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him at the first go off of a bitter cold morning.



Seeing, now, that there were no curtains to the window, and that

the street being very narrow, the house opposite commanded a plain view

into the room, and observing more and more the indecorous figure that

Queequeg made, staving about with little else but his hat and boots on;

I begged him as well as I could, to accelerate his toilet somewhat,

and particularly to get into his pantaloons as soon as possible.

He complied, and then proceeded to wash himself.  At that time in

the morning any Christian would have washed his face; but Queequeg,

to my amazement, contented himself with restricting his ablutions

to his chest, arms, and hands.  He then donned his waistcoat,

and taking up a piece of hard soap on the wash-stand centre table,

dipped it into water and commenced lathering his face.

I was watching to see where he kept his razor, when lo and behold,

he takes the harpoon from the bed corner, slips out the long

wooden stock, unsheathes the head, whets it a little on his boot,

and striding up to the bit of mirror against the wall,

begins a vigorous scraping, or rather harpooning of his cheeks.

Thinks I, Queequeg, this is using Rogers's best cutlery with a vengeance.

Afterwards I wondered the less at this operation when I came to know

of what fine steel the head of a harpoon is made, and how exceedingly

sharp the long straight edges are always kept.



The rest of his toilet was soon achieved, and he proudly marched

out of the room, wrapped up in his great pilot monkey jacket,

and sporting his harpoon like a marshal's baton.







CHAPTER 5



Breakfast





I quickly followed suit, and descending into the bar-room accosted

the grinning landlord very pleasantly.  I cherished no malice

towards him, though he had been skylarking with me not a little

in the matter of my bedfellow.



However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too

scarce a good thing; the more's the pity.  So, if any one man,

in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke

to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully

allow himself to spend and to be spent in that way.

And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him,

be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.



The bar-room was now full of the boarders who had been dropping

in the night previous, and whom I had not as yet had a good look at.

They were nearly all whalemen; chief mates, and second mates,

and third mates, and sea carpenters, and sea coopers,

and sea blacksmiths, and harpooneers, and ship keepers;

a brown and brawny company, with bosky beards; an unshorn,

shaggy set, all wearing monkey jackets for morning gowns.



You could pretty plainly tell how long each one had been ashore.

This young fellow's healthy cheek is like a sun-toasted

pear in hue, and would seem to smell almost as musky;

he cannot have been three days landed from his Indian voyage.

That man next him looks a few shades lighter; you might say

a touch of satin wood is in him.  In the complexion of a third

still lingers a tropic tawn, but slightly bleached withal;

he doubtless has tarried whole weeks ashore.  But who could

show a cheek like Queequeg? which, barred with various tints,

seemed like the Andes' western slope, to show forth in one array,

contrasting climates, zone by zone.



"Grub, ho!" now cried the landlord, flinging open a door,

and in we went to breakfast.



They say that men who have seen the world, thereby become

quite at ease in manner, quite self-possessed in company.

Not always, though:  Ledyard, the great New England traveller,

and Mungo Park, the Scotch one; of all men, they possessed

the least assurance in the parlor.  But perhaps the mere

crossing of Siberia in a sledge drawn by dogs as Ledyard did,

or the taking a long solitary walk on an empty stomach, in the negro

heart of Africa, which was the sum of poor Mungo's performances--

this kind of travel, I say, may not be the very best mode

of attaining a high social polish.  Still, for the most part,

that sort of thing is to be had anywhere.



These reflections just here are occasioned by the circumstance

that after we were all seated at the table, and I was preparing

to hear some good stories about whaling; to my no small

surprise nearly every man maintained a profound silence.

And not only that, but they looked embarrassed.  Yes, here were

a set of sea-dogs, many of whom without the slightest bashfulness

had boarded great whales on the high seas--entire strangers to them--

and duelled them dead without winking; and yet, here they

sat at a social breakfast table--all of the same calling,

all of kindred tastes--looking round as sheepishly at each other

as though they had never been out of sight of some sheepfold

among the Green Mountains.  A curious sight; these bashful bears,

these timid warrior whalemen!



But as for Queequeg--why, Queequeg sat there among them--

at the head of the table, too, it so chanced; as cool as an icicle.

To be sure I cannot say much for his breeding.  His greatest

admirer could not have cordially justified his bringing his harpoon

into breakfast with him, and using it there without ceremony;

reaching over the table with it, to the imminent jeopardy

of many heads, and grappling the beefsteaks towards him.

But that was certainly very coolly done by him, and every one

knows that in most people's estimation, to do anything coolly

is to do it genteelly.



We will not speak of all Queequeg's peculiarities here;

how he eschewed coffee and hot rolls, and applied his undivided

attention to beefsteaks, done rare.  Enough, that when breakfast

was over he withdrew like the rest into the public room,

lighted his tomahawk-pipe, and was sitting there quietly

digesting and smoking with his inseparable hat on, when I

sallied out for a stroll.







CHAPTER 6



The Street

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

of the Scriptures.  Yet what depths of the soul does Jonah's deep

sealine sound! what a pregnant lesson to us is this prophet!

What a noble thing is that canticle in the fish's belly!

How billow-like and boisterously grand!  We feel the floods surging

over us, we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters;

sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is about us!  But what is

this lesson that the book of Jonah teaches?  Shipmates, it is

a two-stranded lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful men,

and a lesson to me as a pilot of the living God.  As sinful men,

it is a lesson to us all, because it is a story of the sin,

hard-heartedness, suddenly awakened fears, the swift punishment,

repentance, prayers, and finally the deliverance and joy

of Jonah.  As with all sinners among men, the sin of this son

of Amittai was in his wilful disobedience of the command of God--

never mind now what that command was, or how conveyed--

which he found a hard command.  But all the things that God

would have us do are hard for us to do--remember that--

and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade.

And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this

disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.



"With this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah still further

flouts at God, by seeking to flee from Him.  He thinks

that a ship made by men, will carry him into countries

where God does not reign but only the Captains of this earth.

He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and seeks a ship that's

bound for Tarshish.  There lurks, perhaps, a hitherto unheeded

meaning here.  By all accounts Tarshish could have been no other

city than the modern Cadiz.  That's the opinion of learned men.

And where is Cadiz, shipmates?  Cadiz is in Spain; as far by water,

from Joppa, as Jonah could possibly have sailed in those

ancient days, when the Atlantic was an almost unknown sea.

Because Joppa, the modern Jaffa, shipmates, is on the most

easterly coast of the Mediterranean, the Syrian; and Tarshish

or Cadiz more than two thousand miles to the westward from that,

just outside the Straits of Gibraltar.  See ye not then, shipmates,

that Jonah sought to flee worldwide from God?  Miserable man!

Oh! most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with slouched

hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God; prowling among

the shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas.

So disordered, self-condemning is his look, that had there

been policemen in those days, Jonah, on the mere suspicion

of something wrong, had been arrested ere he touched a deck.

How plainly he's a fugitive! no baggage, not a hat-box, valise,

or carpet-bag,--no friends accompany him to the wharf with

their adieux.  At last, after much dodging search, he finds

the Tarshish ship receiving the last items of her cargo;

and as he steps on board to see its Captain in the cabin,

all the sailors for the moment desist from hoisting in the goods,

to mark the stranger's evil eye.  Jonah sees this; but in vain

he tries to look all ease and confidence; in vain essays his

wretched smile.  Strong intuitions of the man assure the mariners

he can be no innocent.  In their gamesome but still serious way,

one whispers to the other--"Jack, he's robbed a widow;"

or, "Joe, do you mark him; he's a bigamist;" or, "Harry lad,

I guess he's the adulterer that broke jail in old Gomorrah,

or belike, one of the missing murderers from Sodom."  Another runs

to read the bill that's stuck against the spile upon the wharf

to which the ship is moored, offering five hundred gold coins

for the apprehension of a parricide, and containing a description

of his person.  He reads, and looks from Jonah to the bill;

while all his sympathetic shipmates now crowd round Jonah,

prepared to lay their hands upon him.  Frighted Jonah trembles.

and summoning all his boldness to his face, only looks so much

the more a coward.  He will not confess himself suspected;

but that itself is strong suspicion.  So he makes the best of it;

and when the sailors find him not to be the man that is advertised,

they let him pass, and he descends into the cabin.



"'Who's there?' cries the Captain at his busy desk, hurriedly making

out his papers for the Customs--'Who's there?'  Oh! how that harmless

question mangles Jonah!  For the instant he almost turns to flee again.

But he rallies.  'I seek a passage in this ship to Tarshish;

how soon sail ye, sir?'  Thus far the busy Captain had not looked up

to Jonah, though the man now stands before him; but no sooner does

he hear that hollow voice, than he darts a scrutinizing glance.

'We sail with the next coming tide,' at last he slowly answered,

still intently eyeing him.  'No sooner, sir?'--'Soon enough for any

honest man that goes a passenger.'  Ha!  Jonah, that's another stab.

But he swiftly calls away the Captain from that scent.

'I'll sail with ye,'--he says,--'the passage money how much is that?--

I'll pay now.'  For it is particularly written, shipmates, as if it

were a thing not to be overlooked in this history, 'that he paid

the fare thereof' ere the craft did sail.  And taken with the context,

this is full of meaning.



"Now Jonah's Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects

crime in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless.

In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel

freely and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper,

is stopped at all frontiers.  So Jonah's Captain prepares

to test the length of Jonah's purse, ere he judge him openly.

He charges him thrice the usual sum; and it's assented to.

Then the Captain knows that Jonah is a fugitive; but at the same

time resolves to help a flight that paves its rear with gold.

Yet when Jonah fairly takes out his purse, prudent suspicions still

molest the Captain.  He rings every coin to find a counterfeit.

Not a forger, any way, he mutters; and Jonah is put down for his passage.

'Point out my state-room, Sir,' says Jonah now, 'I'm travel-weary;

I need sleep."  "Thou look'st like it,' says the Captain,

'there's thy room.'  Jonah enters, and would lock the door,

but the lock contains no key.  Hearing him foolishly fumbling there,

the Captain laughs lowly to himself, and mutters something about

the doors of convicts' cells being never allowed to be locked within.

All dressed and dusty as he is, Jonah throws himself into his berth,

and finds the little state-room ceiling almost resting on his forehead.

The air is close, and Jonah gasps.  Then, in that contracted hole,

sunk, too, beneath the ship's water-line, Jonah feels the heralding

presentiment of that stifling hour, when the whale shall hold him

in the smallest of his bowels' wards.



"Screwed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly

oscillates in Jonah's room; and the ship, heeling over towards the wharf

with the weight of the last bales received, the lamp, flame and all,

though in slight motion, still maintains a permanent obliquity with

reference to the room; though, in truth, infallibly straight itself,

it but made obvious the false, lying levels among which it hung.

The lamp alarms and frightens Jonah; as lying in his berth

his tormented eyes roll round the place, and this thus far

successful fugitive finds no refuge for his restless glance.

But that contradiction in the lamp more and more appals him.

The floor, the ceiling, and the side, are all awry.

'Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!' he groans, "straight upward,

so it burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!'

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

curiously carved from the long narrow lower jaw of her hereditary foe.

The helmsman who steered by that tiller in a tempest, felt like

the Tartar, when he holds back his fiery steed by clutching its jaw.

A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy!  All noble things are

touched with that.



Now when I looked about the quarter-deck, for some one having authority,

in order to propose myself as a candidate for the voyage, at first I

saw nobody; but I could not well overlook a strange sort of tent,

or rather wigwam, pitched a little behind the main-mast. It seemed

only a temporary erection used in port.  It was of a conical shape,

some ten feet high; consisting of the long, huge slabs of limber

black bone taken from the middle and highest part of the jaws of

the right-whale. Planted with their broad ends on the deck, a circle

of these slabs laced together, mutually sloped towards each other,

and at the apex united in a tufted point, where the loose hairy fibres

waved to and fro like a top-knot on some old Pottowotamie Sachem's head.

A triangular opening faced towards the bows of the ship, so that

the insider commanded a complete view forward.



And half concealed in this queer tenement, I at length found

one who by his aspect seemed to have authority; and who,

it being noon, and the ship's work suspended, was now enjoying

respite from the burden of command.  He was seated on an

old-fashioned oaken chair, wriggling all over with curious carving;

and the bottom of which was formed of a stout interlacing

of the same elastic stuff of which the wigwam was constructed.



There was nothing so very particular, perhaps, about the appearance

of the elderly man I saw; he was brown and brawny, like most old seamen,

and heavily rolled up in blue pilot-cloth, cut in the Quaker style;

only there was a fine and almost microscopic net-work of the minutest

wrinkles interlacing round his eyes, which must have arisen from his

continual sailings in many hard gales, and always looking to windward;--

for this causes the muscles about the eyes to become pursed together.

Such eye-wrinkles are very effectual in a scowl.



"Is this the Captain of the Pequod?" said I, advancing to the door

of the tent.



"Supposing it be the Captain of the Pequod, what dost thou want

of him?" he demanded.



"I was thinking of shipping."



"Thou wast, wast thou?  I see thou art no Nantucketer--

ever been in a stove boat?"



"No, Sir, I never have."



"Dost know nothing at all about whaling, I dare say--eh?



"Nothing, Sir; but I have no doubt I shall soon learn.

I've been several voyages in the merchant service, and I think that-"



"Merchant service be damned.  Talk not that lingo to me.

Dost see that leg?--I'll take that leg away from thy stern,

if ever thou talkest of the merchant service to me again.

