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the same vessel, get into the same watch, the same boat,

the same mess with me, in short to share my every hap; with both

my hands in his, boldly dip into the Potluck of both worlds.

To all this I joyously assented; for besides the affection I now

felt for Queequeg, he was an experienced harpooneer, and as such,

could not fail to be of great usefulness to one, who, like me,

was wholly ignorant of the mysteries of whaling, though well

acquainted with the sea, as known to merchant seamen.



His story being ended with his pipe's last dying puff,

Queequeg embraced me, pressed his forehead against mine,

and blowing out the light, we rolled over from each other,

this way and that, and very soon were sleeping.







CHAPTER 13



Wheelbarrow





Next morning, Monday, after disposing of the embalmed head

to a barber, for a block, I settled my own and comrade's bill;

using, however, my comrade's money.  The grinning landlord,

as well as the boarders, seemed amazingly tickled at the sudden

friendship which had sprung up between me and Queequeg--

especially as Peter Coffin's cock and bull stories about him

had previously so much alarmed me concerning the very person

whom I now companied with.



We borrowed a wheelbarrow, and embarking our things, including my own poor

carpet-bag, and Queequeg's canvas sack and hammock, away we went down

to "the Moss," the little Nantucket packet schooner moored at the wharf.

As we were going along the people stared; not at Queequeg so much--

for they were used to seeing cannibals like him in their streets,--

but at seeing him and me upon such confidential terms.  But we heeded

them not, going along wheeling the barrow by turns, and Queequeg

now and then stopping to adjust the sheath on his harpoon barbs.

I asked him why he carried such a troublesome thing with him ashore,

and whether all whaling ships did not find their own harpoons.

To this, in substance, he replied, that though what I hinted was

true enough, yet he had a particular affection for his own harpoon,

because it was of assured stuff, well tried in many a mortal combat,

and deeply intimate with the hearts of whales.  In short, like many

inland reapers and mowers, who go into the farmer's meadows armed

with their own scythes--though in no wise obliged to furnish them--

even so, Queequeg, for his own private reasons, preferred his own harpoon.



Shifting the barrow from my hand to his, he told me a funny

story about the first wheelbarrow he had ever seen.

It was in Sag Harbor.  The owners of his ship, it seems, had lent

him one, in which to carry his heavy chest to his boarding house.

Not to seem ignorant about the thing--though in truth he was

entirely so, concerning the precise way in which to manage

the barrow--Queequeg puts his chest upon it; lashes it fast;

and then shoulders the barrow and marches up the wharf.

"Why," said I, "Queequeg, you might have known better than that,

one would think.  Didn't the people laugh?"



Upon this, he told me another story.  The people of his island

of Rokovoko, it seems, at their wedding feasts express the fragrant

water of young cocoanuts into a large stained calabash like a punchbowl;

and this punchbowl always forms the great central ornament on

the braided mat where the feast is held.  Now a certain grand merchant

ship once touched at Rokovoko, and its commander--from all accounts,

a very stately punctilious gentleman, at least for a sea captain--

this commander was invited to the wedding feast of Queequeg's sister,

a pretty young princess just turned of ten.  Well; when all

the wedding guests were assembled at the bride's bamboo cottage,

this Captain marches in, and being assigned the post of honor,

placed himself over against the punchbowl, and between

the High Priest and his majesty the King, Queequeg's father.

Grace being said,--for those people have their grace as well as we--

though Queequeg told me that unlike us, who at such times look

downwards to our platters, they, on the contrary, copying the ducks,

glance upwards to the great Giver of all feasts--Grace, I say,

being said, the High Priest opens the banquet by the immemorial ceremony

of the island; that is, dipping his consecrated and consecrating

fingers into the bowl before the blessed beverage circulates.

Seeing himself placed next the Priest, and noting the ceremony,

and thinking himself--being Captain of a ship--as having plain

precedence over a mere island King, especially in the King's own house--

the Captain coolly proceeds to wash his hands in the punch bowl;--

taking it I suppose for a huge finger-glass. "Now," said Queequeg,

"what you tink now?--Didn't our people laugh?"



At last, passage paid, and luggage safe, we stood on board the schooner.

Hoisting sail, it glided down the Acushnet river.  On one side,

New Bedford rose in terraces of streets, their ice-covered trees all

glittering in the clear, cold air.  Huge hills and mountains of casks

on casks were piled upon her wharves, and side by side the world-wandering

whale ships lay silent and safely moored at last; while from others came

a sound of carpenters and coopers, with blended noises of fires and forges

to melt the pitch, all betokening that new cruises were on the start;

that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second;

and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye.

Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.



Gaining the more open water, the bracing breeze waxed fresh; the little

Moss tossed the quick foam from her bows, as a young colt his snortings.

How I snuffed that Tartar air!--how I spurned that turnpike earth!--

that common highway all over dented with the marks of slavish heels

and hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea which will

permit no records.



At the same foam-fountain, Queequeg seemed to drink and reel with me.

His dusky nostrils swelled apart; he showed his filed and pointed teeth.

