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Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit

that I kept but sorry guard.  With the problem of the universe

revolving in me, how could I--being left completely to myself

at such a thought-engendering altitude--how could I but lightly

hold my obligations to observe all whaleships' standing orders,

"Keep your weather eye open, and sing out every time."



And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners

of Nantucket!  Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad

with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness;

and who offers to ship with the Phaedon instead of Bowditch in his head.

Beware of such an one, I say:  your whales must be seen before they can

be killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes

round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer.

Nor are these monitions at all unneeded.  For nowadays, the whale-fishery

furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded

young men, disgusted with the corking care of earth, and seeking

sentiment in tar and blubber.  Childe Harold not unfrequently perches

himself upon the mast-head of some luckless disappointed whale-ship,

and in moody phrase ejaculates:--



     "Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!

      Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain."



Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded young

philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient

"interest" in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so hopelessly

lost to all honorable ambition, as that in their secret souls they

would rather not see whales than otherwise.  But all in vain;

those young Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect;

they are short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve?

They have left their opera-glasses at home.



"Why, thou monkey," said a harpooneer to one of these lads,

"we've been cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast

not raised a whale yet.  Whales are scarce as hen's teeth

whenever thou art up here."  Perhaps they were; or perhaps

there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon;

but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant,

unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending

cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity;

takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of

that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature;

and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him;

every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form,

seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that

only people the soul by continually flitting through it.

In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came;

becomes diffused through time and space; like Crammer's

sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every

shore the round globe over.



There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted

by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea;

by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God.  But while

this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch;

slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror.

Over Descartian vortices you hover.  And perhaps, at midday,

in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through

that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever.

Heed it well, ye Pantheists!







CHAPTER 36



The Quarter-Deck





(Enter Ahab:  Then, all)





It was not a great while after the affair of the pipe,

that one morning shortly after breakfast, Ahab, as was his wont,

ascended the cabin-gangway to the deck.  There most sea-captains

usually walk at that hour, as country gentlemen, after the same meal,

take a few turns in the garden.



Soon his steady, ivory stride was heard, as to and fro he paced his

old rounds, upon planks so familiar to his tread, that they were all

over dented, like geological stones, with the peculiar mark of his walk.

Did you fixedly gaze, too, upon that ribbed and dented brow;

there also, you would see still stranger foot-prints--the foot-prints

of his one unsleeping, ever-pacing thought.



But on the occasion in question, those dents looked deeper,

even as his nervous step that morning left a deeper mark.

And, so full of his thought was Ahab, that at every uniform turn

that he made, now at the main-mast and now at the binnacle,

you could almost see that thought turn in him as he turned,

and pace in him as he paced; so completely possessing him, indeed,

that it all but seemed the inward mould of every outer movement.



"D'ye mark him, Flask?" whispered Stubb; "the chick that's in him

pecks the shell.  'Twill soon be out."



The hours wore on;--Ahab now shut up within his cabin;

anon, pacing the deck, with the same intense bigotry of purpose

in his aspect.



It drew near the close of day.  Suddenly he came to a halt by

the bulwarks, and inserting his bone leg into the auger-hole there,

and with one hand grasping a shroud, he ordered Starbuck

to send everybody aft.



"Sir!" said the mate, astonished at an order seldom or never given

on ship-board except in some extraordinary case.



"Send everybody aft," repeated Ahab.  "Mast-heads, there! come down!"



When the entire ship's company were assembled, and with curious

and not wholly unapprehensive faces, were eyeing him, for he looked

not unlike the weather horizon when a storm is coming up, Ahab,

after rapidly glancing over the bulwarks, and then darting his

eyes among the crew, started from his standpoint; and as though

not a soul were nigh him resumed his heavy turns upon the deck.

With bent head and half-slouched hat he continued to pace,

unmindful of the wondering whispering among the men; till Stubb

cautiously whispered to Flask, that Ahab must have summoned

them there for the purpose of witnessing a pedestrian feat.

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and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate

he can make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these

very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness

of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.



The first boat we read of, floated on an ocean, that with Portuguese

vengeance had whelmed a whole world without leaving so much as a widow.

That same ocean rolls now; that same ocean destroyed the wrecked ships

of last year.  Yea, foolish mortals, Noah's flood is not yet subsided;

two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.