Marchant service indeed!  I suppose now ye feel considerable

proud of having served in those marchant ships.  But flukes! man,

what makes thee want to go a whaling, eh?--it looks a little

suspicious, don't it, eh?--Hast not been a pirate, hast thou?--

Didst not rob thy last Captain, didst thou?--Dost not think

of murdering the officers when thou gettest to sea?"



I protested my innocence of these things.  I saw that under

the mask of these half humorous innuendoes, this old seaman,

as an insulated Quakerish Nantucketer, was full of his

insular prejudices, and rather distrustful of all aliens,

unless they hailed from Cape Cod or the Vineyard.



"But what takes thee a-whaling? I want to know that before I

think of shipping ye."



"Well, sir, I want to see what whaling is.  I want to see the world."



"Want to see what whaling is, eh?  Have ye clapped eye on Captain Ahab?"



"Who is Captain Ahab, sir?"



"Aye, aye, I thought so.  Captain Ahab is the Captain of this ship."



"I am mistaken then.  I thought I was speaking to the Captain himself."



"Thou art speaking to Captain Peleg--that's who ye are speaking to,

young man.  It belongs to me and Captain Bildad to see the Pequod fitted

out for the voyage, and supplied with all her needs, including crew.

We are part owners and agents.  But as I was going to say, if thou wantest

to know what whaling is, as thou tellest ye do, I can put ye in a way

of finding it out before ye bind yourself to it, past backing out.

Clap eye on Captain Ahab, young man, and thou wilt find that he has

only one leg."



"What do you mean, sir?  Was the other one lost by a whale?"



"Lost by a whale!  Young man, come nearer to me:  it was devoured,

chewed up, crunched by the monstrousest parmacetty that ever chipped

a boat!--ah, ah!"



I was a little alarmed by his energy, perhaps also a little touched

at the hearty grief in his concluding exclamation, but said as calmly

as I could, "What you say is no doubt true enough, sir; but how could

I know there was any peculiar ferocity in that particular whale,

though indeed I might have inferred as much from the simple fact

of the accident."



"Look ye now, young man, thy lungs are a sort of soft, d'ye see;

thou dost not talk shark a bit.  Sure, ye've been to sea before now;

sure of that?"



"Sir," said I, "I thought I told you that I had been four voyages

in the merchant-"



"Hard down out of that!  Mind what I said about the marchant service--

don't aggravate me--I won't have it.  But let us understand each other.

I have given thee a hint about what whaling is! do ye yet feel

inclined for it?"



"I do, sir."



"Very good.  Now, art thou the man to pitch a harpoon down a live

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

Queequeg carrying his harpoon, Captain Peleg in his gruff voice

loudly hailed us from his wigwam, saying he had not suspected

my friend was a cannibal, and furthermore announcing that he let

no cannibals on board that craft, unless they previously

produced their papers.



"What do you mean by that, Captain Peleg?" said I, now jumping

on the bulwarks, and leaving my comrade standing on the wharf.



"I mean," he replied, "he must show his papers."



"Yes," said Captain Bildad in his hollow voice, sticking his head from

behind Peleg's, out of the wigwam.  "He must show that he's converted.

Son of darkness," he added, turning to Queequeg, "art thou at present

in communion with any Christian church?"



"Why," said I, "he's a member of the first Congregational Church."

Here be it said, that many tattooed savages sailing in Nantucket

ships at last come to be converted into the churches.



"First Congregational Church," cried Bildad, "what! that worships

in Deacon Deuteronomy Coleman's meeting-house?" and so saying,

taking out his spectacles, he rubbed them with his great yellow

bandana handkerchief, and putting them on very carefully,

came out of the wigwam, and leaning stiffly over the bulwarks,

took a good long look at Queequeg.



"How long hath he been a member?" he then said, turning to me;

"not very long, I rather guess, young man."



"No," said Peleg, "and he hasn't been baptized right either,

or it would have washed some of that devil's blue off his face."



"Do tell, now," cried Bildad, "is this Philistine a regular member

of Deacon Deuteronomy's meeting?  I never saw him going there,

and I pass it every Lord's day."



"I don't know anything about Deacon Deuteronomy or his meeting,"

said I; "all I know is, that Queequeg here is a born member of the

First Congregational Church.  He is a deacon himself, Queequeg is."



"Young man," said Bildad sternly, "thou art skylarking with me--

explain thyself, thou young Hittite.  What church dost thee

mean? answer me."



Finding myself thus hard pushed, I replied, "I mean, sir, the same

ancient Catholic Church to which you and I, and Captain Peleg there,

and Queequeg here, and all of us, and every mother's son and soul

of us belong; the great and everlasting First Congregation of this

whole worshipping world; we all belong to that; only some of us

cherish some queer crotchets no ways touching the grand belief;

in that we all join hands."



"Splice, thou mean'st splice hands," cried Peleg, drawing nearer.

"Young man, you'd better ship for a missionary,

instead of a fore-mast hand; I never heard a better sermon.

Deacon Deuteronomy--why Father Mapple himself couldn't beat it,

and he's reckoned something.  Come aboard, come aboard:

never mind about the papers.  I say, tell Quohog there--

what's that you call him? tell Quohog to step along.

By the great anchor, what a harpoon he's got there! looks

like good stuff that; and he handles it about right.

I say, Quohog, or whatever your name is, did you ever stand

in the head of a whale-boat? did you ever strike a fish?"



Without saying a word, Queequeg, in his wild sort of way, jumped upon

the bulwarks, from thence into the bows of one of the whale-boats hanging

to the side; and then bracing his left knee, and poising his harpoon,

cried out in some such way as this:--



"Cap'ain, you see him small drop tar on water dere?  You see him? well,

spose him one whale eye, well, den!" and taking sharp aim at it,

he darted the iron right over old Bildad's broad brim, clean across

the ship's decks, and struck the glistening tar spot out of sight.



"Now," said Queequeg, quietly, hauling in the line, "spos-ee him

whale-e eye; why, dad whale dead."



"Quick, Bildad," said Peleg, his partner, who, aghast at the close

vicinity of the flying harpoon, had retreated towards the cabin gangway.

"Quick, I say, you Bildad, and get the ship's papers.

We must have Hedgehog there, I mean Quohog, in one of our boats.

Look ye, Quohog, we'll give ye the ninetieth lay, and that's more

than ever was given a harpooneer yet out of Nantucket."



So down we went into the cabin, and to my great joy Queequeg was soon

enrolled among the same ship's company to which I myself belonged.



When all preliminaries were over and Peleg had got everything ready

for signing, he turned to me and said, "I guess, Quohog there don't

know how to write, does he?  I say, Quohog, blast ye! dost thou sign

thy name or make thy mark?



But at this question, Queequeg, who had twice or thrice before taken

part in similar ceremonies, looked no ways abashed; but taking

the offered pen, copied upon the paper, in the proper place,

an exact counterpart of a queer round figure which was tattooed

upon his arm; so that through Captain Peleg's obstinate mistake

touching his appellative, it stood something like this:--

                             Quohog.

                           his X mark.

Meanwhile Captain Bildad sat earnestly and steadfastly eyeing Queequeg,

and at last rising solemnly and fumbling in the huge pockets

of his broadskirted drab coat took out a bundle of tracts,

and selecting one entitled "The Latter Day Coming; or No Time

to Lose," placed it in Queequeg's hands, and then grasping them

and the book with both his, looked earnestly into his eyes, and said,

"Son of darkness, I must do my duty by thee; I am part owner

of this ship, and feel concerned for the souls of all its crew;

if thou still clingest to thy Pagan ways, which I sadly fear,

I beseech thee, remain not for aye a Belial bondsman.

Spurn the idol Bell, and the hideous dragon; turn from the wrath

to come; mind thine eye, I say; oh! goodness gracious! steer

clear of the fiery pit!"



Something of the salt sea yet lingered in old Bildad's language,

heterogeneously mixed with Scriptural and domestic phrases.



"Avast there, avast there, Bildad, avast now spoiling our harpooneer,

cried Peleg.  "Pious harpooneers never make good voyagers--

it takes the shark out of 'em; no harpooneer is worth a straw

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

forward dedication of that glance.  Not a word he spoke;

nor did his officers say aught to him; though by all their

minutest gestures and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy,

if not painful, consciousness of being under a troubled

master-eye. And not only that, but moody stricken Ahab stood

before them with a crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless

regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.



Ere long, from his first visit in the air, he withdrew into his cabin.

But after that morning, he was every day visible to the crew;

either standing in his pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory stool he had;

or heavily walking the deck.  As the sky grew less gloomy; indeed, began

to grow a little genial, he became still less and less a recluse;

as if, when the ship had sailed from home, nothing but the dead wintry

bleakness of the sea had then kept him so secluded.  And, by and by,

it came to pass, that he was almost continually in the air;

but, as yet, for all that he said, or perceptibly did, on the at

last sunny deck, he seemed as unnecessary there as another mast.

But the Pequod was only making a passage now; not regularly cruising;

nearly all whaling preparatives needing supervision the mates were fully

competent to, so that there was little or nothing, out of himself,

to employ or excite Ahab, now; and thus chase away, for that one interval,

the clouds that layer upon layer were piled upon his brow, as ever

all clouds choose the loftiest peaks to pile themselves upon.



Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling persuasiveness of the pleasant,

holiday weather we came to, seemed gradually to charm him from his mood.

For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home

to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest, most

thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts,

to welcome such gladhearted visitants; so Ahab did, in the end,

a little respond to the playful allurings of that girlish air.

More than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any

other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile.







CHAPTER 29



Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb







Some days elapsed, and ice and icebergs all astern, the Pequod

now went rolling through the bright Quito spring, which at sea,

almost perpetually reigns on the threshold of the eternal August

of the Tropic.  The warmly cool, clear, ringing perfumed, overflowing,

redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up--

flaked up, with rose-water snow.  The starred and stately nights seemed

haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride,

the memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns!

For sleeping man, 'twas hard to choose between such winsome days and

such seducing nights.  But all the witcheries of that unwaning weather

did not merely lend new spells and potencies to the outward world.

Inward they turned upon the soul, especially when the still mild

hours of eve came on; then, memory shot her crystals as the clear ice

most forms of noiseless twilights.  And all these subtle agencies,

more and more they wrought on Ahab's texture.



Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life,

the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.

Among sea-commanders, the old greybeards will oftenest

leave their berths to visit the night-cloaked deck.

It was so with Ahab; only that now, of late, he seemed so much

to live in the open air, that truly speaking, his visits

were more to the cabin, than from the cabin to the planks.

"It feels like going down into one's tomb,"--he would mutter

to himself--"for an old captain like me to be descending this

narrow scuttle, to go to my grave-dug berth."



So, almost every twenty-four hours, when the watches of the night

were set, and the band on deck sentinelled the slumbers of the band below;

and when if a rope was to be hauled upon the forecastle, the sailors

flung it not rudely down, as by day, but with some cautiousness dropt it

to its place for fear of disturbing their slumbering shipmates; when this

sort of steady quietude would begin to prevail, habitually, the silent

steersman would watch the cabin-scuttle; and ere long the old man

would emerge, gripping at the iron banister, to help his crippled way.

Some considering touch of humanity was in him; for at times like these,

he usually abstained from patrolling the quarter-deck; because to his

wearied mates, seeking repose within six inches of his ivory heel,

such would have been the reverberating crack and din of that bony step,

that their dreams would have been of the crunching teeth of sharks.

But once, the mood was on him too deep for common regardings;

and as with heavy, lumber-like pace he was measuring the ship from

taffrail to mainmast, Stubb, the old second mate, came up from below,

and with a certain unassured, deprecating humorousness, hinted that if

Captain Ahab was pleased to walk the planks, then, no one could say nay;

but there might be some way of muffling the noise; hinting something

indistinctly and hesitatingly about a globe of tow, and the insertion

into it, of the ivory heel.  Ah!  Stubb, thou didst not know Ahab then.



"Am I a cannon-ball, Stubb," said Ahab, "that thou wouldst

wad me that fashion?  But go thy ways; I had forgot.

Below to thy nightly grave; where such as ye sleep between shrouds,

to use ye to the filling one at last.--Down, dog, and kennel!"



Starting at the unforeseen concluding exclamation of the so suddenly

scornful old man, Stubb was speechless a moment; then said excitedly,

"I am not used to be spoken to that way, sir; I do but less than half

like it, sir."



"Avast! gritted Ahab between his set teeth, and violently moving away,

as if to avoid some passionate temptation.



"No, sir; not yet," said Stubb, emboldened, "I will not tamely

be called a dog, sir."



"Then be called ten times a donkey, and a mule, and an ass,

and begone, or I'll clear the world of thee!"



As he said this, Ahab advanced upon him with such overbearing

terrors in his aspect, that Stubb involuntarily retreated.



"I was never served so before without giving a hard blow for it,"

muttered Stubb, as he found himself descending the cabin-scuttle.

"It's very queer.  Stop, Stubb; somehow, now, I don't well

know whether to go back and strike him, or--what's that?--

down here on my knees and pray for him?  Yes, that was the thought

coming up in me; but it would be the first time I ever did pray.

It's queer; very queer; and he's queer too; aye, take him fore

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since the sperm whale also has a hump though a smaller one.

His oil is not very valuable.  He has baleen.  He is the most gamesome

and light-hearted of all the whales, making more gay foam and white

water generally than any other of them.



BOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER V. ( Razor Back).--Of this whale

little is known but his name.  I have seen him at a distance

off Cape Horn.  Of a retiring nature, he eludes both hunters

and philosophers.  Though no coward, he has never yet shown any

part of him but his back, which rises in a long sharp ridge.

Let him go.  I know little more of him, nor does anybody else.



BOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER VI.  (Sulphur Bottom).--Another retiring

gentleman, with a brimstone belly, doubtless got by scraping along

the Tartarian tiles in some of his profounder divings.  He is seldom seen;

at least I have never seen him except in the remoter southern seas,

and then always at too great a distance to study his countenance.

He is never chased; he would run away with rope-walks of line.

Prodigies are told of him.  Adieu, Sulphur Bottom!  I can say nothing

more that is true of ye, nor can the oldest Nantucketer.



Thus ends BOOK I. (Folio), and now begins BOOK II.  (Octavo).



OCTAVOES.* These embrace the whales of middling magnitude,

among which at present may be numbered:--I., the Grampus; II., the

Black Fish; III., the Narwhale; IV., the Thrasher; V., the Killer.





*Why this book of whales is not denominated the Quarto is very plain.

Because, while the whales of this order, though smaller than those

of the former order, nevertheless retain a proportionate likeness

to them in figure, yet the bookbinder's Quarto volume in its

dimensioned form does not preserve the shape of the Folio volume,

but the Octavo volume does.





BOOK II.  (Octavo), CHAPTER I. (Grampus).--Though this fish,

whose loud sonorous breathing, or rather blowing,

has furnished a proverb to landsmen, is so well known a denizen

of the deep, yet is he not popularly classed among whales.

But possessing all the grand distinctive features of

the leviathan, most naturalists have recognised him for one.

He is of moderate octavo size, varying from fifteen to twenty-five

feet in length, and of corresponding dimensions round the waist.

He swims in herds; he is never regularly hunted, though his

oil is considerable in quantity, and pretty good for light.

By some fishermen his approach is regarded as premonitory

of the advance of the great sperm whale.



BOOK II.  (Octavo), CHAPTER II.  (Black Fish).--I give the popular

fishermen's names for all these fish, for generally they are the best.

Where any name happens to be vague or inexpressive, I shall say so,

and suggest another.  I do so now touching the Black Fish,

so called because blackness is the rule among almost

all whales.  So, call him the Hyena Whale, if you please.

His voracity is well known and from the circumstance

that the inner angles of his lips are curved upwards,

he carries an everlasting Mephistophelean grin on his face.

This whale averages some sixteen or eighteen feet in length.

He is found in almost all latitudes.  He has a peculiar way

of showing his dorsal hooked fin in swimming, which looks

something like a Roman nose.  When not more profitably employed,

the sperm whale hunters sometimes capture the Hyena whale,

to keep up the supply of cheap oil for domestic employment--

as some frugal housekeepers, in the absence of company, and quite

alone by themselves, burn unsavory tallow instead of odorous wax.

Though their blubber is very thin, some of these whales will

yield you upwards of thirty gallons of oil.



BOOK II.  (Octavo), CHAPTER III.  (Narwhale), that is, Nostril whale.--

Another instance of a curiously named whale, so named I suppose

from his peculiar horn being originally mistaken for a peaked nose.

The creature is some sixteen feet in length, while its horn averages

five feet, though some exceed ten, and even attain to fifteen feet.

Strictly speaking, this horn is but a lengthened tusk, growing out

from the jaw in a line a little depressed from the horizontal.

But it is only found on the sinister side, which has an ill effect,

giving its owner something analogous to the aspect of a clumsy

left-handed man.  What precise purpose this ivory horn or lance answers,

it would be hard to say.  It does not seem to be used like the blade

of the sword-fish and bill-fish; though some sailors tell me that

the Narwhale employs it for a rake in turning over the bottom of

the sea for food.  Charley Coffin said it was used for an ice-piercer;

for the Narwhale, rising to the surface of the Polar Sea, and finding

it sheeted with ice, thrusts his horn up, and so breaks through.

But you cannot prove either of these surmises to be correct.

My own opinion is, that however this one-sided horn may really

be used by the Narwhale--however that may be--it would certainly

be very convenient to him for a folder in reading pamphlets.

The Narwhale I have heard called the Tusked whale, the Horned whale,

and the Unicorn whale.  He is certainly a curious example of the

Unicornism to be found in almost every kingdom of animated nature.

From certain cloistered old authors I have gathered that this same

sea-unicorn's horn was in ancient days regarded as the great antidote

against poison, and as such, preparations of it brought immense prices.

It was also distilled to a volatile salts for fainting ladies the same

way that the horns of the male deer are manufactured into hartshorn.

Originally it was in itself accounted an object of great curiosity.

Black Letter tells me that Sir Martin Frobisher on his return from that

voyage, when Queen Bess did gallantly wave her jewelled hand to him from

a window of Greenwich Palace, as his bold ship sailed down the Thames;

"when Sir Martin returned from that voyage," saith Black Letter,

"on bended knees he presented to her highness a prodigious long horn

of the Narwhale, which for a long period after hung in the castle

at Windsor."  An Irish author avers that the Earl of Leicester,

on bended knees, did likewise present to her highness another horn,

pertaining to a land beast of the unicorn nature.



The Narwhale has a very picturesque, leopard-like look, being of a

milk-white ground color, dotted with round and oblong spots of black.

His oil is very superior, clear and fine; but there is little of it,

and he is seldom hunted.  He is mostly found in the circumpolar seas.



BOOK II.  (Octavo), CHAPTER IV.  (Killer).--Of this whale

little is precisely known to the Nantucketer, and nothing

at all to the professed naturalists.  From what I have seen

of him at a distance, I should say that he was about the bigness

of a grampus.  He is very savage--a sort of Feegee fish.

He sometimes takes the great Folio whales by the lip, and hangs

there like a leech, till the mighty brute is worried to death.

The Killer is never hunted.  I never heard what sort of oil he has.

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While yet the wondering ship's company were gazing upon these strangers,

Ahab cried out to the white-turbaned old man at their head,

"All ready there, Fedallah?"



"Ready," was the half-hissed reply.



"Lower away then; d'ye hear?" shouting across the deck.

"Lower away there, I say."



Such was the thunder of his voice, that spite of their

amazement the men sprang over the rail; the sheaves whirled

round in the blocks; with a wallow, the three boats dropped

into the sea; while, with a dexterous, off-handed daring,

unknown in any other vocation, the sailors, goat-like, leaped

down the rolling ship's side into the tossed boats below.



Hardly had they pulled out from under the ship's lee, when a fourth keel,

coming from the windward side, pulled round under the stern,

and showed the five strangers rowing Ahab, who, standing erect

in the stern, loudly hailed Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, to spread

themselves widely, so as to cover a large expanse of water.

But with all their eyes again riveted upon the swart Fedallah and

his crew, the inmates of the other boats obeyed not the command.



"Captain Ahab?-" said Starbuck.



"Spread yourselves," cried Ahab; "give way, all four boats.

Thou, Flask, pull out more to leeward!"



"Aye, aye, sir," cheerily cried little King-Post, sweeping round his

great steering oar.  "Lay back!" addressing his crew.  "There!--there!--

there again!  There she blows right ahead, boys!--lay back!



"Never heed yonder yellow boys, Archy."



"Oh, I don't mind'em, sir," said Archy; "I knew it all before now.

Didn't I hear 'em in the hold?  And didn't I tell Cabaco here of it?

What say ye, Cabaco?  They are stowaways, Mr. Flask."



"Pull, pull, my fine hearts-alive; pull, my children;

pull, my little ones," drawlingly and soothingly sighed Stubb

to his crew, some of whom still showed signs of uneasiness.

"Why don't you break your backbones, my boys?  What is it you stare at?

Those chaps in yonder boat?  Tut!  They are only five more hands

come to help us never mind from where the more the merrier.

Pull, then, do pull; never mind the brimstone devils are good

fellows enough.  So, so; there you are now; that's the stroke

for a thousand pounds; that's the stroke to sweep the stakes!

Hurrah for the gold cup of sperm oil, my heroes!

Three cheers, men--all hearts alive!  Easy, easy; don't be in a hurry--

don't be in a hurry.  Why don't you snap your oars, you rascals?

Bite something, you dogs!  So, so, so, then:--softly, softly!

That's it--that's it! long and strong.  Give way there, give way!

The devil fetch ye, ye ragamuffin rapscallions; ye are all asleep.

Stop snoring, ye sleepers, and pull.  Pull, will ye? pull,

can't ye? pull, won't ye?  Why in the name of gudgeons and

ginger-cakes don't ye pull?--pull and break something! pull,

and start your eyes out!  Here," whipping out the sharp knife

from his girdle; "every mother's son of ye draw his knife,

and pull with the blade between his teeth.  That's it--that's it.

Now ye do something; that looks like it, my steel-bits. Start her--

start her, my silverspoons!  Start her, marling-spikes!"



Stubb's exordium to his crew is given here at large,

because he had rather a peculiar way of talking to them in general,

and especially in inculcating the religion of rowing.

But you must not suppose from this specimen of his sermonizings

that he ever flew into downright passions with his congregation.

Not at all; and therein consisted his chief peculiarity.

He would say the most terrific things to his crew, in a tone

so strangely compounded of fun and fury, and the fury seemed

so calculated merely as a spice to the fun, that no oarsman

could hear such queer invocations without pulling for

dear life, and yet pulling for the mere joke of the thing.

Besides he all the time looked so easy and indolent himself,

so loungingly managed his steering-oar, and so broadly gaped--

open-mouthed at times--that the mere sight of such a yawning commander,

by sheer force of contrast, acted like a charm upon the crew.

Then again, Stubb was one of those odd sort of humorists,

whose jollity is sometimes so curiously ambiguous, as to put

all inferiors on their guard in the matter of obeying them.



In obedience to a sign from Ahab, Starbuck was now pulling obliquely

across Stubb's bow; and when for a minute or so the two boats were

pretty near to each other, Stubb hailed the mate.



"Mr. Starbuck! larboard boat there, ahoy! a word with ye, sir,

if ye please!"



"Halloa!" returned Starbuck, turning round not a single inch

as he spoke; still earnestly but whisperingly urging his crew;

his face set like a flint from Stubb's.



"What think ye of those yellow boys, sir!



"Smuggled on board, somehow, before the ship sailed.

(Strong, strong, boys!)" in a whisper to his crew,

then speaking out loud again:  "A sad business, Mr. Stubb!

(seethe her, seethe her, my lads!) but never mind, Mr. Stubb,

all for the best.  Let all your crew pull strong, come what will.

(Spring, my men, spring!) There's hogsheads of sperm ahead,

Mr. Stubb, and that's what ye came for.  (Pull, my boys!)

Sperm, sperm's the play!  This at least is duty; duty and profit

hand in hand."



"Aye, aye, I thought as much," soliloquized Stubb, when the

boats diverged, "as soon as I clapt eye on 'em, I thought so.

Aye, and that's what he went into the after hold for, so often,

as Dough-Boy long suspected.  They were hidden down there.

The White Whale's at the bottom of it.  Well, well, so be it!

Can't be helped!  All right!  Give way men!  It ain't the White Whale

to-day! Give way!"



Now the advent of these outlandish strangers at such a critical

instant as the lowering of the boats from the deck, this had not

unreasonably awakened a sort of superstitious amazement in some of

the ship's company; but Archy's fancied discovery having some time

previous got abroad among them, though indeed not credited then,

this had in some small measure prepared them for the event.

It took off the extreme edge of their wonder; and so what with all

this and Stubb's confident way of accounting for their appearance,

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the boat and the ship, and down between this was the sea.

Steelkilt calculated his time, and found that his next trick

at the helm would come round at two o'clock, in the morning

of the third day from that in which he had been betrayed.

At his leisure, he employed the interval in braiding something

very carefully in his watches below.



"'What are you making there?' said a shipmate.



"'What do you think? what does it look like?'



"'Like a lanyard for your bag; but it's an odd one, seems to me.'



'Yes, rather oddish,' said the Lakeman, holding it at arm's length

before him; 'but I think it will answer.  Shipmate, I haven't

enough twine,--have you any?'



"But there was none in the forecastle.



"'Then I must get some from old Rad;' and he rose to go aft.



"'You don't mean to go a begging to him!' said a sailor.



"'Why not?  Do you think he won't do me a turn, when it's

to help himself in the end, shipmate?' and going to the mate,

he looked at him quietly, and asked him for some twine to mend

his hammock.  It was given him--neither twine nor lanyard were

seen again; but the next night an iron ball, closely netted,

partly rolled from the pocket of the Lakeman's monkey jacket,

as he was tucking the coat into his hammock for a pillow.

Twenty-four hours after, his trick at the silent helm--

nigh to the man who was apt to doze over the grave always ready

dug to the seaman's hand--that fatal hour was then to come;

and in the fore-ordaining soul of Steelkilt, the mate was already

stark and stretched as a corpse, with his forehead crushed in.



"But, gentlemen, a fool saved the would-be murderer from

the bloody deed he had planned.  Yet complete revenge he had,

and without being the avenger.  For by a mysterious fatality,

Heaven itself seemed to step in to take out of his hands into

its own the damning thing he would have done.



"It was just between daybreak and sunrise of the morning

of the second day, when they were washing down the decks,

that a stupid Teneriffe man, drawing water in the main-chains,

all at once shouted out, 'There she rolls! there she rolls!'