On, on we flew, and our offing gained, the Moss did homage to the blast;

ducked and dived her bows as a slave before the Sultan.  Sideways leaning,

we sideways darted; every ropeyarn tingling like a wire;

the two tall masts buckling like Indian canes in land tornadoes.

So full of this reeling scene were we, as we stood by the

plunging bowsprit, that for some time we did not notice the jeering

glances of the passengers, a lubber-like assembly, who marvelled

that two fellow beings should be so companionable; as though

a white man were anything more dignified than a whitewashed negro.

But there were some boobies and bumpkins there, who, by their intense

greenness, must have come from the heart and centre of all verdure.

Queequeg caught one of these young saplings mimicking him behind

his back.  I thought the bumpkin's hour of doom was come.

Dropping his harpoon, the brawny savage caught him in his arms,

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Nothing more happened on the passage worthy the mentioning;

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



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

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

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

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

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

substitute for blotting paper.  Some gamesome wights will tell you

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But these extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no Illinois.



Look now at the wondrous traditional story of how this

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

In olden times an eagle swooped down upon the New England

coast and carried off an infant Indian in his talons.

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

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

Setting out in their canoes, after a perilous passage they

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

the poor little Indian's skeleton.



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

declared everlasting war with the mightiest animated mass that

has survived the flood; most monstrous and most mountainous!

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

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

than his most fearless and malicious assaults!



And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits,

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

the watery world like so many Alexanders; parcelling out among

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

armed ones but floating forts; even pirates and privateers,

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

other ships, other fragments of the land like themselves,

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

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

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

to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation.

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

would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions

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

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

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

when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world,

more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman.  With the

landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked

to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer,

out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest,

while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.







CHAPTER 15



Chowder





It was quite late in the evening when the little Moss came snugly

to anchor, and Queequeg and I went ashore; so we could attend

to no business that day, at least none but a supper and a bed.

The landlord of the Spouter-Inn had recommended us to his cousin

Hosea Hussey of the Try Pots, whom he asserted to be the proprietor of one

of the best kept hotels in all Nantucket, and moreover he had assured

us that Cousin Hosea, as he called him, was famous for his chowders.

In short, he plainly hinted that we could not possibly do better

than try pot-luck at the Try Pots.  But the directions he had given

us about keeping a yellow warehouse on our starboard hand till we

opened a white church to the larboard, and then keeping that on

the larboard hand till we made a corner three points to the starboard,

and that done, then ask the first man we met where the place was;

these crooked directions of his very much puzzled us at first,

especially as, at the outset, Queequeg insisted that the yellow warehouse--

our first point of departure--must be left on the larboard hand,

whereas I had understood Peter Coffin to say it was on the starboard.

However, by dint of beating about a little in the dark, and now

and then knocking up a peaceable inhabitant to inquire the way,

we at last came to something which there was no mistaking.



Two enormous wooden pots painted black, and suspended by asses'

ears, swung from the cross-trees of an old top-mast, planted in front

of an old doorway.  The horns of the cross-trees were sawed off on the

other side, so that this old top-mast looked not a little like a gallows.

Perhaps I was over sensitive to such impressions at the time,

but I could not help staring at this gallows with a vague misgiving.

A sort of crick was in my neck as I gazed up to the two

remaining horns; yes, two of them, one for Queequeg, and one for me.

It's ominous, thinks I. A Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my first

whaling port; tombstones staring at me in the whalemen's chapel,

and here a gallows! and a pair of prodigious black pots too!

Are these last throwing out oblique hints touching Tophet?



I was called from these reflections by the sight of a freckled

woman with yellow hair and a yellow gown, standing in the porch

of the inn, under a dull red lamp swinging there, that looked much

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when it is lengthwise hoisted up and down against a ship's side.



As in decapitating the whale, the operator's instrument is

brought close to the spot where an entrance is subsequently

forced into the spermaceti magazine; he has, therefore, to be

uncommonly heedful, lest a careless, untimely stroke should invade

the sanctuary and wastingly let out its invaluable contents.

It is this decapitated end of the head, also, which is at

last elevated out of the water, and retained in that position

by the enormous cutting tackles, whose hempen combinations,

on one side, make quite a wilderness of ropes in that quarter.



Thus much being said, attend now, I pray you, to that marvellous and--

in this particular instance--almost fatal operation whereby

the Sperm Whale's great Heidelburgh Tun is tapped.









CHAPTER 78



Cistern and Buckets





Nimble as a cat, Tashtego mounts aloft; and without altering his

erect posture, runs straight out upon the overhanging mainyard-arm,

to the part where it exactly projects over the hoisted Tun.  He has

carried with him a light tackle called a whip, consisting of

only two parts, travelling through a single-sheaved block.

Securing this block, so that it hangs down from the yard-arm,

he swings one end of the rope, till it is caught and firmly held

by a hand on the deck.  Then, hand-over-hand, down the other part,

the Indian drops through the air, till dexterously he lands

on the summit of the head.  There--still high elevated above

the rest of the company, to whom he vivaciously cries--

he seems some Turkish Muezzin calling the good people to prayers

from the top of a tower.  A short-handled sharp spade being

sent up to him, he diligently searches for the proper place

to begin breaking into the Tun.  In this business he proceeds

very heedfully, like a treasure-hunter in some old house,

sounding the walls to find where the gold is masoned in.

