat, they knew

that the imminent instant had come; they heard, too, an enormous

wallowing sound as of fifty elephants stirring in their litter.

Meanwhile the boat was still booming through the mist,

the waves curling and hissing around us like the erected crests

of enraged serpents.



"That's his hump.  There, there, give it to him!" whispered Starbuck.



A short rushing sound leaped out of the boat; it was the darted iron

of Queequeg.  Then all in one welded commotion came an invisible

push from astern, while forward the boat seemed striking on a ledge;

the sail collapsed and exploded; a gush of scalding vapor shot up

near by; something rolled and tumbled like an earthquake beneath us.

The whole crew were half suffocated as they were tossed

helter-skelter into the white curdling cream of the squall.

Squall, whale, and harpoon had all blended together; and the whale,

merely grazed by the iron, escaped.



Though completely swamped, the boat was nearly unharmed.

Swimming round it we picked up the floating oars, and lashing

them across the gunwale, tumbled back to our places.

There we sat up to our knees in the sea, the water covering

every rib and plank, so that to our downward gazing eyes

the suspended craft seemed a coral boat grown up to us from

the bottom of the ocean.



The wind increased to a howl; the waves dashed their bucklers together;

the whole squall roared, forked, and crackled around us

like a white fire upon the prairie, in which unconsumed,

we were burning; immortal in these jaws of death!  In vain we

hailed the other boats; as well roar to the live coals down

the chimney of a flaming furnace as hail those boats in that storm.

Meanwhile the driving scud, rack, and mist, grew darker

with the shadows of night; no sign of the ship could be seen.

The rising sea forbade all attempts to bale out the boat.

The oars were useless as propellers, performing now the office

of life-preservers. So, cutting the lashing of the waterproof

match keg, after many failures Starbuck contrived to ignite

the lamp in the lantern; then stretching it on a waif pole,

handed it to Queequeg as the standard-bearer of this forlorn hope.

There, then, he sat, holding up that imbecile candle in the heart

of that almighty forlornness.  There, then, he sat, the sign

and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope

in the midst of despair.



Wet, drenched through, and shivering cold, despairing of ship or boat,

we lifted up our eyes as the dawn came on.  The mist still spread

over the sea, the empty lantern lay crushed in the bottom of the boat.

Suddenly Queequeg started to his feet, hollowing his hand to his ear.

We all heard a faint creaking, as of ropes and yards hitherto muffled

by the storm.  The sound came nearer and nearer; the thick mists were

dimly parted by a huge, vague form.  Affrighted, we all sprang into

the sea as the ship at last loomed into view, bearing right down upon

us within a distance of not much more than its length.



Floating on the waves we saw the abandoned boat, as for one

instant it tossed and gaped beneath the ship's bows like a chip

at the base of a cataract; and then the vast hull rolled over it,

and it was seen no more till it came up weltering astern.

Again we swam for it, were dashed against it by the seas,

and were at last taken up and safely landed on board.

Ere the squall came close to, the other boats had cut loose

from their fish and returned to the ship in good time.

The ship had given us up, but was still cruising,

if haply it might light upon some token of our perishing,--

an oar or a lance pole.







CHAPTER 49



The Hyena





There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed

affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast

practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns,

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whales hung by the tail for knockers to the road-side door.

When the porter is sleepy, the anvil-headed whale would be best.

But these knocking whales are seldom remarkable as faithful essays.

On the spires of some old-fashioned churches you will see sheet-iron

whales placed there for weathercocks; but they are so elevated,

and besides that are to all intents and purposes so labelled

with "Hands off!" you cannot examine them closely enough to decide

upon their merit.



In bony, ribby regions of the earth, where at the base of high broken

cliffs masses of rock lie strewn in fantastic groupings upon the plain,

you will often discover images as of the petrified forms of the Leviathan

partly merged in grass, which of a windy day breaks against them

in a surf of green surges.



Then, again, in mountainous countries where the traveller is

continually girdled by amphitheatrical heights; here and there

from some lucky point of view you will catch passing glimpses

of the profiles of whales defined along the undulating ridges.

But you must be a thorough whaleman, to see these sights;

and not only that, but if you wish to return to such a sight again,

you must be sure and take the exact intersecting latitude

and longitude of your first stand-point, else so chance-like

are such observations of the hills, that your precise,

previous stand-point would require a laborious re-discovery;

like the Solomon islands, which still remain incognita, though once

high-ruffed Mendanna trod them and old Figuera chronicled them.



Nor when expandingly lifted by your subject, can you fail

to trace out great whales in the starry heavens, and boats

in pursuit of them; as when long filled with thoughts of war

the Eastern nations saw armies locked in battle among the clouds.

Thus at the North have I chased Leviathan round and round the Pole

with the revolutions of the bright points that first defined him to me.

And beneath the effulgent Antarctic skies I have boarded

the Argo-Navis, and joined the chase against the starry Cetus

far beyond the utmost stretch of Hydrus and the Flying Fish.



With a frigate's anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons

for spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies,

to see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents really

lie encamped beyond my mortal sight!







CHAPTER 58



Brit





Steering north-eastward from the Crozetts, we fell in with vast meadows

of brit, the minute, yellow substance, upon which the Right Whale

largely feeds.  For leagues and leagues it undulated round us,

so that we seemed to be sailing through boundless fields of ripe

and golden wheat.



On the second day, numbers of Right Whales were seen, who, secure from

the attack of a Sperm-Whaler like the Pequod, with open jaws sluggishly

swam through the brit, which, adhering to the fringing fibres of that

wondrous Venetian blind in their mouths, was in that manner separated

from the water that escaped at the lips.



As morning mowers, who side by side slowly and seethingly advance

their scythes through the long wet grass of marshy meads;

even so these monsters swam, making a strange, grassy, cutting sound;

and leaving behind them endless swaths of blue upon the yellow sea.*





*That part of the sea known among whalemen as the "Brazil Banks"

does not bear that name as the Banks of Newfoundland do,

because of there being shallows and soundings there, but because

of this remarkable meadow-like appearance, caused by the vast

drifts of brit continually floating in those latitudes,

where the Right Whale is often chased.





But it was only the sound they made as they parted the brit which at

all reminded one of mowers.  Seen from the mast-heads, especially

when they paused and were stationary for a while, their vast black

forms looked more like lifeless masses of rock than anything else.

And as in the great hunting countries of India, the stranger

at a distance will sometimes pass on the plains recumbent

elephants without knowing them to be such, taking them for bare,

blackened elevations of the soil; even so, often, with him, who for

the first time beholds this species of the leviathans of the sea.

And even when recognized at last, their immense magnitude renders

it very hard really to believe that such bulky masses of overgrowth

can possibly be instinct, in all parts, with the same sort of life

that lives in a dog or a horse.



Indeed.  in other respects, you can hardly regard any creatures

of the deep with the same feelings that you do those of the shore.

For though some old naturalists have maintained that all creatures

of the land are of their kind in the sea; and though taking a broad

general view of the thing, this may very well be; yet coming

to specialties, where, for example, does the ocean furnish any fish

that in disposition answers to the sagacious kindness of the dog?

The accursed shark alone can in any generic respect be said to bear

comparative analogy to him.



But though, to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the seas

have ever been regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and repelling;

though we know the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita,

so that Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover

his one superficial western one; though, by vast odds, the most

terrific of all mortal disasters have immemorially and indiscriminately

befallen tens and hundreds of thousands of those who have gone upon

the waters; though but a moment's consideration will teach that,

however baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much,

in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment;

yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult

and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate

he can make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these

very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness

of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.



The first boat we read of, floated on an ocean, that with Portuguese

vengeance had whelmed a whole world without leaving so much as a widow.

That same ocean rolls now; that same ocean destroyed the wrecked ships

of last year.  Yea, foolish mortals, Noah's flood is not yet subsided;

two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.

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in case the stricken whale should sound so deep as to threaten

to carry off the entire line originally attached to the harpoon.

In these instances, the whale of course is shifted like a mug of ale,

as it were, from the one boat to the other; though the first boat

always hovers at hand to assist its consort.  Second:  This arrangement

is indispensable for common safety's sake; for were the lower

end of the line in any way attached to the boat, and were

the whale then to run the line out to the end almost in a single,

smoking minute as he sometimes does, he would not stop there,

for the doomed boat would infallibly be dragged down after him

into the profundity of the sea; and in that case no town-crier

would ever find her again.



Before lowering the boat for the chase, the upper end of the line

is taken aft from the tub, and passing round the loggerhead there,

is again carried forward the entire length of the boat,

resting crosswise upon the loom or handle of every man's oar,

so that it jogs against his wrist in rowing; and also passing

between the men, as they alternately sit at the opposite gunwales,

to the leaded chocks or grooves in the extreme pointed prow of

the boat, where a wooden pin or skewer the size of a common quill,

prevents it from slipping out.  From the chocks it hangs in a slight

festoon over the bows, and is then passed inside the boat again;

and some ten or twenty fathoms (called box-line) being coiled upon

the box in the bows, it continues its way to the gunwale still

a little further aft, and is then attached to the short-warp--

the rope which is immediately connected with the harpoon;

but previous to that connexion, the short-warp goes through sundry

mystifications too tedious to detail.



Thus the whale-line folds the whole boat in its complicated coils,

twisting and writhing around it in almost every direction.

All the oarsmen are involved in its perilous contortions;

so that to the timid eye of the landsman, they seem as Indian jugglers,

with the deadliest snakes sportively festooning their limbs.

Nor can any son of mortal woman, for the first time, seat himself amid

those hempen intricacies, and while straining his utmost at the oar,

bethink him that at any unknown instant the harpoon may be darted,

and all these horrible contortions be put in play like ringed lightnings;

he cannot be thus circumstanced without a shudder that makes

the very marrow in his bones to quiver in him like a shaken jelly.

Yet habit--strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?--Gayer sallies,

more merry mirth, better jokes, and brighter repartees, you never

heard over your mahogany, than you will hear over the half-inch

white cedar of the whaleboat, when thus hung in hangman's nooses;

and, like the six burghers of Calais before King Edward, the six

men composing the crew pull into the jaws of death, with a halter

around every neck, as you may say.



Perhaps a very little thought will now enable you to account

for those repeated whaling disasters--some few of which are

casually chronicled--of this man or that man being taken out of

the boat by the line, and lost.  For, when the line is darting out,

to be seated then in the boat, is like being seated in the midst

of the manifold whizzings of a steam-engine in full play,

when every flying beam, and shaft, and wheel, is grazing you.

It is worse; for you cannot sit motionless in the heart of

these perils, because the boat is rocking like a cradle, and you

are pitched one way and the other, without the slightest warning;

and only by a certain self-adjusting buoyancy and simultaneousness

of volition and action, can you escape being made a Mazeppa of,

and run away with where the all-seeing sun himself could never

pierce you out.



Again:  as the profound calm which only apparently precedes and

prophesies of the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself;

for, indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelope of the storm;

and contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle

holds the fatal powder, and the ball, and the explosion;

so the graceful repose of the line, as it silently serpentines

about the oarsmen before being brought into actual play--

this is a thing which carries more of true terror than any other

aspect of this dangerous affair.  But why say more?  All men live

enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks;

but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death,

that mortals realize the silent, subtle, everpresent perils of life.

And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat,

you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though

seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon,

by your side.







CHAPTER 61



Stubb Kills a Whale







If to Starbuck the apparition of the Squid was a thing of portents,

to Queequeg it was quite a different object.



"When you see him 'quid," said the savage, honing his harpoon in the bow

of his hoisted boat, "then you quick see him 'parm whale."



The next day was exceedingly still and sultry, and with nothing

special to engage them, the Pequod's crew could hardly

resist the spell of sleep induced by such a vacant sea.

For this part of the Indian Ocean through which we then were

voyaging is not what whalemen call a lively ground; that is,

it affords fewer glimpses of porpoises, dolphins, flying-fish, and

other vivacious denizens of more stirring waters, than those off

the Rio de la Plata, or the in-shore ground off Peru.



It was my turn to stand at the foremast-head; and with my

shoulders leaning against the slackened royal shrouds,

to and fro I idly swayed in what seemed an enchanted air.

No resolution could withstand it; in that dreamy mood losing

all consciousness, at last my soul went out of my body;

though my body still continued to sway as a pendulum will,

long after the power which first moved it is withdrawn.



Ere forgetfulness altogether came over me, I had noticed that

the seamen at the main and mizzen mast-heads were already drowsy.

So that at last all three of us lifelessly swung from the spars,

and for every swing that we made there was a nod from below from

the slumbering helmsman.  The waves, too, nodded their indolent crests;

and across the wide trance of the sea, east nodded to west,

and the sun over all.



Suddenly bubbles seemed bursting beneath my closed eyes;

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there is much running backwards and forwards among the crew.

Now hands are wanted here, and then again hands are wanted there.

