—something like me —only there's a good deal more of him. Aye, aye, I know
that he was never very jolly; and I know that on the passage home, he was a
little out of his mind for a spell; but it was the sharp shooting pains in
his bleeding stump that brought that about, as any one might see. I know,
too, that ever since he lost his leg last voyage by that accursed whale, he's
been a kind of moody —desperate moody, and savage sometimes; but that will
all pass off. And once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee, young man,
it's better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad one. So
good-bye to thee —and wrong not Captain Ahab, because he happens to have a
wicked name. Besides, my boy, he has a wife —not three voyages wedded —a
sweet, resigned girl. Think of that; by that sweet girl that old man has a
child: hold ye then there can be any utter, hopeless harm in Ahab? No, no,
my lad; stricken, blasted, if he be, Ahab has his humanities! As I walked
away, I was full of thoughtfulness; what had been incidentally revealed to
me of Captain Ahab, filled me with a certain wild vagueness of painfulness
concerning him. And somehow, at the time, I felt a sympathy and a sorrow for
him, but for I don't know what, unless it was the cruel loss of his leg. And
yet I also felt a strange awe of him; but that sort of awe, which I cannot at
all describe, was not exactly awe; I do not know what it was. But I felt
it; and it did not disincline me towards him; though I felt impatience at
what seemed like mystery in him, so imperfectly as he was known to me then.
However, my thoughts were at length carried in other directions, so that for
the present dark Ahab slipped my mind.
..






.. < chapter xvii 2 THE RAMADAN >
As Queequeg's Ramadan, or Fasting and
Humiliation, was to continue all day, I did not choose to disturb him till
towards night-fall; for I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody's
religious obligations, never mind how comical, and could not find it in my
heart to undervalue even a congregation of ants worshipping a toad-stool; or
those other creatures in certain parts of our earth, who with a degree of
footmanism quite unprecedented in other planets, bow down before the torso
of a deceased landed proprietor merely on account of the inordinate
possessions yet owned and rented in his name. I say, we good Presbyterian
christians should be charitable in these things, and not fancy ourselves so
vastly superior to other mortals, pagans and what not, because of their
half-crazy conceits on these subjects. There was Queequeg, now, certainly
entertaining the most absurd notions about Yojo and his Ramadan; —but what of
that? Queequeg thought he knew what he was about, I suppose; he seemed to be
content; and there let him rest. All our arguing with him would not avail;
let him be, I say: and Heaven have mercy on us all —Presbyterians and Pagans
alike —for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly
need mending. Towards evening, when I felt assured that all his performances
and rituals must be over, I went up to his room and knocked at the door; but
no answer. I tried to open it, but it was fastened inside. Queequeg, said
I softly through the key-hole: —all silent. I say, Queequeg! why don't you
speak? It's I—Ishmael. But all remained still as before. I began to grow
alarmed. I had allowed him such abundant time; I thought he might have had
an apoplectic fit. I looked through the key-hole; but the door opening into
an odd corner of the room, the key-hole prospect was but a crooked and
sinister one. I could only see part of the foot-board of the bed and a line of
..
the wall, but nothing more. I was surprised to behold resting against the
wall the wooden shaft of Queequeg's harpoon, which the landlady the evening
previous had taken from him, before our mounting to the chamber. That's
strange, thought I; but at any rate, since the harpoon stands yonder, and he
seldom or never goes abroad without it, therefore he must be inside here,
and no possible mistake. Queequeg! —Queequeg! —all still. Something must
have happened. Apoplexy! I tried to burst open the door; but it stubbornly
resisted. Running down stairs, I quickly stated my suspicions to the first
person i met —the chambermaid. la! la! she cried, i thought something
must be the matter. I went to make the bed after breakfast, and the door
was locked; and not a mouse to be heard; and it's been just so silent ever
since. But I thought, may be, you had both gone off and locked your baggage
in for safe keeping. La! La, ma'am! —Mistress! murder! Mrs. Hussey!
apoplexy! —and with these cries, she ran towards the kitchen, I following.