By the time this cautious search is over, a stout ironbound bucket,

precisely like a well-bucket, has been attached to one end

of the whip; while the other end, being stretched across

the deck, is there held by two or three alert hands.

These last now hoist the bucket within grasp of the Indian,

to whom another person has reached up a very long pole.

Inserting this pole into the bucket, Tashtego downward

guides the bucket into the Tun, till it entirely disappears;

then giving the word to the seamen at the whip, up comes the

bucket again, all bubbling like a dairy-maid's pail of new milk.

Carefully lowered from its height, the full-freighted vessel is

caught by an appointed hand, and quickly emptied into a large tub.

Then remounting aloft, it again goes through the same round

until the deep cistern will yield no more.  Towards the end,

Tashtego has to ram his long pole harder and harder, and deeper

and deeper into the Tun, until some twenty feet of the pole

have gone down.



Now, the people of the Pequod had been baling some time in this way;

several tubs had been filled with the fragrant sperm; when all at

once a queer accident happened.  Whether it was that Tashtego,

that wild Indian, was so heedless and reckless as to let go for a moment

his one-handed hold on the great cabled tackles suspending the head;

or whether the place where he stood was so treacherous and oozy;

or whether the Evil One himself would have it to fall out so,

without stating his particular reasons; how it was exactly,

there is no telling now; but, on a sudden, as the eightieth

or ninetieth bucket came suckingly up--my God! poor Tashtego--

like the twin reciprocating bucket in a veritable well,

dropped head-foremost down into this great Tun of Heidelburgh,

and with a horrible oily gurgling, went clean out of sight!



"Man overboard!" cried Daggoo, who amid the general consternation

first came to his senses.  "Swing the bucket this way!"

and putting one foot into it, so as the better to secure his

slippery hand-hold on the whip itself the hoisters ran him high up

to the top of the head, almost before Tashtego could have reached

its interior bottom.  Meantime, there was a terrible tumult.

Looking over the side, they saw the before lifeless head throbbing

and heaving just below the surface of the sea, as if that moment

seized with some momentous idea; whereas it was only the poor

Indian unconsciously revealing by those struggles the perilous

depth to which he had sunk.



At this instant, while Daggoo, on the summit of the head, was clearing

the whip--which had somehow got foul of the great cutting tackles--

a sharp cracking noise was heard; and to the unspeakable horror

of all, one of the two enormous hooks suspending the head tore out,

and with a vast vibration the enormous mass sideways swung,

till the drunk ship reeled and shook as if smitten by an iceberg.

The one remaining hook, upon which the entire strain now depended,

seemed every instant to be on the point of giving way; an event

still more likely from the violent motions of the head.



"Come down, come down!" yelled the seamen to Daggoo, but with one hand

holding on to the heavy tackles, so that if the head should drop,

he would still remain suspended; the negro having cleared the foul line,

rammed down the bucket into the now collapsed well, meaning that

the buried harpooneer should grasp it, and so be hoisted out.



"In heaven's name, man," cried Stubb, "are you ramming

home a cartridge there?--Avast!  How will that help him;

jamming that iron-bound bucket on top of his head?

Avast, will ye!"



"Stand clear of the tackle!" cried a voice like the bursting

of a rocket.



Almost in the same instant, with a thunder-boom, the enormous

mass dropped into the sea, like Niagara's Table-Rock into

the whirlpool; the suddenly relieved hull rolled away from it,

to far down her glittering copper; and all caught their breath,

as half swinging--now over the sailors' heads, and now

over the water--Daggoo, through a thick mist of spray,

was dimly beheld clinging to the pendulous tackles, while poor,

buried-alive Tashtego was sinking utterly down to the bottom

of the sea!  But hardly had the blinding vapor cleared away,

when a naked figure with a boardingsword in his hand,

was for one swift moment seen hovering over the bulwarks.

The next, a loud splash announced that my brave Queequeg had

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and no sign of either the sinker or the diver could be seen.

Some hands now jumped into a boat alongside, and pushed a little

off from the ship.



"Ha! ha!" cried Daggoo, all at once, from his now quiet,

swinging perch overhead; and looking further off from the side,

we saw an arm thrust upright from the blue waves; a sight strange

to see, as an arm thrust forth from the grass over a grave.



"Both! both!--it is both!"-cried Daggoo again with a joyful shout;

and soon after, Queequeg was seen boldly striking out with one hand,

and with the other clutching the long hair of the Indian.  Drawn into

the waiting boat, they were quickly brought to the deck; but Tashtego

was long in coming to, and Queequeg did not look very brisk.



Now, how had this noble rescue been accomplished?  Why, diving after

the slowly descending head, Queequeg with his keen sword had made

side lunges near its bottom, so as to scuttle a large hole there;

then dropping his sword, had thrust his long arm far inwards

and upwards, and so hauled out our poor Tash by the head.