There is no staying in any one place; for at one and the same

time everything has to be done everywhere.  It is much

the same with him who endeavors the description of the scene.

We must now retrace our way a little.  It was mentioned that upon

first breaking ground in the whale's back, the blubber-hook was

inserted into the original hole there cut by the spades of the mates.

But how did so clumsy and weighty a mass as that same hook get

fixed in that hole?  It was inserted there by my particular

friend Queequeg, whose duty it was, as harpooneer, to descend

upon the monster's back for the special purpose referred to.

But in very many cases, circumstances require that the harpooneer

shall remain on the whale till the whole tensing or stripping

operation is concluded.  The whale, be it observed, lies almost

entirely submerged, excepting the immediate parts operated upon.

So down there, some ten feet below the level of the deck, the poor

harpooneer flounders about, half on the whale and half in the water,

as the vast mass revolves like a tread-mill beneath him.

On the occasion in question, Queequeg figured in the Highland costume--

a shirt and socks--in which to my eyes, at least, he appeared to

uncommon advantage; and no one had a better chance to observe him,

as will presently be seen.



Being the savage's bowsman, that is, the person who pulled

the bow-oar in his boat (the second one from forward),

it was my cheerful duty to attend upon him while taking

that hard-scrabble scramble upon the dead whale's back.

You have seen Italian organ-boys holding a dancing-ape by a long cord.

Just so, from the ship's steep side, did I hold Queequeg down

there in the sea, by what is technically called in the fishery

a monkey-rope, attached to a strong strip of canvas belted

round his waist.



It was a humorously perilous business for both of us.  For, before we

proceed further, it must be said that the monkey-rope was fast at

both ends; fast to Queequeg's broad canvas belt, and fast to my narrow

leather one.  So that for better or for worse, we two, for the time,

were wedded; and should poor Queequeg sink to rise no more, then both

usage and honor demanded, that instead of cutting the cord, it should drag

me down in his wake.  So, then, an elongated Siamese ligature united us.

Queequeg was my own inseparable twin brother; nor could I any way get

rid of the dangerous liabilities which the hempen bond entailed.



So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then,

that while earnestly watching his motions, I seemed distinctly

to perceive that my own individuality was now merged in a

joint stock company of two; that my free will had received

a mortal wound; and that another's mistake or misfortune

might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster and death.

Therefore, I saw that here was a sort of interregnum in Providence;

for its even-handed equity never could have so gross an injustice.

And yet still further pondering--while I jerked him now and

then from between the whale and ship, which would threaten

to jam him--still further pondering, I say, I saw that this

situation of mine was the precise situation of every mortal

that breathes; only, in most cases, he, one way or other,

has this Siamese connexion with a plurality of other mortals.

If your banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by mistake

sends you poison in your pills, you die.  True, you may

say that, by exceeding caution, you may possibly escape

these and the multitudinous other evil chances of life.

But handle Queequeg's monkey-rope heedfully as I would,

sometimes he jerked it so, that I came very near sliding overboard.

Nor could I possibly forget that, do what I would, I only had

the management of one end of it.*





*The monkey-rope is found in all whalers; but it was only in

the Pequod that the monkey and his holder were ever tied together.

This improvement upon the original usage was introduced by no less

a man than Stubb, in order to afford to the imperilled harpooneer

the strongest possible guarantee for the faithfulness and vigilance

of his monkey-rope holder.





I have hinted that I would often jerk poor Queequeg from between

the whale and the ship--where he would occasionally fall,

from the incessant rolling and swaying of both.

But this was not the only jamming jeopardy he was exposed to.

Unappalled by the massacre made upon them during the night,

the sharks now freshly and more keenly allured by the before pent

blood which began to flow from the carcass--the rabid creatures

swarmed round it like bees in a beehive.



And right in among those sharks was Queequeg; who often pushed

them aside with his floundering feet.  A thing altogether

incredible were it not that attracted by such prey as a dead whale,

the otherwise miscellaneously carnivorous shark will seldom

touch a man.



Nevertheless, it may well be believed that since they have

such a ravenous finger in the pie, it is deemed but wise

to look sharp to them.  Accordingly, besides the monkey-rope,

with which I now and then jerked the poor fellow from too

close a vicinity to the maw of what seemed a peculiarly

ferocious shark--he was provided with still another protection.

Suspended over the side in one of the stages, Tashtego and Daggoo

continually flourished over his head a couple of keen whale-spades,

wherewith they slaughtered as many sharks as they could reach.

This procedure of theirs, to be sure, was very disinterested

and benevolent of them.  They meant Queequeg's best happiness,

I admit; but in their hasty zeal to befriend him, and from

the circumstance that both he and the sharks were at times half

hidden by the blood-muddled water, those indiscreet spades

of theirs would come nearer amputating a leg than a tall.

But poor Queequeg, I suppose, straining and gasping there

with that great iron hook--poor Queequeg, I suppose, only prayed

to his Yojo, and gave up his life into the hands of his gods.



Well, well, my dear comrade and twin-brother, thought I, as I

drew in and then slacked off the rope to every swell of the sea--

what matters it, after all?  Are you not the precious

image of each and all of us men in this whaling world?

That unsounded ocean you gasp in, is Life; those sharks, your foes;

those spades, your friends; and what between sharks and spades

you are in a sad pickle and peril, poor lad.



But courage! there is good cheer in store for you, Queequeg.  For now,

as with blue lips and blood-shot eyes the exhausted savage at last

climbs up the chains and stands all dripping and involuntarily

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"I tell ye what it is, men"--cried Stubb to his crew--It's against my

religion to get mad; but I'd like to eat that villainous Yarman--Pull--

won't ye?  Are ye going to let that rascal beat ye?  Do ye love brandy?

A hogshead of brandy, then, to the best man.  Come, why don't some of ye

burst a blood-vessel? Who's that been dropping an anchor overboard--

we don't budge an inch--we're becalmed.  Halloo, here's grass growing

in the boat's bottom--and by the Lord, the mast there's budding.

This won't do, boys.  Look at that Yarman!  The short and long of

it is, men, will ye spit fire or not?"



"Oh! see the suds he makes!" cried Flask, dancing up and down--"What

a hump--Oh, do pile on the beef--lays like a log!  Oh! my lads,

do spring--slap-jacks and quahogs for supper, you know, my lads--

baked clams and muffins--oh, do, do, spring,--he's a hundred barreler--

don't lose him now--don't oh, don't!--see that Yarman--Oh, won't ye pull

for your duff, my lads--such a sog! such a sogger!  Don't ye love sperm?

There goes three thousand dollars, men!--a bank!--a whole bank!

The bank of England!--Oh, do, do, do!--What's that Yarman about now?"



At this moment Derick was in the act of pitching his lamp-feeder

at the advancing boats, and also his oil-can; perhaps with the double

view of retarding his rivals' way, and at the same time economically

accelerating his own by the momentary impetus of the backward toss.



"The unmannerly Dutch dogger!" cried Stubb.  "Pull now, men,

like fifty thousand line-of-battle-ship loads of red-haired devils.

What d'ye say, Tashtego; are you the man to snap your spine in

two-and-twenty pieces for the honor of old Gayhead?  What d'ye say?"



"I say, pull like god-dam,"--cried the Indian.



Fiercely, but evenly incited by the taunts of the German, the Pequod's

three boats now began ranging almost abreast; and, so disposed,

momentarily neared him.  In that fine, loose, chivalrous attitude

of the headsman when drawing near to his prey, the three mates stood

up proudly, occasionally backing the after oarsman with an exhilarating

cry of, "There she slides, now!  Hurrah for the white-ash breeze!

Down with the Yarman!  Sail over him!"



But so decided an original start had Derick had, that spite

of all their gallantry, he would have proved the victor

in this race, had not a righteous judgment descended upon him

in a crab which caught the blade of his midship oarsman.

While this clumsy lubber was striving to free his white-ash,

and while, in consequence, Derick's boat was nigh to capsizing,

and he thundering away at his men in a mighty rage;--that was

a good time for Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask.  With a shout,

they took a mortal start forwards, and slantingly ranged up

on the German's quarter.  An instant more, and all four boats

were diagonically in the whale's immediate wake, while stretching

from them, on both sides, was the foaming swell that he made.



It was a terrific, most pitiable, and maddening sight.

The whale was now going head out, and sending his spout

before him in a continual tormented jet; while his one poor

fin beat his side in an agony of fright.  Now to this hand,

now to that, he yawed in his faltering flight, and still at

every billow that he broke, he spasmodically sank in the sea,

or sideways rolled towards the sky his one beating fin.

So have I seen a bird with clipped wing, making affrighted broken

circles in the air, vainly striving to escape the piratical hawks.

But the bird has a voice, and with plaintive cries will make

known her fear; but the fear of this vast dumb brute of the sea,

was chained up and enchanted in him; he had no voice,

save that choking respiration through his spiracle, and this

made the sight of him unspeakably pitiable; while still,

in his amazing bulk, portcullis jaw, and omnipotent tail,

there was enough to appal the stoutest man who so pitied.



Seeing now that but a very few moments more would give the Pequod's

boats the advantage, and rather than be thus foiled of his game,

Derick chose to hazard what to him must have seemed a most unusually

long dart, ere the last chance would for ever escape.



But no sooner did his harpooneer stand up for the stroke, than all

three tigers--Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo--instinctively sprang

to their feet, and standing in a diagonal row, simultaneously pointed

their barbs; and darted over the head of the German harpooneer,

their three Nantucket irons entered the whale.  Blinding vapors

of foam and white-fire! The three boats, in the first fury of the

whale's headlong rush, bumped the German's aside with such force,

that both Derick and his baffled harpooneer were spilled out,

and sailed over by the three flying keels.



"Don't be afraid, my butter-boxes," cried Stubb, casting a passing

glance upon them as he shot by; "ye'll be picked up presently--

all right--I saw some sharks astern--St. Bernard's dogs, you know--

relieve distressed travellers.  Hurrah! this is the way to sail now.

Every keel a sunbeam!  Hurrah!--Here we go like three tin

kettles at the tail of a mad cougar!  This puts me in mind

of fastening to an elephant in a tilbury on a plain--

makes the wheelspokes fly, boys, when you fasten to him that way;

and there's danger of being pitched out too, when you strike a hill.

Hurrah! this is the way a fellow feels when he's going

to Davy Jones--all a rush down an endless inclined plane!

Hurrah! this whale carries the everlasting mail!"



But the monster's run was a brief one.  Giving a sudden gasp,

he tumultuously sounded.  With a grating rush, the three lines flew round

the loggerheads with such a force as to gouge deep grooves in them;

while so fearful were the harpooneers that this rapid sounding

would soon exhaust the lines, that using all their dexterous might,

they caught repeated smoking turns with the rope to hold on;

till at last--owing to the perpendicular strain from the lead-lined

chocks of the boats, whence the three ropes went straight

down into the blue--the gunwales of the bows were almost even

with the water, while the three sterns tilted high in the air.

And the whale soon ceasing to sound, for some time they

remained in that attitude, fearful of expending more line,

though the position was a little ticklish.  But though boats have

been taken down and lost in this way, yet it is this "holding on,"

as it is called; this hooking up by the sharp barbs of his live

flesh from the back; this it is that often torments the Leviathan

into soon rising again to meet the sharp lance of his foes.

Yet not to speak of the peril of the thing, it is to be doubted

whether this course is always the best; for it is but reasonable

to presume, that the longer the stricken whale stays under water,

the more he is exhausted.  Because, owing to the enormous surface of him--

in a full grown sperm whale something less than 2000 square feet--

the pressure of the water is immense.  We all know what an astonishing

atmospheric weight we ourselves stand up under; even here,

above-ground, in the air; how vast, then, the burden of a whale,

bearing on his back a column of two hundred fathoms of ocean!

It must at least equal the weight of fifty atmospheres.  One whaleman

has estimated it at the weight of twenty line-of-battle ships,

with all their guns, and stores, and men on board.



As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea,

gazing down into its eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan

or cry of any sort, nay, not so much as a ripple or a bubble

came up from its depths; what landsman would have thought,

that beneath all that silence and placidity, the utmost

monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in agony!

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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

must have contained something in the shape of practical hints

to young architects, these Vedas were lying at the bottom of

the waters; so Vishnoo became incarnate in a whale, and sounding

down in him to the uttermost depths, rescued the sacred volumes.

Was not this Vishnoo a whaleman, then? even as a man who rides

a horse is called a horseman?



Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there's

a member-roll for you!  What club but the whaleman's can head

off like that?







CHAPTER 83



Jonah Historically Regarded





Reference was made to the historical story of Jonah and the whale

in the preceding chapter.  Now some Nantucketers rather distrust this

historical story of Jonah and the whale.  But then there were some

sceptical Greeks and Romans, who, standing out from the orthodox pagans

of their times, equally doubted the story of Hercules and the whale,

and Arion and the dolphin; and yet their doubting those traditions

did not make those traditions one whit the less facts, for all that.