Mrs. Hussey soon appeared, with a mustard-pot in one hand and a vinegar-cruet
in the other, having just broken away from the occupation of attending to the
castors, and scolding her little black boy meantime. Wood-house! cried I,
which way to it? Run for God's sake, and fetch something to pry open the
door —the axe! —the axe! he's had a stroke; depend upon it! —and so saying I
was unmethodically rushing up stairs again empty-handed, when Mrs. Hussey
interposed the mustard-pot and vinegar-cruet, and the entire castor of her
countenance. What's the matter with you, young man? Get the axe! For
God's sake, run for the doctor, some one, while I pry it open! Look here,
said the landlady, quickly putting down the vinegar-cruet, so as to have one
hand free; look here; are you talking about prying open any of my doors?
—and with that she seized my arm. What's the matter with you? What's the
matter with you, shipmate? In as calm, but rapid a manner as possible, I
gave her to understand the whole case. Unconsciously clapping the
vinegar-cruet
..
to one side of her nose, she ruminated for an instant; then exclaimed — No! I
haven't seen it since I put it there. Running to a little closet under the
landing of the stairs, she glanced in, and returning, told me that Queequeg's
harpoon was missing. He's killed himself, she cried. It's unfort'nate
stiggs done over again —there goes another counterpane —god pity his poor
mother! —it will be the ruin of my house. Has the poor lad a sister? Where's
that girl? —there, Betty, go to Snarles the Painter, and tell him to paint
me a sign, with —"no suicides permitted here, and no smoking in the parlor;"
—might as well kill both birds at once. Kill? The Lord be merciful to his
ghost! What's that noise there? You, young man, avast there! And running
up after me, she caught me as I was again trying to force open the door. I
won't allow it; I won't have my premises spoiled. Go for the locksmith,
there's one about a mile from here. But avast! putting her hand in her
side-pocket, here's a key that'll fit, I guess; let's see. And with that,
she turned it in the lock; but, alas! Queequeg's supplemental bolt remained
unwithdrawn within. Have to burst it open, said I, and was running down
the entry a little, for a good start, when the landlady caught at me, again
vowing I should not break down her premises; but I tore from her, and with a
sudden bodily rush dashed myself full against the mark. With a prodigious
noise the door flew open, and the knob slamming against the wall, sent the
plaster to the ceiling; and there, good heavens! there sat Queequeg,
altogether cool and self-collected; right in the middle of the room;
squatting on his hams, and holding Yojo on top of his head. He looked neither
one way nor the other way, but sat like a carved image with scarce a sign of
active life. Queequeg, said I, going up to him, Queequeg, what's the
matter with you? He hain't been a sittin' so all day, has he? said the
landlady. But all we said, not a word could we drag out of him; I almost
felt like pushing him over, so as to change his position, for it was almost
intolerable, it seemed so painfully and unnaturally
..
constrained; especially, as in all probability he had been sitting so for
upwards of eight or ten hours, going too without his regular meals. Mrs.
Hussey, said I, he's alive at all events; so leave us, if you please, and
I will see to this strange affair myself. Closing the door upon the landlady,
I endeavored to prevail upon Queequeg to take a chair; but in vain. There
he sat; and all he could do —for all my polite arts and blandishments —he
would not move a peg, nor say a single word, nor even look at me, nor
notice my presence in any the slightest way. I wonder, thought I, if this can
possibly be a part of his Ramadan; do they fast on their hams that way in his
native island. It must be so; yes, it's part of his creed, I suppose;
well, then, let him rest; he'll get up sooner or later, no doubt. It can't
last for ever, thank God, and his Ramadan only comes once a year; and I
don't believe it's very punctual then. I went down to supper. After sitting a
long time listening to the long stories of some sailors who had just come from
a plum-pudding voyage, as they called it (that is, a short whaling-voyage in
a schooner or brig, confined to the north of the line, in the Atlantic Ocean
only); after listening to these plum-puddingers till nearly eleven o'clock,
I went up stairs to go to bed, feeling quite sure by this time Queequeg must
certainly have brought his Ramadan to a termination. But no; there he was
just where I had left him; he had not stirred an inch. I began to grow
vexed with him; it seemed so downright senseless and insane to be sitting
there all day and half the night on his hams in a cold room, holding a piece
of wood on his head. For heaven's sake, Queequeg, get up and shake yourself;
get up and have some supper. You'll starve; you'll kill yourself,
Queequeg. But not a word did he reply. Despairing of him, therefore, I
determined to go to bed and to sleep; and no doubt, before a great while, he
would follow me. But previous to turning in, I took my heavy bearskin
jacket, and threw it over him, as it promised to be a very cold night; and he
had nothing but his ordinary round jacket on. For some time, do all I would,
I could not get into the faintest doze. I had blown out the candle; and the
mere thought of Queequeg—
..