He averred, that upon first thrusting in for him, a leg was presented;

but well knowing that that was not as it ought to be, and might

occasion great trouble;--he had thrust back the leg, and by a

dexterous heave and toss, had wrought a somerset upon the Indian;

so that with the next trial, he came forth in the good old way--

head foremost.  As for the great head itself, that was doing

as well as could be expected.



And thus, through the courage and great skill in obstetrics of Queequeg,

the deliverance, or rather, delivery of Tashtego, was successfully

accomplished, in the teeth, too, of the most untoward and apparently

hopeless impediments; which is a lesson by no means to be forgotten.

Midwifery should be taught in the same course with fencing and boxing,

riding and rowing.



I know that this queer adventure of the Gay-Header's will be sure

to seem incredible to some landsmen, though they themselves may have

either seen or heard of some one's falling into a cistern ashore;

an accident which not seldom happens, and with much less reason too

than the Indian's, considering the exceeding slipperiness of the curb

of the Sperm Whale's well.



But, peradventure, it may be sagaciously urged, how is this?

We thought the tissued, infiltrated head of the Sperm Whale,

was the lightest and most corky part about him; and yet thou makest

it sink in an element of a far greater specific gravity than itself.

We have thee there.  Not at all, but I have ye; for at the time poor

Tash fell in, the case had been nearly emptied of its lighter contents,

leaving little but the dense tendinous wall of the well--a double welded,

hammered substance, as I have before said, much heavier than

the sea water, and a lump of which sinks in it like lead almost.

But the tendency to rapid sinking in this substance was in the present

instance materially counteracted by the other parts of the head remaining

undetached from it, so that it sank very slowly and deliberately indeed,

affording Queequeg a fair chance for performing his agile obstetrics

on the run, as you may say.  Yes, it was a running delivery,

so it was.



Now, had Tashtego perished in that head, it had been a very

precious perishing; smothered in the very whitest and daintiest

of fragrant spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in

the secret inner chamber and sanctum sanctorum of the whale.

Only one sweeter end can readily be recalled--the delicious

death of an Ohio honey-hunter, who seeking honey in the crotch

of a hollow tree, found such exceeding store of it, that leaning

too far over, it sucked him in, so that he died embalmed.

How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato's honey head,

and sweetly perished there?







CHAPTER 79



The Prairie





To scan the lines of his face, or feel the bumps on the head of

this Leviathan; this is a thing which no Physiognomist or Phrenologist

has as yet undertaken.  Such an enterprise would seem almost as

hopeful as for Lavater to have scrutinized the wrinkles on the Rock

of Gibraltar, or for Gall to have mounted a ladder and manipulated

the Dome of the Pantheon.  Still, in that famous work of his,

Lavater not only treats of the various faces of men, but also attentively

studies the faces of horses, birds, serpents, and fish; and dwells

in detail upon the modifications of expression discernible therein.

Nor have Gall and his disciple Spurzheim failed to throw out some hints

touching the phrenological characteristics of other beings than man.

Therefore, though I am but ill qualified for a pioneer, in the application

of these two semi-sciences to the whale, I will do my endeavor.

I try all things; I achieve what I can.



Physiognomically regarded, the Sperm Whale is an anomalous creature.

He has no proper nose.  And since the nose is the central

and most conspicuous of the features; and since it perhaps

most modifies and finally controls their combined expression;

hence it would seem that its entire absence, as an external appendage,

must very largely affect the countenance of the whale.

For as in landscape gardening, a spire, cupola, monument,

or tower of some sort, is deemed almost indispensable to

the completion of the scene; so no face can be physiognomically

in keeping without the elevated open-work belfry of the nose.

Dash the nose from Phidias's marble Jove, and what a

sorry remainder!  Nevertheless, Leviathan is of so mighty

a magnitude, all his proportions are so stately, that the same

deficiency which in the sculptured Jove were hideous,

in him is no blemish at all.  Nay, it is an added grandeur.

A nose to the whale would have been impertinent.

As on your physiognomical voyage you sail round his vast head

in your jollyboat, your noble conceptions of him are never

insulted by the reflection that he has a nose to be pulled.

A pestilent conceit, which so often will insist upon obtruding

even when beholding the mightiest royal beadle on his throne.



In some particulars, perhaps the most imposing physiognomical view

to be had of the Sperm Whale, is that of the full front of his head.

This aspect is sublime.



In thought, a fine human brow is like the East when troubled with

the morning.  In the repose of the pasture, the curled brow of the bull

has a touch of the grand in it.  Pushing heavy cannon up mountain defiles,

the elephant's brow is majestic.  Human or animal, the mystical

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tow-line in his boat, he would do what he could to help them,

by pulling out the lighter whale of the two from the ship's side.

While the Frenchman's boats, then, were engaged in towing the ship

one way, Stubb benevolently towed away at his whale the other way,

ostentatiously slacking out a most unusually long tow-line.



Presently a breeze sprang up; Stubb feigned to cast off from the whale;

hoisting his boats, the Frenchman soon increased his distance,

while the Pequod slid in between him and Stubb's whale.

