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It was in Sag Harbor.  The owners of his ship, it seems, had lent

him one, in which to carry his heavy chest to his boarding house.

Not to seem ignorant about the thing--though in truth he was

entirely so, concerning the precise way in which to manage

the barrow--Queequeg puts his chest upon it; lashes it fast;

and then shoulders the barrow and marches up the wharf.

"Why," said I, "Queequeg, you might have known better than that,

one would think.  Didn't the people laugh?"



Upon this, he told me another story.  The people of his island

of Rokovoko, it seems, at their wedding feasts express the fragrant

water of young cocoanuts into a large stained calabash like a punchbowl;

and this punchbowl always forms the great central ornament on

the braided mat where the feast is held.  Now a certain grand merchant

ship once touched at Rokovoko, and its commander--from all accounts,

a very stately punctilious gentleman, at least for a sea captain--

this commander was invited to the wedding feast of Queequeg's sister,

a pretty young princess just turned of ten.  Well; when all

the wedding guests were assembled at the bride's bamboo cottage,

this Captain marches in, and being assigned the post of honor,

placed himself over against the punchbowl, and between

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the watery world like so many Alexanders; parcelling out among

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

armed ones but floating forts; even pirates and privateers,

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

other ships, other fragments of the land like themselves,

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

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

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

to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation.

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

would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions

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

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

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

when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world,

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bucket again, all bubbling like a dairy-maid's pail of new milk.

Carefully lowered from its height, the full-freighted vessel is

caught by an appointed hand, and quickly emptied into a large tub.

Then remounting aloft, it again goes through the same round

until the deep cistern will yield no more.  Towards the end,

Tashtego has to ram his long pole harder and harder, and deeper

and deeper into the Tun, until some twenty feet of the pole

have gone down.



Now, the people of the Pequod had been baling some time in this way;

several tubs had been filled with the fragrant sperm; when all at

once a queer accident happened.  Whether it was that Tashtego,

that wild Indian, was so heedless and reckless as to let go for a moment

his one-handed hold on the great cabled tackles suspending the head;

or whether the place where he stood was so treacherous and oozy;

or whether the Evil One himself would have it to fall out so,

without stating his particular reasons; how it was exactly,

there is no telling now; but, on a sudden, as the eightieth

or ninetieth bucket came suckingly up--my God! poor Tashtego--

like the twin reciprocating bucket in a veritable well,

dropped head-foremost down into this great Tun of Heidelburgh,

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the sea water, and a lump of which sinks in it like lead almost.

But the tendency to rapid sinking in this substance was in the present

instance materially counteracted by the other parts of the head remaining

undetached from it, so that it sank very slowly and deliberately indeed,

affording Queequeg a fair chance for performing his agile obstetrics

on the run, as you may say.  Yes, it was a running delivery,

so it was.



Now, had Tashtego perished in that head, it had been a very

precious perishing; smothered in the very whitest and daintiest

of fragrant spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in

the secret inner chamber and sanctum sanctorum of the whale.

Only one sweeter end can readily be recalled--the delicious

death of an Ohio honey-hunter, who seeking honey in the crotch

of a hollow tree, found such exceeding store of it, that leaning

too far over, it sucked him in, so that he died embalmed.

How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato's honey head,

and sweetly perished there?

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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,

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and when the works were in full operation certainly gave forth

no very pleasant savor.  But all this is quite different

from a South Sea Sperm Whaler; which in a voyage of four

years perhaps, after completely filling her hold with oil,

does not, perhaps, consume fifty days in the business of boiling out;

and in the state that it is casked, the oil is nearly scentless.

The truth is, that living or dead, if but decently treated,

whales as a species are by no means creatures of ill odor;

nor can whalemen be recognised, as the people of the middle

ages affected to detect a Jew in the company, by the nose.

Nor indeed can the whale possibly be otherwise than fragrant,

when, as a general thing, he enjoys such high health;

taking abundance of exercise; always out of doors; though, it is true,

seldom in the open air.  I say, that the motion of a Sperm Whale's

flukes above water dispenses a perfume, as when a musk-scented

lady rustles her dress in a warm parlor.  What then shall I liken

the Sperm Whale to for fragrance, considering his magnitude?

Must it not be to that famous elephant, with jewelled tusks,

and redolent with myrrh, which was led out of an Indian town

to do honor to Alexander the Great?







CHAPTER 93



The Castaway

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Now, while discoursing of sperm it behooves to speak of other things akin

to it, in the business of preparing the sperm whale for the try-works.



First comes white-horse, so called, which is obtained from the tapering

part of the fish, and also from the thicker portions of his flukes.

It is tough with congealed tendons--a wad of muscle--but still contains

some oil.  After being severed from the whale, the white-horse

is first cut into portable oblongs ere going to the mincer.

They look much like blocks of Berkshire marble.



Plum-pudding is the term bestowed upon certain fragmentary parts of

the whale's flesh, here and there adhering to the blanket of blubber,

and often participating to a considerable degree in its unctuousness.

It is a most refreshing, convivial, beautiful object to behold.

As its name imports, it is of an exceedingly rich, mottled tint, with a

bestreaked snowy and golden ground, dotted with spots of the deepest

crimson and purple.  It is plums of rubies, in pictures of citron.

Spite of reason, it is hard to keep yourself from eating it.

I confess, that once I stole behind the foremast to try it.

It tasted something as I should conceive a royal cutlet from

the thigh of Louis le Gros might have tasted, supposing him

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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.



Detached broken fossils of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their bones

and skeletons, have within thirty years past, at various intervals,

been found at the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, in France,

in England, in Scotland, and in the States of Louisiana, Mississippi,

and Alabama.  Among the more curious of such remains is part of a skull,

which in the year 1779 was disinterred in the Rue Dauphine in Paris,

a short street opening almost directly upon the palace of the Tuileries;

and bones disinterred in excavating the great docks of Antwerp,

in Napoleon's time.  Cuvier pronounced these fragments to have belonged

to some utterly unknown Leviathanic species.



But by far the most wonderful of all Cetacean relics was the almost

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

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But soon resuming his horizontal attitude, Moby Dick swam swiftly

round and round the wrecked crew; sideways churning the water in his

vengeful wake, as if lashing himself up to still another and more

deadly assault.  The sight of the splintered boat seemed to madden him,

as the blood of grapes and mulberries cast before Antiochus's

elephants in the book of Maccabees.  Meanwhile Ahab half smothered

in the foam of the whale's insolent tail, and too much of a cripple

to swim,--though he could still keep afloat, even in the heart

of such a whirlpool as that; helpless Ahab's head was seen,

like a tossed bubble which the least chance shock might burst.

From the boat's fragmentary stern, Fedallah incuriously and mildly

eyed him; the clinging crew, at the other drifting end, could not

succor him; more than enough was it for them to look to themselves.

For so revolvingly appalling was the White Whale's aspect,

and so planetarily swift the ever-contracting circles

he made, that he seemed horizontally swooping upon them.

And though the other boats, unharmed, still hovered hard by;

still they dared not pull into the eddy to strike, lest that should be

the signal for the instant destruction of the jeopardized castaways,

Ahab and all; nor in that case could they themselves hope to escape.

With straining eyes, then, they remained on the outer edge of