Wherein differ the sea and the land, that a miracle upon

one is not a miracle upon the other?  Preternatural terrors

rested upon the Hebrews, when under the feet of Korah and his

company the live ground opened and swallowed them up for ever;

yet not a modern sun ever sets, but in precisely the same manner

the live sea swallows up ships and crews.



But not only is the sea such a foe to man who is an alien

to it, but it is also a fiend to its own off-spring;

worse than the Persian host who murdered his own guests;

sparing not the creatures which itself hath spawned.

Like a savage tigress that tossing in the jungle overlays her

own cubs, so the sea dashes even the mightiest whales against

the rocks, and leaves them there side by side with the split

wrecks of ships.  No mercy, no power but its own controls it.

Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost

its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe.



Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded

creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part,

and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure.

Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of

its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape

of many species of sharks.  Consider once more, the universal

cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other,

carrying on eternal war since the world began.



Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most

docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land;

and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself?

For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul

of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy,

but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life.

God keep thee!  Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!





CHAPTER 59



Squid





Slowly wading through the meadows of brit, the Pequod still

held on her way north-eastward towards the island of Java;

a gentle air impelling her keel, so that in the surrounding

serenity her three tall tapering masts mildly waved

to that languid breeze, as three mild palms on a plain.

And still, at wide intervals in the silvery night, the lonely,

alluring jet would be seen.



But one transparent blue morning, when a stillness almost

preternatural spread over the sea, however unattended with any

stagnant calm; when the long burnished sun-glade on the waters

seemed a golden finger laid across them, enjoining some secrecy;

when the slippered waves whispered together as they softly ran on;

in this profound hush of the visible sphere a strange spectre

was seen by Daggoo from the main-mast-head.



In the distance, a great white mass lazily rose, and rising higher

and higher, and disentangling itself from the azure, at last gleamed

before our prow like a snow-slide, new slid from the hills.

Thus glistening for a moment, as slowly it subsided, and sank.

Then once more arose, and silently gleamed.  It seemed not a whale;

and yet is this Moby Dick? thought Daggoo.  Again the phantom

went down, but on re-appearing once more, with a stiletto-like

cry that startled every man from his nod, the negro yelled

out--"There! there again! there she breaches! right ahead!

The White Whale, the White Whale!"



Upon this, the seamen rushed to the yard-arms, as in swarming-time

the bees rush to the boughs.  Bare-headed in the sultry sun,

Ahab stood on the bowsprit, and with one hand pushed far behind

in readiness to wave his orders to the helmsman, cast his eager

glance in the direction indicated aloft by the outstretched

motionless arm of Daggoo.



Whether the flitting attendance of the one still and solitary

jet had gradually worked upon Ahab, so that he was now prepared

to connect the ideas of mildness and repose with the first sight

of the particular whale he pursued; however this was, or whether

his eagerness betrayed him; whichever way it might have been,

no sooner did he distinctly perceive the white mass, than with

a quick intensity he instantly gave orders for lowering.



The four boats were soon on the water; Ahab's in advance,

and all swiftly pulling towards their prey.  Soon it went down,

and while, with oars suspended, we were awaiting its reappearance,

lo! in the same spot where it sank, once more it slowly rose.

Almost forgetting for the moment all thoughts of Moby Dick,

we now gazed at the most wondrous phenomenon which the secret

seas have hitherto revealed to mankind.  A vast pulpy mass,

furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-color, lay

floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from

its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas,

as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach.

No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token

of either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows,

an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life.



As with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again,

Starbuck still gazing at the agitated waters where it had sunk,

with a wild voice exclaimed--"Almost rather had I seen Moby Dick

and fought him, than to have seen thee, thou white ghost!"



"What was it, Sir?" said Flask.



"The great live squid, which, they say, few whale-ships ever beheld,

and returned to their ports to tell of it."



But Ahab said nothing; turning his boat, he sailed back to the vessel;

the rest as silently following.

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hear? away you sail then.--Halloa! stop! make a bow before you go.--

Avast heaving again!  Whale-balls for breakfast--don't forget."



"Wish, by gor! whale eat him, 'stead of him eat whale.

I'm bressed if he ain't more of shark dan Massa Shark hisself,"

muttered the old man, limping away; with which sage ejaculation

he went to his hammock.