Whereupon Stubb quickly pulled to the floating body, and hailing

the Pequod to give notice of his intentions, at once proceeded to reap

the fruit of his unrighteous cunning.  Seizing his sharp boat-spade,

he commenced an excavation in the body, a little behind the side fin.

You would almost have thought he was digging a cellar there in the sea;

and when at length his spade struck against the gaunt ribs, it was

like turning up old Roman tiles and pottery buried in fat English loam.

His boat's crew were all in high excitement, eagerly helping their chief,

and looking as anxious as gold-hunters.



And all the time numberless fowls were diving, and ducking,

and screaming, and yelling, and fighting around them.

Stubb was beginning to look disappointed, especially as the horrible

nosegay increased, when suddenly from out the very heart of

this plague, there stole a faint stream of perfume, which flowed

through the tide of bad smells without being absorbed by it,

as one river will flow into and then along with another,

without at all blending with it for a time.



"I have it, I have it," cried Stubb, with delight, striking something

in the subterranean regions, "a purse! a purse!"



Dropping his spade, he thrust both hands in, and drew out

handfuls of something that looked like ripe Windsor soap,

or rich mottled old cheese; very unctuous and savory withal.

You might easily dent it with your thumb; it is of a hue

between yellow and ash color.  And this, good friends,

is ambergris, worth a gold guinea an ounce to any druggist.

Some six handfuls were obtained; but more was unavoidably lost

in the sea, and still more, perhaps, might have been secured

were it not for impatient Ahab's loud command to Stubb to desist,

and come on board, else the ship would bid them good-bye.







CHAPTER 92



Ambergris





Now this ambergris is a very curious substance, and so important as an

article of commerce, that in 1791 a certain Nantucket-born Captain Coffin

was examined at the bar of the English House of Commons on that subject.

For at that time, and indeed until a comparatively late day,

the precise origin of ambergris remained, like amber itself,

a problem to the learned.  Though the word ambergris is but the French

compound for grey amber, yet the two substances are quite distinct.

For amber, though at times found on the sea-coast, is also dug up in some

far inland soils, whereas ambergris is never found except upon the sea.

Besides, amber is a hard, transparent, brittle, odorless substance,

used for mouth-pieces to pipes, for beads and ornaments; but ambergris

is soft, waxy, and so highly fragrant and spicy, that it is largely used

in perfumery, in pastiles, precious candles, hair-powders, and pomatum.

The Turks use it in cooking, and also carry it to Mecca, for the same

purpose that frankincense is carried to St. Peter's in Rome.  Some wine

merchants drop a few grains into claret, to flavor it.



Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should

regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels

of a sick whale!  Yet so it is.  By some, ambergris is supposed to be

the cause, and by others the effect, of the dyspepsia in the whale.

How to cure such a dyspepsia it were hard to say, unless by administering

three or four boat loads of Brandreth's pills, and then running out

of harm's way, as laborers do in blasting rocks.



I have forgotten to say that there were found in this ambergris,

certain hard, round, bony plates, which at first Stubb thought

might be sailors' trousers buttons; but it afterwards turned

out that they were nothing, more than pieces of small squid

bones embalmed in that manner.



Now that the incorruption of this most fragrant ambergris

should be found in the heart of such decay; is this nothing?

Bethink thee of that saying of St. Paul in Corinthians,

about corruption and incorruption; how that we are sown in dishonor,

but raised in glory.  And likewise call to mind that saying

of Paracelsus about what it is that maketh the best musk.

Also forget not the strange fact that of all things of ill-savor,

Cologne-water, in its rudimental manufacturing stages,

is the worst.



I should like to conclude the chapter with the above appeal,

but cannot, owing to my anxiety to repel a charge often made

against whalemen, and which, in the estimation of some already

biased minds, might be considered as indirectly substantiated

by what has been said of the Frenchman's two whales.

Elsewhere in this volume the slanderous aspersion has been disproved,

that the vocation of whaling is throughout a slatternly,

untidy business.  But there is another thing to rebut.

They hint that all whales always smell bad.  Now how did this

odious stigma originate?



I opine, that it is plainly traceable to the first arrival of

the Greenland whaling ships in London, more than two centuries ago.

Because those whalemen did not then, and do not now, try out

their oil at sea as the Southern ships have always done;

but cutting up the fresh blubber in small bits, thrust it through

the bung holes of large casks, and carry it home in that manner;

the shortness of the season in those Icy Seas, and the sudden and

violent storms to which they are exposed, forbidding any other course.

The consequence is, that upon breaking into the hold, and unloading

one of these whale cemeteries, in the Greenland dock, a savor is

given forth somewhat similar to that arising from excavating an old

city graveyard, for the foundations of a Lying-in Hospital.



I partly surmise also, that this wicked charge against

whalers may be likewise imputed to the existence on the coast

of Greenland, in former times, of a Dutch village called

Schmerenburgh or Smeerenberg, which latter name is the one used

by the learned Fogo Von Slack, in his great work on Smells,

a text-book on that subject.  As its name imports (smeer, fat;

berg, to put up), this village was founded in order to afford

a place for the blubber of the Dutch whale fleet to be tried out,

without being taken home to Holland for that purpose.