Jesu, what a whale!  It was Moby Dick.



"'Moby Dick!' cried Don Sebastian; 'St. Dominic!  Sir sailor,

but do whales have christenings?  Whom call you Moby Dick?'



"'A very white, and famous, and most deadly immortal monster, Don;--

but that would be too long a story.'



"'How? how?' cried all the young Spaniards, crowding.



"'Nay, Dons, Dons--nay, nay!  I cannot rehearse that now.

Let me get more into the air, Sirs.'



"'The chicha! the chicha!' cried Don Pedro; 'our vigorous friend

looks faint;--fill up his empty glass!'



"No need, gentlemen; one moment, and I proceed.--Now, gentlemen,

so suddenly perceiving the snowy whale within fifty yards of the ship--

forgetful of the compact among the crew--in the excitement of the moment,

the Teneriffe man had instinctively and involuntarily lifted his voice

for the monster, though for some little time past it had been plainly

beheld from the three sullen mast-heads. All was now a phrensy.

'The White Whale--the White Whale!' was the cry from captain,

mates, and harpooneers, who, undeterred by fearful rumours,

were all anxious to capture so famous and precious a fish;

while the dogged crew eyed askance, and with curses, the appalling beauty

of the vast milky mass, that lit up by a horizontal spangling sun,

shifted and glistened like a living opal in the blue morning sea.

Gentlemen, a strange fatality pervades the whole career of these events,

as if verily mapped out before the world itself was charted.

The mutineer was the bowsman of the mate, and when fast to a fish,

it was his duty to sit next him, while Radney stood up with his lance

in the prow, and haul in or slacken the line, at the word of command.

Moreover, when the four boats were lowered, the mate's got the start;

and none howled more fiercely with delight than did Steelkilt,

as he strained at his oar.  After a stiff pull, their harpooneer

got fast, and, spear in hand, Radney sprang to the bow.

He was always a furious man, it seems, in a boat.  And now his

bandaged cry was, to beach him on the whale's topmost back.

Nothing loath, his bowsman hauled him up and up, through a blinding

foam that blent two whitenesses together; till of a sudden the boat

struck as against a sunken ledge, and keeling over, spilled out the

standing mate.  That instant, as he fell on the whale's slippery back,

the boat righted, and was dashed aside by the swell, while Radney

was tossed over into the sea, on the other flank of the whale.

He struck out through the spray, and, for an instant, was dimly seen

through that veil, wildly seeking to remove himself from the eye

of Moby Dick.  But the whale rushed round in a sudden maelstrom;

seized the swimmer between his jaws; and rearing high up with him,

plunged headlong again, and went down.



"Meantime, at the first tap of the boat's bottom, the Lakeman

had slackened the line, so as to drop astern from the whirlpool;

calmly looking on, he thought his own thoughts.  But a sudden, terrific,

downward jerking of the boat, quickly brought his knife to the line.

He cut it; and the whale was free.  But, at some distance,

Moby Dick rose again, with some tatters of Radney's red

woollen shirt, caught in the teeth that had destroyed him.

All four boats gave chase again; but the whale eluded them,

and finally wholly disappeared.



"In good time, the Town-Ho reached her port--a savage, solitary place--

where no civilized creature resided.  There, headed by the Lakeman,

all but five or six of the foremastmen deliberately deserted among

the palms; eventually, as it turned out, seizing a large double

war-canoe of the savages, and setting sail for some other harbor.



"The ship's company being reduced to but a handful, the captain called

upon the Islanders to assist him in the laborious business of heaving

down the ship to stop the leak.  But to such unresting vigilance over

their dangerous allies was this small band of whites necessitated,

both by night and by day, and so extreme was the hard work they underwent,

that upon the vessel being ready again for sea, they were in such

a weakened condition that the captain durst not put off with them

in so heavy a vessel.  After taking counsel with his officers,

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to another; 'I fear our sailor friend runs risks of the archiepiscopacy.

Let us withdraw more out of the moonlight.  I see no need of this.'



"'Excuse me for running after you, Don Sebastian; but may I

also beg that you will be particular in procuring the largest

sized Evangelists you can.'





'This is the priest, he brings you the Evangelists,' said Don Sebastian,

gravely, returning with a tall and solemn figure.



"'Let me remove my hat.  Now, venerable priest, further into the light,

and hold the Holy Book before me that I may touch it.



"'So help me Heaven, and on my honor the story I have

told ye, gentlemen, is in substance and its great items, true.

I know it to be true; it happened on this ball; I trod the ship;

I knew the crew; I have seen and talked with Steelkilt since

the death of Radney."







CHAPTER 55



Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales





I shall ere long paint to you as well as one can without canvas,

something like the true form of the whale as he actually appears

to the eye of the whaleman when in his own absolute body the whale

is moored alongside the whaleship so that he can be fairly stepped

upon there.  It may be worth while, therefore, previously to advert

to those curious imaginary portraits of him which even down to

the present day confidently challenge the faith of the landsman.

It is time to set the world right in this matter, by proving such

pictures of the whale all wrong.



It may be that the primal source of all those pictorial delusions will

be found among the oldest Hindoo, Egyptian, and Grecian sculptures.

For ever since those inventive but unscrupulous times when on the marble

panellings of temples, the pedestals of statues, and on shields,

medallions, cups, and coins, the dolphin was drawn in scales of

chain-armor like Saladin's, and a helmeted head like St. George's;

ever since then has something of the same sort of license prevailed,

not only in most popular pictures of the whale, but in many scientific

presentations of him.



Now, by all odds, the most ancient extant portrait anyways

purporting to be the whale's, is to be found in the famous

cavern-pagoda of Elephants, in India.  The Brahmins maintain

that in the almost endless sculptures of that immemorial pagoda,

all the trades and pursuits, every conceivable avocation of man,

were prefigured ages before any of them actually came into being.

No wonder then, that in some sort our noble profession

of whaling should have been there shadowed forth.  The Hindoo

whale referred to, occurs in a separate department of the wall,

depicting the incarnation of Vishnu in the form of leviathan,

learnedly known as the Matse Avatar.  But though this sculpture

is half man and half whale, so as only to give the tail

of the latter, yet that small section of him is all wrong.

It looks more like the tapering tail of an anaconda,

than the broad palms of the true whale's majestic flukes.



But go to the old Galleries, and look now at a great Christian

painter's portrait of this fish; for he succeeds no better

than the antediluvian Hindoo.  It is Guido's picture of

Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the sea-monster or whale.

Where did Guido get the model of such a strange creature as that?

Nor does Hogarth, in painting the same scene in his own

"Perseus Descending," make out one whit better.  The huge

corpulence of that Hogarthian monster undulates on the surface,

scarcely drawing one inch of water.  It has a sort of howdah on

its back, and its distended tusked mouth into which the billows

are rolling, might be taken for the Traitors' Gate leading from

the Thames by water into the Tower.  Then, there are the Prodromus

whales of the old Scotch Sibbald, and Jonah's whale, as depicted

in the prints of old Bibles and the cuts of old primers.

What shall be said of these?  As for the book-binder's whale

winding like a vine-stalk round the stock of a descending anchor--

as stamped and gilded on the backs and titlepages of many

books both old and new--that is a very picturesque but purely

fabulous creature, imitated, I take it, from the like figures

on antique vases.  Though universally denominated a dolphin,

I nevertheless call this book-binder's fish an attempt at a whale;

because it was so intended when the device was first introduced.

It was introduced by an old Italian publisher somewhere

about the 15th century, during the Revival of Learning;

and in those days, and even down to a comparatively late period,

dolphins were popularly supposed to be a species of the Leviathan.



In the vignettes and other embellishments of some ancient books

you will at times meet with very curious touches at the whale,

where all manner of spouts, jets d'eau, hot springs and cold,

Saratoga and Baden-Baden, come bubbling up from his unexhausted brain.

In the title-page of the original edition of the "Advancement of Learning"

you will find some curious whales.



But quitting all these unprofessional attempts, let us glance at those

pictures of leviathan purporting to be sober, scientific delineations,

by those who know.  In old Harris's collection of voyages there

are some plates of whales extracted from a Dutch book of voyages,

A.D. 1671, entitled "A Whaling Voyage to Spitzbergen in the ship Jonas

in the Whale, Peter Peterson of Friesland, master."  In one of those

plates the whales, like great rafts of logs, are represented lying

among ice-isles, with white bears running over their living backs.

In another plate, the prodigious blunder is made of representing

the whale with perpendicular flukes.



Then again, there is an imposing quarto, written by one Captain Colnett,

a Post Captain in the English navy, entitled "A Voyage round

Cape Horn into the South Seas, for the purpose of extending

the Spermaceti Whale Fisheries."  In this book is an outline

purporting to be a "Picture of a Physeter or Spermaceti whale,

drawn by scale from one killed on the coast of Mexico, August, 1793,

and hoisted on deck."  I doubt not the captain had this veracious

picture taken for the benefit of his marines.  To mention but one

thing about it, let me say that it has an eye which applied,

according to the accompanying scale, to a full grown sperm whale,

would make the eye of that whale a bow-window some five feet long.

Ah, my gallant captain, why did ye not give us Jonah looking

out of that eye!



Nor are the most conscientious compilations of Natural History

for the benefit of the young and tender, free from the same

heinousness of mistake.  Look at that popular work

"Goldsmith's Animated Nature."  In the abridged London edition

of 1807, there are plates of an alleged "whale" and a "narwhale."

I do not wish to seem inelegant, but this unsightly whale

looks much like an amputated sow; and, as for the narwhale,

one glimpse at it is enough to amaze one, that in this nineteenth

century such a hippogriff could be palmed for genuine upon

any intelligent public of schoolboys.



Then, again, in 1825, Bernard Germain, Count de Lacepede,

a great naturalist, published a scientific systemized whale book,

wherein are several pictures of the different species of

the Leviathan.  All these are not only incorrect, but the picture

of the Mysticetus or Greenland whale (that is to say the Right

whale), even Scoresby, a long experienced man as touching

that species, declares not to have its counterpart in nature.



But the placing of the cap-sheaf to all this blundering business

was reserved for the scientific Frederick Cuvier, brother to the

famous Baron.  In 1836, he published a Natural History of Whales,

in which he gives what he calls a picture of the Sperm Whale.

Before showing that picture to any Nantucketer, you had best

provide for your summary retreat from Nantucket.  In a word,

Frederick Cuvier's Sperm Whale is not a Sperm Whale, but a squash.

Of course, he never had the benefit of a whaling voyage (such men

seldom have), but whence he derived that picture, who can tell?

Perhaps he got it as his scientific predecessor in the same field,

Desmarest, got one of his authentic abortions; that is, from a

Chinese drawing.  And what sort of lively lads with the pencil

those Chinese are, many queer cups and saucers inform us.



As for the sign-painters' whales seen in the streets hanging

over the shops of oil-dealers, what shall be said of them?

They are generally Richard III.  whales, with dromedary humps,

and very savage; breakfasting on three or four sailor tarts,

that is whaleboats full of mariners:  their deformities

floundering in seas of blood and blue paint.



But these manifold mistakes in depicting the whale are not so very

surprising after all.  Consider!  Most of the scientific drawings have

been taken from the stranded fish; and these are about as correct as a

drawing of a wrecked ship, with broken back, would correctly represent

the noble animal itself in all its undashed pride of hull and spars.

Though elephants have stood for their full-lengths, the living

Leviathan has never yet fairly floated himself for his portrait.

The living whale, in his full majesty and significance, is only

to be seen at sea in unfathomable waters; and afloat the vast

bulk of him is out of sight, like a launched line-of-battle ship;

and out of that element it is a thing eternally impossible for mortal

man to hoist him bodily into the air, so as to preserve all his mighty

swells and undulations.  And, not to speak of the highly presumable

difference of contour between a young suckling whale and a full-grown

Platonian Leviathan; yet, even in the case of one of those young

sucking whales hoisted to a ship's deck, such is then the outlandish,

eel-like, limbered, varying shape of him, that his precise expression

the devil himself could not catch.



But it may be fancied, that from the naked skeleton of the stranded whale,

accurate hints may be derived touching his true form.  Not at all.

For it is one of the more curious things about this Leviathan,

that his skeleton gives very little idea of his general shape.

Though Jeremy Bentham's skeleton, which hangs for candelabra

in the library of one of his executors, correctly conveys the idea

of a burly-browed utilitarian old gentleman, with all Jeremy's

other leading personal characteristics; yet nothing of this

kind could be inferred from any leviathan's articulated bones.

In fact, as the great Hunter says, the mere skeleton of the whale

bears the same relation to the fully invested and padded animal

as the insect does to the chrysalis that so roundingly envelopes it.

This peculiarity is strikingly evinced in the head, as in some part

of this book will be incidentally shown.  It is also very curiously

displayed in the side fin, the bones of which almost exactly answer

to the bones of the human hand, minus only the thumb.  This fin has

four regular bone-fingers, the index, middle, ring, and little finger.

But all these are permanently lodged in their fleshy covering,

as the human fingers in an artificial covering.  "However recklessly

the whale may sometimes serve us," said humorous Stubb one day,

"he can never be truly said to handle us without mittens."



For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it,

you must needs conclude that the great Leviathan is that one

creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last.

True, one portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another,

but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness.

So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what

the whale really looks like.  And the only mode in which you

can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour,

is by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run

no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him.

Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious

in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.







