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the Tomahawk from one to the other, till slowly there grew

over us a blue hanging tester of smoke, illuminated by the flame

of the new-lit lamp.



Whether it was that this undulating tester rolled the savage

away to far distant scenes, I know not, but he now spoke

of his native island; and, eager to hear his history,

I begged him to go on and tell it.  He gladly complied.

Though at the time I but ill comprehended not a few of his words,

yet subsequent disclosures, when I had become more familiar

with his broken phraseology, now enable me to present the whole

story such as it may prove in the mere skeleton I give.







CHAPTER 12



Biographical





Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West

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ancient and interesting one, let us in some measure expatiate here.

I take it, that the earliest standers of mast-heads were the

old Egyptians; because, in all my researches, I find none prior to them.

For though their progenitors, the builders of Babel, must doubtless,

by their tower, have intended to rear the loftiest mast-head in

all Asia, or Africa either; yet (ere the final truck was put to it)

as that great stone mast of theirs may be said to have gone by

the board, in the dread gale of God's wrath; therefore, we cannot

give these Babel builders priority over the Egyptians.  And that

the Egyptians were a nation of mast-head standers, is an

assertion based upon the general belief among archaeologists,

that the first pyramids were founded for astronomical purposes:

a theory singularly supported by the peculiar stairlike formation

of all four sides of those edifices; whereby, with prodigious long

upliftings of their legs, those old astronomers were wont to mount

to the apex, and sing out for new stars; even as the look-outs of a

modern ship sing out for a sail, or a whale just bearing in sight.

In Saint Stylites, the famous Christian hermit of old times,

who built him a lofty stone pillar in the desert and spent the whole

latter portion of his life on its summit, hoisting his food from

the ground with a tackle; in him we have a remarkable instance

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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,

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the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt of wampum was

the deepest pledge of honor; though in many climes, whiteness typifies

the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge, and contributes

to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by milk-white steeds;

though even in the higher mysteries of the most august religions

it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness and power;

by the Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame being

held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies,

Great Jove himself being made incarnate in a snow-white bull;

and though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred

White Dog was by far the holiest festival of their theology,

that spotless, faithful creature being held the purest envoy they

could send to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of their

own fidelity; and though directly from the Latin word for white,

all Christian priests derive the name of one part of their

sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the cassock;

and though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is

specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of our Lord;

though in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the redeemed,

and the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before

the great-white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there

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only think of the gigantic involutions of his intestines,

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

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



Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behoves

me to approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise;

not overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood,

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

Having already described him in most of his present habitatory

and anatomical peculiarities, it now remains to magnify him in

an archaeological, fossiliferous, and antediluvian point of view.

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

such portly terms might justly be deemed unwarrantably grandiloquent.

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

to this enterprise under the weightiest words of the dictionary.

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

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

quarto edition of Johnson, expressly purchased for that purpose;

because that famous lexicographer's uncommon personal bulk more fitted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

though many there be who have tried it.



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

credentials as a geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous

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

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

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

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

of monsters now almost completely extinct; the subsequent relics

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

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

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

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

which is the last preceding the superficial formations.  And though

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

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

their taking ranks as Cetacean fossils.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

of the globe have blotted out of existence.



When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons,

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

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

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

the annihilated antichronical Leviathans, their incalculable seniors;

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

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

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Inasmuch, then, as this Leviathan comes floundering down

upon us from the head-waters of the Eternities, it may be

fitly inquired, whether, in the long course of his generations,

he has not degenerated from the original bulk of his sires.



But upon investigation we find, that not only are the whales

of the present day superior in magnitude to those whose fossil

remains are found in the Tertiary system (embracing a distinct

geological period prior to man), but of the whales found in

that Tertiary system, those belonging to its latter formations

exceed in size those of its earlier ones.



Of all the pre-adamite whales yet exhumed, by far the largest

is the Alabama one mentioned in the last chapter, and that

was less than seventy feet in length in the skeleton.

Whereas, we have already seen, that the tape-measure gives

seventy-two feet for the skeleton of a large sized modern whale.

And I have heard, on whalemen's authority, that Sperm Whales have

been captured near a hundred feet long at the time of capture.



But may it not be, that while the whales of the present hour are an

advance in magnitude upon those of all previous geological periods;

may it not be, that since Adam's time they have degenerated?



Assuredly, we must conclude so, if we are to credit the accounts

of such gentlemen as Pliny, and the ancient naturalists generally.

For Pliny tells us of Whales that embraced acres of living bulk,

and Aldrovandus of others which measured eight hundred feet in length--

Rope Walks and Thames Tunnels of Whales!  And even in the days

of Banks and Solander, Cooke's naturalists, we find a Danish member

of the Academy of Sciences setting down certain Iceland Whales

(reydan-siskur, or Wrinkled Bellies) at one hundred and twenty yards;