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"There it is again--under the hatches--don't you hear it--a cough--

it sounded like a cough."



"Cough be damned!  Pass along that return bucket."



"There again--there it is!--it sounds like two or three sleepers

turning over, now!"



"Caramba! have done, shipmate, will ye?  It's the three soaked

biscuits ye eat for supper turning over inside of ye--nothing else.

Look to the bucket!"



"Say what ye will, shipmate; I've sharp ears."



"Aye, you are the chap, ain't ye, that heard the hum of the old

Quakeress's knitting-needles fifty miles at sea from Nantucket;

you're the chap."



"Grin away; we'll see what turns up.  Hark ye, Cabaco, there is

somebody down in the after-hold that has not yet been seen on deck;

and I suspect our old Mogul knows something of it too.

I heard Stubb tell Flask, one morning watch, that there was

something of that sort in the wind."



"Tish! the bucket!"







CHAPTER 44



The Chart





Had you followed Captain Ahab down into his cabin after the squall

that took place on the night succeeding that wild ratification

of his purpose with his crew, you would have seen him go to a locker

in the transom, and bringing out a large wrinkled roll of yellowish

sea charts, spread them before him on his screwed-down table.

Then seating himself before it, you would have seen him intently

study the various lines and shadings which there met his eye;

and with slow but steady pencil trace additional courses over spaces

that before were blank.  At intervals, he would refer to piles

of old log-books beside him, wherein were set down the seasons

and places in which, on various former voyages of various ships,

sperm whales had been captured or seen.



While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in chains

over his head, continually rocked with the motion of the ship,

and for ever threw shifting gleams and shadows of lines upon

his wrinkled brow, till it almost seemed that while he himself

was marking out lines and courses on the wrinkled charts,

some invisible pencil was also tracing lines and courses upon

the deeply marked chart of his forehead.



But it was not this night in particular that, in the solitude

of his cabin, Ahab thus pondered over his charts.

Almost every night they were brought out; almost every night

some pencil marks were effaced, and others were substituted.

For with the charts of all four oceans before him, Ahab was

threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a view to the more

certain accomplishment of that monomaniac thought of his soul.



Now, to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans,

it might seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek out one

solitary creature in the unhooped oceans of this planet.

But not so did it seem to Ahab, who knew the sets of all

tides and currents; and thereby calculating the driftings of

the sperm whale's food; and, also calling to mind the regular,

ascertained seasons for hunting him in particular latitudes;

could arrive at reasonable surmises, almost approaching

to certainties, concerning the timeliest day to be upon this

or that ground in search of his prey.



So assured, indeed, is the fact concerning the periodicalness of the sperm

whale's resorting to given waters, that many hunters believe that,

could he be closely observed and studied throughout the world;

were the logs for one voyage of the entire whale fleet carefully collated,

then the migrations of the sperm whale would be found to correspond in

invariability to those of the herring-shoals or the flights of swallows.

On this hint, attempts have been made to construct elaborate migratory

charts of the sperm whale.*





*Since the above was written, the statement is happily borne

out by an official circular, issued by Lieutenant Maury,

of the National Observatory, Washington, April 16th, 1851.

By that circular, it appears that precisely such a chart is in course

of completion; and portions of it are presented in the circular.

"This chart divides the ocean into districts of five degrees

of latitude by five degrees of longitude; perpendicularly through

each of which districts are twelve columns for the twelve months;

and horizontally through each of which districts are three lines;

one to show the number of days that have been spent in each month

in every district, and the two others to show the number of days

in which whales, sperm or right, have been seen."





Besides, when making a passage from one feeding-ground to another,

the sperm whales, guided by some infallible instinct--say, rather,

secret intelligence from the Deity--mostly swim in veins, as they

are called; continuing their way along a given ocean-line with

such undeviating exactitude, that no ship ever sailed her course,

by any chart, with one tithe of such marvellous precision.

Though, in these cases, the direction taken by any one whale

be straight as a surveyor's parallel, and though the line

of advance be strictly confined to its own unavoidable,

straight wake, yet the arbitrary vein in which at these times

he is said to swim, generally embraces some few miles in width

(more or less, as the vein is presumed to expand or contract);

but never exceeds the visual sweep from the whale-ship's

mast-heads, when circumspectly gliding along this magic zone.