CHAPTER 56



Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales and the True Pictures

of Whaling Scenes





In connexion with the monstrous pictures of whales, I am strongly

tempted here to enter upon those still more monstrous stories of them

which are to be found in certain books, both ancient and modern,

especially in Pliny, Purchas, Hackluyt, Harris, Cuvier, &c. But I

pass that matter by.



I know of only four published outlines of the great

Sperm Whale; Colnett's, Huggins's, Frederick Cuvier's, and Beale's. In

the previous chapter Colnett and Cuvier have been referred to.

Huggins's is far better than theirs; but, by great odds,

Beale's is the best.  All Beale's drawings of this whale

are good, excepting the middle figure in the picture of three

whales in various attitudes, capping his second chapter.

His frontispiece, boats attacking Sperm Whales, though no doubt

calculated to excite the civil scepticism of some parlor men,

is admirably correct and life-like in its general effect.

Some of the Sperm Whale drawings in J. Ross Browne are pretty

correct in contour; but they are wretchedly engraved.

That is not his fault though.



Of the Right Whale, the best outline pictures are in Scoresby;

but they are drawn on too small a scale to convey a desirable impression.

He has but one picture of whaling scenes, and this is a sad deficiency,

because it is by such pictures only, when at all well done, that you

can derive anything like a truthful idea of the living whale as seen

by his living hunters.



But, taken for all in all, by far the finest, though in

some details not the most correct, presentations of whales

and whaling scenes to be anywhere found, are two large

French engravings, well executed, and taken from paintings by

one Garnery.  Respectively, they represent attacks on the Sperm

and Right Whale.  In the first engraving a noble Sperm Whale

is depicted in full majesty of might, just risen beneath the boat

from the profundities of the ocean, and bearing high in the.

air upon his back the terrific wreck of the stoven planks.

The prow of the boat is partially unbroken, and is drawn just

balancing upon the monster's spine; and standing in that prow,

for that one single incomputable flash of time, you behold

an oarsman, half shrouded by the incensed boiling spout of

the whale, and in the act of leaping, as if from a precipice.

The action of the whole thing is wonderfully good and true.

The half-emptied line-tub floats on the whitened sea;

the wooden poles of the spilled harpoons obliquely bob in it;

the heads of the swimming crew are scattered about the whale

in contrasting expressions of affright; while in the black

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CHAPTER 60



The Line





With reference to the whaling scene shortly to be described,

as well as for the better understanding of all similar scenes

elsewhere presented, I have here to speak of the magical,

sometimes horrible whale-line.



The line originally used in the fishery was of the best hemp,

slightly vapored with tar, not impregnated with it, as in

the case of ordinary ropes; for while tar, as ordinarily used,

makes the hemp more pliable to the rope-maker, and also renders

the rope itself more convenient to the sailor for common

ship use; yet, not only would the ordinary quantity too much

stiffen the whale-line for the close coiling to which it must

be subjected; but as most seamen are beginning to learn, tar in

general by no means adds to the rope's durability or strength,

however much it may give it compactness and gloss.



Of late years the Manilla rope has in the American fishery almost

entirely superseded hemp as a material for whale-lines; for, though not

so durable as hemp, it is stronger, and far more soft and elastic;

and I will add (since there is an aesthetics in all things),

is much more handsome and becoming to the boat, than hemp.

Hemp is a dusky, dark fellow, a sort of Indian; but Manilla

is as a golden-haired Circassian to behold.



The whale-line is only two thirds of an inch in thickness.

At first sight, you would not think it so strong as it really is.

By experiment its one and fifty yarns will each suspend a weight

of one hundred and twenty pounds; so that the whole rope will

bear a strain nearly equal to three tons.  In length, the common

sperm whale-line measures something over two hundred fathoms.

Towards the stern of the boat it is spirally coiled away in the tub,

not like the worm-pipe of a still though, but so as to form one round,

cheese-shaped mass of densely bedded "sheaves," or layers of

concentric spiralizations, without any hollow but the "heart,"

or minute vertical tube formed at the axis of the cheese.

As the least tangle or kink in the coiling would, in running out,

infallibly take somebody's arm, leg, or entire body off,

the utmost precaution is used in stowing the line in its tub.

Some harpooneers will consume almost an entire morning in this business,

carrying the line high aloft and then reeving it downwards through

a block towards the tub, so as in the act of coiling to free it

from all possible wrinkles and twists.



In the English boats two tubs are used instead of one;

the same line being continuously coiled in both tubs.

There is some advantage in this; because these twin-tubs

being so small they fit more readily into the boat,

and do not strain it so much; whereas, the American tub,

nearly three feet in diameter and of proportionate depth,

makes a rather bulky freight for a craft whose planks are but

one-half inch in thickness; for the bottom of the whale-boat

is like critical ice, which will bear up a considerable

distributed weight, but not very much of a concentrated one.

When the painted canvas cover is clapped on the american line-tub,

the boat looks as if it were pulling off with a prodigious

great wedding-cake to present to the whales.



Both ends of the line are exposed; the lower end terminating

in an eye-splice or loop coming up from the bottom against

the side of the tub, and hanging over its edge completely

disengaged from everything.  This arrangement of the lower end

is necessary on two accounts.  First:  In order to facilitate

the fastening to it of an additional line from a neighboring boat,

in case the stricken whale should sound so deep as to threaten

to carry off the entire line originally attached to the harpoon.

In these instances, the whale of course is shifted like a mug of ale,

as it were, from the one boat to the other; though the first boat

always hovers at hand to assist its consort.  Second:  This arrangement

is indispensable for common safety's sake; for were the lower

end of the line in any way attached to the boat, and were

the whale then to run the line out to the end almost in a single,

smoking minute as he sometimes does, he would not stop there,

for the doomed boat would infallibly be dragged down after him

into the profundity of the sea; and in that case no town-crier

would ever find her again.



Before lowering the boat for the chase, the upper end of the line

is taken aft from the tub, and passing round the loggerhead there,

is again carried forward the entire length of the boat,

resting crosswise upon the loom or handle of every man's oar,

so that it jogs against his wrist in rowing; and also passing

between the men, as they alternately sit at the opposite gunwales,

to the leaded chocks or grooves in the extreme pointed prow of

the boat, where a wooden pin or skewer the size of a common quill,

prevents it from slipping out.  From the chocks it hangs in a slight

festoon over the bows, and is then passed inside the boat again;

and some ten or twenty fathoms (called box-line) being coiled upon

the box in the bows, it continues its way to the gunwale still

a little further aft, and is then attached to the short-warp--

the rope which is immediately connected with the harpoon;

but previous to that connexion, the short-warp goes through sundry

mystifications too tedious to detail.



Thus the whale-line folds the whole boat in its complicated coils,

twisting and writhing around it in almost every direction.

All the oarsmen are involved in its perilous contortions;

so that to the timid eye of the landsman, they seem as Indian jugglers,

with the deadliest snakes sportively festooning their limbs.

Nor can any son of mortal woman, for the first time, seat himself amid

those hempen intricacies, and while straining his utmost at the oar,

bethink him that at any unknown instant the harpoon may be darted,

and all these horrible contortions be put in play like ringed lightnings;

he cannot be thus circumstanced without a shudder that makes

the very marrow in his bones to quiver in him like a shaken jelly.

Yet habit--strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?--Gayer sallies,

more merry mirth, better jokes, and brighter repartees, you never

heard over your mahogany, than you will hear over the half-inch

white cedar of the whaleboat, when thus hung in hangman's nooses;

and, like the six burghers of Calais before King Edward, the six

men composing the crew pull into the jaws of death, with a halter

around every neck, as you may say.



Perhaps a very little thought will now enable you to account

for those repeated whaling disasters--some few of which are

casually chronicled--of this man or that man being taken out of

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this seems so outlandish a thing that one must needs go a little

into the history and philosophy of it.



It is upon record, that three centuries ago the tongue of the Right Whale

was esteemed a great delicacy in France, and commanded large

prices there.  Also, that in Henry VIIIth's time, a certain cook of

the court obtained a handsome reward for inventing an admirable sauce

to be eaten with barbacued porpoises, which, you remember, are a species

of whale.  Porpoises, indeed, are to this day considered fine eating.

The meat is made into balls about the size of billiard balls,

and being well seasoned and spiced might be taken for turtle-balls

or veal balls.  The old monks of Dunfermline were very fond of them.

They had a great porpoise grant from the crown.



The fact is, that among his hunters at least, the whale would

by all hands be considered a noble dish, were there not so much

of him; but when you come to sit down before a meat-pie

nearly one hundred feet long, it takes away your appetite.

Only the most unprejudiced of men like Stubb, nowadays partake

of cooked whales; but the Esquimaux are not so fastidious.

We all know how they live upon whales, and have rare old vintages

of prime old train oil.  Zogranda, one of their most famous doctors,

recommends strips of blubber for infants, as being exceedingly

juicy and nourishing.  And this reminds me that certain Englishmen,

who long ago were accidentally left in Greenland by a whaling vessel--

that these men actually lived for several months on the mouldy

scraps of whales which had been left ashore after trying

out the blubber.  Among the Dutch whalemen these scraps

are called "fritters"; which, indeed, they greatly resemble,

being brown and crisp, and smelling something like old

Amsterdam housewives' dough-nuts or oly-cooks, when fresh.

They have such an eatable look that the most self-denying

stranger can hardly keep his hands off.



But what further depreciates the whale as a civilized dish,

is his exceeding richness.  He is the great prize ox of the sea,

too fat to be delicately good.  Look at his hump, which would

be as fine eating as the buffalo's (which is esteemed

a rare dish), were it not such a solid pyramid of fat.

But the spermaceti itself, how bland and creamy that is;

like the transparent, half jellied, white meat of a cocoanut

in the third month of its growth, yet far too rich to supply

a substitute for butter.  Nevertheless, many whalemen

have a method of absorbing it into some other substance,

and then partaking of it.  In the long try watches of the night

it is a common thing for the seamen to dip their ship-biscuit

into the huge oil-pots and let them fry there awhile.

Many a good supper have I thus made.



In the case of a small Sperm Whale the brains are accounted a fine dish.

The casket of the skull is broken into with an axe, and the two plump,

whitish lobes being withdrawn (precisely resembling two large puddings),

they are then mixed with flour, and cooked into a most delectable mess,

in flavor somewhat resembling calves' head, which is quite a dish

among some epicures; and every one knows that some young bucks among

the epicures, by continually dining upon calves' brains, by and by get to

have a little brains of their own, so as to be able to tell a calf's head

from their own heads; which, indeed, requires uncommon discrimination.

And that is the reason why a young buck with an intelligent looking calf's

head before him, is somehow one of the saddest sights you can see.

The head looks a sort of reproachfully at him, with an "Et

tu Brute!" expression.



It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively

unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him

with abhorrence; that appears to result, in some way,

from the consideration before mentioned:  i.e. that a man

should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea, and eat it

too by its own light.  But no doubt the first man that ever

murdered an ox was regarded as a murderer; perhaps he was hung;

and if he had been put on his trial by oxen, he certainly would

have been; and he certainly deserved it if any murderer does.

Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds

of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds.

Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal's jaw?

Cannibals? who is not a cannibal?  I tell you it will be more

tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary

in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable

for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgment,

than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest

geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers

in thy pate-de-foie-gras.



But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he? and that is

adding insult to injury, is it?  Look at your knife-handle, there,

my civilized and enlightened gourmand, dining off that roast beef,

what is that handle made of?--what but the bones of the brother

of the very ox you are eating?  And what do you pick your teeth with,

after devouring that fat goose?  With a feather of the same fowl.

And with what quill did the Secretary of the Society for the

Suppression of Cruelty to Ganders formally indite his circulars?

It is only within the last month or two that that society passed

a resolution to patronize nothing but steel pens.







CHAPTER 66



The Shark Massacre





When in the Southern Fishery a captured Sperm Whale, after long

and weary toil, is brought alongside late at night, it is not,

as a general thing at least, customary to proceed at once to the business

of cutting him in.  For that business is an exceedingly laborious one;

is not very soon completed; and requires all hands to set about it.

Therefore, the common usage is to take in all sail; lash the helm a'lee;

and then send every one below to his hammock till daylight,

with the reservation that, until that time, anchor-watches shall be kept;

that is, two and two for an hour, each couple, the crew in rotation

shall mount the deck to see that all goes well.



But sometimes, especially upon the Line in the Pacific,

this plan will not answer at all; because such incalculable

hosts of sharks gather round the moored carcase, that were

he left so for six hours, say, on a stretch, little more than

the skeleton would be visible by morning.  In most other parts

of the ocean, however, where these fish do not so largely abound,

their wondrous voracity can be at times considerably diminished,

by vigorously stirring them up with sharp whaling-spades,

a procedure notwithstanding, which, in some instances,

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But joking aside, though; do you know, Rose-bud, that it's

all nonsense trying to get any oil out of such whales?

As for that dried up one, there, he hasn't a gill in

his whole carcase."



"I know that well enough; but, d'ye see, the Captain here won't believe

it; this is his first voyage; he was a Cologne manufacturer before.

But come aboard, and mayhap he'll believe you, if he won't me;

and so I'll get out of this dirty scrape."



"Anything to oblige ye, my sweet and pleasant fellow,"

rejoined Stubb, and with that he soon mounted to the deck.

There a queer scene presented itself.  The sailors,

in tasselled caps of red worsted, were getting the heavy tackles

in readiness for the whales.  But they worked rather slow

and talked very fast, and seemed in anything but a good humor.