not four feet off —sitting there in that uneasy position, stark alone in
the cold and dark; this made me really wretched. Think of it; sleeping all
night in the same room with a wide awake pagan on his hams in this dreary,
unaccountable Ramadan! But somehow I dropped off at last, and knew nothing
more till break of day; when, looking over the bedside, there squatted
Queequeg, as if he had been screwed down to the floor. But as soon as the
first glimpse of sun entered the window, up he got, with stiff and grating
joints, but with a cheerful look; limped towards me where I lay; pressed
his forehead again against mine; and said his Ramadan was over. Now, as I
before hinted, I have no objection to any person's religion, be it what it
may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person,
because that other person don't believe it also. But when a man's religion
becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment to him; and, in fine,
makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it
high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him. And
just so I now did with Queequeg. Queequeg, said I, get into bed now, and
lie and listen to me. I then went on, beginning with the rise and progress
of the primitive religions, and coming down to the various religions of the
present time, during which time I labored to show Queequeg that all these
Lents, Ramadans, and prolonged ham-squattings in cold, cheerless rooms were
stark nonsense; bad for the health; useless for the soul; opposed, in
short, to the obvious laws of Hygiene and common sense. I told him, too, that
he being in other things such an extremely sensible and sagacious savage, it
pained me, very badly pained me, to see him now so deplorably foolish about
this ridiculous Ramadan of his. Besides, argued I, fasting makes the body
cave in; hence the spirit caves in; and all thoughts born of a fast must
necessarily be half-starved. This is the reason why most dyspeptic
religionists cherish such melancholy notions about their hereafters. In one
word, Queequeg, said I, rather digressively; hell is an idea first born on
an undigested apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the
hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans.
..
I then asked Queequeg whether he himself was ever troubled with dyspepsia;
expressing the idea very plainly, so that he could take it in. He said no;
only upon one memorable occasion. It was after a great feast given by his
father the king, on the gaining of a great battle wherein fifty of the enemy
had been killed by about two o'clock in the afternoon, and all cooked and
eaten that very evening. No more, Queequeg, said I, shuddering; that will
do; for I knew the inferences without his further hinting them. I had seen
a sailor who had visited that very island, and he told me that it was the
custom, when a great battle had been gained there, to barbecue all the slain
in the yard or garden of the victor; and then, one by one, they were placed
in great wooden trenchers, and garnished round like a pilau, with breadfruit
and cocoanuts; and with some parsley in their mouths, were sent round with
the victor's compliments to all his friends, just as though these presents
were so many Christmas turkeys. After all, I do not think that my remarks
about religion made much impression upon Queequeg. Because, in the first
place, he somehow seemed dull of hearing on that important subject, unless
considered from his own point of view; and, in the second place, he did not
more than one third understand me, couch my ideas simply as I would; and,
finally, he no doubt thought he knew a good deal more about the true religion
than I did. He looked at me with a sort of condescending concern and
compassion, as though he thought it a great pity that such a sensible young
man should be so hopelessly lost to evangelical pagan piety. At last we rose
and dressed; and Queequeg, taking a prodigiously hearty breakfast of chowders
of all sorts, so that the landlady should not make much profit by reason of
his Ramadan, we sallied out to board the Pequod, sauntering along, and
picking our teeth with halibut bones.
..