The sum is, that at particular seasons within that breadth

and along that path, migrating whales may with great confidence

be looked for.



And hence not only at substantiated times, upon well known

separate feeding-grounds, could Ahab hope to encounter his prey;

but in crossing the widest expanses of water between those grounds

he could, by his art, so place and time himself on his way,

as even then not to be wholly without prospect of a meeting.

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they must also have food for their more common, daily appetites.

For even the high lifted and chivalric Crusaders of old times

were not content to traverse two thousand miles of land to fight

for their holy sepulchre, without committing burglaries,

picking pockets, and gaining other pious perquisites by the way.

Had they been strictly held to their one final and romantic object--

that final and romantic object, too many would have turned

from in disgust.  I will not strip these men, thought Ahab,

of all hopes of cash--aye, cash.  They may scorn cash now;

but let some months go by, and no perspective promise of it to them,

and then this same quiescent cash all at once mutinying in them,

this same cash would soon cashier Ahab.



Nor was there wanting still another precautionary motive more

related to Ahab personally.  Having impulsively, it is probable,

and perhaps somewhat prematurely revealed the prime but private

purpose of the Pequod's voyage, Ahab was now entirely conscious that,

in so doing, he had indirectly laid himself open to the unanswerable

charge of usurpation; and with perfect impunity, both moral and legal,

his crew if so disposed, and to that end competent, could refuse all

further obedience to him, and even violently wrest from him the command.

From even the barely hinted imputation of usurpation, and the possible

consequences of such a suppressed impression gaining ground,

Ahab must of course have been most anxious to protect himself.

That protection could only consist in his own predominating brain

and heart and hand, backed by a heedful, closely calculating attention

to every minute atmospheric influence which it was possible for his

crew to be subjected to.



For all these reasons then, and others perhaps too analytic to be verbally

developed here, Ahab plainly saw that he must still in a good degree

continue true to the natural, nominal purpose of the Pequod's voyage;

observe all customary usages; and not only that, but force himself

to evince all his well known passionate interest in the general pursuit

of his profession.



Be all this as it may, his voice was now often heard

hailing the three mastheads and admonishing them to keep

a bright look-out, and not omit reporting even a porpoise.

This vigilance was not long without reward.







CHAPTER 47



The Mat-Maker





It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon; the seamen were lazily lounging

about the decks, or vacantly gazing over into the lead-colored waters.

Queequeg and I were mildly employed weaving what is called a sword-mat,

for an additional lashing to our boat.  So still and subdued and yet

somehow preluding was all the scene, and such an incantation of revelry

lurked in the air, that each silent sailor seemed resolved into his

own invisible self.



I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat.

As I kept passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline

between the long yarns of the warp, using my own hand for the shuttle,

and as Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid his heavy

oaken sword between the threads, and idly looking off upon

the water, carelessly and unthinkingly drove home every yarn;

I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over

the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting

dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were

the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically

weaving and weaving away at the Fates.  There lay the fixed

threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning,

unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit

of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own.

This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own

hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into

these unalterable threads.  Meantime, Queequeg's impulsive,

indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly,

or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be;

and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a

corresponding contrast in the final aspect of the completed fabric;

this savage's sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions

both warp and woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chance--

aye, chance, free will, and necessity--no wise incompatible--

all interweavingly working together.  The straight warp

of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course--

its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that;

free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads;

and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines

of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will,

though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either,

and has the last featuring blow at events.





Thus we were weaving and weaving away when I started at a sound

so strange, long drawn, and musically wild and unearthly,

that the ball of free will dropped from my hand, and I stood

gazing up at the clouds whence that voice dropped like a wing.

High aloft in the cross-trees was that mad Gay-Header, Tashtego.

His body was reaching eagerly forward, his hand stretched out

like a wand, and at brief sudden intervals he continued his cries.

To be sure the same sound was that very moment perhaps being

heard all over the seas, from hundreds of whalemen's look-outs

perched as high in the air; but from few of those lungs could

that accustomed old cry have derived such a marvellous cadence

as from Tashtego the Indian's.



As he stood hovering over you half suspended in air, so wildly

and eagerly peering towards the horizon, you would have thought

him some prophet or seer beholding the shadows of Fate,

and by those wild cries announcing their coming.