All their noses upwardly projected from their faces like

so many jibbooms.  Now and then pairs of them would drop

their work, and run up to the mast-head to get some fresh air.

Some thinking they would catch the plague, dipped oakum

in coal-tar, and at intervals held it to their nostrils.

Others having broken the stems of their pipes almost short off

at the bowl, were vigorously puffing tobacco-smoke, so that it

constantly filled their olfactories.



Stubb was struck by a shower of outcries and anathemas proceeding

from the Captain's round-house abaft; and looking in that direction

saw a fiery face thrust from behind the door, which was held ajar

from within.  This was the tormented surgeon, who, after in vain

remonstrating against the proceedings of the day, had betaken

himself to the Captain's round-house (cabinet he called it)

to avoid the pest; but still, could not help yelling out his

entreaties and indignations at times.



Marking all this, Stubb argued well for his scheme, and turning to

the Guernsey-man had a little chat with him, during which the stranger

mate expressed his detestation of his Captain as a conceited ignoramus,

who had brought them all into so unsavory and unprofitable a pickle.

Sounding him carefully, Stubb further perceived that the Guernsey-man

had not the slightest suspicion concerning the ambergris.

He therefore held his peace on that head, but otherwise was quite

frank and confidential with him, so that the two quickly concocted

a little plan for both circumventing and satirizing the Captain,

without his at all dreaming of distrusting their sincerity.

According to this little plan of theirs, the Guernsey-man, under cover

of an interpreter's office, was to tell the Captain what he pleased,

but as coming from Stubb; and as for Stubb, he was to utter any nonsense

that should come uppermost in him during the interview.



By this time their destined victim appeared from his cabin.

He was a small and dark, but rather delicate looking man

for a sea-captain, with large whiskers and moustache, however;

and wore a red cotton velvet vest with watch-seals at his side.

To this gentleman, Stubb was now politely introduced by

the Guernsey-man, who at once ostentatiously put on the aspect

of interpreting between them.



"What shall I say to him first?" said he.



"Why," said Stubb, eyeing the velvet vest and the watch and seals,

"you may as well begin by telling him that he looks a sort of babyish

to me, though I don't pretend to be a judge."



"He says, Monsieur," said the Guernsey-man, in French,

turning to his captain, "that only yesterday his ship spoke

a vessel, whose captain and chief-mate, with six sailors,

had all died of a fever caught from a blasted whale they

had brought alongside."



Upon this the captain started, and eagerly desired to know more.



"What now?" said the Guernsey-man to Stubb.



"Why, since he takes it so easy, tell him that now I

have eyed him carefully, I'm quite certain that he's no

more fit to command a whale-ship than a St. Jago monkey.

In fact, tell him from me he's a baboon."



"He vows and declares, Monsieur, that the other whale,

the dried one, is far more deadly than the blasted one;

in fine, Monsieur, he conjures us, as we value our lives,

to cut loose from these fish."



Instantly the captain ran forward, and in a loud voice commanded

his crew to desist from hoisting the cutting-tackles, and at once

cast loose the cables and chains confining the whales to the ship.



"What now?" said the Guernsey-man, when the Captain had returned to them.



"Why, let me see; yes, you may as well tell him now that--that--in fact,

tell him I've diddled him, and (aside to himself) perhaps somebody else."



"He says, Monsieur, that he's very happy to have been of any

service to us."



Hearing this, the captain vowed that they were the grateful parties

(meaning himself and mate), and concluded by inviting Stubb down into

his cabin to drink a bottle of Bordeaux.



"He wants you to take a glass of wine with him," said the interpreter.



"Thank him heartily; but tell him it's against my principles to drink

with the man I've diddled.  In fact, tell him I must go."



"He says, Monsieur, that his principles won't admit of his drinking;

but that if Monsieur wants to live another day to drink, then Monsieur

had best drop all four boats, and pull the ship away from these whales,

for it's so calm they won't drift."



By this time Stubb was over the side, and getting into his boat,

hailed the Guernsey-man to this effect,--that having a long

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

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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;

and, temporarily, Pip was put into his place.



The first time Stubb lowered with him, Pip evinced much nervousness;

but happily, for that time, escaped close contact with the whale;

and therefore came off not altogether discreditably; though Stubb

observing him, took care, afterwards, to exhort him to cherish his

courageousness to the utmost, for he might often find it needful.



Now upon the second lowering, the boat paddled upon the whale;

and as the fish received the darted iron, it gave its customary rap,

which happened, in this instance, to be right under poor Pip's seat.

The involuntary consternation of the moment caused him to leap,

paddle in hand, out of the boat; and in such a way, that part of the slack

whale line coming against his chest, he breasted it overboard with him,

so as to become entangled in it, when at last plumping into the water.

That instant the stricken whale started on a fierce run, the line

swiftly straightened; and presto! poor Pip came all foaming up

to the chocks of the boat, remorselessly dragged there by the line,

which had taken several turns around his chest and neck.



Tashtego stood in the bows.  He was full of the fire of the hunt.

He hated Pip for a poltroon.  Snatching the boat-knife from its sheath,

he suspended its sharp edge over the line, and turning towards Stubb,

exclaimed interrogatively, "Cut?"  Meantime Pip's blue, choked face

plainly looked, Do, for God's sake!  All passed in a flash.

In less than half a minute, this entire thing happened.



"Damn him, cut!" roared Stubb; and so the whale was lost

and Pip was saved.



So soon as he recovered himself, the poor little negro was assailed

by yells and execrations from the crew.  Tranquilly permitting

these irregular cursings to evaporate, Stubb then in a plain,

business-like, but still half humorous manner, cursed Pip officially;

and that done, unofficially gave him much wholesome advice.

The substance was, Never jump from a boat, Pip, except--but all

the rest was indefinite, as the soundest advice ever is.

Now, in general, Stick to the boat, is your true motto in whaling;

but cases will sometimes happen when Leap from the boat, is still better.

Moreover, as if perceiving at last that if he should give undiluted

conscientious advice to Pip, he would be leaving him too wide a margin

to jump in for the future; Stubb suddenly dropped all advice,

and concluded with a peremptory command "Stick to the boat, Pip,

or by the Lord, I won't pick you up if you jump; mind that.

We can't afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell

for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama.  Bear that in mind,

and don't jump any more."  Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted,

that though man loved his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal,

which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.



But we are all in the hands of the Gods; and Pip jumped again.

It was under very similar circumstances to the first performance;

but this time he did not breast out the line; and hence, when the whale

started to run, Pip was left behind on the sea, like a hurried

traveller's trunk.  Alas!  Stubb was but too true to his word.

It was a beautiful, bounteous, blue day! the spangled sea calm

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so far as the Massachusetts calendar, and Bowditch's navigator,

and Daboll's arithmetic go.  Signs and wonders, eh?  Pity if there

is nothing wonderful in signs, and significant in wonders!

There's a clue somewhere; wait a bit; hist--hark!  By Jove, I have it!

Look you, Doubloon, your zodiac here is the life of man in one

round chapter; and now I'll read it off, straight out of the book.

Come, Almanack!  To begin:  there's Aries, or the Ram--

lecherous dog, he begets us; then, Taurus, or the Bull--

he bumps us the first thing; then Gemini, or the Twins--

that is, Virtue and Vice; we try to reach Virtue,

when lo! comes Cancer the Crab, and drags us back; and here,

going from Virtue, Leo, a roaring Lion, lies in the path--

he gives a few fierce bites and surly dabs with his paw;

we escape, and hail Virgo, the Virgin! that's our first love;

we marry and think to be happy for aye, when pop comes Libra,

or the Scales--happiness weighed and found wanting; and while we

are very sad about that, Lord! how we suddenly jump, as Scorpio,

or the Scorpion, stings us in the rear; we are curing the wound,

when whang comes the arrows all round; Sagittarius, or the Archer,

is amusing himself.  As we pluck out the shafts, stand aside!

here's the battering-ram, Capricornus, or the Goat; full tilt,

he comes rushing, and headlong we are tossed; when Aquarius,

or the Waterbearer, pours out his whole deluge and drowns us;

and to wind up with Pisces, or the Fishes, we sleep.

There's a sermon now, writ in high heaven, and the sun goes through

it every year, and yet comes out of it all alive and hearty.

Jollily he, aloft there, wheels through toil and trouble; and so,

alow here, does jolly Stubb.  Oh, jolly's the word for aye!

Adieu, Doubloon!  But stop; here comes little King-Post;

dodge round the try-works, now, and let's hear what he'll have

to say.  There; he's before it; he'll out with something presently.

So, so; he's beginning."



"I see nothing here, but a round thing made of gold, and whoever raises

a certain whale, this round thing belongs to him.  So, what's all

this staring been about?  It is worth sixteen dollars, that's true;

and at two cents the cigar, that's nine hundred and sixty cigars.

I won't smoke dirty pipes like Stubb, but I like cigars, and here's nine

hundred and sixty of them; so here goes Flask aloft to spy 'em out."



"Shall I call that Wise or foolish, now; if it be really wise it has

a foolish look to it; yet, if it be really foolish, then has it a sort

of wiseish look to it.  But, avast; here comes our old Manxman--the old

hearse-driver, he must have been, that is, before he took to the sea.

He luffs up before the doubloon; halloa, and goes round on the other

side of the mast; why, there's a horse-shoe nailed on that side;

and now he's back again; what does that mean?  Hark! he's muttering--

voice like an old worn-out coffee-mill. Prick ears, and listen!"



"If the White Whale be raised, it must be in a month and a day,

when the sun stands in some one of these signs.  I've studied signs,

and know their marks; they were taught me two score years ago,

by the old witch in Copenhagen.  Now, in what sign will the sun then be?

The horse-shoe sign; for there it is, right opposite the gold.

And what's the horse-shoe sign?  The lion is the horse-shoe sign--

the roaring and devouring lion.  Ship, old ship! my old head shakes

to think of thee."



"There's another rendering now; but still one text.  All sorts of men

in one kind of world, you see.  Dodge again! here comes Queequeg--

all tattooing--looks like the signs of the Zodiac himself.  What says

the Cannibal?  As I live he's comparing notes; looking at his thigh bone;

thinks the sun is in the thigh, or in the calf, or in the bowels,

I suppose, as the old women talk Surgeon's Astronomy in the back country.

And by Jove, he's found something there in the vicinity of his thigh--

I guess it's Sagittarius, or the Archer.  No:  he don't know what to make

of the doubloon; he takes it for an old button off some king's trowsers.

But, aside again! here comes that ghost-devil, Fedallah; tail coiled

out of sight as usual, oakum in the toes of his pumps as usual.

What does he say, with that look of his?  Ah, only makes a sign

to the sign and bows himself; there is a sun on the coin--

fire worshipper, depend upon it.  Ho! more and more.  This way comes Pip--

poor boy! would he had died, or I; he's half horrible to me.

He too has been watching all of these interpreters myself included--

and look now, he comes to read, with that unearthly idiot face.

Stand away again and hear him.  Hark!"



"I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look."



"Upon my soul, he's been studying Murray's Grammar!  Improving his mind,

poor fellow!  But what's that he says now--hist!"



"I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look."



"Why, he's getting it by heart--hist! again."



"I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look."



"Well, that's funny."



"And I, you, and he; and we, ye, and they, are all bats;

and I'm a crow, especially when I stand a'top of this pine

tree here.  Caw! caw! caw! caw! caw! caw!  Ain't I a crow?

And where's the scare-crow? There he stands; two bones stuck

into a pair of old trowsers, and two more poked into the sleeves

of an old jacket."



"Wonder if he means me?--complimentary--poor lad!--I could go

hang myself.  Any way, for the present, I'll quit Pip's vicinity.

I can stand the rest, for they have plain wits; but he's too

crazy-witty for my sanity.  So, so, I leave him muttering."



"Here's the ship's navel, this doubloon here, and they are all one fire

to unscrew it.  But, unscrew your navel, and what's the consequence?

Then again, if it stays here, that is ugly, too, for when aught's

nailed to the mast it's a sign that things grow desperate.

Ha! ha! old Ahab! the White Whale; he'll nail ye!  This is a pine tree.

My father, in old Tolland county, cut down a pine tree once, and found

a silver ring grown over in it; some old darkey's wedding ring.

How did it get there?  And so they'll say in the resurrection,

when they come to fish up this old mast, and find a doubloon lodged in it,

with bedded oysters for the shaggy bark.  Oh, the gold! the precious,

precious gold!--the green miser'll hoard ye soon!  Hish! hish!

God goes 'mong the worlds blackberrying.  Cook! ho, cook! and cook us!

Jenny! hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, Jenny, Jenny! and get your hoe-cake done!"







CHAPTER 100



Leg and Arm



The Pequod of Nantucket, Meets the Samuel Enderby, of London







"Ship, ahoy!  Hast seen the White Whale?"



So cried Ahab, once more hailing a ship showing English colors,

bearing down under the stern.  Trumpet to mouth, the old man was standing

in his hoisted quarter-deck, his ivory leg plainly revealed to the

stranger captain, who was carelessly reclining in his own boat's bow.

He was a darkly-tanned, burly, goodnatured, fine-looking man, of sixty

or thereabouts, dressed in a spacious roundabout, that hung round him

in festoons of blue pilot-cloth; and one empty arm of this jacket

streamed behind him like the broidered arm of a huzzar's surcoat.



"Hast seen the White Whale!"