CHAPTER 65



The Whale as a Dish









That mortal man should feed upon the creature that feeds

his lamp, and, like Stubb, eat him by his own light, as you may say;

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

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For the strain constantly kept up by the windlass continually

keeps the whale rolling over and over in the water, and as

the blubber in one strip uniformly peels off along the line

called the "scarf," simultaneously cut by the spades of Starbuck

and Stubb, the mates; and just as fast as it is thus peeled off,

and indeed by that very act itself, it is all the time being hoisted

higher and higher aloft till its upper end grazes the main-top;

the men at the windlass then cease heaving, and for a moment

or two the prodigious blood-dripping mass sways to and fro

as if let down from the sky, and every one present must take

good heed to dodge it when it swings, else it may box his ears

and pitch him headlong overboard.



One of the attending harpooneers now advances with a long, keen weapon

called a boarding-sword, and watching his chance he dexterously slices

out a considerable hole in the lower part of the swaying mass.

Into this hole, the end of the second alternating great tackle is then

hooked so as to retain a hold upon the blubber, in order to prepare for

what follows.  Whereupon, this accomplished swordsman, warning all hands

to stand off, once more makes a scientific dash at the mass, and with a

few sidelong, desperate, lunging, slicings, severs it completely in twain;

so that while the short lower part is still fast, the long upper strip,

called a blanket-piece, swings clear, and is all ready for lowering.

The heavers forward now resume their song, and while the one tackle is

peeling and hoisting a second strip from the whale, the other is slowly

slackened away, and down goes the first strip through the main hatchway

right beneath, into an unfurnished parlor called the blubber-room. Into

this twilight apartment sundry nimble hands keep coiling away the long

blanket-piece as if it were a great live mass of plaited serpents.

And thus the work proceeds; the two tackles hoisting and lowering

simultaneously; both whale and windlass heaving, the heavers singing,

the blubber-room gentlemen coiling, the mates scarfing, the ship

straining, and all hands swearing occasionally, by way of assuaging

the general friction.







CHAPTER 68



The Blanket





I have given no small attention to that not unvexed subject,

the skin of the whale.  I have had controversies about it with

experienced whalemen afloat, and learned naturalists ashore.

My original opinion remains unchanged; but it is only an opinion.



The question is, what and where is the skin of the whale.

Already you know what his blubber is.  That blubber is something

of the consistence of firm, close-grained beef, but tougher,

more elastic and compact, and ranges from eight or ten to twelve

and fifteen inches in thickness.



Now, however preposterous it may at first seem to talk of any creature's

skin as being of that sort of consistence and thickness, yet in point

of fact these are no arguments against such a presumption; because you

cannot raise any other dense enveloping layer from the whale's body

but that same blubber; and the outermost enveloping layer of any animal,

if reasonably dense, what can that be but the skin?  True, from the

unmarred dead body of the whale, you may scrape off with your hand an

infinitely thin, transparent substance, somewhat resembling the thinnest

shreds of isinglass, only it is almost as flexible and soft as satin;

that is, previous to being dried, when it not only contracts and thickens,

but becomes rather hard and brittle.  I have several such dried bits,

which I use for marks in my whale-books. It is transparent, as I

said before; and being laid upon the printed page, I have sometimes

pleased myself with fancying it exerted a magnifying influence.

At any rate, it is pleasant to read about whales through their

own spectacles, as you may say.  But what I am driving at here is this.

That same infinitely thin, isinglass substance, which, I admit,

invests the entire body of the whale, is not so much to be regarded

as the skin of the creature, as the skin of the skin, so to speak; for it

were simply ridiculous to say, that the proper skin of the tremendous

whale is thinner and more tender than the skin of a new-born child.

But no more of this.



Assuming the blubber to be the skin of the whale; then, when this skin,

as in the case of a very large Sperm Whale, will yield the bulk

of one hundred barrels of oil; and, when it is considered that,

in quantity, or rather weight, that oil, in its expressed state,

is only three fourths, and not the entire substance of the coat; some idea

may hence be had of the enormousness of that animated mass, a mere

part of whose mere integument yields such a lake of liquid as that.

Reckoning ten barrels to the ton, you have ten tons for the net weight

of only three quarters of the stuff of the whale's skin.



In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among

the many marvels he presents.  Almost invariably it is all over obliquely

crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array,

something like those in the finest Italian line engravings.