.. < chapter xviii 2 HIS MARK >
As we were walking down the end of the wharf
towards the ship, Queequeg carrying his harpoon, Captain Peleg in his gruff
voice loudly hailed us from his wigwam, saying he had not suspected my friend
was a cannibal, and furthermore announcing that he let no cannibals on board
that craft, unless they previously produced their papers. What do you mean
by that, Captain Peleg? said I, now jumping on the bulwarks, and leaving my
comrade standing on the wharf. I mean, he replied, he must show his
papers. Yea, said Captain Bildad in his hollow voice, sticking his head
from behind Peleg's, out of the wigwam. He must show that he's converted.
Son of darkness, he added, turning to Queequeg, art thou at present in
communion with any christian church? Why, said I, he's a member of the
first Congregational Church. Here be it said, that many tattooed savages
sailing in Nantucket ships at last come to be converted into the churches.
First Congregational Church, cried Bildad, what! that worships in Deacon
Deuteronomy Coleman's meeting-house? and so saying, taking out his
spectacles, he rubbed them with his great yellow bandana handkerchief, and
putting them on very carefully, came out of the wigwam, and leaning stiffly
over the bulwarks, took a good long look at Queequeg. How long hath he been
a member? he then said, turning to me; not very long, I rather guess,
young man. No, said Peleg, and he hasn't been baptized right either, or
it would have washed some of that devil's blue off his face. Do tell, now,
cried Bildad, is this Philistine a regular member of Deacon Deuteronomy's
meeting? I never saw him going there, and I pass it every Lord's day.
..
I don't know anything about Deacon Deuteronomy or his meeeting, said I,
all I know is, that Queequeg here is a born member of the First
Congregational Church. He is a deacon himself, Queequeg is. Young man,
said Bildad sternly, thou art skylarking with me —explain thyself, thou
young Hittite. What church dost thee mean? answer me. Finding myself thus
hard pushed, I replied. I mean, sir, the same ancient Catholic Church to
which you and I, and Captain Peleg there, and Queequeg here, and all of us,
and every mother's son and soul of us belong; the great and everlasting
First Congregation of this whole worshipping world; we all belong to that;
only some of us cherish some queer crotchets noways touching the grand belief;
in that we all join hands. Splice, thou mean'st splice hands, cried
Peleg, drawing nearer. Young man, you'd better ship for a missionary,
instead of a fore-mast hand; I never heard a better sermon. Deacon
Deuteronomy —why Father Mapple himself couldn't beat it, and he's reckoned
something. Come aboard, come aboard; never mind about the papers. I say,
tell Quohog there —what's that you call him? tell Quohog to step along. By
the great anchor, what a harpoon he's got there! looks like good stuff that;
and he handles it about right. I say, Quohog, or whatever your name is, did
you ever stand in the head of a whale-boat? did you ever strike a fish?
Without saying a word, Queequeg, in his wild sort of way, jumped upon the
bulwarks, from thence into the bows of one of the whale-boats hanging to the
side; and then bracing his left knee, and poising his harpoon, cried out in
some such way as this: — Cap'ain, you see him small drop tar on water dere?
You see him? well, spose him one whale eye, well, den! and taking sharp
aim at it, he darted the iron right over old Bildad's broad brim, clean across
the ship's decks, and struck the glistening tar spot out of sight. Now,
said Queequeg, quietly hauling in the line, spos-ee him whale-e eye; why,
dad whale dead. Quick, Bildad, said Peleg, his partner, who, aghast at the
..
close vicinity of the flying harpoon, had retreated towards the cabin gangway.
Quick, I say, you Bildad, and get the ship's papers. We must have Hedgehog
there, I mean Quohog, in one of our boats. Look ye, Quohog, we'll give ye
the ninetieth lay, and that's more than ever was given a harpooneer yet out of
Nantucket. So down we went into the cabin, and to my great joy Queequeg
was soon enrolled among the same ship's company to which I myself belonged.