It was a collection of furnaces, fat-kettles, and oil sheds;

and when the works were in full operation certainly gave forth

no very pleasant savor.  But all this is quite different

from a South Sea Sperm Whaler; which in a voyage of four

years perhaps, after completely filling her hold with oil,

does not, perhaps, consume fifty days in the business of boiling out;

and in the state that it is casked, the oil is nearly scentless.

The truth is, that living or dead, if but decently treated,

whales as a species are by no means creatures of ill odor;

nor can whalemen be recognised, as the people of the middle

ages affected to detect a Jew in the company, by the nose.

Nor indeed can the whale possibly be otherwise than fragrant,

when, as a general thing, he enjoys such high health;

taking abundance of exercise; always out of doors; though, it is true,

seldom in the open air.  I say, that the motion of a Sperm Whale's

flukes above water dispenses a perfume, as when a musk-scented

lady rustles her dress in a warm parlor.  What then shall I liken

the Sperm Whale to for fragrance, considering his magnitude?

Must it not be to that famous elephant, with jewelled tusks,

and redolent with myrrh, which was led out of an Indian town

to do honor to Alexander the Great?







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;

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here and there rolling about in the liquid part.

It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid.

A sweet and unctuous duty!  No wonder that in old times this

sperm was such a favorite cosmetic.  Such a clearer! such

a sweetener! such a softener; such a delicious mollifier!

After having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt

like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralize.



As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter

exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship

under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed

my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues,

woven almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers,

and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes

their wine; as.  I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,--

literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets;

I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow;

I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm,

I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit

the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue

in allaying the heat of anger; while bathing in that bath,

I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice,

of any sort whatsoever.



Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed

that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed

that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me;

and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers'

hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules.

Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did

this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing

their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally;

as much as to say,--Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer

cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor

or envy!  Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us

all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves

universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.



Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever!

For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences,

I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower,

or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity;

not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy;

but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle,

the fire-side; the country; now that I have perceived all this,

I am ready to squeeze case eternally.  In thoughts of the

visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise,

each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.





Now, while discoursing of sperm it behooves to speak of other things akin

to it, in the business of preparing the sperm whale for the try-works.



First comes white-horse, so called, which is obtained from the tapering

part of the fish, and also from the thicker portions of his flukes.

It is tough with congealed tendons--a wad of muscle--but still contains

some oil.  After being severed from the whale, the white-horse

is first cut into portable oblongs ere going to the mincer.

They look much like blocks of Berkshire marble.



Plum-pudding is the term bestowed upon certain fragmentary parts of

the whale's flesh, here and there adhering to the blanket of blubber,

and often participating to a considerable degree in its unctuousness.

It is a most refreshing, convivial, beautiful object to behold.

As its name imports, it is of an exceedingly rich, mottled tint, with a

bestreaked snowy and golden ground, dotted with spots of the deepest

crimson and purple.  It is plums of rubies, in pictures of citron.

Spite of reason, it is hard to keep yourself from eating it.

I confess, that once I stole behind the foremast to try it.

It tasted something as I should conceive a royal cutlet from

the thigh of Louis le Gros might have tasted, supposing him

to have been killed the first day after the venison season,

and that particular venison season contemporary with an unusually

fine vintage of the vineyards of Champagne.



There is another substance, and a very singular one, which turns

up in the course of this business, but which I feel it to be

very puzzling adequately to describe.  It is called slobgollion;

an appellation original with the whalemen, and even so is

the nature of the substance.  It is an ineffably oozy,

stringy affair, most frequently found in the tubs of sperm,

after a prolonged squeezing, and subsequent decanting.

I hold it to be the wondrously thin, ruptured membranes

of the case, coalescing.



Gurry, so called, is a term properly belonging to right whalemen,

but sometimes incidentally used by the sperm fishermen.

It designates the dark, glutinous substance which is scraped off

the back of the Greenland or right whale, and much of which covers

the decks of those inferior souls who hunt that ignoble Leviathan.



Nippers.  Strictly this word is not indigenous to the whale's vocabulary.

But as applied by whalemen, it becomes so.  A whaleman's nipper

is a short firm strip of tendinous stuff cut from the tapering

part of Leviathan's tail:  it averages an inch in thickness,

and for the rest, is about the size of the iron part of a hoe.

Edgewise moved along the oily deck, it operates like a leathern squilgee;

and by nameless blandishments, as of magic, allures along with

it all impurities.



But to learn all about these recondite matters, your best way is at once

to descend into the blubber-room, and have a long talk with its inmates.

This place has previously been mentioned as the receptacle

for the blanket-pieces, when stript and hoisted from the whale.

When the proper time arrives for cutting up its contents, this apartment

is a scene of terror to all tyros, especially by night.  On one side,

lit by a dull lantern, a space has been left clear for the workmen.