"See you this?" and withdrawing it from the folds that had hidden it,

he held up a white arm of sperm whale bone, terminating in a wooden

head like a mallet.



"Man my boat!" cried Ahab, impetuously, and tossing about the oars

near him--"Stand by to lower!"



In less than a minute, without quitting his little craft,

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general bulk of his unobstructed bones.  But as the colossal

skull embraces so very large a proportion of the entire extent

of the skeleton; as it is by far the most complicated part;

and as nothing is to be repeated concerning it in this chapter,

you must not fail to carry it in your mind, or under your arm,

as we proceed, otherwise you will not gain a complete notion

of the general structure we are about to view.



In length, the Sperm Whale's skeleton at Tranque measured

seventy-two feet:  so that when fully invested and extended in life,

he must have been ninety feet long; for in the whale, the skeleton

loses about one fifth in length compared with the living body.

Of this seventy-two feet, his skull and jaw comprised some

twenty feet, leaving some fifty feet of plain backbone.

Attached to this back-bone, for something less than a third

of its length, was the mighty circular basket of ribs which once

enclosed his vitals.



To me this vast ivory-ribbed chest, with the long, unrelieved spine,

extending far away from it in a straight line, not a little resembled

the hull of a great ship new-laid upon the stocks, when only some

twenty of her naked bow-ribs are inserted, and the keel is otherwise,

for the time, but a long, disconnected timber.



The ribs were ten on a side.  The first, to begin from the neck,

was nearly six feet long; the second, third, and fourth were each

successively longer, till you came to the climax of the fifth,

or one of the middle ribs, which measured eight feet and

some inches.  From that part, the remaining ribs diminished,

till the tenth and last only spanned five feet and some inches.

In general thickness, they all bore a seemly correspondence

to their length.  The middle ribs were the most arched.

In some of the Arsacides they are used for beams whereon to lay

footpath bridges over small streams.



In considering these ribs, I could not but be struck anew with

the circumstance, so variously repeated in this book, that the skeleton

of the whale is by no means the mould of his invested form.

The largest of the Tranque ribs, one of the middle ones,

occupied that part of the fish which, in life, is greatest

in depth.  Now, the greatest depth of the invested body of this

particular whale must have been at least sixteen feet; whereas,

the corresponding rib measured but little more than eight feet.

So that this rib only conveyed half of the true notion

of the living magnitude of that part.  Besides, for some way,

where I now saw but a naked spine, all that had been once wrapped

round with tons of added bulk in flesh, muscle, blood, and bowels.

Still more, for the ample fins, I here saw but a few disordered joints;

and in place of the weighty and majestic, but boneless flukes,

an utter blank!



How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man

to try to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring

over his dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood.

No. Only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within

the eddyings of his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea,

can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out.



But the spine.  For that, the best way we can consider it is,

with a crane, to pile its bones high up on end.  No speedy enterprise.

But now it's done, it looks much like Pompey's Pillar.



There are forty and odd vertebrae in all, which in the skeleton

are not locked together.  They mostly lie like the great knobbed

blocks on a Gothic spire, forming solid courses of heavy masonry.

The largest, a middle one, is in width something less than three feet,

and in depth more than four.  The smallest, where the spine tapers

away into the tail, is only two inches in width, and looks something

like a white billiard-ball. I was told that there were still

smaller ones, but they had been lost by some little cannibal urchins,

the priest's children, who had stolen them to play marbles with.

Thus we see how that the spine of even the hugest of living things

tapers off at last into simple child's play.







CHAPTER 104



The Fossil Whale





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.

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It is, man.  Look, put thy live leg here in the place where mine once was;

so, now, here is only one distinct leg to the eye, yet two to the soul.

Where thou feelest tingling life; there, exactly there, there to a hair,

do I. Is't a riddle?



I should humbly call it a poser, sir.



Hist, then.  How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing

may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely

where thou now standest; aye, and standing there in thy spite?

In thy most solitary hours, then, dost thou not fear eavesdroppers?

Hold, don't speak!  And if I still feel the smart of my crushed leg,

though it be now so long dissolved; then, why mayest not thou, carpenter,

feel the fiery pains of hell for ever, and without a body?  Hah!



Good Lord!  Truly, sir, if it comes to that, I must calculate over again;

I think I didn't carry a small figure, sir.



Look ye, pudding-heads should never grant premises.--How long

before this leg is done?



Perhaps an hour, sir.



Bungle away at it then, and bring it to me (turns to go).

Oh, Life.  Here I am, proud as Greek god, and yet standing debtor

to this blockhead for a bone to stand on!  Cursed be that mortal

inter-indebtedness which will not do away with ledgers.

I would be free as air; and I'm down in the whole world's books.

I am so rich, I could have given bid for bid with the wealthiest

Praetorians at the auction of the Roman empire (which was the world's);

and yet I owe for the flesh in the tongue I brag with.  By heavens!

I'll get a crucible, and into it, and dissolve myself down to one small,

compendious vertebra.  So.



Carpenter ( resuming his work).





Well, well, well!  Stubb knows him best of all, and Stubb always says

he's queer; says nothing but that one sufficient little word queer;

he's queer, says Stubb; he's queer--queer, queer; and keeps dinning it

into Mr. Starbuck all the time--queer--sir--queer, queer, very queer.

And here's his leg.  Yes, now that I think of it, here's his bed-fellow!

has a stick of whale's jaw-bone for a wife!  And this is his leg;

he'll stand on this.  What was that now about one leg standing

in three places, and all three places standing in one hell--

how was that?  Oh!  I don't wonder he looked so scornful at me!

I'm a sort of strange-thoughted sometimes, they say; but that's

only haphazard-like. Then, a short, little old body like me,

should never undertake to wade out into deep waters with tall,

heron-built captains; the water chucks you under the chin pretty quick,

and there's a great cry for life-boats. And here's the heron's leg!

long and slim, sure enough!  Now, for most folks one pair of legs

lasts a lifetime, and that must be because they use them mercifully,

as a tender-hearted old lady uses her roly-poly old coach-horses.

But Ahab; oh he's a hard driver.  Look, driven one leg to death,

and spavined the other for life, and now wears out bone legs by the cord.

Halloa, there, you Smut! bear a hand there with those screws,

and let's finish it before the resurrection fellow comes

a-calling with his horn for all legs, true or false, as brewery

men go round collecting old beer barrels, to fill 'em up again.

What a leg this is!  It looks like a real live leg, filed down

to nothing but the core; he'll be standing on this to-morrow;

he'll be taking altitudes on it.  Halloa!  I almost forgot the little

oval slate, smoothed ivory, where he figures up the latitude.

So, so; chisel, file, and sand-paper, now!







CHAPTER 109



Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin







According to usage they were pumping the ship next morning;

and lo! no inconsiderable oil came up with the water;

the casks below must have sprung a bad leak.  Much concern

was shown; and Starbuck went down into the cabin to report

this unfavorable affair.*





*In Sperm-whalemen with any considerable quantity of oil on board,

it is a regular semiweekly duty to conduct a hose into the hold,

and drench the casks with sea-water; which afterwards,

at varying intervals, is removed by the ship's pumps.

Hereby the casks are sought to be kept damply tight; while by

the changed character of the withdrawn water, the mariners

readily detect any serious leakage in the precious cargo.





Now, from the South and West the Pequod was drawing nigh to Formosa

and the Bashee Isles, between which lies one of the tropical outlets

from the China waters into the Pacific.  And so Starbuck found Ahab

with a general chart of the oriental archipelagoes spread before him;

and another separate one representing the long eastern coasts

of the Japanese islands--Niphon, Matsmai, and Sikoke.  With his

snow-white new ivory leg braced against the screwed leg of his table,

and with a long pruning-hook of a jack-knife in his hand, the wondrous

old man, with his back to the gangway door, was wrinkling his brow,

and tracing his old courses again.



"Who's there?" hearing the footstep at the door, but not turning

round to it.  "On deck!  Begone!"



"Captain Ahab mistakes; it is I. The oil in the hold is leaking, sir.

We must up Burtons and break out."



"Up Burtons and break out?  Now that we are nearing Japan;

heave-to here for a week to tinker a parcel of old hoops?"



"Either do that, sir, or waste in one day more oil than we

may make good in a year.  What we come twenty thousand miles

to get is worth saving, sir."



"So it is, so it is; if we get it."



"I was speaking of the oil in the hold, sir."



"And I was not speaking or thinking of that at all.

Begone!  Let it leak!  I'm all aleak myself.  Aye! leaks in leaks!

not only full of leaky casks, but those leaky casks are in a

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Started from his slumbers, Ahab, face to face, saw the Parsee;

and hooped round by the gloom of the night they seemed the last men

in a flooded world.  "I have dreamed it again," said he.



"Of the hearses?  Have I not said, old man, that neither hearse

nor coffin can be thine?"



"And who are hearsed that die on the sea?"



"But I said, old man, that ere thou couldst die on this voyage,

two hearses must verily be seen by thee on the sea; the first not

made by mortal hands; and the visible wood of the last one must

be grown in America."



"Aye, aye! a strange sight that, Parsee!--a hearse and its plumes floating

over the ocean with the waves for the pall-bearers. Ha!  Such a sight

we shall not soon see."



"Believe it or not, thou canst not die till it be seen, old man."



"And what was that saying about thyself?"



"Though it come to the last, I shall still go before thee thy pilot."



"And when thou art so gone before--if that ever befall--then ere

I can follow, thou must still appear to me, to pilot me still?--

Was it not so?  Well, then, did I believe all ye say, oh my pilot!

I have here two pledges that I shall yet slay Moby Dick and survive it."



"Take another pledge, old man," said the Parsee, as his eyes lighted

up like fire-flies in the gloom--"Hemp only can kill thee."



"The gallows, ye mean.--I am immortal then, on land and on sea,"

cried Ahab, with a laugh of derision;--"Immortal on land and on sea!"



Both were silent again, as one man.  The grey dawn came on,

and the slumbering crew arose from the boat's bottom, and ere

noon the dead whale was brought to the ship.







CHAPTER 118



The Quadrant





The season for the Line at length drew near; and every

day when Ahab, coming from his cabin cast his eyes aloft,

the vigilant helmsman would ostentatiously handle his spokes,

and the eager mariners quickly run to the braces, and would stand

there with all their eyes centrally fixed on the nailed doubloon;

impatient for the order to point the ship's prow for the equator.

In good time the order came.  It was hard upon high noon;

and Ahab, seated in the bows of his high-hoisted boat,

was about taking his wonted daily observation of the sun

to determine his latitude.



Now, in that Japanese sea, the days in summer are as freshets

of effulgences.  That unblinkingly vivid Japanese sun

seems the blazing focus of the glassy ocean's immeasurable

burning-glass. The sky looks lacquered; clouds there are none;

the horizon floats; and this nakedness of unrelieved

radiance is as the insufferable splendors of God's throne.

Well that Ahab's quadrant was furnished with colored glasses,

through which to take sight of that solar fire.

So, swinging his seated form to the roll of the ship,

and with his astrological-looking instrument placed to his eye,

he remained in that posture for some moments to catch the precise

instant when the sun should gain its precise meridian.

Meantime while his whole attention was absorbed, the Parsee

was kneeling beneath him on the ship's deck, and with face

thrown up like Ahab's, was eyeing the same sun with him;

only the lids of his eyes half hooded their orbs, and his

wild face was subdued to an earthly passionlessness.

At length the desired observation was taken; and with his pencil

upon his ivory leg, Ahab soon calculated what his latitude must

be at that precise instant.  Then falling into a moment's revery,

he again looked up towards the sun and murmured to himself:

"Thou seamark! thou high and mighty Pilot! thou tellest me truly

where I am--but canst thou cast the least hint where I shall be?

Or canst thou tell where some other thing besides me is this

moment living?  Where is Moby Dick?  This instant thou must

be eyeing him.  These eyes of mine look into the very eye

that is even now beholding him; aye, and into the eye that

is even now equally beholding the objects on the unknown,

thither side of thee, thou sun!"



Then gazing at his quadrant, and handling, one after the other,

its numerous cabalistical contrivances, he pondered again,

and muttered:  "Foolish toy! babies' plaything of haughty Admirals,

and Commodores, and Captains; the world brags of thee,

of thy cunning and might; but what after all canst thou do,

but tell the poor, pitiful point, where thou thyself happenest

to be on this wide planet, and the hand that holds thee:

no! not one jot more!  Thou canst not tell where one drop

of water or one grain of sand will be to-morrow noon; and yet

with thy impotence thou insultest the sun!  Science!  Curse thee,

thou vain toy; and cursed be all the things that cast man's eyes

aloft to that heaven, whose live vividness but scorches him,

as these old eyes are even now scorched with thy light, O sun!

Level by nature to this earth's horizon are the glances of man's eyes;

not shot from the crown of his head, as if God had meant

him to gaze on his firmament.  Curse thee, thou quadrant!"

dashing it to the deck, "no longer will I guide my earthly way

by thee; the level ship's compass, and the level deadreckoning,

by log and by line; these shall conduct me, and show me my place

on the sea.  Aye," lighting from the boat to the deck, "thus I

trample on thee, thou paltry thing that feebly pointest on high;

thus I split and destroy thee!"



As the frantic old man thus spoke and thus trampled with his live

and dead feet, a sneering triumph that seemed meant for Ahab,

and a fatalistic despair that seemed meant for himself--

these passed over the mute, motionless Parsee's face.