But these marks do not seem to be impressed upon the isinglass

substance above mentioned, but seem to be seen through it,

as if they were engraved upon the body itself.  Nor is this all.

In some instances, to the quick, observant eye, those linear marks,

as in a veritable engraving, but afford the ground for far

other delineations.  These are hieroglyphical; that is, if you call

those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids hieroglyphics,

then that is the proper word to use in the present connexion.

By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale

in particular, I was much struck with a plate representing

the old Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic

palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi.  Like those

mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable.

This allusion to the Indian rocks reminds me of another thing.

Besides all the other phenomena which the exterior of the Sperm Whale

presents, he not seldom displays the back, and more especially his flanks,

effaced in great part of the regular linear appearance, by reason

of numerous rude scratches, altogether of an irregular, random aspect.

I should say that those New England rocks on the seacoast,

which Agassiz imagines to bear the marks of violent scraping

contact with vast floating icebergs--I should say, that those rocks

must not a little resemble the Sperm Whale in this particular.

It also seems to me that such scratches in the whale are probably

made by hostile contact with other whales; for I have most remarked

them in the large, full-grown bulls of the species.



A word or two more concerning this matter of the skin

or blubber of the whale.  It has already been said, that it

is stript from him in long pieces, called blanket-pieces.

Like most sea-terms, this one is very happy and significant.

For the whale is indeed wrapt up in his blubber as in a real

blanket or counterpane; or, still better, an Indian poncho slipt

over his head, and skirting his extremity.  It is by reason of this

cosy blanketing of his body, that the whale is enabled to keep

himself comfortable in all weathers, in all seas, times, and tides.

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It had been next to impossible to dart these drugged-harpoons,

were it not that as we advanced into the herd, our whale's way

greatly diminished; moreover, that as we went still further

and further from the circumference of commotion, the direful

disorders seemed waning.  So that when at last the jerking

harpoon drew out, and the towing whale sideways vanished;

then, with the tapering force of his parting momentum, we glided

between two whales into the innermost heart of the shoal, as if

from some mountain torrent we had slid into a serene valley lake.

Here the storms in the roaring glens between the outermost whales,

were heard but not felt.  In this central expanse the sea

presented that smooth satin-like surface, called a sleek,

produced by the subtle moisture thrown off by the whale

in his more quiet moods.  Yes, we were now in that enchanted

calm which they say lurks at the heart of every commotion.

And still in the distracted distance we beheld the tumults of

the outer concentric circles, and saw successive pods of whales,

eight or ten in each, swiftly going round and round, like multiplied

spans of horses in a ring; and so closely shoulder to shoulder,

that a Titanic circus-rider might easily have over-arched

the middle ones, and so have gone round on their backs.

Owing to the density of the crowd of reposing whales,

more immediately surrounding the embayed axis of the herd,

no possible chance of escape was at present afforded us.

We must watch for a breach in the living wall that hemmed us in;

the wall that had only admitted us in order to shut us up.

Keeping at the centre of the lake, we were occasionally

visited by small tame cows and calves; the women and children

of this routed host.



Now, inclusive of the occasional wide intervals between

the revolving outer circles, and inclusive of the spaces

between the various pods in any one of those circles,

the entire area at this juncture, embraced by the whole multitude,

must have contained at least two or three square miles.

At any rate--though indeed such a test at such a time might

be deceptive--spoutings might be discovered from our low boat

that seemed playing up almost from the rim of the horizon.

I mention this circumstance, because, as if the cows and

calves had been purposely locked up in this innermost fold;

and as if the wide extent of the herd had hitherto prevented them

from learning the precise cause of its stopping; or, possibly,

being so young, unsophisticated, and every way innocent

and inexperienced; however it may have been, these smaller whales--

now and then visiting our becalmed boat from the margin of the lake--

evinced a wondrous fearlessness and confidence, or else a still

becharmed panic which it was impossible not to marvel at.

Like household dogs they came snuffling round us,

right up to our gunwales, and touching them; till it almost

seemed that some spell had suddenly domesticated them.

Queequeg patted their foreheads; Starbuck scratched their backs

with his lance; but fearful of the consequences, for the time

refrained from darting it.



But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and

still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side.

For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms

of the nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their

enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers.  The lake, as I

have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent;

and as human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze

away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time;

and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually

feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence;--even so did the young

of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us,

as if we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their new-born sight.

Floating on their sides, the mothers also seemed quietly eyeing us.