One old Sag-Harbor whaleman's chief reason for questioning the Hebrew

story was this:--He had one of those quaint old-fashioned Bibles,

embellished with curious, unscientific plates; one of which represented

Jonah's whale with two spouts in his head--a peculiarity only true

with respect to a species of the Leviathan (the Right Whale,

and the varieties of that order), concerning which the fishermen

have this saying, "A penny roll would choke him"; his swallow is so

very small.  But, to this, Bishop Jebb's anticipative answer is ready.

It is not necessary, hints the Bishop, that we consider Jonah as tombed in

the whale's belly, but as temporarily lodged in some part of his mouth.

And this seems reasonable enough in the good Bishop.  For truly,

the Right Whale's mouth would accommodate a couple of whist-tables,

and comfortably seat all the players.  Possibly, too, Jonah might

have ensconced himself in a hollow tooth; but, on second thoughts,

the Right Whale is toothless.



Another reason which Sag-Harbor (he went by that name)

urged for his want of faith in this matter of the prophet,

was something obscurely in reference to his incarcerated body

and the whale's gastric juices.  But this objection likewise falls

to the ground, because a German exegetist supposes that Jonah

must have taken refuge in the floating body of a dead whale--

even as the French soldiers in the Russian campaign turned

their dead horses into tents, and crawled into them.

Besides, it has been divined by other continental commentators,

that when Jonah was thrown overboard from the Joppa ship,

he straightway effected his escape to another vessel near by,

some vessel with a whale for a figure-head; and, I would add,

possibly called "The Whale," as some craft are nowadays

christened the "Shark," the "Gull," the "Eagle."  Nor have

there been wanting learned exegetists who have opined

that the whale mentioned in the book of Jonah merely meant

a life-preserver--an inflated bag of wind--which the endangered

prophet swam to, and so was saved from a watery doom.

Poor Sag-Harbor, therefore, seems worsted all round.

But he had still another reason for his want of faith.

It was this, if I remember right:  Jonah was swallowed

by the whale in the Mediterranean Sea, and after three days'

he was vomited up somewhere within three days' journey of Nineveh,

a city on the Tigris, very much more than three days'

journey across from the nearest point of the Mediterranean coast.

How is that?



But was there no other way for the whale to land the prophet within

that short distance of Nineveh?  Yes.  He might have carried him

round by the way of the Cape of Good Hope.  But not to speak

of the passage through the whole length of the Mediterranean,

and another passage up the Persian Gulf and Red Sea,

such a supposition would involve the complete circumnavigation

of all Africa in three days, not to speak of the Tigris waters,

near the site of Nineveh, being too shallow for any whale to swim in.

Besides, this idea of Jonah's weathering the Cape of Good Hope

at so early a day would wrest the honor of the discovery of that

great headland from Bartholomew Diaz, its reputed discoverer,

and so make modern history a liar.



But all these foolish arguments of old Sag-Harbor only evinced his

foolish pride of reason--a thing still more reprehensible in him,

seeing that he had but little learning except what he had picked up from

the sun and the sea.  I say it only shows his foolish, impious pride,

and abominable, devilish rebellion against the reverend clergy.

For by a Portuguese Catholic priest, this very idea of Jonah's going to

Nineveh via the Cape of Good Hope was advanced as a signal magnification

of the general miracle.  And so it was.  Besides, to this day,

the highly enlightened Turks devoutly believe in the historical story

of Jonah.  And some three centuries ago, an English traveller in old

Harris's Voyages, speaks of a Turkish Mosque built in honor of Jonah,

in which Mosque was a miraculous lamp that burnt without any oil.









CHAPTER 84



Pitchpoling







To make them run easily and swiftly, the axles of carriages

are anointed; and for much the same purpose, some whalers perform

an analogous operation upon their boat; they grease the bottom.

Nor is it to be doubted that as such a procedure can do no harm,

it may possibly be of no contemptible advantage; considering that

oil and water are hostile; that oil is a sliding thing,

and that the object in view is to make the boat slide bravely.

Queequeg believed strongly in anointing his boat, and one morning

not long after the German ship Jungfrau disappeared, took more than

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while all the time, Starbuck stood up in the bows, lance in hand,

pricking out of our way whatever whales he could reach by short darts,

for there was no time to make long ones.  Nor were the oarsmen

quite idle, though their wonted duty was now altogether dispensed with.

They chiefly attended to the shouting part of the business.

"Out of the way, Commodore!" cried one, to a great dromedary that of

a sudden rose bodily to the surface, and for an instant threatened

to swamp us.  "Hard down with your tail, there!" cried a second

to another, which, close to our gunwale, seemed calmly cooling

himself with his own fan-like extremity.



All whale-boats carry certain curious contrivances,

originally invented by the Nantucket Indians, called druggs.

Two thick squares of wood of equal size are stoutly

clenched together, so that they cross each other's grain at

right angles; a line of considerable length is then attached

to the middle of this block, and the other end of the line

being looped, it can in a moment be fastened to a harpoon.

It is chiefly among gallied whales that this drugg is used.

For then, more whales are close round you than you can

possibly chase at one time.  But sperm whales are not every

day encountered; while you may, then, you must kill all you can.

And if you cannot kill them all at once, you must wing them,

so that they can be afterwards killed at your leisure.  Hence it is,

that at times like these the drug, comes into requisition.

Our boat was furnished with three of them.  The first and second were

successfully darted, and we saw the whales staggeringly running off,

fettered by the enormous sidelong resistance of the towing drugg.

They were cramped like malefactors with the chain and ball.

But upon flinging the third, in the act of tossing overboard

the clumsy wooden block, it caught under one of the seats of the boat,

and in an instant tore it out and carried it away, dropping the

oarsman in the boat's bottom as the seat slid from under him.

On both sides the sea came in at the wounded planks, but we

stuffed two or three drawers and shirts in, and so stopped

the leaks for the time.



It had been next to impossible to dart these drugged-harpoons,

were it not that as we advanced into the herd, our whale's way

greatly diminished; moreover, that as we went still further

and further from the circumference of commotion, the direful

disorders seemed waning.  So that when at last the jerking

harpoon drew out, and the towing whale sideways vanished;

then, with the tapering force of his parting momentum, we glided

between two whales into the innermost heart of the shoal, as if

from some mountain torrent we had slid into a serene valley lake.

Here the storms in the roaring glens between the outermost whales,

were heard but not felt.  In this central expanse the sea

presented that smooth satin-like surface, called a sleek,

produced by the subtle moisture thrown off by the whale

in his more quiet moods.  Yes, we were now in that enchanted

calm which they say lurks at the heart of every commotion.

And still in the distracted distance we beheld the tumults of

the outer concentric circles, and saw successive pods of whales,

eight or ten in each, swiftly going round and round, like multiplied

spans of horses in a ring; and so closely shoulder to shoulder,

that a Titanic circus-rider might easily have over-arched

the middle ones, and so have gone round on their backs.

Owing to the density of the crowd of reposing whales,

more immediately surrounding the embayed axis of the herd,

no possible chance of escape was at present afforded us.

We must watch for a breach in the living wall that hemmed us in;

the wall that had only admitted us in order to shut us up.

Keeping at the centre of the lake, we were occasionally

visited by small tame cows and calves; the women and children

of this routed host.



Now, inclusive of the occasional wide intervals between

the revolving outer circles, and inclusive of the spaces

between the various pods in any one of those circles,

the entire area at this juncture, embraced by the whole multitude,

must have contained at least two or three square miles.

At any rate--though indeed such a test at such a time might

be deceptive--spoutings might be discovered from our low boat

that seemed playing up almost from the rim of the horizon.

I mention this circumstance, because, as if the cows and

calves had been purposely locked up in this innermost fold;

and as if the wide extent of the herd had hitherto prevented them

from learning the precise cause of its stopping; or, possibly,

being so young, unsophisticated, and every way innocent

and inexperienced; however it may have been, these smaller whales--

now and then visiting our becalmed boat from the margin of the lake--

evinced a wondrous fearlessness and confidence, or else a still

becharmed panic which it was impossible not to marvel at.

Like household dogs they came snuffling round us,

right up to our gunwales, and touching them; till it almost

seemed that some spell had suddenly domesticated them.

Queequeg patted their foreheads; Starbuck scratched their backs

with his lance; but fearful of the consequences, for the time

refrained from darting it.



But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and

still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side.

For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms

of the nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their

enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers.  The lake, as I

have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent;

and as human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze

away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time;

and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually

feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence;--even so did the young

of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us,

as if we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their new-born sight.

Floating on their sides, the mothers also seemed quietly eyeing us.

One of these little infants, that from certain queer tokens seemed

hardly a day old, might have measured some fourteen feet in length,

and some six feet in girth.  He was a little frisky; though as yet

his body seemed scarce yet recovered from that irksome position it

had so lately occupied in the maternal reticule; where, tail to head,

and all ready for the final spring, the unborn whale lies bent like a

Tartar's bow.  The delicate side-fins, and the palms of his flukes,

still freshly retained the plaited crumpled appearance of a baby's

ears newly arrived from foreign parts.



"Line! line!" cried Queequeg, looking over the gunwale;

"him fast! him fast!--Who line him!  Who struck?--Two whale;

one big, one little!"



"What ails ye, man?" cried Starbuck.



"Look-e here," said Queequeg, pointing down.

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do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm;

and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me,

deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal

mildness of joy.



Meanwhile, as we thus lay entranced, the occasional sudden frantic

spectacles in the distance evinced the activity of the other boats,

still engaged in drugging the whales on the frontier of the host;

or possibly carrying on the war within the first circle,

where abundance of room and some convenient retreats were afforded them.

But the sight of the enraged drugged whales now and then blindly darting

to and fro across the circles, was nothing to what at last met our eyes.

It is sometimes the custom when fast to a whale more than commonly

powerful and alert, to seek to hamstring him, as it were,

by sundering or maiming his gigantic tail-tendon. It is done by

darting a short-handled cutting-spade, to which is attached a rope

for hauling it back again.  A whale wounded (as we afterwards learned)

in this part, but not effectually, as it seemed, had broken away

from the boat, carrying along with him half of the harpoon line;

and in the extraordinary agony of the wound, he was now dashing

among the revolving circles like the lone mounted desperado Arnold,

at the battle of Saratoga, carrying dismay wherever he went.



But agonizing as was the wound of this whale, and an appalling

spectacle enough, any way; yet the peculiar horror with which

he seemed to inspire the rest of the herd, was owing to a cause

which at first the intervening distance obscured from us.

But at length we perceived that by one of the unimaginable accidents

of the fishery, this whale had become entangled in the harpoon-line

that he towed; he had also run away with the cutting-spade in him;

and while the free end of the rope attached to that weapon,

had permanently caught in the coils of the harpoon-line round

his tail, the cutting-spade itself had worked loose from his flesh.

So that tormented to madness, he was now churning through the water,

violently flailing with his flexible tail, and tossing the keen

spade about him, wounding and murdering his own comrades.



This terrific object seemed to recall the whole herd from their

stationary fright.  First, the whales forming the margin of our lake

began to crowd a little, and tumble against each other, as if lifted

by half spent billows from afar; then the lake itself began faintly

to heave and swell; the submarine bridal-chambers and nurseries vanished;

in more and more contracting orbits the whales in the more central circles

began to swim in thickening clusters.  Yes, the long calm was departing.

A low advancing hum was soon heard; and then like to the tumultuous

masses of block-ice when the great river Hudson breaks up in Spring,

the entire host of whales came tumbling upon their inner centre,

as if to pile themselves up in one common mountain.  Instantly Starbuck

and Queequeg changed places; Starbuck taking the stern.



"Oars!  Oars!" he intensely whispered, seizing the helm--"gripe

your oars, and clutch your souls, now!  My God, men, stand by!

Shove him off, you Queequeg--the whale there!--prick him!--hit him!

Stand up--stand up, and stay so!  Spring men--pull, men; never mind

their backs--scrape them!--scrape away!"



The boat was now all but jammed between two vast black bulks,

leaving a narrow Dardanelles between their long lengths.

But by desperate endeavor we at last shot into a temporary opening;

then giving way rapidly, and at the same time earnestly watching

for another outlet.  After many similar hair-breadth escapes, we at

last swiftly glided into what had just been one of the outer circles,

but now crossed by random whales, all violently making for one centre.

This lucky salvation was cheaply purchased by the loss of Queequeg's

hat, who, while standing in the bows to prick the fugitive whales,

had his hat taken clean from his head by the air-eddy made by the sudden

tossing of a pair of broad flukes close by.



Riotous and disordered as the universal commotion now was,

it soon resolved itself into what seemed a systematic movement;

for having clumped together at last in one dense body,

they then renewed their onward flight with augmented fleetness.

Further pursuit was useless; but the boats still lingered in their

wake to pick up what drugged whales might be dropped astern,

and likewise to secure one which Flask had killed and waited.