They generally go in pairs,--a pike-and-gaffman and a spade-man. The

whaling-pike is similar to a frigate's boarding-weapon of the same name.

The gaff is something like a boat-hook. With his gaff, the gaffman

hooks on to a sheet of blubber, and strives to hold it from slipping,

as the ship pitches and lurches about.  Meanwhile, the spade-man stands

on the sheet itself, perpendicularly chopping it into the portable

horse-pieces. This spade is sharp as hone can make it; the spademan's

feet are shoeless; the thing he stands on will sometimes irresistibly

slide away from him, like a sledge.  If he cuts off one of his own toes,

or one of his assistants', would you be very much astonished?

Toes are scarce among veteran blubber-room men.

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From his mighty bulk the whale affords a most congenial theme

whereon to enlarge, amplify, and generally expatiate.  Would you,

you could not compress him.  By good rights he should only be

treated of in imperial folio.  Not to tell over again his furlongs

from spiracle to tail, and the yards he measures about the waist;

only think of the gigantic involutions of his intestines,

where they lie in him like great cables and hawsers coiled away

in the subterranean orlop-deck of a line-of-battle-ship.



Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behoves

me to approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise;

not overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood,

and spinning him out to the uttermost coil of his bowels.

Having already described him in most of his present habitatory

and anatomical peculiarities, it now remains to magnify him in

an archaeological, fossiliferous, and antediluvian point of view.

Applied to any other creature than the Leviathan--to an ant or a flea--

such portly terms might justly be deemed unwarrantably grandiloquent.

But when Leviathan is the text, the case is altered.  Fain am I to stagger

to this enterprise under the weightiest words of the dictionary.

And here be it said, that whenever it has been convenient to consult

one in the course of these dissertations, I have invariably used a huge

quarto edition of Johnson, expressly purchased for that purpose;

because that famous lexicographer's uncommon personal bulk more fitted

him to compile a lexicon to be used by a whale author like me.



One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject,

though it may seem but an ordinary one.  How, then, with me,

writing of this Leviathan?  Unconsciously my chirography

expands into placard capitals.  Give me a condor's quill!

Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand!  Friends, hold my arms!

For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan,

they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching

comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle

of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men,

and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving

panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe,

not excluding its suburbs.  Such, and so magnifying, is the

virtue of a large and liberal theme!  We expand to its bulk.

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.

No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea,

though many there be who have tried it.



Ere entering upon the subject of Fossil Whales, I present my

credentials as a geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous

time I have been a stone-mason, and also a great digger of ditches,

canals and wells, wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts.

Likewise, by way of preliminary, I desire to remind the reader,

that while in the earlier geological strata there are found the fossils

of monsters now almost completely extinct; the subsequent relics

discovered in what are called the Tertiary formations seem the connecting,

or at any rate intercepted links, between the antichronical creatures,

and those whose remote posterity are said to have entered the Ark;

all the Fossil Whales hitherto discovered belong to the Tertiary period,

which is the last preceding the superficial formations.  And though

none of them precisely answer to any known species of the present time,

they are yet sufficiently akin to them in general respects, to justify

their taking ranks as Cetacean fossils.



Detached broken fossils of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their bones

and skeletons, have within thirty years past, at various intervals,

been found at the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, in France,

in England, in Scotland, and in the States of Louisiana, Mississippi,

and Alabama.  Among the more curious of such remains is part of a skull,

which in the year 1779 was disinterred in the Rue Dauphine in Paris,

a short street opening almost directly upon the palace of the Tuileries;

and bones disinterred in excavating the great docks of Antwerp,

in Napoleon's time.  Cuvier pronounced these fragments to have belonged

to some utterly unknown Leviathanic species.



But by far the most wonderful of all Cetacean relics was the almost

complete vast skeleton of an extinct monster, found in the year 1842,

on the plantation of Judge Creagh, in Alabama.  The awe-stricken credulous

slaves in the vicinity took it for the bones of one of the fallen angels.

The Alabama doctors declared it a huge reptile, and bestowed upon it

the name of Basilosaurus.  But some specimen bones of it being taken

across the sea to Owen, the English Anatomist, it turned out that this

alleged reptile was a whale, though of a departed species.  A significant

illustration of the fact, again and again repeated in this book,

that the skeleton of the whale furnishes but little clue to the shape

of his fully invested body.  So Owen rechristened the monster Zeuglodon;

and in his paper read before the London Geological Society, pronounced it,

in substance, one of the most extraordinary creatures which the mutations

of the globe have blotted out of existence.



When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons,

skulls, tusks, jaws, ribs, and vertebrae, all characterized

by partial resemblances to the existing breeds of sea-monsters;

but at the same time bearing on the other hand similar affinities to

the annihilated antichronical Leviathans, their incalculable seniors;

I am, by a flood, borne back to that wondrous period, ere time

itself can be said to have begun; for time began with man.

Here Saturn's grey chaos rolls over me, and I obtain dim,

shuddering glimpses into those Polar eternities; when wedged

bastions of ice pressed hard upon what are now the Tropics;

and in all the 25,000 miles of this world's circumference,

not an inhabitable hand's breadth of land was visible.