One of these little infants, that from certain queer tokens seemed

hardly a day old, might have measured some fourteen feet in length,

and some six feet in girth.  He was a little frisky; though as yet

his body seemed scarce yet recovered from that irksome position it

had so lately occupied in the maternal reticule; where, tail to head,

and all ready for the final spring, the unborn whale lies bent like a

Tartar's bow.  The delicate side-fins, and the palms of his flukes,

still freshly retained the plaited crumpled appearance of a baby's

ears newly arrived from foreign parts.



"Line! line!" cried Queequeg, looking over the gunwale;

"him fast! him fast!--Who line him!  Who struck?--Two whale;

one big, one little!"



"What ails ye, man?" cried Starbuck.



"Look-e here," said Queequeg, pointing down.



As when the stricken whale, that from the tub has reeled

out hundreds of fathoms of rope; as, after deep sounding,

he floats up again, and shows the slackened curling line

buoyantly rising and spiralling towards the air; so now,

Starbuck saw long coils of the umbilical cord of Madame Leviathan,

by which the young cub seemed still tethered to its dam.

Not seldom in the rapid vicissitudes of the chase, this natural line,

with the maternal end loose, becomes entangled with the hempen one,

so that the cub is thereby trapped.  Some of the subtlest secrets

of the seas seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond.

We saw young Leviathan amours in the deep.*





*The sperm whale, as with all other species of the Leviathan,

but unlike most other fish, breeds indifferently at all seasons;

after a gestation which may probably be set down at nine months,

producing but one at a time; though in some few known instances

giving birth to an Esau and Jacob:--a contingency provided for

in suckling by two teats, curiously situated, one on each side

of the anus; but the breasts themselves extend upwards from that.

When by chance these precious parts in a nursing whale are cut by

the hunter's lance, the mother's pouring milk and blood rivallingly

discolor the sea for rods.  The milk is very sweet and rich;

it has been tasted by man; it might do well with strawberries.

When overflowing with mutual esteem, the whales salute more hominum.





And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations

and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre

freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments;

yea, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight.

But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being,

do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm;

and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me,

deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and looking as anxious as gold-hunters.



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

and screaming, and yelling, and fighting around them.

Stubb was beginning to look disappointed, especially as the horrible

nosegay increased, when suddenly from out the very heart of

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

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

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

without at all blending with it for a time.



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

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



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

handfuls of something that looked like ripe Windsor soap,

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

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

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

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

Some six handfuls were obtained; but more was unavoidably lost

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

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

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







CHAPTER 92



Ambergris





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

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

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

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

the precise origin of ambergris remained, like amber itself,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

might be sailors' trousers buttons; but it afterwards turned

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

bones embalmed in that manner.



Now that the incorruption of this most fragrant ambergris

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cologne-water, in its rudimental manufacturing stages,

is the worst.



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

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

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

biased minds, might be considered as indirectly substantiated

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

Elsewhere in this volume the slanderous aspersion has been disproved,

that the vocation of whaling is throughout a slatternly,

untidy business.  But there is another thing to rebut.

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

odious stigma originate?



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

given forth somewhat similar to that arising from excavating an old

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



I partly surmise also, that this wicked charge against

whalers may be likewise imputed to the existence on the coast

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

Schmerenburgh or Smeerenberg, which latter name is the one used

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

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As she drew nigh, all eyes were fixed upon her broad beams,

called shears, which, in some whaling-ships, cross the quarter-deck

at the height of eight or nine feet; serving to carry the spare,

unrigged, or disabled boats.



Upon the stranger's shears were beheld the shattered, white ribs,

and some few splintered planks, of what had once been a whale-boat;

but you now saw through this wreck, as plainly as you see through

the peeled, half-unhinged, and bleaching skeleton of a horse.



"Hast seen the White Whale?"



"Look!" replied the hollow-cheeked captain from his taffrail;

and with his trumpet he pointed to the wreck.



"Hast killed him?"



"The harpoon is not yet forged that will ever will do that,"

answered the other, sadly glancing upon a rounded hammock on

the deck, whose gathered sides some noiseless sailors were busy

in sewing together.



"Not forged!" and snatching Perth's levelled iron from the crotch,

Ahab held it out, exclaiming--"Look ye, Nantucketer; here in this

hand I hold his death!  Tempered in blood, and tempered by lightning

are these barbs; and I swear to temper them triply in that hot place

behind the fin, where the White Whale most feels his accursed life!"