The waif is a pennoned pole, two or three of which are carried

by every boat; and which, when additional game is at hand,

are inserted upright into the floating body of a dead whale,

both to mark its place on the sea, and also as token of

prior possession, should the boats of any other ship draw near.



The result of this lowering was somewhat illustrative of that

sagacious saying in the Fishery,--the more whales the less fish.

Of all the drugged whales only one was captured.

The rest contrived to escape for the time, but only to be taken,

as will hereafter be seen, by some other craft than the Pequod.









CHAPTER 88



Schools and Schoolmasters





The previous chapter gave account of an immense body or herd

of Sperm Whales, and there was also then given the probable

cause inducing those vast aggregations.



Now, though such great bodies are at times encountered, yet, as must

have been seen, even at the present day, small detached bands are

occasionally observed, embracing from twenty to fifty individuals each.

Such bands are known as schools.  They generally are of two sorts;

those composed almost entirely of females, and those mustering none

but young vigorous males, or bulls as they are familiarly designated.



In cavalier attendance upon the school of females, you invariably see

a male of full grown magnitude, but not old; who, upon any alarm,

evinces his gallantry by falling in the rear and covering the flight

of his ladies.  In truth, this gentleman is a luxurious Ottoman,

swimming about over the watery world, surroundingly accompanied by all

the solaces and endearments of the harem.  The contrast between this

Ottoman and his concubines is striking; because, while he is always

of the largest leviathanic proportions, the ladies, even at full growth,

are not more than one-third of the bulk of an average-sized male.

They are comparatively delicate, indeed; I dare say, not to exceed half

a dozen yards round the waist.  Nevertheless, it cannot be denied,

that upon the whole they are hereditarily entitled to en bon point.



It is very curious to watch this harem and its lord in their

indolent ramblings.  Like fashionables, they are for ever

on the move in leisurely search of variety.  You meet them

on the Line in time for the full flower of the Equatorial

feeding season, having just returned, perhaps, from spending

the summer in the Northern seas, and so cheating summer of all

unpleasant weariness and warmth.  By the time they have lounged

up and down the promenade of the Equator awhile, they start

for the Oriental waters in anticipation of the cool season there,

and so evade the other excessive temperature of the year.



When serenely advancing on one of these journeys, if any strange

suspicious sights are seen, my lord whale keeps a wary eye on his

interesting family.  Should any unwarrantably pert young Leviathan coming

that way, presume to draw confidentially close to one of the ladies,

with what prodigious fury the Bashaw assails him, and chases him away!

High times, indeed, if unprincipled young rakes like him

are to be permitted to invade the sanctity of domestic bliss;

though do what the Bashaw will, he cannot keep the most notorious

Lothario out of his bed; for alas! all fish bed in common.

As ashore, the ladies often cause the most terrible duels among

their rival admirers; just so with the whales, who sometimes come

to deadly battle, and all for love.  They fence with their long

lower jaws, sometimes locking them together, and so striving for

the supremacy like elks that warringly interweave their antlers.

Not a few are captured having the deep scars of these encounters,--

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Now, as the harem of whales is called by the fishermen a school, so is

the lord and master of that school technically known as the schoolmaster.

It is therefore not in strict character, however admirably satirical,

that after going to school himself, he should then go abroad

inculcating not what he learned there, but the folly of it.

His title, schoolmaster, would very naturally seem derived from

the name bestowed upon the harem itself, but some have surmised

that the man who first thus entitled this sort of Ottoman whale,

must have read the memoirs of Vidocq, and informed himself what sort

of a country-schoolmaster that famous Frenchman was in his younger days,

and what was the nature of those occult lessons he inculcated into

some of his pupils.



The same secludedness and isolation to which the schoolmaster

whale betakes himself in his advancing years, is true

of all aged Sperm Whales.  Almost universally, a lone whale--

as a solitary Leviathan is called--proves an ancient one.

Like venerable moss-bearded Daniel Boone, he will have no

one near him but Nature herself; and her he takes to wife

in the wilderness of waters, and the best of wives she is,

though she keeps so many moody secrets.



The schools composing none but young and vigorous males,

previously mentioned, offer a strong contrast to the harem schools.

For while those female whales are characteristically timid,

the young males, or forty-barrel-bulls, as they call them,

are by far the most pugnacious of all Leviathans, and proverbially

the most dangerous to encounter; excepting those wondrous

grey-headed, grizzled whales, sometimes met, and these will fight

you like grim fiends exasperated by a penal gout.



The Forty-barrel-bull schools are larger than the harem schools.

Like a mob of young collegians, they are full of fight, fun,

and wickedness, tumbling round the world at such a reckless,

rollicking rate, that no prudent underwriter would insure them

any more than he would a riotous lad at Yale or Harvard.  They soon

relinquish this turbulence though, and when about three-fourths grown,

break up, and separately go about in quest of settlements,

that is, harems.



Another point of difference between the male and female schools

is still more characteristic of the sexes.  Say you strike

a Forty-barrel-bull--poor devil! all his comrades quit him.

But strike a member of the harem school, and her companions swim

around her with every token of concern, sometimes lingering

so near her and so long, as themselves to fall a prey.







CHAPTER 89



Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish





The allusion to the waifs and waif-poles in the last chapter

but one, necessitates some account of the laws and regulations

of the whale fishery, of which the waif may be deemed the grand

symbol and badge.



It frequently happens that when several ships are cruising in company,

a whale may be struck by one vessel, then escape, and be finally killed

and captured by another vessel; and herein are indirectly comprised

many minor contingencies, all partaking of this one grand feature.

For example,--after a weary and perilous chase and capture of a whale,

the body may get loose from the ship by reason of a violent storm;

and drifting far away to leeward, be retaken by a second whaler, who,

in a calm, snugly tows it alongside, without risk of life or line.

Thus the most vexatious and violent disputes would often arise between

the fishermen, were there not some written or unwritten, universal,

undisputed law applicable to all cases.



Perhaps the only formal whaling code authorized by legislative enactment,

was that of Holland.  It was decreed by the States-General in A.D. 1695.

But though no other nation has ever had any written whaling law,

yet the American fishermen have been their own legislators

and lawyers in this matter.  They have provided a system which

for terse comprehensiveness surpasses Justinian's Pandects and

the By-laws of the Chinese Society for the Suppression of Meddling

with other People's Business.  Yes; these laws might be engraven

on a Queen Anne's farthing, or the barb of a harpoon, and worn

round the neck, so small are they.



I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it.



II.  A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it.



But what plays the mischief with this masterly code is the admirable

brevity of it, which necessitates a vast volume of commentaries

to expound it.



First:  What is a Fast-Fish? Alive or dead a fish is technically fast,

when it is connected with an occupied ship or boat, by any medium

at all controllable by the occupant or occupants,--a mast, an oar,

a nine-inch cable, a telegraph wire, or a strand of cobweb, it is all

the same.  Likewise a fish is technically fast when it bears a waif,

or any other recognized symbol of possession; so long as the party

wailing it plainly evince their ability at any time to take it alongside,

as well as their intention so to do.



These are scientific commentaries; but the commentaries of the whalemen

themselves sometimes consist in hard words and harder knocks--

the Coke-upon-Littleton of the fist.  True, among the more upright

and honorable whalemen allowances are always made for peculiar cases,

where it would be an outrageous moral injustice for one party to claim

possession of a whale previously chased or killed by another party.

But others are by no means so scrupulous.



Some fifty years ago there was a curious case of whale-trover

litigated in England, wherein the plaintiffs set forth

that after a hard chase of a whale in the Northern seas;

and when indeed they (the plaintiffs) had succeeded in harpooning

the fish; they were at last, through peril of their lives,

obliged to forsake not only their lines, but their boat itself.

Ultimately the defendants (the crew of another ship)

came up with the whale, struck, killed, seized, and finally

appropriated it before the very eyes of the plaintiffs.

And when those defendants were remonstrated with, their captain

snapped his fingers in the plaintiffs' teeth, and assured

them that by way of doxology to the deed he had done,

he would now retain their line, harpoons, and boat, which had

remained attached to the whale at the time of the seizure.

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CHAPTER 93



The Castaway





It was but some few days after encountering the Frenchman, that a most

significant event befell the most insignificant of the Pequod's crew;

an event most lamentable; and which ended in providing the sometimes

madly merry and predestinated craft with a living and ever accompanying

prophecy of whatever shattered sequel might prove her own.



Now, in the whale ship, it is not every one that goes in the boats.

Some few hands are reserved called shipkeepers, whose province it

is to work the vessel while the boats are pursuing the whale.

As a general thing, these shipkeepers are as hardy fellows

as the men comprising the boats' crews.  But if there happen

to be an unduly slender, clumsy, or timorous wight in the ship,

that wight is certain to be made a ship-keeper. It was so in the Pequod

with the little negro Pippin by nick-name, Pip by abbreviation.

Poor Pip! ye have heard of him before; ye must remember his tambourine

on that dramatic midnight, so gloomy-jolly.



In outer aspect, Pip and Dough-Boy made a match, like a black pony

and a white one, of equal developments, though of dissimilar color,

driven in one eccentric span.  But while hapless Dough-Boy was by nature

dull and torpid in his intellects, Pip, though over tender-hearted,

was at bottom very bright, with that pleasant, genial, jolly brightness

peculiar to his tribe; a tribe, which ever enjoy all holidays

and festivities with finer, freer relish than any other race.

For blacks, the year's calendar should show naught but three hundred

and sixty-five Fourth of Julys and New Year's Days.  Nor smile so,

while I write that this little black was brilliant, for even blackness has

its brilliancy; behold yon lustrous ebony, panelled in king's cabinets.

But Pip loved life, and all life's peaceable securities; so that

the panic-striking business in which he had somehow unaccountably

become entrapped, had most sadly blurred his brightness; though, as ere

long will be seen, what was thus temporarily subdued in him,

in the end was destined to be luridly illumined by strange wild fires,

that fictitiously showed him off to ten times the natural lustre

with which in his native Tolland County in Connecticut, he had once

enlivened many a fiddler's frolic on the green; and at melodious

even-tide, with his gay ha-ha! had turned the round horizon into

one star-belled tambourine.  So, though in the clear air of day,

suspended against a blue-veined neck, the pure-watered diamond drop will

healthful glow; yet, when the cunning jeweller would show you the diamond

in its most impressive lustre, he lays it against a gloomy ground,

and then lights it up, not by the sun, but by some unnatural gases.

Then come out those fiery effulgences, infernally superb; then the

evil-blazing diamond, once the divinest symbol of the crystal skies,

looks like some crown-jewel stolen from the King of Hell.  But let

us to the story.



It came to pass, that in the ambergris affair Stubb's after-oarsman

chanced so to sprain his hand, as for a time to become quite maimed;

and, temporarily, Pip was put into his place.



The first time Stubb lowered with him, Pip evinced much nervousness;

but happily, for that time, escaped close contact with the whale;

and therefore came off not altogether discreditably; though Stubb

observing him, took care, afterwards, to exhort him to cherish his

courageousness to the utmost, for he might often find it needful.



Now upon the second lowering, the boat paddled upon the whale;

and as the fish received the darted iron, it gave its customary rap,

which happened, in this instance, to be right under poor Pip's seat.

The involuntary consternation of the moment caused him to leap,

paddle in hand, out of the boat; and in such a way, that part of the slack

whale line coming against his chest, he breasted it overboard with him,

so as to become entangled in it, when at last plumping into the water.

That instant the stricken whale started on a fierce run, the line

swiftly straightened; and presto! poor Pip came all foaming up

to the chocks of the boat, remorselessly dragged there by the line,

which had taken several turns around his chest and neck.



Tashtego stood in the bows.  He was full of the fire of the hunt.

He hated Pip for a poltroon.  Snatching the boat-knife from its sheath,

he suspended its sharp edge over the line, and turning towards Stubb,

exclaimed interrogatively, "Cut?"  Meantime Pip's blue, choked face

plainly looked, Do, for God's sake!  All passed in a flash.

In less than half a minute, this entire thing happened.



"Damn him, cut!" roared Stubb; and so the whale was lost

and Pip was saved.



So soon as he recovered himself, the poor little negro was assailed

by yells and execrations from the crew.  Tranquilly permitting

these irregular cursings to evaporate, Stubb then in a plain,

business-like, but still half humorous manner, cursed Pip officially;

and that done, unofficially gave him much wholesome advice.

The substance was, Never jump from a boat, Pip, except--but all

the rest was indefinite, as the soundest advice ever is.

Now, in general, Stick to the boat, is your true motto in whaling;

but cases will sometimes happen when Leap from the boat, is still better.

Moreover, as if perceiving at last that if he should give undiluted

conscientious advice to Pip, he would be leaving him too wide a margin

to jump in for the future; Stubb suddenly dropped all advice,

and concluded with a peremptory command "Stick to the boat, Pip,

or by the Lord, I won't pick you up if you jump; mind that.