"There she blows! there! there! there! she blows! she blows!"



"Where-away?"



"On the lee-beam, about two miles off! a school of them!"



Instantly all was commotion.



The Sperm Whale blows as a clock ticks, with the same undeviating

and reliable uniformity.  And thereby whalemen distinguish this

fish from other tribes of his genus.



"There go flukes!" was now the cry from Tashtego;

and the whales disappeared.



"Quick, steward!" cried Ahab.  "Time! time!"



Dough-Boy hurried below, glanced at the watch, and reported the exact

minute to Ahab.



The ship was now kept away from the wind, and she went gently

rolling before it.  Tashtego reporting that the whales

had gone down heading to leeward, we confidently looked

to see them again directly in advance of our bows.

For that singular craft at times evinced by the Sperm Whale when,

sounding with his head in one direction, he nevertheless,

while concealed beneath the surface, mills around, and swiftly

swims off in the opposite quarter--this deceitfulness of his

could not now be in action; for there was no reason to suppose

that the fish seen by Tashtego had been in any way alarmed,

or indeed knew at all of our vicinity.  One of the men selected

for shipkeepers--that is, those not appointed to the boats,

by this time relieved the Indian at the main-mast head.

The sailors at the fore and mizzen had come down; the line

tubs were fixed in their places; the cranes were thrust out;

the mainyard was backed, and the three boats swung over

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having no place to sit in, is pulled off to his visit all standing

like a pine tree.  And often you will notice that being conscious

of the eyes of the whole visible world resting on him from

the sides of the two ships, this standing captain is all alive

to the importance of sustaining his dignity by maintaining his legs.

Nor is this any very easy matter; for in his rear is the immense

projecting steering oar hitting him now and then in the small of

his back, the after-oar reciprocating by rapping his knees in front.

He is thus completely wedged before and behind, and can only

expand himself sideways by settling down on his stretched legs;

but a sudden, violent pitch of the boat will often go far to topple him,

because length of foundation is nothing without corresponding breadth.

Merely make a spread angle of two poles, and you cannot stand them up.

Then, again, it would never do in plain sight of the world's riveted eyes,

it would never do, I say, for this straddling captain to be seen

steadying himself the slightest particle by catching hold of anything

with his hands; indeed, as token of his entire, buoyant self-command,

he generally carries his hands in his trowsers' pockets; but perhaps being

generally very large, heavy hands, he carries them there for ballast.

Nevertheless there have occurred instances, well authenticated ones too,

where the captain has been known for an uncommonly critical moment or two,

in a sudden squall say--to seize hold of the nearest oarsman's hair,

and hold on there like grim death.







CHAPTER 54



The Town-Ho's Story





(As told at the Golden Inn)





The Cape of Good Hope, and all the watery region round about there,

is much like some noted four corners of a great highway, where you

meet more travellers than in any other part.



It was not very long after speaking the Goney that another

homeward-bound whaleman, the Town-Ho,* was encountered.

She was manned almost wholly by Polynesians.  In the short gam that

ensued she gave us strong news of Moby Dick.  To some the general

interest in the White Whale was now wildly heightened by a circumstance

of the Town-Ho's story, which seemed obscurely to involve with the whale

a certain wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called

judgments of God which at times are said to overtake some men.

This latter circumstance, with its own particular accompaniments,

forming what may be called the secret part of the tragedy about to

be narrated, never reached the ears of Captain Ahab or his mates.

For that secret part of the story was unknown to the captain

of the Town-Ho himself.  It was the private property of three

confederate white seamen of that ship, one of whom, it seems,

communicated it to Tashtego with Romish injunctions of secrecy,

but the following night Tashtego rambled in his sleep, and revealed

so much of it in that way, that when he was wakened he could not

well withhold the rest.  Nevertheless, so potent an influence did

this thing have on those seamen in the Pequod who came to the full

knowledge of it, and by such a strange delicacy, to call it so,

were they governed in this matter, that they kept the secret among

themselves so that it never transpired abaft the Pequod's main-mast.

Interweaving in its proper place this darker thread with the story

as publicly narrated on the ship, the whole of this strange affair

I now proceed to put on lasting record.





*The ancient whale-cry upon first sighting a whale from the mast-head,

still used by whalemen in hunting the famous Gallipagos terrapin.





