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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

revealing his brawny shoulders through the freezing foam.

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

The greenhorn had gone down.  Shooting himself perpendicularly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Queequeg took his last long dive.



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

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

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

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

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

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

We cannibals must help these Christians."







CHAPTER 14



Nantucket







Nothing more happened on the passage worthy the mentioning;

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



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

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

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

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

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

substitute for blotting paper.  Some gamesome wights will tell you

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But these extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no Illinois.



Look now at the wondrous traditional story of how this

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

In olden times an eagle swooped down upon the New England

coast and carried off an infant Indian in his talons.

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

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

Setting out in their canoes, after a perilous passage they

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

the poor little Indian's skeleton.



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

declared everlasting war with the mightiest animated mass that

has survived the flood; most monstrous and most mountainous!

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

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

than his most fearless and malicious assaults!



And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits,

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

the watery world like so many Alexanders; parcelling out among

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

armed ones but floating forts; even pirates and privateers,

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

other ships, other fragments of the land like themselves,

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

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

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

to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation.

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

would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions

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

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

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

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.

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And as for those who, previously hearing of the White Whale,

by chance caught sight of him; in the beginning of the thing

they had every one of them, almost, as boldly and fearlessly

lowered for him, as for any other whale of that species.

But at length, such calamities did ensue in these assaults--

not restricted to sprained wrists and ankles, broken limbs,

or devouring amputations--but fatal to the last degree of fatality;

those repeated disastrous repulses, all accumulating and piling

their terrors upon Moby Dick; those things had gone far to

shake the fortitude of many brave hunters, to whom the story

of the White Whale had eventually come.



Nor did wild rumors of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and still

the more horrify the true histories of these deadly encounters.

For not only do fabulous rumors naturally grow out of the very body

of all surprising terrible events,--as the smitten tree gives birth

to its fungi; but, in maritime life, far more than in that of terra firma,

wild rumors abound, wherever there is any adequate reality for them

to cling to.  And as the sea surpasses the land in this matter,

so the whale fishery surpasses every other sort of maritime life,

in the wonderfulness and fearfulness of the rumors which sometimes

circulate there.  For not only are whalemen as a body unexempt

from that ignorance and superstitiousness hereditary to all sailors;

but of all sailors, they are by all odds the most directly brought

into contact with whatever is appallingly astonishing in the sea;

face to face they not only eye its greatest marvels, but, hand to jaw,

give battle to them.  Alone, in such remotest waters, that though

you sailed a thousand miles, and passed a thousand shores, you would

not come to any chiselled hearth-stone, or aught hospitable beneath

that part of the sun; in such latitudes and longitudes, pursuing too

such a calling as he does, the whaleman is wrapped by influences

all tending to make his fancy pregnant with many a mighty birth.

No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit

over the wildest watery spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Whale

did in the end incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints,

and half-formed foetal suggestions of supernatural agencies,

which eventually invested Moby Dick with new terrors unborrowed from

anything that visibly appears.  So that in many cases such a panic

did he finally strike, that few who by those rumors, at least,

had heard of the White Whale, few of those hunters were willing

to encounter the perils of his jaw.



But there were still other and more vital practical influences at work.

Nor even at the present day has the original prestige of the

Sperm Whale, as fearfully distinguished from all other species

of the leviathan, died out of the minds of the whalemen as a body.

There are those this day among them, who, though intelligent and

courageous enough in offering battle to the Greenland or Right whale,

would perhaps--either from professional inexperience, or incompetency,

or timidity, decline a contest with the Sperm Whale; at any rate,

there are plenty of whalemen, especially among those whaling nations

not sailing under the American flag, who have never hostilely

encountered the Sperm Whale, but whose sole knowledge of the leviathan

is restricted to the ignoble monster primitively pursued in the North;

seated on their hatches, these men will hearken with a childish fireside

interest and awe, to the wild, strange tales of Southern whaling.

Nor is the preeminent tremendousness of the great Sperm Whale

anywhere more feelingly comprehended, than on board of those prows

which stem him.



And as if the now tested reality of his might had in former legendary

times thrown its shadow before it; we find some book naturalists--

Olassen and Povelson--declaring the Sperm Whale not only to be

a consternation to every other creature in the sea, but also to be

so incredibly ferocious as continually to be athirst for human blood.