We can't afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell

for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama.  Bear that in mind,

and don't jump any more."  Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted,

that though man loved his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal,

which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.



But we are all in the hands of the Gods; and Pip jumped again.

It was under very similar circumstances to the first performance;

but this time he did not breast out the line; and hence, when the whale

started to run, Pip was left behind on the sea, like a hurried

traveller's trunk.  Alas!  Stubb was but too true to his word.

It was a beautiful, bounteous, blue day! the spangled sea calm

and cool, and flatly stretching away, all round, to the horizon,

like gold-beater's skin hammered out to the extremest.  Bobbing up

and down in that sea, Pip's ebon head showed like a head of cloves.

No boat-knife was lifted when he fell so rapidly astern.

Stubb's inexorable back was turned upon him; and the whale was winged.

In three minutes, a whole mile of shoreless ocean was between

Pip and Stubb.  Out from the centre of the sea, poor Pip turned

his crisp, curling, black head to the sun, another lonely castaway,

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So be it, then!  Here's stout stuff for woe to work on.

So be it, then."



"No fairy fingers can have pressed the gold, but devil's

claws must have left their mouldings there since yesterday,"

murmured Starbuck to himself, leaning against the bulwarks.

"The old man seems to read Belshazzar's awful writing.

I have never marked the coin inspectingly.  He goes below; let me read.

A dark valley between three mighty, heaven-abiding peaks,

that almost seem the Trinity, in some faint earthly symbol.

So in this vale of Death, God girds us round; and over all our gloom,

the sun of Righteousness still shines a beacon and a hope.

If we bend down our eyes, the dark vale shows her mouldy soil;

but if we lift them, the bright sun meets our glance half way, to cheer.

Yet, oh, the great sun is no fixture; and if, at midnight, we would

fain snatch some sweet solace from him, we gaze for him in vain!

This coin speaks wisely, mildly, truly, but still sadly to me.

I will quit it, lest Truth shake me falsely."



"There now's the old Mogul," soliloquized Stubb by the try-works,

"he's been twigging it; and there goes Starbuck from the same,

and both with faces which I should say might be somewhere

within nine fathoms long.  And all from looking at a piece

of gold, which did I have it now on Negro Hill or in

Corlaer's Hook, I'd not look at it very long ere spending it.

Humph! in my poor, insignificant opinion, I regard this as queer.

I have seen doubloons before now in my voyagings; your doubloons

of old Spain, your doubloons of Peru, your doubloons of Chili,

your doubloons of Bolivia, your doubloons of Popayan;

with plenty of gold moidores and pistoles, and joes,

and half joes, and quarter joes.  What then should there be

in this doubloon of the Equator that is so killing wonderful?

By Golconda! let me read it once.  Halloa! here's signs and

wonders truly!  That, now, is what old Bowditch in his Epitome

calls the zodiac, and what my almanack below calls ditto.

I'll get the almanack; and as I have heard devils can be raised

with Daboll's arithmetic, I'll try my hand at raising a meaning

out of these queer curvicues here with the Massachusetts calendar.

Here's the book.  Let's see now.  Signs and wonders;

and the sun, he's always among 'em.  Hem, hem, hem; here they are--

here they go--all alive:  Aries, or the Ram; Taurus, or the Bull

and Jimimi! here's Gemini himself, or the Twins.  Well; the sun

he wheels among 'em.  Aye, here on the coin he's just crossing

the threshold between two of twelve sitting-rooms all in a ring.

Book! you lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places.

You'll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come

in to supply the thoughts.  That's my small experience,

so far as the Massachusetts calendar, and Bowditch's navigator,

and Daboll's arithmetic go.  Signs and wonders, eh?  Pity if there

is nothing wonderful in signs, and significant in wonders!

There's a clue somewhere; wait a bit; hist--hark!  By Jove, I have it!

Look you, Doubloon, your zodiac here is the life of man in one

round chapter; and now I'll read it off, straight out of the book.

Come, Almanack!  To begin:  there's Aries, or the Ram--

lecherous dog, he begets us; then, Taurus, or the Bull--

he bumps us the first thing; then Gemini, or the Twins--

that is, Virtue and Vice; we try to reach Virtue,

when lo! comes Cancer the Crab, and drags us back; and here,

going from Virtue, Leo, a roaring Lion, lies in the path--

he gives a few fierce bites and surly dabs with his paw;

we escape, and hail Virgo, the Virgin! that's our first love;

we marry and think to be happy for aye, when pop comes Libra,

or the Scales--happiness weighed and found wanting; and while we

are very sad about that, Lord! how we suddenly jump, as Scorpio,

or the Scorpion, stings us in the rear; we are curing the wound,

when whang comes the arrows all round; Sagittarius, or the Archer,

is amusing himself.  As we pluck out the shafts, stand aside!

here's the battering-ram, Capricornus, or the Goat; full tilt,

he comes rushing, and headlong we are tossed; when Aquarius,

or the Waterbearer, pours out his whole deluge and drowns us;

and to wind up with Pisces, or the Fishes, we sleep.

There's a sermon now, writ in high heaven, and the sun goes through

it every year, and yet comes out of it all alive and hearty.

Jollily he, aloft there, wheels through toil and trouble; and so,

alow here, does jolly Stubb.  Oh, jolly's the word for aye!

Adieu, Doubloon!  But stop; here comes little King-Post;

dodge round the try-works, now, and let's hear what he'll have

to say.  There; he's before it; he'll out with something presently.

So, so; he's beginning."



"I see nothing here, but a round thing made of gold, and whoever raises

a certain whale, this round thing belongs to him.  So, what's all

this staring been about?  It is worth sixteen dollars, that's true;

and at two cents the cigar, that's nine hundred and sixty cigars.

I won't smoke dirty pipes like Stubb, but I like cigars, and here's nine

hundred and sixty of them; so here goes Flask aloft to spy 'em out."



"Shall I call that Wise or foolish, now; if it be really wise it has

a foolish look to it; yet, if it be really foolish, then has it a sort

of wiseish look to it.  But, avast; here comes our old Manxman--the old

hearse-driver, he must have been, that is, before he took to the sea.

He luffs up before the doubloon; halloa, and goes round on the other

side of the mast; why, there's a horse-shoe nailed on that side;

and now he's back again; what does that mean?  Hark! he's muttering--

voice like an old worn-out coffee-mill. Prick ears, and listen!"



"If the White Whale be raised, it must be in a month and a day,

when the sun stands in some one of these signs.  I've studied signs,

and know their marks; they were taught me two score years ago,

by the old witch in Copenhagen.  Now, in what sign will the sun then be?

The horse-shoe sign; for there it is, right opposite the gold.

And what's the horse-shoe sign?  The lion is the horse-shoe sign--

the roaring and devouring lion.  Ship, old ship! my old head shakes

to think of thee."



"There's another rendering now; but still one text.  All sorts of men

in one kind of world, you see.  Dodge again! here comes Queequeg--

all tattooing--looks like the signs of the Zodiac himself.  What says

the Cannibal?  As I live he's comparing notes; looking at his thigh bone;

thinks the sun is in the thigh, or in the calf, or in the bowels,

I suppose, as the old women talk Surgeon's Astronomy in the back country.

And by Jove, he's found something there in the vicinity of his thigh--

I guess it's Sagittarius, or the Archer.  No:  he don't know what to make

of the doubloon; he takes it for an old button off some king's trowsers.

But, aside again! here comes that ghost-devil, Fedallah; tail coiled

out of sight as usual, oakum in the toes of his pumps as usual.

What does he say, with that look of his?  Ah, only makes a sign

to the sign and bows himself; there is a sun on the coin--

fire worshipper, depend upon it.  Ho! more and more.  This way comes Pip--

poor boy! would he had died, or I; he's half horrible to me.

He too has been watching all of these interpreters myself included--

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"The White Whale," said the Englishman, pointing his ivory arm

towards the East, and taking a rueful sight along it, as if it

had been a telescope; There I saw him, on the Line, last season."



"And he took that arm off, did he?" asked Ahab, now sliding

down from the capstan, and resting on the Englishman's shoulder,

as he did so.



"Aye, he was the cause of it, at least; and that leg, too?"



"Spin me the yarn," said Ahab; "how was it?"



"It was the first time in my life that I ever cruised on the Line,"

began the Englishman.  "I was ignorant of the White Whale at that time.

Well, one day we lowered for a pod of four or five whales, and my

boat fastened to one of them; a regular circus horse he was, too,

that went milling and milling round so that my boat's crew could

only trim dish, by sitting all their sterns on the outer gunwale.

Presently up breaches from the bottom of the sea a bouncing great whale,

with a milky-white head and hump, all crows' feet and wrinkles."



"It was he, it was he!" cried Ahab, suddenly letting out

his suspended breath.



"And harpoons sticking in near his starboard fin.  Aye, aye--

they were mine--my irons," cried Ahab, exultingly--"but on!"



"Give me a chance, then," said the Englishman, good-humoredly. "Well,

this old great-grandfather, with the white head and hump, runs all afoam

into the pod, and goes to snapping furiously at my fast-line!



"Aye, I see!--wanted to part it; free the fast-fish--an old trick--

I know him."



"How it was exactly," continued the one-armed commander,

"I do not know; but in biting the line, it got foul of his teeth,

caught there somehow; but we didn't know it then; so that when we

afterwards pulled on the line, bounce we came plump on to his hump!

instead of the other whale's; that went off to windward, all fluking.

Seeing how matters stood, and what a noble great whale it was--

the noblest and biggest I ever saw, sir, in my life--I resolved

to capture him, spite of the boiling rage he seemed to be in.

And thinking the hap-hazard line would get loose, or the tooth

it was tangled to might draw (for I have a devil of a boat's

crew for a pull on a whale-line); seeing all this, I say,

I jumped into my first mate's boat--Mr. Mounttop's here

(by the way, Captain--Mounttop; Mounttop--the captain);--

as I was saying, I jumped into Mounttop's boat, which, d'ye see,

was gunwale and gunwale with mine, then; and snatching the

first harpoon, let this old great-grandfather have it.  But, Lord,

look you, sir--hearts and souls alive, man--the next instant,

in a jiff, I was blind as a bat--both eyes out--all befogged

and bedeadened with black foam--the whale's tail looming straight

up out of it, perpendicular in the air, like a marble steeple.

No use sterning all, then; but as I was groping at midday,

with a blinding sun, all crown-jewels; as I was groping, I say,

after the second iron, to toss it overboard--down comes the tail

like a Lima tower, cutting my boat in two, leaving each half

in splinters; and, flukes first, the white hump backed through

the wreck, as though it was all chips.  We all struck out.

To escape his terrible flailings, I seized hold of my harpoon-pole

sticking in him, and for a moment clung to that like a sucking fish.

But a combing sea dashed me off, and at the same instant,

the fish, taking one good dart forwards, went down like a flash;

and the barb of that cursed second iron towing along near me

caught me here" (clapping his hand just below his shoulder);

"yes, caught me just here, I say, and bore me down to

Hell's flames, I was thinking; when, when, all of a sudden,

thank the good God, the barb ript its way along the flesh--

clear along the whole length of my arm--came out nigh my wrist,

and up I floated;--and that gentleman there will tell you the rest

(by the way, captain--Dr. Bunger, ship's surgeon:  Bunger, my lad,--

the captain). Now, Bunger boy, spin your part of the yarn."



The professional gentleman thus familiarly pointed out,

had been all the time standing near them, with nothing

specific visible, to denote his gentlemanly rank on board.

His face was an exceedingly round but sober one; he was dressed

in a faded blue woollen frock or shirt, and patched trowsers;

and had thus far been dividing his attention between a marlingspike

he held in one hand, and a pill-box held in the other,

occasionally casting a critical glance at the ivory limbs of

the two crippled captains.  But, at his superior's introduction

of him to Ahab, he politely bowed, and straightway went on

to do his captain's bidding.



"It was a shocking bad wound," began the whale-surgeon;

"and, taking my advice, Captain Boomer here, stood our old Sammy-"



"Samuel Enderby is the name of my ship," interrupted the

one-armed captain, addressing Ahab; "go on, boy."



"Stood our old Sammy off to the northward, to get out of the blazing

hot weather there on the Line.  But it was no use--I did all I could;

sat up with him nights; was very severe with him in the matter of diet-"



"Oh, very severe!" chimed in the patient himself; then suddenly

altering his voice, "Drinking hot rum toddies with me every night,

till he couldn't see to put on the bandages; and sending me

to bed, half seas over, about three o'clock in the morning.

Oh, ye stars! he sat up with me indeed, and was very severe

in my diet.  Oh! a great watcher, and very dietetically severe,

is Dr. Bunger.  (Bunger, you dog, laugh out! why don't ye?

You know you're a precious jolly rascal.) But, heave ahead, boy,

I'd rather be killed by you than kept alive by any other man."