For my humor's sake, I shall preserve the style in which I once narrated

it at Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish friends, one saint's eve,

smoking upon the thick-gilt tiled piazza of the Golden Inn.  Of those

fine cavaliers, the young Dons, Pedro and Sebastian, were on the closer

terms with me; and hence the interluding questions they occasionally put,

and which are duly answered at the time.



"Some two years prior to my first learning the events which I am about

rehearsing to you, gentlemen, the Town-Ho, Sperm Whaler of Nantucket,

was cruising in your Pacific here, not very many days' sail eastward from

the eaves of this good Golden Inn.  She was somewhere to the northward of

the Line.  One morning upon handling the pumps according to daily usage,

it was observed that she made more water in her hold than common.

They supposed a sword-fish had stabbed her, gentlemen.  But the captain,

having some unusual reason for believing that rare good luck awaited

him in those latitudes; and therefore being very averse to quit them,

and the leak not being then considered at all dangerous, though, indeed,

they could not find it after searching the hold as low down as was

possible in rather heavy weather, the ship still continued her cruisings,

the mariners working at the pumps at wide and easy intervals; but no good

luck came; more days went by and not only was the leak yet undiscovered,

but it sensibly increased.  So much so, that now taking some alarm,

the captain, making all sail, stood away for the nearest harbor among

the islands, there to have his hull hove out and repaired.



"Though no small passage was before her, yet, if the commonest

chance favoured, he did not at all fear that his ship would founder

by the way, because his pumps were of the best, and being periodically

relieved at them, those six-and-thirty men of his could easily

keep the ship free; never mind if the leak should double on her.

In truth, well nigh the whole of this passage being attended by very

prosperous breezes, the Town-Ho had all but certainly arrived in perfect

safety at her port without the occurrence of the least fatality,

had it not been for the brutal overbearing of Radney, the mate,

a Vineyarder, and the bitterly provoked vengeance of Steelkilt,

a Lakeman and desperado from Buffalo.



"'Lakeman!--Buffalo!  Pray, what is a Lakeman, and where is Buffalo?'

said Don Sebastian, rising in his swinging mat of grass.



"On the eastern shore of our Lake Erie, Don; but--I crave

your courtesy--may be, you shall soon hear further of all that.

Now, gentlemen, in square-sail brigs and three-masted ships,

well nigh as large and stout as any that ever sailed out of your

old Callao to far Manilla; this Lakeman, in the land-locked heart

of our America, had yet been nurtured by all those agrarian

freebooting impressions popularly connected with the open ocean.

For in their interflowing aggregate, those grand fresh-water seas

of ours,--Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan,--

possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the ocean's

noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of races and

of climes.  They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles,

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But no sooner did his harpooneer stand up for the stroke, than all

three tigers--Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo--instinctively sprang

to their feet, and standing in a diagonal row, simultaneously pointed

their barbs; and darted over the head of the German harpooneer,

their three Nantucket irons entered the whale.  Blinding vapors

of foam and white-fire! The three boats, in the first fury of the

whale's headlong rush, bumped the German's aside with such force,

that both Derick and his baffled harpooneer were spilled out,

and sailed over by the three flying keels.



"Don't be afraid, my butter-boxes," cried Stubb, casting a passing

glance upon them as he shot by; "ye'll be picked up presently--

all right--I saw some sharks astern--St. Bernard's dogs, you know--

relieve distressed travellers.  Hurrah! this is the way to sail now.

Every keel a sunbeam!  Hurrah!--Here we go like three tin

kettles at the tail of a mad cougar!  This puts me in mind

of fastening to an elephant in a tilbury on a plain--

makes the wheelspokes fly, boys, when you fasten to him that way;

and there's danger of being pitched out too, when you strike a hill.

Hurrah! this is the way a fellow feels when he's going

to Davy Jones--all a rush down an endless inclined plane!

Hurrah! this whale carries the everlasting mail!"



But the monster's run was a brief one.  Giving a sudden gasp,

he tumultuously sounded.  With a grating rush, the three lines flew round

the loggerheads with such a force as to gouge deep grooves in them;

while so fearful were the harpooneers that this rapid sounding

would soon exhaust the lines, that using all their dexterous might,

they caught repeated smoking turns with the rope to hold on;

till at last--owing to the perpendicular strain from the lead-lined

chocks of the boats, whence the three ropes went straight

down into the blue--the gunwales of the bows were almost even

with the water, while the three sterns tilted high in the air.