"Then God keep thee, old man--see'st thou that"--

pointing to the hammock--"I bury but one of five stout men,

who were alive only yesterday; but were dead ere night.

Only that one I bury; the rest were buried before they died;

you sail upon their tomb."  Then turning to his crew--"Are

ye ready there? place the plank then on the rail, and lift

the body; so, then--Oh!  God"--advancing towards the hammock

with uplifted hands--"may the resurrection and the life-"



"Brace forward!  Up helm!" cried Ahab like lightning to his men.



But the suddenly started Pequod was not quick enough to escape

the sound of the splash that the corpse soon made as it struck the sea;

not so quick, indeed, but that some of the flying bubbles might have

sprinkled her hull with their ghostly baptism.



As Ahab now glided from the dejected Delight, the strange life-buoy

hanging at the Pequod's stern came into conspicuous relief.



"Ha! yonder! look yonder, men!" cried a foreboding voice in her wake.

"In vain, oh, ye strangers, ye fly our sad burial; ye but turn us

your taffrail to show us your coffin!"







CHAPTER 132



The Symphony





It was a clear steel-blue day.  The firmaments of air and sea were

hardly separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air

was transparently pure and soft, with a woman's look, and the robust

and man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells,

as Samson's chest in his sleep.



Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small,

unspeckled birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air;

but to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue,

rushed mighty leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; and these were

the strong, troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea.



But though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades

and shadows without; those two seemed one; it was only the sex,

as it were, that distinguished them.



Aloft, like a royal czar and king, the sun seemed giving this

gentle air to this bold and rolling sea; even as bride to groom.

And at the girdling line of the horizon, a soft and tremulous motion--

most seen here at the Equator--denoted the fond, throbbing trust,

the loving alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom away.



Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles;

haggardly firm and unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals,

that still glow in the ashes of ruin; untottering Ahab stood

forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting his splintered

helmet of a brow to the fair girl's forehead of heaven.



Oh, immortal infancy, and innocency of the azure!

Invisible winged creatures that frolic all round us!

Sweet childhood of air and sky! how oblivious were ye of old Ahab's

close-coiled woe!  But so have I seen little Miriam and Martha,

laughing-eyed elves, heedlessly gambol around their old sire;

sporting with the circle of singed locks which grew on the marge

of that burnt-out crater of his brain.



Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side

and watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze,

the more and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity.

But the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel,

for a moment, the cankerous thing in his soul.  That glad,

happy air, that winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him;

the step-mother world, so long cruel--forbidding--now threw

affectionate arms round his stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously

sob over him, as if over one, that however wilful and erring,

she could yet find it in her heart to save and to bless.

From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea;

nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.



Starbuck saw the old man; saw him, how he heavily leaned over the side;

and he seemed to hear in his own true heart the measureless

sobbing that stole out of the centre of the serenity around.

Careful not to touch him, or be noticed by him, he yet drew near

to him, and stood there.



Ahab turned.



"Starbuck!"



"Sir."



"Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky.

On such a day--very much such a sweetness as this--I struck

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since the White Whale had been first descried; and whether it

was that Ahab's crew were all such tiger-yellow barbarians,

and therefore their flesh more musky to the senses of the sharks--

a matter sometimes well known to affect them,--however it was,

they seemed to follow that one boat without molesting the others.



"Heart of wrought steel!" murmured Starbuck gazing over the side,

and following with his eyes the receding boat--"canst thou

yet ring boldly to that sight?--lowering thy keel among

ravening sharks, and followed by them, open-mouthed to the chase;

and this the critical third day?--For when three days

flow together in one continuous intense pursuit; be sure

the first is the morning, the second the noon, and the third

the evening and the end of that thing--be that end what it may.

Oh! my God! what is this that shoots through me, and leaves me

so deadly calm, yet expectant,--fixed at the top of a shudder!

Future things swim before me, as in empty outlines and skeletons;

all the past is somehow grown dim.  Mary, girl; thou fadest

in pale glories behind me; boy!  I seem to see but thy eyes

grown wondrous blue.  Strangest problems of life seem clearing;

but clouds sweep between--Is my journey's end coming?

My legs feel faint; like his who has footed it all day.