Nor even down to so late a time as Cuvier's, were these or almost

similar impressions effaced.  For in his Natural History,

the Baron himself affirms that at sight of the Sperm Whale, all fish

(sharks included) are "struck with the most lively terrors,"

and "often in the precipitancy of their flight dash themselves against

the rocks with such violence as to cause instantaneous death."

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,

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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

of consternation in the other world, as of mortal trepidation here.

And from that pallor of the dead, we borrow the expressive hue

of the shroud in which we wrap them.  Nor even in our superstitions

do we fail to throw the same snowy mantle round our phantoms;

all ghosts rising in a milk-white fog--Yea, while these terrors

seize us, let us add, that even the king of terrors, when personified

by the evangelist, rides on his pallid horse.



Therefore, in his other moods, symbolize whatever grand or gracious

thing he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest

idealized significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul.



But though without dissent this point be fixed, how is mortal

man to account for it?  To analyse it, would seem impossible.

Can we, then, by the citation of some of those instances

wherein this thing of whiteness--though for the time either

wholly or in great part stripped of all direct associations

calculated to impart to it aught fearful, but nevertheless,

is found to exert over us the same sorcery, however modified;--

can we thus hope to light upon some chance clue to conduct us

to the hidden cause we seek?



Let us try.  But in a matter like this, subtlety appeals to subtlety,

and without imagination no man can follow another into these halls.

And though, doubtless, some at least of the imaginative impressions

about to be presented may have been shared by most men, yet few

perhaps were entirely conscious of them at the time, and therefore

may not be able to recall them now.

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

from this incumbrance the Sperm Whale is wholly free.  But there

are instances where, after the lapse of many hours or several days,

the sunken whale again rises, more buoyant than in life.

But the reason of this is obvious.  Gases are generated in him;

he swells to a prodigious magnitude; becomes a sort of animal balloon.

A line-of-battle ship could hardly keep him under then.

In the Shore Whaling, on soundings, among the Bays of New Zealand,

when a Right Whale gives token of sinking, they fasten buoys

to him, with plenty of rope; so that when the body has gone down,

they know where to look for it when it shall have ascended again.



It was not long after the sinking of the body that a cry

was heard from the Pequod's mast-heads, announcing that the

Jungfrau was again lowering her boats; though the only spout

in sight was that of a Fin-Back, belonging to the species of

uncapturable whales, because of its incredible power of swimming.

Nevertheless, the Fin-Back's spout is so similar to the Sperm Whale's,

that by unskilful fishermen it is often mistaken for it.

And consequently Derick and all his host were now in valiant

chase of this unnearable brute.  The Virgin crowding all sail,

made after her four young keels, and thus they all disappeared

far to leeward, still in bold, hopeful chase.



Oh! many are the Fin-Backs, and many are the Dericks, my friend.







CHAPTER 82



The Honor and Glory of Whaling







There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness

is the true method.



The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches

up to the very spring-head of it so much the more am I impressed

with its great honorableness and antiquity; and especially when I

find so many great demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts,

who one way or other have shed distinction upon it, I am transported

with the reflection that I myself belong, though but subordinately,

to so emblazoned a fraternity.



The gallant Perseus, a son of Jupiter, was the first whaleman;

and to the eternal honor of our calling be it said, that the first

whale attacked by our brotherhood was not killed with any

sordid intent.  Those were the knightly days of our profession,

when we only bore arms to succor the distressed, and not to fill

men's lamp-feeders. Every one knows the fine story of Perseus

and Andromeda; how the lovely Andromeda, the daughter of a king,

was tied to a rock on the sea-coast, and as Leviathan was in

the very act of carrying her off, Perseus, the prince of whalemen,

intrepidly advancing, harpooned the monster, and delivered

and married the maid.  It was an admirable artistic exploit,

rarely achieved by the best harpooneers of the present day;

inasmuch as this Leviathan was slain at the very first dart.

And let no man doubt this Arkite story; for in the ancient Joppa,

now Jaffa, on the Syrian coast, in one of the Pagan temples,

there stood for many ages the vast skeleton of a whale,

which the city's legends and all the inhabitants asserted

to be the identical bones of the monster that Perseus slew.

When the Romans took Joppa, the same skeleton was carried to Italy

in triumph.  What seems most singular and suggestively important

in this story, is this:  it was from Joppa that Jonah set sail.



Akin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda--indeed, by some

supposed to be indirectly derived from it--is that famous story

of St. George and the Dragon; which dragon I maintain to have

been a whale; for in many old chronicles whales and dragons

are strangely jumbled together, and often stand for each other.