And the whale soon ceasing to sound, for some time they

remained in that attitude, fearful of expending more line,

though the position was a little ticklish.  But though boats have

been taken down and lost in this way, yet it is this "holding on,"

as it is called; this hooking up by the sharp barbs of his live

flesh from the back; this it is that often torments the Leviathan

into soon rising again to meet the sharp lance of his foes.

Yet not to speak of the peril of the thing, it is to be doubted

whether this course is always the best; for it is but reasonable

to presume, that the longer the stricken whale stays under water,

the more he is exhausted.  Because, owing to the enormous surface of him--

in a full grown sperm whale something less than 2000 square feet--

the pressure of the water is immense.  We all know what an astonishing

atmospheric weight we ourselves stand up under; even here,

above-ground, in the air; how vast, then, the burden of a whale,

bearing on his back a column of two hundred fathoms of ocean!

It must at least equal the weight of fifty atmospheres.  One whaleman

has estimated it at the weight of twenty line-of-battle ships,

with all their guns, and stores, and men on board.



As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea,

gazing down into its eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan

or cry of any sort, nay, not so much as a ripple or a bubble

came up from its depths; what landsman would have thought,

that beneath all that silence and placidity, the utmost

monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in agony!

Not eight inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows.

Seems it credible that by three such thin threads the great

Leviathan was suspended like the big weight to an eight day clock.

Suspended? and to what?  To three bits of board.  Is this

the creature of whom it was once so triumphantly said--"Canst thou

fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish-spears?

The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold, the spear,

the dart, nor the habergeon:  he esteemeth iron as straw;

the arrow cannot make him flee; darts are counted as stubble;

he laugheth at the shaking of a spear!"  This the creature?

this he?  Oh! that unfulfilments should follow the prophets.

For with the strength of a thousand thighs in his tail,

Leviathan had run his head under the mountains of the sea,

to hide him from the Pequod's fishspears!



In that sloping afternoon sunlight, the shadows that the three boats sent

down beneath the surface, must have been long enough and broad enough

to shade half Xerxes' army.  Who can tell how appalling to the wounded

whale must have been such huge phantoms flitting over his head!



"Stand by, men; he stirs," cried Starbuck, as the three lines suddenly

vibrated in the water, distinctly conducting upwards to them,

as by magnetic wires, the life and death throbs of the whale,

so that every oarsman felt them in his seat.  The next moment,

relieved in a great part from the downward strain at the bows,

the boats gave a sudden bounce upwards, as a small icefield will,

when a dense herd of white bears are scared from it into the sea.



"Haul in!  Haul in!" cried Starbuck again; "he's rising."



The lines, of which, hardly an instant before, not one hand's

breadth could have been gained, were now in long quick coils

flung back all dripping into the boats, and soon the whale

broke water within two ship's length of the hunters.



His motions plainly denoted his extreme exhaustion.

In most land animals there are certain valves or flood-gates

in many of their veins, whereby when wounded, the blood is in

some degree at least instantly shut off in certain directions.

Not so with the whale; one of whose peculiarities it is,

to have an entire non-valvular structure of the blood-vessels,

so that when pierced even by so small a point as a harpoon,

a deadly drain is at once begun upon his whole arterial system;

and when this is heightened by the extraordinary pressure

of water at a great distance below the surface, his life

may be said to pour from him in incessant streams.

Yet so vast is the quantity of blood in him, and so distant

and numerous its interior fountains, that he will keep

thus bleeding and bleeding for a considerable period;

even as in a drought a river will flow, whose source is

in the well-springs of far-off and indiscernible hills.

Even now, when the boats pulled upon this whale, and perilously

drew over his swaying flukes, and the lances were darted into him,

they were followed by steady jets from the new made wound,

which kept continually playing, while the natural spout-hole

in his head was only at intervals, however rapid, sending its

affrighted moisture into the air.  From this last vent no blood

yet came, because no vital part of him had thus far been struck.

His life, as they significantly call it, was untouched.



As the boats now more closely surrounded him, the whole upper part of his

form, with much of it that is ordinarily submerged, was plainly revealed.