When all preliminaries were over and Peleg had got everything ready for
signing, he turned to me and said, I guess Quohog there don't know how to
write, does he? I say, Quohog, blast ye! dost thou sign thy name or make thy
mark? But at this question, Queequeg, who had twice or thrice before taken
part in similar ceremonies, looked no ways abashed; but taking the offered
pen, copied upon the paper, in the proper place, an exact counterpart of a
queer round figure which was tattooed upon his arm; so that through Captain
Peleg's obstinate mistake touching his appellative, it stood something like
this: — Quohog his mark. Meanwhile Captain Bildad sat earnestly and
steadfastly eyeing Queequeg, and at last rising solemnly and fumbling in the
huge pockets of his broad-skirted drab coat, took out a bundle of tracts,
and selecting one entitled The Latter Day Coming; or No Time to Lose, placed
it in queequeg's hands, and then grasping them and the book with both his,
looked earnestly into his eyes, and said, Son of darkness, I must do my
duty by thee; I am part owner of this ship, and feel concerned for the souls
of all its crew; if thou still clingest to thy Pagan ways, which I sadly
fear, I beseech thee, remain not for aye a Belial bondsman. Spurn the idol
Bell, and the hideous dragon; turn from the wrath to come; mind thine eye,
I say; oh! goodness gracious! steer clear of the fiery pit! Something of
the salt sea yet lingered in old Bildad's language, heterogeneously mixed with
Scriptural and domestic phrases. Avast there, avast there, Bildad, avast now
spoiling our harpooneer,
..
cried Peleg. Pious harpooneers never make good voyagers —it takes the shark
out of 'em; no harpooneer is worth a straw who aint pretty sharkish. There
was young Nat Swaine, once the bravest boat-header out of all Nantucket and
the Vineyard; he joined the meeting, and never came to good. He got so
frightened about his plaguy soul, that he shrinked and sheered away from
whales, for fear of after-claps in case he got stove and went to Davy Jones.
Peleg! Peleg! said Bildad, lifting his eyes and hands, thou thyself, as
I myself, hast seen many a perilous time; thou knowest, Peleg, what it is to
have the fear of death; how, then, can'st thou prate in this ungodly guise.
Thou beliest thine own heart, Peleg. Tell me, when this same Pequod here had
her three masts overboard in that typhoon on Japan, that same voyage when
thou went mate with Captain Ahab, did'st thou not think of Death and the
Judgment then? Hear him, hear him now, cried Peleg, marching across the
cabin, and thrusting his hands far down into his pockets, — hear him, all of
ye. Think of that! When every moment we thought the ship would sink! Death
and the judgment then? What? With all three masts making such an everlasting
thundering against the side; and every sea breaking over us, fore and aft.
Think of Death and the Judgment then? No! no time to think about Death then.
Life was what Captain Ahab and I was thinking of; and how to save all hands
—how to rig jury-masts — how to get into the nearest port; that was what I
was thinking of. Bildad said no more, but buttoning up his coat, stalked on
deck, where we followed him. There he stood, very quietly overlooking some
sail-makers who were mending a top-sail in the waist. Now and then he
stooped to pick up a patch, or save an end of tarred twine, which otherwise
might have been wasted.
..






.. < chapter xix 2 THE PROPHET >
Shipmates, have ye shipped in that ship?
Queequeg and I had just left the Pequod, and were sauntering away from the
water, for the moment each occupied with his own thoughts, when the above
words were put to us by a stranger, who, pausing before us, levelled his
massive forefinger at the vessel in question. He was but shabbily apparelled
in faded jacket and patched trowsers; a rag of a black handkerchief
investing his neck. A confluent small-pox had in all directions flowed over
his face, and left it like the complicated ribbed bed of a torrent, when the
rushing waters have been dried up. Have ye shipped in her? he repeated.
You mean the ship Pequod, I suppose, said I, trying to gain a little more
time for an uninterrupted look at him. Aye, the Pequod —that ship there, he
said, drawing back his whole arm, and then rapidly shoving it straight out
from him, with the fixed bayonet of his pointed finger darted full at the
object. Yes, said I, we have just signed the articles. Anything down
there about your souls? About what? Oh, perhaps you hav'n't got any, he
said quickly. no matter though, i know many chaps that hav'n't got any,
—good luck to 'em; and they are all the better off for it. A soul's a sort
of a fifth wheel to a wagon. What are you jabbering about, shipmate? said
I. He's got enough, though, to make up for all deficiencies of that sort in
other chaps, abruptly said the stranger, placing a nervous emphasis upon the
word he. Queequeg, said I, let's go; this fellow has broken loose from
somewhere; he's talking about something and somebody we don't know.