"Thou art as a lion of the waters, and as a dragon of

the sea," said Ezekiel; hereby, plainly meaning a whale;

in truth, some versions of the Bible use that word itself.

Besides, it would much subtract from the glory of the exploit

had St. George but encountered a crawling reptile of the land,

instead of doing battle with the great monster of the deep.

Any man may kill a snake, but only a Perseus, a St. George,

a Coffin, have the heart in them to march boldly up to a whale.



Let not the modern paintings of this scene mislead us;

for though the creature encountered by that valiant whaleman

of old is vaguely represented of a griffin-like shape,

and though the battle is depicted on land and the saint

on horseback, yet considering the great ignorance of those times,

when the true form of the whale was unknown to artists;

and considering that as in Perseus' case, St. George's

whale might have crawled up out of the sea on the beach;

and considering that the animal ridden by St. George might have

been only a large seal, or sea-horse; bearing all this in mind,

it will not appear altogether incompatible with the sacred

legend and the ancientest draughts of the scene, to hold this

so-called dragon no other than the great Leviathan himself.

In fact, placed before the strict and piercing truth,

this whole story will fare like that fish, flesh, and fowl

idol of the Philistines, Dagon by name; who being planted

before the ark of Israel, his horse's head and both the palms

of his hands fell off from him, and only the stump or fishy

part of him remained.  Thus, then, one of our own noble stamp,

even a whaleman, is the tutelary guardian of England;

and by good rights, we harpooneers of Nantucket should be

enrolled in the most noble order of St. George.  And therefore,

let not the knights of that honorable company (none of whom,

I venture to say, have ever had to do with a whale like their

great patron), let them never eye a Nantucketer with disdain,

since even in our woollen frocks and tarred trowsers we are much

better entitled to St. George's decoration than they.



Whether to admit Hercules among us or not, concerning this I long

remained dubious:  for though according to the Greek mythologies,

that antique Crockett and Kit Carson--that brawny doer

of rejoicing good deeds, was swallowed down and thrown up

by a whale; still, whether that strictly makes a whaleman

of him, that might be mooted.  It nowhere appears that he ever

actually harpooned his fish, unless, indeed, from the inside.

Nevertheless, he may be deemed a sort of involuntary whaleman;

at any rate the whale caught him, if he did not the whale.

I claim him for one of our clan.



But, by the best contradictory authorities, this Grecian story

of Hercules and the whale is considered to be derived from the still

more ancient Hebrew story of Jonah and the whale; and vice versa;

certainly they are very similar.  If I claim the demigod then,

why not the prophet?



Nor do heroes, saints, demigods, and prophets alone comprise

the whole roll of our order.  Our grand master is still to be named;

for like royal kings of old times, we find the head-waters

of our fraternity in nothing short of the great gods themselves.

That wondrous oriental story is now to be rehearsed from the Shaster,

which gives us the dread Vishnoo, one of the three persons

in the godhead of the Hindoos; gives us this divine Vishnoo

himself for our Lord;--Vishnoo, who, by the first of his ten

earthly incarnations, has for ever set apart and sanctified the whale.

When Brahma, or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster, resolved to

recreate the world after one of its periodical dissolutions,

he gave birth to Vishnoo, to preside over the work; but the Vedas,

or mystical books, whose perusal would seem to have been indispensable

to Vishnoo before beginning the creation, and which therefore

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?

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

in these latitudes, and in preparation for the peculiarly active

pursuits shortly to be anticipated, Perth, the begrimed, blistered

old blacksmith, had not removed his portable forge to the hold again,

after concluding his contributory work for Ahab's leg, but still

retained it on deck, fast lashed to ringbolts by the foremast;

being now almost incessantly invoked by the headsmen, and harpooneers,

and bowsmen to do some little job for them; altering, or repairing,

or new shaping their various weapons and boat furniture.

Often he would be surrounded by an eager circle, all waiting

to be served; holding boat-spades, pikeheads, harpoons, and lances,

and jealously watching his every sooty movement, as he toiled.

Nevertheless, this old man's was a patient hammer wielded by a

patient arm.  No murmur, no impatience, no petulance did come

from him.  Silent, slow, and solemn; bowing over still further his

chronically broken back, he toiled away, as if toil were life itself,

and the heavy beating of his hammer the heavy beating of his heart.

And so it was.--Most miserable!