"My captain, you must have ere this perceived, respected sir"--

said the imperturbable godly-looking Bunger, slightly bowing

to Ahab--"is apt to be facetious at times; he spins us many

clever things of that sort.  But I may as well say--en passant,

as the French remark--that I myself--that is to say, Jack Bunger,

late of the reverend clergy--am a strict total abstinence man;

I never drink-"



"Water!" cried the captain; "he never drinks it; it's a sort

of fits to him; fresh water throws him into the hydrophobia;

but go on--go on with the arm story."



"Yes, I may as well," said the surgeon, coolly.  "I was about

observing, sir, before Captain Boomer's facetious interruption,

that spite of my best and severest endeavors, the wound kept getting

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I confess, that since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated very far

beneath the skin of the adult whale; nevertheless, I have been

blessed with an opportunity to dissect him in miniature.

In a ship I belonged to, a small cub Sperm Whale was once

bodily hoisted to the deck for his poke or bag, to make sheaths

for the barbs of the harpoons, and for the heads of the lances.

Think you I let that chance go, without using my boat-hatchet

and jack-knife, and breaking the seal and reading all the contents

of that young cub?



And as for my exact knowledge of the bones of the leviathan

in their gigantic, full grown development, for that rare knowledge

I am indebted to my late royal friend Tranquo, king of Tranque,

one of the Arsacides.  For being at Tranque, years ago,

when attached to the trading-ship Dey of Algiers, I was invited

to spend part of the Arsacidean holidays with the lord of Tranque,

at his retired palm villa at Pupella; a sea-side glen not very far

distant from what our sailors called Bamboo-Town, his capital.



Among many other fine qualities, my royal friend Tranquo,

being gifted with a devout love for all matters of barbaric vertu,

had brought together in Pupella whatever rare things the more ingenious

of his people could invent; chiefly carved woods of wonderful devices,

chiselled shells, inlaid spears, costly paddles, aromatic canoes;

and all these distributed among whatever natural wonders,

the wonder-freighted, tribute-rendering waves had cast upon his shores.



Chief among these latter was a great Sperm Whale, which, after an

unusually long raging gale, had been found dead and stranded, with his

head against a cocoa-nut tree, whose plumage-like, tufted droopings

seemed his verdant jet.  When the vast body had at last been stripped

of its fathomdeep enfoldings, and the bones become dust dry in the sun,

then the skeleton was carefully transported up the Pupella glen,

where a grand temple of lordly palms now sheltered it.



The ribs were hung with trophies; the vertebrae were carved

with Arsacidean annals, in strange hieroglyphics; in the skull,

the priests kept up an unextinguished aromatic flame, so that the mystic

head again sent forth its vapory spout; while, suspended from

a bough, the terrific lower jaw vibrated over all the devotees,

like the hair-hung sword that so affrighted Damocles.



It was a wondrous sight.  The wood was green as mosses of the Icy Glen;

the trees stood high and haughty, feeling their living sap;

the industrious earth beneath was as a weaver's loom,

with a gorgeous carpet on it, whereof the ground-vine tendrils

formed the warp and woof, and the living flowers the figures.

All the trees, with all their laden branches; all the shrubs,

and ferns, and grasses; the message-carrying air; all these

unceasingly were active.  Through the lacings of the leaves,

the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure.

Oh, busy weaver! unseen weaver!--pause!--one word!--

whither flows the fabric? what palace may it deck? wherefore

all these ceaseless toilings?  Speak, weaver!--stay thy hand!--

but one single word with thee!  Nay--the shuttle flies--

the figures float from forth the loom; the fresher-rushing

carpet for ever slides away.  The weaver-god, he weaves;

and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice;

and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened;

and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that

speak through it.  For even so it is in all material factories.

The spoken words that are inaudible among the flying spindles;

those same words are plainly heard without the walls, bursting from

the opened casements.  Thereby have villainies been detected.

Ah, mortal! then, be heedful; for so, in all this din of the great

world's loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be overheard afar.



Now, amid the green, life-restless loom of that Arsacidean wood,

the great, white, worshipped skeleton lay lounging--a gigantic idler!

Yet, as the ever-woven verdant warp and woof intermixed and hummed

around him, the mighty idler seemed the cunning weaver; himself all woven

over with the vines; every month assuming greener, fresher verdure;

but himself a skeleton.  Life folded Death; Death trellised Life;

the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories.



Now, when with royal Tranquo I visited this wondrous whale,

and saw the skull an altar, and the artificial smoke ascending

from where the real jet had issued, I marvelled that the king

should regard a chapel as an object of vertu.  He laughed.

But more I marvelled that the priests should swear that smoky jet

of his was genuine.  To and fro I paced before this skeleton--

brushed the vines aside--broke through the ribs--and with a ball

of Arsacidean twine, wandered, eddied long amid its many winding,

shaded colonnades and arbors.  But soon my line was out;

and following it back, I emerged from the opening where I entered.

I saw no living thing within; naught was there but bones.



Cutting me a green measuring-rod, I once more dived within

the skeleton.  From their arrow-slit in the skull, the priests

perceived me taking the altitude of the final rib, "How now!"

they shouted; "Dar'st thou measure this our god!  That's for us."

"Aye, priests--well, how long do ye make him, then?"  But hereupon

a fierce contest rose among them, concerning feet and inches;

they cracked each other's sconces with their yard-sticks--

the great skull echoed--and seizing that lucky chance,

I quickly concluded my own admeasurements.



These admeasurements I now propose to set before you.

But first, be it recorded, that, in this matter, I am not free

to utter any fancied measurements I please.  Because there are

skeleton authorities you can refer to, to test my accuracy.

There is a Leviathanic Museum, they tell me, in Hull, England,

one of the whaling ports of that country, where they have some

fine specimens of fin-backs and other whales.  Likewise, I have

heard that in the museum of Manchester, in New Hampshire,

they have what the proprietors call "the only perfect specimen

of a Greenland or River Whale in the United States."  Moreover, at a

place in Yorkshire, England, Burton Constable by name, a certain

Sir Clifford Constable has in his possession the skeleton of a

Sperm Whale, but of moderate size, by no means of the full-grown

magnitude of my friend King Tranquo's.



In both cases, the stranded whales to which these two skeletons belonged,

were originally claimed by their proprietors upon similar grounds.

King Tranquo seizing his because he wanted it; and Sir Clifford,

because he was lord of the seignories of those parts.

Sir Clifford's whale has been articulated throughout; so that,

like a great chest of drawers, you can open and shut him,

in all his bony cavities--spread out his ribs like a gigantic fan--

and swing all day upon his lower jaw.  Locks are to be put

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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

abounding with them, hence that species also is declining.

For they are only being driven from promontory to cape; and if

one coast is no longer enlivened with their jets, then, be sure,

some other and remoter strand has been very recently startled

by the unfamiliar spectacle.



Furthermore:  concerning these last mentioned Leviathans,

they have two firm fortresses, which, in all human probability,

will for ever remain impregnable.  And as upon the invasion of

their valleys, the frosty Swiss have retreated to their mountains;

so, hunted from the savannas and glades of the middle seas,

the whale-bone whales can at last resort to their Polar citadels,

and diving under the ultimate glassy barriers and walls there,

come up among icy fields and floes! and in a charmed circle

of everlasting December, bid defiance to all pursuit from man.



But as perhaps fifty of these whale-bone whales are harpooned

for one cachalot, some philosophers of the forecastle have

concluded that this positive havoc has already very seriously

diminished their battalions.  But though for some time past

a number of these whales, not less than 13,000, have been

annually slain on the nor'west coast by the Americans alone;

yet there are considerations which render even this circumstance

of little or no account as an opposing argument in this matter.



Natural as it is to be somewhat incredulous concerning the populousness

of the more enormous creatures of the globe, yet what shall we

say to Harto, the historian of Goa, when he tells us that at one

hunting the King of Siam took 4,000 elephants; that in those regions

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As the frantic old man thus spoke and thus trampled with his live

and dead feet, a sneering triumph that seemed meant for Ahab,

and a fatalistic despair that seemed meant for himself--

these passed over the mute, motionless Parsee's face.

Unobserved he rose and glided away; while, awestruck by the aspect

of their commander, the seamen clustered together on the forecastle,

till Ahab, troubledly pacing the deck, shouted out--"To the braces!

Up helm!--square in!"



In an instant the yards swung round; and as the ship half-wheeled

upon her heel, her three firm-seated graceful masts erectly poised

upon her long, ribbed hull, seemed as the three Horatii pirouetting

on one sufficient steed.



Standing between the knight-heads, Starbuck watched the Pequod's

tumultuous way, and Ahab's also, as he went lurching along the deck.



"I have sat before the dense coal fire and watched it all aglow,

full of its tormented flaming life; and I have seen it wane

at last, down, down, to dumbest dust.  Old man of oceans!

of all this fiery life of thine, what will at length remain

but one little heap of ashes!"



"Aye," cried Stubb, "but sea-coal ashes--mind ye that, Mr. Starbuck--

sea-coal, not your common charcoal.  Well, well!  I heard

Ahab mutter, 'Here some one thrusts these cards into these old

hands of mine; swears that I must play them, and no others.'

And damn me, Ahab, but thou actest right; live in the game,

and die in it!"







CHAPTER 119



The Candles





Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs:  the tiger

of Bengal crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure.

Skies the most effulgent but basket the deadliest thunders:

gorgeous Cuba knows tornadoes that never swept tame

northern lands.  So, too, it is, that in these resplendent

Japanese seas the mariner encounters the direst of all storms,

the Typhoon.  It will sometimes burst from out that cloudless sky,

like an exploding bomb upon a dazed and sleepy town.



Towards evening of that day, the Pequod was torn of her canvas,

and bare-poled was left to fight a Typhoon which had struck

her directly ahead.  When darkness came on, sky and sea roared

and split with the thunder, and blazed with the lightning,

that showed the disabled mast fluttering here and there

with the rags which the first fury of the tempest had left

for its after sport.



Holding by a shroud, Starbuck was standing on the quarter-deck;

at every flash of the lightning glancing aloft, to see

what additional disaster might have befallen the intricate

hamper there; while Stubb and Flask were directing the men

in the higher hoisting and firmer lashing of the boats.

But all their pains seemed naught.  Though lifted to the very top

of the cranes, the windward quarter boat (Ahab's) did not escape.

A great rolling sea, dashing high up against the reeling ship's

high teetering side, stove in the boat's bottom at the stern,

and left it again, all dripping through like a sieve.



"Bad work, bad work!  Mr. Starbuck," said Stubb, regarding the wreck,

"but the sea will have its way.  Stubb, for one, can't fight it.

You see, Mr. Starbuck, a wave has such a great long start before it leaps,

all round the world it runs, and then comes the spring!  But as for me,

all the start I have to meet it, is just across the deck here.

But never mind; it's all in fun:  so the old song says;"--(sings.)



                     Oh! jolly is the gale,

                     And a joker is the whale,

                     A' flourishin' his tail,--

        Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky

          lad, is the Ocean, oh!

                     The scud all a flyin',

                     That's his flip only foamin';

                     When he stirs in the spicin',--

        Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky

          lad, is the Ocean, oh!

                     Thunder splits the ships,

                     But he only smacks his lips,

                     A tastin' of this flip,--

        Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky

          lad, is the Ocean, oh!





"Avast Stubb," cried Starbuck, "let the Typhoon sing, and strike

his harp here in our rigging; but if thou art a brave man thou

wilt hold thy peace."



"But I am not a brave man; never said I was a brave man;

I am a coward; and I sing to keep up my spirits.

And I tell you what it is, Mr. Starbuck, there's no way

to stop my singing in this world but to cut my throat.

And when that's done, ten to one I sing ye the doxology

for a wind-up."



"Madman! look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own."



"What! how can you see better of a dark night than anybody else,

never mind how foolish?"



"Here!" cried Starbuck, seizing Stubb by the shoulder, and pointing

his hand towards the weather bow, "markest thou not that the gale

comes from the eastward, the very course Ahab is to run for Moby Dick?

the very course he swung to this day noon? now mark his boat there;

where is that stove?  In the stern-sheets, man; where he is wont to stand--

his stand-point is stove, man!  Now jump overboard, and sing away,

if thou must!



"I don't half understand ye:  what's in the wind?"



"Yes, yes, round the Cape of Good Hope is the shortest way to Nantucket,"

soliloquized Starbuck suddenly, heedless of Stubb's question.

"The gale that now hammers at us to stave us, we can turn it into a fair

wind that will drive us towards home.  Yonder, to windward, all is

blackness of doom; but to leeward, homeward--I see it lightens up there;

but not with the lightning."

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A touch, and Starbuck may survive to hug his wife and child again.--

Oh Mary!  Mary!--boy! boy! boy!--But if I wake thee not to death,

old man, who can tell to what unsounded deeps Starbuck's body this day

week may sink, with all the crew!  Great God, where art Thou?  Shall I?

shall I?--The wind has gone down and shifted, sir; the fore and main

topsails are reefed and set! she heads her course."