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and firmly secured so, with inter-twistings of twine.

This done, pole, iron, and rope--like the Three Fates--

remained inseparable, and Ahab moodily stalked away with the weapon;

the sound of his ivory leg, and the sound of the hickory pole,

both hollowly ringing along every plank.  But ere he entered

his cabin, a light, unnatural, half-bantering, yet most piteous

sound was heard.  Oh!  Pip, thy wretched laugh, thy idle

but unresting eye; all thy strange mummeries not unmeaningly

blended with the black tragedy of the melancholy ship,

and mocked it!







CHAPTER 114



The Gilder





Penetrating further and further into the heart of the Japanese

cruising ground the Pequod was soon all astir in the fishery.

Often, in mild, pleasant weather, for twelve, fifteen, eighteen,

and twenty hours on the stretch, they were engaged in the boats,

steadily pulling, or sailing, or paddling after the whales,

or for an interlude of sixty or seventy minutes calmly awaiting

their uprising; though with but small success for their pains.



At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth,

slow heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe;

and so sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves,

that like hearth-stone cats they purr against the gunwale;

these are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil

beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger

heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember,

that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.



These are the times, when in his whale-boat the rover softly feels

a certain filial, confident, land-like feeling towards the sea; that he

regards it as so much flowery earth; and the distant ship revealing

only the tops of her masts, seems struggling forward, not through high

rolling waves, but through the tall grass of a rolling prairie:

as when the western emigrants' horses only show their erected ears,

while their hidden bodies widely wade through the amazing verdure.



The long-drawn virgin vales; the mild blue hill-sides;

as over these there steals the hush, the hum; you almost swear

that play-wearied children lie sleeping in these solitudes,

in some glad May-time, when the flowers of the woods are plucked.

And all this mixes with your most mystic mood; so that fact and fancy,

half-way meeting, interpenetrate, and form one seamless whole.



Nor did such soothing scenes, however temporary, fail of at least

as temporary an effect on Ahab.  But if these secret golden

keys did seem to open in him his own secret golden treasuries,

yet did his breath upon them prove but tarnishing.



Oh, grassy glades! oh ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul;

in ye,--though long parched by the dead drought of the earthly life,--

in ye, men yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover;

and for some few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life

immortal on them.  Would to God these blessed calms would last.

But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp

and woof:  calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm.

There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not

advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:--

through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless

faith, adolescence' doubt (the common doom), then scepticism,

then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose

of If.  But once gone through, we trace the round again;

and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally.

Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more?

In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest

will never weary?  Where is the foundling's father hidden?

Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die

in bearing them:  the secret of our paternity lies in their grave,

and we must there to learn it.



And that same day, too, gazing far down from his boat's side

into that same golden sea, Starbuck lowly murmured:--



"Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride's eyes!--

Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibal ways.

Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down

and do believe."



And Stubb, fish-like, with sparkling scales, leaped up in that

same golden light:--



"I am Stubb, and Stubb has his history; but here Stubb takes

oaths that he has always been jolly!"







CHAPTER 115



The Pequod Meets The Bachelor





And jolly enough were the sights and the sounds that came bearing down

before the wind, some few weeks after Ahab's harpoon had been welded.



It was a Nantucket ship, the Bachelor, which had just wedged

in her last cask of oil, and bolted down her bursting hatches;

and now, in glad holiday apparel, was joyously, though somewhat

vain-gloriously, sailing round among the widely-separated ships

on the ground, previous to pointing her prow for home.



The three men at her mast-head wore long streamers of narrow red

bunting at their hats; from the stern, a whale-boat was suspended,

bottom down; and hanging captive from the bowsprit was seen the long

lower jaw of the last whale they had slain.  Signals, ensigns,

and jacks of all colors were flying from her rigging, on every side.

Sideways lashed in each of her three basketed tops were two barrels

of sperm; above which, in her top-mast cross-trees, you saw slender

breakers of the same precious fluid; and nailed to her main truck

was a brazen lamp.



As was afterwards learned, the Bachelor had met with

the most surprising success; all the more wonderful,

for that while cruising in the same seas numerous other vessels

had gone entire months without securing a single fish.