Then the whole world was the whale's; and, king of creation,

he left his wake along the present lines of the Andes and

the Himmalehs.  Who can show a pedigree like Leviathan?  Ahab's harpoon

had shed older blood than the Pharaoh's. Methuselah seems a schoolboy.

I look round to shake hands with Shem.  I am horror-struck

at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeakable

terrors of the whale, which, having been before all time,

must needs exist after all humane ages are over.



But not alone has this Leviathan left his pre-adamite traces in the

stereotype plates of nature, and in limestone and marl bequeathed his

ancient bust; but upon Egyptian tablets, whose antiquity seems to claim

for them an almost fossiliferous character, we find the unmistakable print

of his fin.  In an apartment of the great temple of Denderah, some fifty

years ago, there was discovered upon the granite ceiling a sculptured

and painted planisphere, abounding in centaurs, griffins, and dolphins,

similar to the grotesque figures on the celestial globe of the moderns.

Gliding among them, old Leviathan swam as of yore; was there swimming

in that planisphere, centuries before Solomon was cradled.



Nor must there be omitted another strange attestation of the antiquity

of the whale, in his own osseous postdiluvian reality, as set down

by the venerable John Leo, the old Barbary traveller.



"Not far from the Sea-side, they have a Temple, the Rafters

and Beams of which are made of Whale-Bones; for Whales of a

monstrous size are oftentimes cast up dead upon that shore.

The Common People imagine, that by a secret Power bestowed by God

upon the Temple, no Whale can pass it without immediate death.

But the truth of the Matter is, that on either side

of the Temple, there are Rocks that shoot two Miles into

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but the tiger-yellow crew were tumbling over each other's heads

to gain the uttermost stern.



And now, while both elastic gunwales were springing in and out,

as the whale dallied with the doomed craft in this devilish way;

and from his body being submerged beneath the boat, he could not be

darted at from the bows, for the bows were almost inside of him,

as it were; and while the other boats involuntarily paused,

as before a quick crisis impossible to withstand, then it was that

monomaniac Ahab, furious with this tantalizing vicinity of his foe,

which placed him all alive and helpless in the very jaws he hated;

frenzied with all this, he seized the long bone with his

naked hands, and wildly strove to wrench it from its gripe.

As now he thus vainly strove, the jaw slipped from him;

the frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped,

as both jaws, like an enormous shears, sliding further aft,

bit the craft completely in twain, and locked themselves fast

again in the sea, midway between the two floating wrecks.

These floated aside, the broken ends drooping, the crew at

the stern-wreck clinging to the gunwales, and striving to hold

fast to the oars to lash them across.



At that preluding moment, ere the boat was yet snapped, Ahab, the first

to perceive the whale's intent, by the crafty upraising of his head,

a movement that loosed his hold for the time; at that moment his

hand had made one final effort to push the boat out of the bite.

But only slipping further into the whale's mouth, and tilting over

sideways as it slipped, the boat had shaken off his hold on the jaw;

spilled him out of it, as he leaned to the push; and so he fell

flat-faced upon the sea.



Ripplingly withdrawing from his prey, Moby Dick now lay at a

little distance, vertically thrusting his oblong white head up

and down in the billows; and at the same time slowly revolving his

whole spindled body; so that when his vast wrinkled forehead rose--

some twenty or more feet out of the water--the now rising swells,

with all their confluent waves, dazzlingly broke against it;

vindictively tossing their shivered spray still higher into

the air.* So, in a gale, the but half baffled Channel billows only

recoil from the base of the Eddystone, triumphantly to overleap

its summit with their scud.





*This motion is peculiar to the sperm whale.  It receives its designation

(pitchpoling) from its being likened to that preliminary up-and-down

poise of the whale-lance, in the exercise called pitchpoling,

previously described.  By this motion the whale must best and most

comprehensively view whatever objects may be encircling him.





But soon resuming his horizontal attitude, Moby Dick swam swiftly

round and round the wrecked crew; sideways churning the water in his

vengeful wake, as if lashing himself up to still another and more

deadly assault.  The sight of the splintered boat seemed to madden him,

as the blood of grapes and mulberries cast before Antiochus's

elephants in the book of Maccabees.  Meanwhile Ahab half smothered

in the foam of the whale's insolent tail, and too much of a cripple

to swim,--though he could still keep afloat, even in the heart

of such a whirlpool as that; helpless Ahab's head was seen,

like a tossed bubble which the least chance shock might burst.

From the boat's fragmentary stern, Fedallah incuriously and mildly

eyed him; the clinging crew, at the other drifting end, could not

succor him; more than enough was it for them to look to themselves.

For so revolvingly appalling was the White Whale's aspect,

and so planetarily swift the ever-contracting circles

he made, that he seemed horizontally swooping upon them.

And though the other boats, unharmed, still hovered hard by;

still they dared not pull into the eddy to strike, lest that should be

the signal for the instant destruction of the jeopardized castaways,

Ahab and all; nor in that case could they themselves hope to escape.

With straining eyes, then, they remained on the outer edge of

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