..
Stop! cried the stranger. Ye said true —ye hav'n't seen Old Thunder yet,
have ye? Who's Old Thunder? said I, again riveted with the insane
earnestness of his manner. Captain Ahab. What! the captain of our ship,
the Pequod? Aye, among some of us old sailor chaps, he goes by that name.
Ye hav'n't seen him yet, have ye? No, we hav'n't. He's sick they say, but
is getting better, and will be all right again before long. All right again
before long! laughed the stranger, with a solemnly derisive sort of laugh.
Look ye; when captain Ahab is all right, then this left arm of mine will be
all right; not before. What do you know about him? What did they tell
you about him? Say that! They didn't tell much of anything about him; only
I've heard that he's a good whale-hunter, and a good captain to his crew.
That's true, that's true —yes, both true enough. But you must jump when he
gives an order. Step and growl; growl and go —that's the word with Captain
Ahab. But nothing about that thing that happened to him off Cape Horn, long
ago, when he lay like dead for three days and nights; nothing about that
deadly skrimmage with the Spaniard afore the altar in Santa? — heard nothing
about that, eh? Nothing about the silver calabash he spat into? And nothing
about his losing his leg last voyage, according to the prophecy. Didn't ye
hear a word about them matters and something more, eh? No, I don't think ye
did; how could ye? Who knows it? Not all Nantucket, I guess. But
hows'ever, mayhap, ye've heard tell about the leg, and how he lost it; aye,
ye have heard of that, I dare say. Oh yes, that every one knows a'most —I
mean they know he's only one leg; and that a parmacetti took the other off.
My friend, said I, what all this gibberish of yours is about, I don't
know, and I don't much care; for it seems to me that you must be a little
damaged in the head. But if you are speaking of Captain Ahab, of that ship
there, the Pequod, then let me tell you, that I know all about the loss of
his leg.
..
All about it, eh —sure you do? —all? Pretty sure. With finger pointed
and eye levelled at the Pequod, the beggar-like stranger stood a moment, as if
in a troubled reverie; then starting a little, turned and said: — Ye've
shipped, have ye? Names down on the papers? Well, well, what's signed, is
signed; and what's to be, will be; and then again, perhaps it wont be, after
all. Any how, it's all fixed and arranged a'ready; and some sailors or
other must go with him, I suppose; as well these as any other men, God pity
'em! Morning to ye, shipmates, morning; the ineffable heavens bless ye; I'm
sorry I stopped ye. Look here, friend, said I, if you have anything
important to tell us, out with it; but if you are only trying to bamboozle
us, you are mistaken in your game; that's all I have to say. And it's said
very well, and I like to hear a chap talk up that way; you are just the man
for him —the likes of ye. Morning to ye, shipmates, morning! Oh, when ye get
there, tell 'em I've concluded not to make one of 'em. Ah, my dear fellow,
you can't fool us that way —you can't fool us. It is the easiest thing in
the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him. Morning to
ye, shipmates, morning. Morning it is, said I. Come along, Queequeg,
let's leave this crazy man. But stop, tell me your name, will you?
Elijah. Elijah! thought I, and we walked away, both commenting, after
each other's fashion, upon this ragged old sailor; and agreed that he was
nothing but a humbug, trying to be a bugbear. But we had not gone perhaps
above a hundred yards, when chancing to turn a corner, and looking back as I
did so, who should be seen but Elijah following us, though at a distance.
Somehow, the sight of him struck me so, that I said nothing to Queequeg of
his being behind, but passed on with my comrade, anxious to see whether the
stranger would turn the same corner that we did. He did; and then it seemed
to me that he was dogging us, but with what intent I could not for the life
of me imagine. This circumstance, coupled with his ambiguous, half-hinting,
half-revealing, shrouded sort of talk, now begat in me
..
all kinds of vague wonderments and half-apprehensions, and all connected with
the Pequod; and Captain Ahab; and the leg he had lost; and the Cape Horn
fit; and the silver calabash; and what Captain Peleg had said of him, when
I left the ship the day previous; and the prediction of the squaw Tistig;
and the voyage we had bound ourselves to sail; and a hundred other shadowy
things. I was resolved to satisfy myself whether this ragged Elijah was
really dogging us or not, and with that intent crossed the way with Queequeg,
and on that side of it retraced our steps. But Elijah passed on, without
seeming to notice us. This relieved me; and once more, and finally as it
seemed to me, I pronounced him in my heart, a humbug.