Not only had barrels of beef and bread been given away to make

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thus marred or lost; and if the binnacle compasses be affected,

the same fate reaches all the others that may be in the ship;

even were the lowermost one inserted into the kelson.



Deliberately standing before the binnacle, and eyeing

the transpointed compasses, the old man, with the sharp

of his extended hand, now took the precise bearing of the sun,

and satisfied that the needles were exactly inverted, shouted out

his orders for the ship's course to be changed accordingly.

The yards were hard up; and once more the Pequod thrust her

undaunted bows into the opposing wind, for the supposed fair

one had only been juggling her.



Meanwhile, whatever were his own secret thoughts, Starbuck

said nothing, but quietly he issued all requisite orders;

while Stubb and Flask--who in some small degree seemed then

to be sharing his feelings--likewise unmurmuringly acquiesced.

As for the men, though some of them lowly rumbled, their fear

of Ahab was greater than their fear of Fate.  But as ever before,

the pagan harpooneers remained almost wholly unimpressed;

or if impressed, it was only with a certain magnetism shot

into their congenial hearts from inflexible Ahab's.



For a space the old man walked the deck in rolling reveries.

But chancing to slip with his ivory heel, he saw the crushed

copper sight-tubes of the quadrant he had the day before dashed

to the deck.



"Thou poor, proud heaven-gazer and sun's pilot! yesterday I

wrecked thee, and to-day the compasses would fain have wrecked me.

So, so.  But Ahab is lord over the level loadstone yet.

Mr. Starbuck--a lance without the pole; a top-maul, and the smallest

of the sail-maker's needles.  Quick!"



Accessory, perhaps, to the impulse dictating the thing he was now about

to do, were certain prudential motives, whose object might have been

to revive the spirits of his crew by a stroke of his subtile skill,

in a matter so wondrous as that of the inverted compasses.

Besides, the old man well knew that to steer by transpointed needles,

though clumsily practicable, was not a thing to be passed over by

superstitious sailors, without some shudderings and evil portents.



"Men," said he, steadily turning upon the crew, as the mate

handed him the things he had demanded, "my men, the thunder

turned old Ahab's needles; but out of this bit of steel Ahab

can make one of his own, that will point as true as any."



Abashed glances of servile wonder were exchanged by the sailors,

as this was said; and with fascinated eyes they awaited whatever

magic might follow.  But Starbuck looked away.



With a blow from the top-maul Ahab knocked off the steel head of

the lance, and then handing to the mate the long iron rod remaining,

bade him hold it upright, without its touching the deck.

Then, with the maul, after repeatedly smiting the upper end of this

iron rod, he placed the blunted needle endwise on the top of it,

and less strongly hammered that, several times, the mate still holding

the rod as before.  Then going through some small strange motions

with it--whether indispensable to the magnetizing of the steel,

or merely intended to augment the awe of the crew, is uncertain--

he called for linen thread; and moving to the binnacle, slipped out

the two reversed needles there, and horizontally suspended the

sail-needle by its middle, over one of the compass cards.  At first,

the steel went round and round, quivering and vibrating at either end;

but at last it settled to its place, when Ahab, who had been intently

watching for this result, stepped frankly back from the binnacle,

and pointing his stretched arm towards it, exclaimed,--"Look ye,

for yourselves, if Ahab be not the lord of the level loadstone!

The sun is East, and that compass swears it!"



One after another they peered in, for nothing but their own eyes

could persuade such ignorance as theirs, and one after another

they slunk away.



In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab

in all his fatal pride.







CHAPTER 125



The Log and Line





While now the fated Pequod had been so long afloat this voyage,

the log and line had but very seldom been in use.

Owing to a confident reliance upon other means of determining

the vessel's place, some merchantmen, and many whalemen,

especially when cruising, wholly neglect to heave the log;

though at the same time, and frequently more for form's sake

than anything else, regularly putting down upon the customary

slate the course steered by the ship, as well as the presumed

average rate of progression every hour.  It had been thus

with the Pequod.  The wooden reel and angular log attached hung,

long untouched, just beneath the railing of the after bulwarks.

Rains and spray had damped it; the sun and wind had warped it;

all the elements had combined to rot a thing that hung so idly.

But heedless of all this, his mood seized Ahab, as he happened

to glance upon the reel, not many hours after the magnet scene,

and he remembered how his quadrant was no more, and recalled

his frantic oath about the level log and line.  The ship was

sailing plungingly; astern the billows rolled in riots.