Feel thy heart,--beats it yet?  Stir thyself, Starbuck!--

stave it off--move, move! speak aloud!--Mast-head there!

See ye my boy's hand on the hill?--Crazed; aloft there!--

keep thy keenest eye upon the boats:--mark well the whale!--

Ho! again!--drive off that hawk! see! he pecks--he tears the vane"--

pointing to the red flag flying at the main-truck--"Ha, he soars

away with it!--Where's the old man now? see'st thou that sight,

oh Ahab!--shudder, shudder!"



The boats had not gone very far, when by a signal from the mast-heads--

a downward pointed arm, Ahab knew that the whale had sounded;

but intending to be near him at the next rising, he held on his way

a little sideways from the vessel; the becharmed crew maintaining

the profoundest silence, as the head-bent waves hammered and hammered

against the opposing bow.



"Drive, drive in your nails, oh ye waves! to their uttermost

heads drive them in! ye but strike a thing without a lid;

and no coffin and no hearse can be mine:--and hemp only can

kill me!  Ha! ha!"



Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles;

then quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged

berg of ice, swiftly rising to the surface.  A low rumbling sound

was heard; a subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths;

as bedraggled with trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances,

a vast form shot lengthwise, but obliquely from the sea.

Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it hovered for a moment

in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back into the deep.

Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for an instant

like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of flakes,

leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble

trunk of the whale.



"Give way!" cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to

the attack; but maddened by yesterday's fresh irons that corroded in him,

Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell

from heaven.  The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad

white forehead, beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted together;

as head on, he came churning his tail among the boats; and once more

flailed them apart; spilling out the irons and lances from the two mates'

boats, and dashing in one side of the upper part of their bows,

but leaving Ahab's almost without a scar.



While Daggoo and Queequeg were stopping the strained planks;

and as the whale swimming out from them, turned, and showed

one entire flank as he shot by them again; at that moment

a quick cry went up.  Lashed round and round to the fish's back;

pinioned in the turns upon turns in which, during the past night,

the whale had reeled the involutions of the lines around him,

the half torn body of the Parsee was seen; his sable raiment

frayed to shreds; his distended eyes turned full upon old Ahab.



The harpoon dropped from his hand.



"Befooled, befooled!"--drawing in a long lean breath--"Aye, Parsee!  I see

thee again.--Aye, and thou goest before; and this, this then is the hearse

that thou didst promise.  But I hold thee to the last letter of thy word.

Where is the second hearse?  Away, mates, to the ship! those boats

are useless now; repair them if ye can in time, and return to me;

if not, Ahab is enough to die--Down, men! the first thing that but

offers to jump from this boat I stand in, that thing I harpoon.

Ye are not other men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey me.--

Where's the whale? gone down again?"



But he looked too nigh the boat; for as if bent upon escaping

with the corpse he bore, and as if the particular place of the last

encounter had been but a stage in his leeward voyage, Moby Dick

was now again steadily swimming forward; and had almost passed

the ship,--which thus far had been sailing in the contrary direction

to him, though for the present her headway had been stopped.

He seemed swimming with his utmost velocity, and now only intent

upon pursuing his own straight path in the sea.



"Oh!  Ahab," cried Starbuck, "not too late is it, even now,

the third day, to desist.  See!  Moby Dick seeks thee not.

It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!"



Setting sail to the rising wind, the lonely boat was

swiftly impelled to leeward, by both oars and canvas.

And at last when Ahab was sliding by the vessel, so near

as plainly to distinguish Starbuck's face as he leaned

over the rail, he hailed him to turn the vessel about,

and follow him, not too swiftly, at a judicious interval.

Glancing upwards he saw Tashtego, Queequeg, and Daggoo,

eagerly mounting to the three mast-heads; while the oarsmen

were rocking in the two staved boats which had but just been

hoisted to the side, and were busily at work in repairing them.

One after the other, through the port-holes, as he sped,

he also caught flying glimpses of Stubb and Flask,

busying themselves on deck among bundles of new irons and lances.

As he saw all this; as he heard the hammers in the broken boats;

far other hammers seemed driving a nail into his heart.

But he rallied.  And now marking that the vane or flag

was gone from the main-mast-head, he shouted to Tashtego,

who had just gained that perch, to descend again for another flag,

and a hammer and nails, and so nail it to the mast.



Whether fagged by the three days' running chase, and the