Unobserved he rose and glided away; while, awestruck by the aspect

of their commander, the seamen clustered together on the forecastle,

till Ahab, troubledly pacing the deck, shouted out--"To the braces!

Up helm!--square in!"



In an instant the yards swung round; and as the ship half-wheeled

upon her heel, her three firm-seated graceful masts erectly poised

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sail-needle by its middle, over one of the compass cards.  At first,

the steel went round and round, quivering and vibrating at either end;

but at last it settled to its place, when Ahab, who had been intently

watching for this result, stepped frankly back from the binnacle,

and pointing his stretched arm towards it, exclaimed,--"Look ye,

for yourselves, if Ahab be not the lord of the level loadstone!

The sun is East, and that compass swears it!"



One after another they peered in, for nothing but their own eyes

could persuade such ignorance as theirs, and one after another

they slunk away.



In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab

in all his fatal pride.







CHAPTER 125



The Log and Line





While now the fated Pequod had been so long afloat this voyage,

the log and line had but very seldom been in use.

Owing to a confident reliance upon other means of determining

the vessel's place, some merchantmen, and many whalemen,

especially when cruising, wholly neglect to heave the log;

though at the same time, and frequently more for form's sake

than anything else, regularly putting down upon the customary

slate the course steered by the ship, as well as the presumed

average rate of progression every hour.  It had been thus

with the Pequod.  The wooden reel and angular log attached hung,

long untouched, just beneath the railing of the after bulwarks.

Rains and spray had damped it; the sun and wind had warped it;

all the elements had combined to rot a thing that hung so idly.

But heedless of all this, his mood seized Ahab, as he happened

to glance upon the reel, not many hours after the magnet scene,

and he remembered how his quadrant was no more, and recalled

his frantic oath about the level log and line.  The ship was

sailing plungingly; astern the billows rolled in riots.



"Forward, there!  Heave the log!"



Two seamen came.  The golden-hued Tahitian and the grizzly Manxman.

"Take the reel, one of ye, I'll heave."



They went towards the extreme stern, on the ship's lee side,

where the deck, with the oblique energy of the wind, was now

almost dipping into the creamy, sidelong-rushing sea.



The Manxman took the reel, and holding it high up, by the projecting

handle-ends of the spindle, round which the spool of line revolved,

so stood with the angular log hanging downwards, till Ahab

advanced to him.



Ahab stood before him, and was lightly unwinding some thirty

or forty turns to form a preliminary hand-coil to toss overboard,

when the old Manxman, who was intently eyeing both him and the line,

made bold to speak.



"Sir, I mistrust it; this line looks far gone, long heat and wet

have spoiled it."



"'Twill hold, old gentleman.  Long heat and wet, have they spoiled thee?

Thou seem'st to hold.  Or, truer perhaps, life holds thee; not thou it."



"I hold the spool, sir.  But just as my captain says.

With these grey hairs of mine 'tis not worth while disputing,

'specially with a superior, who'll ne'er confess."



"What's that?  There now's a patched professor in Queen Nature's

granite-founded College; but methinks he's too subservient.

Where wert thou born?"



"In the little rocky Isle of Man, sir."



"Excellent!  Thou'st hit the world by that."



"I know not, sir, but I was born there."



"In the Isle of Man, hey?  Well, the other way, it's good.

Here's a man from Man; a man born in once independent Man, and now

unmanned of Man; which is sucked in--by what?  Up with the reel!

The dead, blind wall butts all inquiring heads at last.

Up with it!  So."



The log was heaved.  The loose coils rapidly straightened out in a long

dragging line astern, and then, instantly, the reel began to whirl.

In turn, jerkingly raised and lowered by the rolling billows, the towing

resistance of the log caused the old reelman to stagger strangely.



"Hold hard!"



Snap! the overstrained line sagged down in one long festoon;

the tugging log was gone.



"I crush the quadrant, the thunder turns the needles,

and now the mad sea parts the log-line. But Ahab can mend all.

Haul in here, Tahitian; reel up, Manxman.  And look ye,

let the carpenter make another log, and mend thou the line.

See to it."



"There he goes now; to him nothing's happened; but to me,

the skewer seems loosening out of the middle of the world.

Haul in, haul in, Tahitian!  These lines run whole, and whirling out:

come in broken, and dragging slow.  Ha, Pip? come to help; eh, Pip?"



"Pip? whom call ye Pip?  Pip jumped from the whaleboat.

Pip's missing.  Let's see now if ye haven't fished him

up here, fisherman.  It drags hard; I guess he's holding on.

Jerk him, Tahiti!  Jerk him off we haul in no cowards here.

Ho! there's his arm just breaking water.  A hatchet! a hatchet!

cut it off--we haul in no cowards here.  Captain Ahab! sir,

sir! here's Pip, trying to get on board again."



"Peace, thou crazy loon," cried the Manxman, seizing him by the arm.

"Away from the quarter-deck!"



"The greater idiot ever scolds the lesser," muttered Ahab, advancing.

"Hands off from that holiness!  Where sayest thou Pip was, boy?



"Astern there, sir, astern!  Lo! lo!"



"And who art thou, boy?  I see not my reflection in the vacant pupils

of thy eyes.  Oh God! that man should be a thing for immortal souls

to sieve through!  Who art thou, boy?"



"Bell-boy, sir; ship's-crier; ding, dong, ding!  Pip!  Pip!  Pip!  One

hundred pounds of clay reward for Pip; five feet high--looks cowardly--

quickest known by that!  Ding, dong, ding!  Who's seen Pip the coward?"



"There can be no hearts above the snow-line. Oh, ye frozen

heavens! look down here.  Ye did beget this luckless child,

and have abandoned him, ye creative libertines.  Here, boy;

Ahab's cabin shall be Pip's home henceforth, while Ahab lives.

Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy; thou art tied to me by cords

woven of my heart-strings. Come, let's down."



"What's this? here's velvet shark-skin," intently gazing at Ahab's hand,

and feeling it.  "Ah, now, had poor Pip but felt so kind a thing as this,

perhaps he had ne'er been lost!  This seems to me, sir, as a man-rope;

something that weak souls may hold by.  Oh, sir, let old Perth now come

and rivet these two hands together; the black one with the white,

for I will not let this go."



"Oh, boy, nor will I thee, unless I should thereby drag thee

to worse horrors than are here.  Come, then, to my cabin.

Lo! ye believers in gods all goodness, and in man all ill,

lo you! see the omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man;

and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full

of the sweet things of love and gratitude.  Come!  I feel prouder

leading thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an Emperor's!"



"There go two daft ones now," muttered the old Manxman.

"One daft with strength, the other daft with weakness.

But here's the end of the rotten line--all dripping, too.

Mend it, eh?  I think we had best have a new line altogether.

I'll see Mr. Stubb about it."







CHAPTER 126



The Life-Buoy





Steering now south-eastward by Ahab's levelled steel,

and her progress solely determined by Ahab's level log and line;

the Pequod held on her path towards the Equator.  Making so long

a passage through such unfrequented waters, descrying no ships,

and ere long, sideways impelled by unvarying trade winds,

over waves monotonously mild; all these seemed the strange calm

things preluding some riotous and desperate scene.



At last, when the ship drew near to the outskirts, as it were,

of the Equatorial fishing-ground, and in the deep darkness that

goes before the dawn, was sailing by a cluster of rocky islets;

the watch--then headed by Flask--was startled by a cry so plaintively

wild and unearthly--like half-articulated wailings of the ghosts

of all Herod's murdered Innocents--that one and all, they started

from their reveries, and for the space of some moments stood,

or sat, or leaned all transfixed by listening, like the carved

Roman slave, while that wild cry remained within hearing.

The Christian or civilized part of the crew said it was mermaids,

and shuddered; but the pagan harpooneers remained unappalled.

Yet the grey Manxman--the oldest mariner of all--declared that

the wild thrilling sounds that were heard, were the voices of newly

drowned men in the sea.

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"Bad news; she brings bad news," muttered the old Manxman.  But ere

her commander, who, with trumpet to mouth, stood up in his boat;

ere he could hopefully hail, Ahab's voice was heard.



"Hast seen the White Whale?"



"Aye, yesterday.  Have ye seen a whale-boat adrift?"



Throttling his joy, Ahab negatively answered this unexpected question;

and would then have fain boarded the stranger, when the stranger

captain himself, having stopped his vessel's way, was seen

descending her side.  A few keen pulls, and his boat-hook soon

clinched the Pequod's main-chains, and he sprang to the deck.

Immediately he was recognized by Ahab for a Nantucketer he knew.

But no formal salutation was exchanged.



"Where was he?--not killed!--not killed!" cried Ahab, closely advancing.

"How was it?"



It seemed that somewhat late on the afternoon of the day previous,

while three of the stranger's boats were engaged with a shoal

of whales, which had led them some four or five miles from the ship;

and while they were yet in swift chase to windward, the white hump

and head of Moby Dick had suddenly loomed up out of the blue water,

not very far to leeward; whereupon, the fourth rigged boat--

a reserved one--had been instantly lowered in chase.

After a keen sail before the wind, this fourth boat--the swiftest

keeled of all--seemed to have succeeded in fastening--at least,

as well as the man at the mast-head could tell anything about it.

In the distance he saw the diminished dotted boat; and then a swift

gleam of bubbling white water; and after that nothing more;

whence it was concluded that the stricken whale must have

indefinitely run away with his pursuers, as often happens.

There was some apprehension, but no positive alarm, as yet.

The recall signals were placed in the rigging; darkness came on;

and forced to pick up her three far to windward boats--ere going

in quest of the fourth one in the precisely opposite direction--

the ship had not only been necessitated to leave that boat

to its fate till near midnight, but, for the time, to increase

her distance from it.  But the rest of her crew being at last

safe aboard, she crowded all sail--stunsail on stunsail--

after the missing boat; kindling a fire in her try-pots for a beacon;

and every other man aloft on the look-out. But though when she

had thus sailed a sufficient distance to gain the presumed place

of the absent ones when last seen; though she then paused to lower

her spare boats to pull all around her; and not finding anything,

had again dashed on; again paused, and lowered her boats;

and though she had thus continued doing till daylight;

yet not the least glimpse of the missing keel had been seen.



The story told, the stranger Captain immediately went on to reveal

his object in boarding the Pequod.  He desired that ship to unite

with his own in the search; by sailing over the sea some four or five

miles apart, on parallel lines, and so sweeping a double horizon,

as it were.



"I will wager something now," whispered Stubb to Flask, "that some one

in that missing boat wore off that Captain's best coat; mayhap, his watch--

he's so cursed anxious to get it back.  Who ever heard of two pious

whale-ships cruising after one missing whale-boat in the height

of the whaling season?  See, Flask, only see how pale he looks--

pale in the very buttons of his eyes--look--it wasn't the coat--

it must have been the-"



"My boy, my own boy is among them.  For God's sake--I beg, I conjure"--

here exclaimed the stranger Captain to Ahab, who thus far had but

icily received his petition.  "For eight-and-forty hours let me

charter your ship--I will gladly pay for it, and roundly pay for it--

if there be no other way--for eight-and-forty hours only--only that--

you must, oh, you must, and you shall do this thing."



"His son!" cried Stubb, "oh, it's his son he's lost!

I take back the coat and watch--what says Ahab?  We must

save that boy."



"He's drowned with the rest on 'em, last night," said the old Manx

sailor standing behind them; "I heard; all of ye heard their spirits."



Now, as it shortly turned out, what made this incident of the Rachel's

the more melancholy, was the circumstance, that not only was one

of the Captain's sons among the number of the missing boat's crew;

but among the number of the other boats' crews, at the same time,

but on the other hand, separated from the ship during the dark

vicissitudes of the chase, there had been still another son;

as that for a time, the wretched father was plunged to the bottom

of the cruellest perplexity; which was only solved for him

by his chief mate's instinctively adopting the ordinary procedure

of a whaleship in such emergencies, that is, when placed between

jeopardized but divided boats, always to pick up the majority first.

But the captain, for some unknown constitutional reason,

had refrained from mentioning all this, and not till forced to it

by Ahab's iciness did he allude to his one yet missing boy;

a little lad, but twelve years old, whose father with the earnest

but unmisgiving hardihood of a Nantucketer's paternal love,

had thus early sought to initiate him in the perils and wonders

of a vocation almost immemorially the destiny of all his race.

Nor does it unfrequently occur, that Nantucket captains will

send a son of such tender age away from them, for a protracted

three or four years' voyage in some other ship than their own;

so that their first knowledge of a whaleman's career shall

be unenervated by any chance display of a father's natural

but untimely partiality, or undue apprehensiveness and concern.



Meantime, now the stranger was still beseeching his poor boon of Ahab;

and Ahab still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock, but without

the least quivering of his own.



"I will not go," said the stranger, "till you say aye to me.

Do to me as you would have me do to you in the like case.

For you too have a boy, Captain Ahab--though but a child,

and nestling safely at home now--a child of your old age too--

Yes, yes, you relent; I see it--run, run, men, now, and stand

by to square in the yards."



"Avast," cried Ahab--"touch not a rope-yarn"; then in a voice that

prolongingly moulded every word--"Captain Gardiner, I will not do it.

Even now I lose time, Good-bye, good-bye. God bless ye, man, and may I

forgive myself, but I must go.  Mr. Starbuck, look at the binnacle watch,

and in three minutes from this present instant warn off all strangers;

then brace forward again, and let the ship sail as before."