"Forward, there!  Heave the log!"



Two seamen came.  The golden-hued Tahitian and the grizzly Manxman.

"Take the reel, one of ye, I'll heave."



They went towards the extreme stern, on the ship's lee side,

where the deck, with the oblique energy of the wind, was now

almost dipping into the creamy, sidelong-rushing sea.



The Manxman took the reel, and holding it high up, by the projecting

handle-ends of the spindle, round which the spool of line revolved,

so stood with the angular log hanging downwards, till Ahab

advanced to him.



Ahab stood before him, and was lightly unwinding some thirty

or forty turns to form a preliminary hand-coil to toss overboard,

when the old Manxman, who was intently eyeing both him and the line,

made bold to speak.

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over the destroying billows they almost touched;--at that instant, a red

arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act

of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar.

A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards

from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag,

and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept

its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood;

and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged

savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there;

and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial

beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag

of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink

to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her,

and helmeted herself with it.



Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf;

a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed,

and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five

thousand years ago.





Epilogue



       "AND I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE"

                                            Job.



The drama's done.  Why then here does any one step forth?--

Because one did survive the wreck.





It so chanced, that after the Parsee's disappearance, I was

he whom the Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab's bowsman,

when that bowsman assumed the vacant post; the same, who, when on

the last day the three men were tossed from out of the rocking boat,

was dropped astern.  So, floating on the margin of the ensuing scene,

and in full sight of it, when the halfspent suction of the sunk ship

reached me, I was then, but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex.

When I reached it, it had subsided to a creamy pool.

Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the button-like

black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle,

like another Ixion I did revolve.  Till, gaining that vital centre,

the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of its

cunning spring, and, owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great force,

the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over,

and floated by my side.  Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost

one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirgelike main.

The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on

their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks.

On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last.

It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search

after her missing children, only found another orphan.











  ETYMOLOGY



  (Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School)



The pale Usher--threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain;

I see him now.  He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars,

with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay

flags of all the known nations of the world.  He loved to dust

his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.



  "While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by

what name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue leaving out,

through ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh the

signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true."

    --HACKLUYT



  "WHALE. ... Sw. and Dan. hval. This animal is named from roundness

or rolling; for in Dan. hvalt is arched or vaulted."

    --WEBSTER'S DICTIONARY



  "WHALE. ... It is more immediately from the Dut. and Ger.

Wallen; A.S. Walw-ian, to roll, to wallow."

    --RICHARDSON'S DICTIONARY



          KETOS,               Greek.

          CETUS,               Latin.

          WHOEL,               Anglo-Saxon.

          HVALT,               Danish.

          WAL,                 Dutch.

          HWAL,                Swedish.

          WHALE,               Icelandic.

          WHALE,               English.

          BALEINE,             French.

          BALLENA,             Spanish.

          PEKEE-NUEE-NUEE,     Fegee.

          PEKEE-NUEE-NUEE,     Erromangoan.





  EXTRACTS

  (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian)



It will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm

of a poor devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long

Vaticans and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random

allusions to whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever,

sacred or profane.  therefore you must not, in every case at least,

take the higgledy-piggledy whale statements, however authentic,

in these extracts, for veritable gospel cetology.  Far from it.

As touching the ancient authors generally, as well as the poets

here appearing, these extracts are solely valuable or entertaining,

as affording a glancing bird's eye view of what has been

promiscuously said, thought, fancied, and sung of Leviathan,

by many nations and generations, including our own.



So fare thee well, poor devil of a Sub-Sub, whose commentator I am.

Thou belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world

will ever warm; and for whom even Pale Sherry would be too rosy-strong;

but with whom one sometimes loves to sit, and feel poor-devilish, too;

and grow convivial upon tears; and say to them bluntly, with full

eyes and empty glasses, and in not altogether unpleasant sadness--

Give it up, Sub-Subs! For by how much more pains ye take to please

the world, by so much the more shall ye for ever go thankless!

Would that I could clear out Hampton Court and the Tuileries for ye!

But gulp down your tears and hie aloft to the royal-mast with

your hearts; for your friends who have gone before are clearing