"Stern all!  Oh Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart at last!"



Such were the sounds that now came hurtling from out the old man's

tormented sleep, as if Starbuck's voice had caused the long dumb

dream to speak.



The yet levelled musket shook like a drunkard's arm against the panel;

Starbuck seemed wrestling with an angel, but turning from the door,

he placed the death-tube in its rack, and left the place.



"He's too sound asleep, Mr. Stubb; go thou down, and wake him,

and tell him.  I must see to the deck here.  Thou know'st

what to say."







CHAPTER 124



The Needle





Next morning the not-yet-subsided sea rolled in long slow

billows of mighty bulk, and striving in the Pequod's

gurgling track, pushed her on like giants' palms outspread.

The strong unstaggering breeze abounded so, that sky and air

seemed vast outbellying sails; the whole world boomed before

the wind.  Muffled in the full morning light, the invisible

sun was only known by the spread intensity of his place;

where his bayonet rays moved on in stacks.  Emblazonings, as of

crowned Babylonian kings and queens, reigned over everything.

The sea was as a crucible of molten gold, that bubblingly leaps

with light and heat.



Long maintaining an enchanted silence, Ahab stood apart; and every

time the teetering ship loweringly pitched down her bowsprit,

he turned to eye the bright sun's rays produced ahead;

and when she profoundly settled by the stern, he turned behind,

and saw the sun's rearward place, and how the same yellow rays

were blending with his undeviating wake.



"Ha, ha, my ship! thou mightest well be taken now for the sea-chariot of

the sun.  Ho, ho! all ye nations before my prow, I bring the sun to ye!

Yoke on the further billows; hallo! a tandem, I drive the sea!"



But suddenly reined back by some counter thought, he hurried towards

the helm, huskily demanding how the ship was heading.



"East-sou-east, sir," said the frightened steersman.



"Thou liest!" smiting him with his clenched fist.

"Heading East at this hour in the morning, and the sun astern?"



Upon this every soul was confounded; for the phenomenon just

then observed by Ahab had unaccountably escaped every one else;

but its very blinding palpableness must have been the cause.



Thrusting his head half-way into the binnacle, Ahab caught

one glimpse of the compasses; his uplifted arm slowly fell;

for a moment he almost seemed to stagger.  Standing behind

him Starbuck looked, and lo! the two compasses pointed East,

and the Pequod was as infallibly going West.



But ere the first wild alarm could get out abroad among the crew, the old

man with a rigid laugh exclaimed, "I have it!  It has happened before.

Mr. Starbuck, last night's thunder turned our compasses--that's all.

Thou hast before now heard of such a thing, I take it."



"Aye; but never before has it happened to me, sir," said the

pale mate, gloomily.



Here, it must needs be said, that accidents like this have

in more than one case occurred to ships in violent storms.

The magnetic energy, as developed in the mariner's needle, is,

as all know, essentially one with the electricity beheld in heaven;

hence it is not to be much marvelled at, that such things should be.

In instances where the lightning has actually struck the vessel,

so as to smite down some of the spars and rigging, the effect upon

the needle has at times been still more fatal; all its loadstone

virtue being annihilated, so that the before magnetic steel was of no

more use than an old wife's knitting needle.  But in either case,

the needle never again, of itself, recovers the original virtue

thus marred or lost; and if the binnacle compasses be affected,

the same fate reaches all the others that may be in the ship;

even were the lowermost one inserted into the kelson.



Deliberately standing before the binnacle, and eyeing

the transpointed compasses, the old man, with the sharp

of his extended hand, now took the precise bearing of the sun,

and satisfied that the needles were exactly inverted, shouted out

his orders for the ship's course to be changed accordingly.

The yards were hard up; and once more the Pequod thrust her

undaunted bows into the opposing wind, for the supposed fair

one had only been juggling her.



Meanwhile, whatever were his own secret thoughts, Starbuck

said nothing, but quietly he issued all requisite orders;

while Stubb and Flask--who in some small degree seemed then

to be sharing his feelings--likewise unmurmuringly acquiesced.

As for the men, though some of them lowly rumbled, their fear

of Ahab was greater than their fear of Fate.  But as ever before,

the pagan harpooneers remained almost wholly unimpressed;

or if impressed, it was only with a certain magnetism shot

into their congenial hearts from inflexible Ahab's.



For a space the old man walked the deck in rolling reveries.

But chancing to slip with his ivory heel, he saw the crushed

copper sight-tubes of the quadrant he had the day before dashed

to the deck.



"Thou poor, proud heaven-gazer and sun's pilot! yesterday I

wrecked thee, and to-day the compasses would fain have wrecked me.

So, so.  But Ahab is lord over the level loadstone yet.

Mr. Starbuck--a lance without the pole; a top-maul, and the smallest

of the sail-maker's needles.  Quick!"

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An eagle flew thrice round Tarquin's head, removing his cap to

replace it, and thereupon Tanaquil, his wife, declared that Tarquin

would be king of Rome.  But only by the replacing of the cap

was that omen accounted good.  Ahab's hat was never restored;

the wild hawk flew on and on with it; far in advance of the prow:

and at last disappeared; while from the point of that disappearance,

a minute black spot was dimly discerned, falling from that vast

height into the sea.







CHAPTER 131



The Pequod Meets The Delight







The intense Pequod sailed on; the rolling waves and days went by;

the life-buoy-coffin still lightly swung; and another ship,

most miserably misnamed the Delight, was descried.

As she drew nigh, all eyes were fixed upon her broad beams,

called shears, which, in some whaling-ships, cross the quarter-deck

at the height of eight or nine feet; serving to carry the spare,

unrigged, or disabled boats.



Upon the stranger's shears were beheld the shattered, white ribs,

and some few splintered planks, of what had once been a whale-boat;

but you now saw through this wreck, as plainly as you see through

the peeled, half-unhinged, and bleaching skeleton of a horse.



"Hast seen the White Whale?"



"Look!" replied the hollow-cheeked captain from his taffrail;

and with his trumpet he pointed to the wreck.



"Hast killed him?"



"The harpoon is not yet forged that will ever will do that,"

answered the other, sadly glancing upon a rounded hammock on

the deck, whose gathered sides some noiseless sailors were busy

in sewing together.



"Not forged!" and snatching Perth's levelled iron from the crotch,

Ahab held it out, exclaiming--"Look ye, Nantucketer; here in this

hand I hold his death!  Tempered in blood, and tempered by lightning

are these barbs; and I swear to temper them triply in that hot place

behind the fin, where the White Whale most feels his accursed life!"



"Then God keep thee, old man--see'st thou that"--

pointing to the hammock--"I bury but one of five stout men,

who were alive only yesterday; but were dead ere night.

Only that one I bury; the rest were buried before they died;

you sail upon their tomb."  Then turning to his crew--"Are

ye ready there? place the plank then on the rail, and lift

the body; so, then--Oh!  God"--advancing towards the hammock

with uplifted hands--"may the resurrection and the life-"



"Brace forward!  Up helm!" cried Ahab like lightning to his men.



But the suddenly started Pequod was not quick enough to escape

the sound of the splash that the corpse soon made as it struck the sea;

not so quick, indeed, but that some of the flying bubbles might have

sprinkled her hull with their ghostly baptism.



As Ahab now glided from the dejected Delight, the strange life-buoy

hanging at the Pequod's stern came into conspicuous relief.



"Ha! yonder! look yonder, men!" cried a foreboding voice in her wake.

"In vain, oh, ye strangers, ye fly our sad burial; ye but turn us

your taffrail to show us your coffin!"







CHAPTER 132



The Symphony





It was a clear steel-blue day.  The firmaments of air and sea were

hardly separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air

was transparently pure and soft, with a woman's look, and the robust

and man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells,

as Samson's chest in his sleep.



Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small,

unspeckled birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air;

but to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue,

rushed mighty leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; and these were

the strong, troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea.



But though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades

and shadows without; those two seemed one; it was only the sex,

as it were, that distinguished them.



Aloft, like a royal czar and king, the sun seemed giving this

gentle air to this bold and rolling sea; even as bride to groom.

And at the girdling line of the horizon, a soft and tremulous motion--

most seen here at the Equator--denoted the fond, throbbing trust,

the loving alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom away.



Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles;

haggardly firm and unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals,

that still glow in the ashes of ruin; untottering Ahab stood

forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting his splintered

helmet of a brow to the fair girl's forehead of heaven.



Oh, immortal infancy, and innocency of the azure!

Invisible winged creatures that frolic all round us!

Sweet childhood of air and sky! how oblivious were ye of old Ahab's

close-coiled woe!  But so have I seen little Miriam and Martha,

laughing-eyed elves, heedlessly gambol around their old sire;

sporting with the circle of singed locks which grew on the marge

of that burnt-out crater of his brain.



Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side

and watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze,

the more and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity.

But the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel,

for a moment, the cankerous thing in his soul.  That glad,

happy air, that winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him;

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monomaniac Ahab, furious with this tantalizing vicinity of his foe,

which placed him all alive and helpless in the very jaws he hated;

frenzied with all this, he seized the long bone with his

naked hands, and wildly strove to wrench it from its gripe.

As now he thus vainly strove, the jaw slipped from him;

the frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped,

as both jaws, like an enormous shears, sliding further aft,

bit the craft completely in twain, and locked themselves fast

again in the sea, midway between the two floating wrecks.

These floated aside, the broken ends drooping, the crew at

the stern-wreck clinging to the gunwales, and striving to hold

fast to the oars to lash them across.



At that preluding moment, ere the boat was yet snapped, Ahab, the first

to perceive the whale's intent, by the crafty upraising of his head,

a movement that loosed his hold for the time; at that moment his

hand had made one final effort to push the boat out of the bite.

But only slipping further into the whale's mouth, and tilting over

sideways as it slipped, the boat had shaken off his hold on the jaw;

spilled him out of it, as he leaned to the push; and so he fell

flat-faced upon the sea.



Ripplingly withdrawing from his prey, Moby Dick now lay at a

little distance, vertically thrusting his oblong white head up

and down in the billows; and at the same time slowly revolving his

whole spindled body; so that when his vast wrinkled forehead rose--

some twenty or more feet out of the water--the now rising swells,

with all their confluent waves, dazzlingly broke against it;

vindictively tossing their shivered spray still higher into

the air.* So, in a gale, the but half baffled Channel billows only

recoil from the base of the Eddystone, triumphantly to overleap

its summit with their scud.





*This motion is peculiar to the sperm whale.  It receives its designation

(pitchpoling) from its being likened to that preliminary up-and-down

poise of the whale-lance, in the exercise called pitchpoling,

previously described.  By this motion the whale must best and most

comprehensively view whatever objects may be encircling him.





But soon resuming his horizontal attitude, Moby Dick swam swiftly

round and round the wrecked crew; sideways churning the water in his

vengeful wake, as if lashing himself up to still another and more

deadly assault.  The sight of the splintered boat seemed to madden him,

as the blood of grapes and mulberries cast before Antiochus's

elephants in the book of Maccabees.  Meanwhile Ahab half smothered

in the foam of the whale's insolent tail, and too much of a cripple

to swim,--though he could still keep afloat, even in the heart

of such a whirlpool as that; helpless Ahab's head was seen,

like a tossed bubble which the least chance shock might burst.

From the boat's fragmentary stern, Fedallah incuriously and mildly

eyed him; the clinging crew, at the other drifting end, could not

succor him; more than enough was it for them to look to themselves.

For so revolvingly appalling was the White Whale's aspect,

and so planetarily swift the ever-contracting circles

he made, that he seemed horizontally swooping upon them.

And though the other boats, unharmed, still hovered hard by;

still they dared not pull into the eddy to strike, lest that should be

the signal for the instant destruction of the jeopardized castaways,

Ahab and all; nor in that case could they themselves hope to escape.

With straining eyes, then, they remained on the outer edge of

the direful zone, whose centre had now become the old man's head.



Meantime, from the beginning all this had been descried from the ship's

mast heads; and squaring her yards, she had borne down upon the scene;

and was now so nigh, that Ahab in the water hailed her!--"Sail on the"--

but that moment a breaking sea dashed on him from Moby Dick, and whelmed

him for the time.  But struggling out of it again, and chancing to rise

on a towering crest, he shouted,--"Sail on the whale!--Drive him off!"



The Pequod's prows were pointed-, and breaking up the charmed circle,

she effectually parted the white whale from his victim.

As he sullenly swam off, the boats flew to the rescue.



Dragged into Stubb's boat with blood-shot, blinded eyes,

the white brine caking in his wrinkles; the long tension

of Ahab's bodily strength did crack, and helplessly he yielded

to his body's doom for a time, lying all crushed in the bottom

of Stubb's boat, like one trodden under foot of herds of elephants.

Far inland, nameless wails came from him, as desolate sounds

from out ravines.