A peculiar walk in this old man, a certain slight but painful

appearing yawing in his gait, had at an early period of the voyage

excited the curiosity of the mariners.  And to the importunity

of their persisted questionings he had finally given in;

and so it came to pass that every one now knew the shameful

story of his wretched fate.



Belated, and not innocently, one bitter winter's midnight,

on the road running between two country towns, the blacksmith

half-stupidly felt the deadly numbness stealing over him,

and sought refuge in a leaning, dilapidated barn.

The issue was, the loss of the extremities of both feet.

Out of this revelation, part by part, at last came out the four

acts of the gladness, and the one long, and as yet uncatastrophied

fifth act of the grief of his life's drama.



He was an old man, who, at the age of nearly sixty, had postponedly

encountered that thing in sorrow's technicals called ruin.

He had been an artisan of famed excellence, and with plenty

to do; owned a house and garden; embraced a youthful,

daughter-like, loving wife, and three blithe, ruddy children;

every Sunday went to a cheerful-looking church, planted in a grove.

But one night, under cover of darkness, and further concealed

in a most cunning disguisement, a desperate burglar slid

into his happy home, and robbed them all of everything.

And darker yet to tell, the blacksmith himself did

ignorantly conduct this burglar into his family's heart.

It was the Bottle Conjuror!  Upon the opening of that fatal cork,

forth flew the fiend, and shrivelled up his home.  Now, for prudent,

most wise, and economic reasons, the blacksmith's shop was in

the basement of his dwelling, but with a separate entrance to it;

so that always had the young and loving healthy wife listened

with no unhappy nervousness, but with vigorous pleasure,

to the stout ringing of her young-armed old husband's hammer;

whose reverberations, muffled by passing through the floors

and walls, came up to her, not unsweetly, in her nursery;

and so, to stout Labor's iron lullaby, the blacksmith's infants

were rocked to slumber.



Oh, woe on woe!  Oh, Death, why canst thou not sometimes be timely?

Hadst thou taken this old blacksmith to thyself ere his full ruin

came upon him, then had the young widow had a delicious grief,

and her orphans a truly venerable, legendary sire to dream of in

their after years; and all of them a care-killing competency.

But Death plucked down some virtuous elder brother, on whose whistling

daily toil solely hung the responsibilities of some other family,

and left the worse than useless old man standing, till the hideous

rot of life should make him easier to harvest.



Why tell the whole?  The blows of the basement hammer every day

grew more and more between; and each blow every day grew fainter

than the last; the wife sat frozen at the window, with tearless eyes,

glitteringly gazing into the weeping faces of her children;

the bellows fell; the forge choked up with cinders; the house

was sold; the mother dived down into the long church-yard grass;

her children twice followed her thither; and the houseless,

familyless old man staggered off a vagabond in crape; his every

woe unreverenced; his grey head a scorn to flaxen curls!



Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this;

but Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried;

it is but the first salutation to the possibilities

of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored;

therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men, who still

have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide,

does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread

forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful,

new-life adventures; and from the hearts of infinite Pacifics,

the thousand mermaids sing to them--"Come hither, broken-hearted;

here is another life without the guilt of intermediate death;

here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them.

Come hither! bury thyself in a life which, to your now equally

abhorred and abhorring, landed world, is more oblivious than death.

Come hither! put up thy grave-stone, too, within the churchyard,

and come hither, till we marry thee!"



Hearkening to these voices, East and West, by early sunrise,

and by fall of eve, the blacksmith's soul responded, Aye, I come!

And so Perth went a-whaling.







CHAPTER 113



The Forge





With matted beard, and swathed in a bristling shark-skin apron,

about mid-day, Perth was standing between his forge and anvil,

the latter placed upon an iron-wood log, with one hand holding a pike-head

in the coals, and with the other at his forge's lungs, when Captain Ahab

came along, carrying in his hand a small rusty-looking leathern bag.

While yet a little distance from the forge, moody Ahab paused;

till at last, Perth, withdrawing his iron from the fire, began hammering

it upon the anvil--the red mass sending off the sparks in thick

hovering flights, some of which flew close to Ahab.



"Are these thy Mother Carey's chickens, Perth? they are always flying

in thy wake; birds of good omen, too, but not to all;--look here,

they burn; but thou--thou liv'st among them without a scorch."



"Because I am scorched all over, Captain Ahab," answered Perth,

resting for a moment on his hammer; "I am past scorching-,