But this intensity of his physical prostration did but so much

the more abbreviate it.  In an instant's compass, great hearts

sometimes condense to one deep pang, the sum total of those

shallow pains kindly diffused through feebler men's whole lives.

And so, such hearts, though summary in each one suffering;

still, if the gods decree it, in their life-time aggregate

a whole age of woe, wholly made up of instantaneous intensities;

for even in their pointless centres, those noble natures contain

the entire circumferences of inferior souls.



"The harpoon," said Ahab, half way rising, and draggingly leaning

on one bended arm--"is it safe?"



"Aye, sir, for it was not darted; this is it," said Stubb, showing it.



"Lay it before me;--any missing men?"



"One, two, three, four, five;--there were five oars, sir, and here

are five men."



"That's good.--Help me, man; I wish to stand.  So, so, I see him!

there! there! going to leeward still; what a leaping spout!--

Hands off from me!  The eternal sap runs up in Ahab's bones again!

Set the sail; out oars; the helm!"



It is often the case that when a boat is stove, its crew,

being picked up by another boat, help to work that second boat;

and the chase is thus continued with what is called double-banked oars.

It was thus now.  But the added power of the boat did not equal

the added power of the whale, for he seemed to have treble-banked

his every fin; swimming with a velocity which plainly showed,

that if now, under these circumstances, pushed on, the chase

would prove an indefinitely prolonged, if not a hopeless one;

nor could any crew endure for so long a period, such an unintermitted,

intense straining at the oar; a thing barely tolerable only in some one

brief vicissitude.  The ship itself, then, as it sometimes happens,

offered the most promising intermediate means of overtaking the chase.

Accordingly, the boats now made for her, and were soon swayed up

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for the light to spread.



"See nothing, sir."



"Turn up all hands and make sail! he travels faster than I thought for;--

the top-gallant sails!--aye, they should have been kept on her all night.

But no matter--'tis but resting for the rush."



Here be it said, that this pertinacious pursuit of one particular whale,

continued through day into night, and through night into day,

is a thing by no means unprecedented in the South sea fishery.

For such is the wonderful skill, prescience of experience,

and invincible confidence acquired by some great natural geniuses among

the Nantucket commanders; that from the simple observation of a whale

when last descried, they will, under certain given circumstances,

pretty accurately foretell both the direction in which he will continue

to swim for a time, while out of sight, as well as his probable

rate of progression during that period.  And, in these cases,

somewhat as a pilot, when about losing sight of a coast, whose general

trending he well knows, and which he desires shortly to return to again,

but at some further point; like as this pilot stands by his compass,

and takes the precise bearing of the cape at present visible,

in order the more certainly to hit aright the remote, unseen headland,

eventually to be visited:  so does the fisherman, at his compass,

with the whale; for after being chased, and diligently marked,

through several hours of daylight, then, when night obscures

the fish, the creature's future wake through the darkness is almost

as established to the sagacious mind of the hunter, as the pilot's

coast is to him.  So that to this hunter's wondrous skill,

the proverbial evanescence of a thing writ in water, a wake,

is to all desired purposes well nigh as reliable as the steadfast land.

And as the mighty iron Leviathan of the modern railway is so familiarly

known in its every pace, that, with watches in their hands, men time

his rate as doctors that of a baby's pulse; and lightly say of it,

the up train or the down train will reach such or such a spot,

at such or such an hour; even so, almost, there are occasions

when these Nantucketers time that other Leviathan of the deep,

according to the observed humor of his speed; and say to themselves,

so many hours hence this whale will have gone two hundred miles,

will have about reached this or that degree of latitude or longitude.

But to render this acuteness at all successful in the end, the wind

and the sea must be the whaleman's allies; for of what present avail

to the becalmed or wind-bound mariner is the skill that assures him

he is exactly ninety-three leagues and a quarter from his port?

Inferable from these statements, are many collateral subtile matters

touching the chase of whales.



The ship tore on; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when

a cannonball, missent, becomes a plough-share and turns up

the level field.



"By salt and hemp!" cried Stubb, "but this swift motion of the deck

creeps up one's legs and tingles at the heart.  This ship and I

are two brave fellows!--Ha, ha!  Some one take me up, and launch me,

spine-wise, on the sea,--for by live-oaks! my spine's a keel.

Ha, ha! we go the gait that leaves no dust behind!"



"There she blows--she blows!--she blows!--right ahead!"

was now the mast-head cry.



"Aye, aye!" cried Stubb, "I knew it--ye can't escape--blow on and split

your spout, O whale! the mad fiend himself is after ye! blow your trump--

blister your lungs!--Ahab will dam off your blood, as a miller shuts

his watergate upon the stream!"



And Stubb did but speak out for well nigh all that crew.

The frenzies of the chase had by this time worked them

bubblingly up, like old wine worked anew.  Whatever pale

fears and forebodings some of them might have felt before;

these were not only now kept out of sight through the growing

awe of Ahab, but they were broken up, and on all sides routed,

as timid prairie hares that scatter before the bounding bison.

The hand of Fate had snatched all their souls; and by the stirring

perils of the previous day; the rack of the past night's suspense;

the fixed, unfearing, blind, reckless way in which their wild

craft went plunging towards its flying mark; by all these things,

their hearts were bowled along.  The wind that made great bellies

of their sails, and rushed the vessel on by arms invisible

as irresistible; this seemed the symbol of that unseen agency

which so enslaved them to the race.



They were one man, not thirty.  For as the one ship that held them all;

though it was put together of all contrasting things--oak, and maple,

and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp--yet all these ran

into each other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way,

both balanced and directed by the long central keel; even so,

all the individualities of the crew, this man's valor, that man's fear;

guilt and guiltiness, all varieties were welded into oneness,

and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord

and keel did point to.



The rigging lived.  The mast-heads, like the tops of

tall palms, were outspreadingly tufted with arms and legs.

Clinging to a spar with one hand, some reached forth the other

with impatient wavings; others, shading their eyes from the

vivid sunlight, sat far out on the rocking yards; all the spars

in full bearing of mortals, ready and ripe for their fate.

Ah! how they still strove through that infinite blueness to seek

out the thing that might destroy them!



"Why sing ye not out for him, if ye see him?" cried Ahab, when, after the

lapse of some minutes since the first cry, no more had been heard.

"Sway me up, men; ye have been deceived; not Moby Dick casts one odd

jet that way, and then disappears."



It was even so; in their headlong eagerness, the men had mistaken

some other thing for the whale-spout, as the event itself soon proved;

for hardly had Ahab reached his perch; hardly was the rope belayed

to its pin on deck, when he struck the key-note to an orchestra,

that made the air vibrate as with the combined discharge of rifles.

The triumphant halloo of thirty buckskin lungs was heard, as--

much nearer to the ship than the place of the imaginary jet,

less than a mile ahead--Moby Dick bodily burst into view!

For not by any calm and indolent spoutings; not by the peaceable gush

of that mystic fountain in his head, did the White Whale now reveal

his vicinity; but by the far more wondrous phenomenon of breaching.

Rising with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths,

the Sperm Whale thus booms his entire bulk into the pure

element of air, and piling up a mountain of dazzling foam,

shows his place to the distance of seven miles and more.

In those moments, the torn, enraged waves he shakes off, seem his mane;

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Unmindful of the tedious rope-ladders of the shrouds, the men,

like shooting stars, slid to the deck, by the isolated backstays

and halyards; while Ahab, less dartingly, but still rapidly

was dropped from his perch.



"Lower away," he cried, so soon as he had reached his boat--a spare one,

rigged the afternoon previous.  "Mr. Starbuck, the ship is thine--

keep away from the boats, but keep near them.  Lower, all!"



As if to strike a quick terror into them, by this time being

the first assailant himself, Moby Dick had turned, and was now

coming for the three crews.  Ahab's boat was central; and cheering

his men, he told them he would take the whale head-and-head,--

that is, pull straight up to his forehead,--a not uncommon thing;

for when within a certain limit, such a course excludes

the coming onset from the whale's sidelong vision.

But ere that close limit was gained, and while yet all

three boats were plain as the ship's three masts to his eye;

the White Whale churning himself into furious speed, almost in

an instant as it were, rushing among the boats with open jaws,

and a lashing tail, offered appalling battle on every side;

and heedless of the irons darted at him from every boat,

seemed only intent on annihilating each separate plank

of which those boats were made.  But skilfully manoeuvred,

incessantly wheeling like trained chargers in the field;

the boats for a while eluded him; though, at times, but by a

plank's breadth; while all the time, Ahab's unearthly slogan

tore every other cry but his to shreds.



But at last in his untraceable evolutions, the White Whale so

crossed and recrossed, and in a thousand ways entangled the slack

of the three lines now fast to him, that they foreshortened,

and, of themselves, warped the devoted boats towards the planted

irons in him; though now for a moment the whale drew aside

a little, as if to rally for a more tremendous charge.

Seizing that opportunity, Ahab first paid out more line;

and then was rapidly hauling and jerking in upon it again--

hoping that way to disencumber it of some snarls--when lo!--

a sight more savage than the embattled teeth of sharks!



Caught and twisted--corkscrewed in the mazes of the line,

loose harpoons and lances, with all their bristling barbs and points,

came flashing and dripping up to the chocks in the bows of Ahab's boat.

Only one thing could be done.  Seizing the boat-knife, he critically

reached within--through--and then, without--the rays of steel;

dragged in the line beyond, passed it, inboard, to the bowsman,

and then, twice sundering the rope near the chocks--dropped the

intercepted fagot of steel into the sea; and was all fast again.

That instant, the White Whale made a sudden rush among the remaining

tangles of the other lines; by so doing, irresistibly dragged

the more involved boats of Stubb and Flask towards his flukes;

dashed them together like two rolling husks on a surf-beaten beach,

and then, diving down into the sea, disappeared in a boiling maelstrom,

in which, for a space, the odorous cedar chips of the wrecks danced

round and round, like the grated nutmeg in a swiftly stirred

bowl of punch.



While the two crews were yet circling in the waters, reaching out

after the revolving line-tubs, oars, and other floating furniture,

while aslope little Flask bobbed up and down like an empty vial,

twitching his legs upwards to escape the dreaded jaws of sharks;

and Stubb was lustily singing out for some one to ladle him up;

and while the old man's line--now parting--admitted of his

pulling into the creamy pool to rescue whom he could;--

in that wild simultaneousness of a thousand concreted perils,--

Ahab's yet unstricken boat seemed drawn up towards Heaven by

invisible wires,--as, arrow-like, shooting perpendicularly from the sea,

the White Whale dashed his broad forehead against its bottom,

and sent it turning over and over, into the air; till it fell again--

gunwale downwards--and Ahab and his men struggled out from under it,

like seals from a sea-side cave.



The first uprising momentum of the whale--modifying its direction

as he struck the surface--involuntarily launched him along it,

to a little distance from the centre of the destruction he had made;

and with his back to it, he now lay for a moment slowly feeling

with his flukes from side to side; and whenever a stray oar,

bit of plank, the least chip or crumb of the boats touched his skin,

his tail swiftly drew back, and came sideways smiting the sea.

But soon, as if satisfied that his work for that time was done,

he pushed his pleated forehead through the ocean, and trailing

after him the intertangled lines, continued his leeward way

at a traveller's methodic pace.



As before, the attentive ship having descried the whole fight,

again came bearing down to the rescue, and dropping a boat,

picked up the floating mariners, tubs, oars, and whatever else

could be caught at, and safely landed them on her decks.

Some sprained shoulders, wrists, and ankles; livid contusions;

wrenched harpoons and lances; inextricable intricacies of rope;

shattered oars and planks; all these were there; but no

fatal or even serious ill seemed to have befallen any one.

As with Fedallah the day before, so Ahab was now found grimly clinging

to his boat's broken half, which afforded a comparatively easy float;

nor did it so exhaust him as the previous day's mishap.



But when he was helped to the deck, all eyes were fastened upon him;

as instead of standing by himself he still half-hung upon the shoulder

of Starbuck, who had thus far been the foremost to assist him.

His ivory leg had been snapped off, leaving but one short sharp splinter.



"Aye, aye, Starbuck, 'tis sweet to lean sometimes, be the leaner

who he will; and would old Ahab had leaned oftener than he has."



"The ferrule has not stood, sir," said the carpenter, now coming up;

I put good work into that leg."



"But no bones broken, sir, I hope," said Stubb with true concern.



"Aye! and all splintered to pieces, Stubb!--d'ye see it.--

But even with a broken bone, old Ahab is untouched; and I account

no living bone of mine one jot more me, than this dead one

that's lost.  Nor white whale, nor man, nor fiend, can so much

as graze old Ahab in his own proper and inaccessible being.

Can any lead touch yonder floor, any mast scrape yonder roof?--

Aloft there! which way?"



"Dead to leeward, sir."



"Up helm, then; pile on the sail again, ship keepers! down

the rest of the spare boats and rig them--Mr. Starbuck away,