..






.. < chapter xx 15 ALL ASTIR >
A day or two passed, and there was great
activity aboard the pequod. not only were the old sails being mended, but
new sails were coming on board, and bolts of canvas, and coils of rigging;
in short, everything betokened that the ship's preparations were hurrying to a
close. Captain Peleg seldom or never went ashore, but sat in his wigwam
keeping a sharp look-out upon the hands: Bildad did all the purchasing and
providing at the stores; and the men employed in the hold and on the rigging
were working till long after night-fall. On the day following Queequeg's
signing the articles, word was given at all the inns where the ship's company
were stopping, that their chests must be on board before night, for there
was no telling how soon the vessel might be sailing. So Queequeg and I got
down our traps, resolving, however, to sleep ashore till the last. But it
seems they always give very long notice in these cases, and the ship did not
sail for several days. But no wonder; there was a good deal to be done, and
there
..
is no telling how many things to be thought of, before the Pequod was fully
equipped. Every one knows what a multitude of things —beds, sauce-pans,
knives and forks, shovels and tongs, napkins, nut-crackers, and what not, are
indispensable to the business of housekeeping. Just so with whaling, which
necessitates a three-years' housekeeping upon the wide ocean, far from all
grocers, costermongers, doctors, bakers, and bankers. And though this also
holds true of merchant vessels, yet not by any means to the same extent as
with whalemen. For besides the great length of the whaling voyage, the
numerous articles peculiar to the prosecution of the fishery, and the
impossibility of replacing them at the remote harbors usually frequented, it
must be remembered, that of all ships, whaling vessels are the most exposed
to accidents of all kinds, and especially to the destruction and loss of the
very things upon which the success of the voyage most depends. Hence, the
spare boats, spare spars, and spare lines and harpoons, and spare everythings,
almost, but a spare captain and duplicate ship. At the period of our arrival
at the Island, the heaviest storage of the Pequod had been almost completed;
comprising her beef, bread, water, fuel, and iron hoops and staves. But, as
before hinted, for some time there was a continual fetching and carrying on
board of divers odds and ends of things, both large and small. Chief among
those who did this fetching and carrying was Captain Bildad's sister, a lean
old lady of a most determined and indefatigable spirit, but withal very
kindhearted, who seemed resolved that, if she could help it, nothing should
be found wanting in the Pequod, after once fairly getting to sea. At one time
she would come on board with a jar of pickles for the steward's pantry;
another time with a bunch of quills for the chief mate's desk, where he kept
his log; a third time with a roll of flannel for the small of some one's
rheumatic back. Never did any woman better deserve her name, which was
Charity —Aunt Charity, as everybody called her. And like a sister of
charity did this charitable Aunt Charity bustle about hither and thither,
ready to turn her hand and heart to anything that promised to yield safety,
comfort, and consolation to all on board
..
a ship in which her beloved brother Bildad was concerned, and in which she
herself owned a score or two of well-saved dollars. But it was startling to
see this excellent hearted Quakeress coming on board, as she did the last
day, with a long oil-ladle in one hand, and a still longer whaling lance in
the other. Nor was Bildad himself nor Captain Peleg at all backward. As for
Bildad, he carried about with him a long list of the articles needed, and at
every fresh arrival, down went his mark opposite that article upon the paper.
Every once and a while Peleg came hobbling out of his whalebone den, roaring
at the men down the hatchways, roaring up to the riggers at the mast-head,
and then concluded by roaring back into his wigwam. During these days of
preparation, Queequeg and I often visited the craft, and as often I asked
about Captain Ahab, and how he was, and when he was going to come on board
his ship. To these questions they would answer, that he was getting better
and better, and was expected aboard every day; meantime, the two Captains,
Peleg and Bildad, could attend to everything necessary to fit the vessel for
the voyage. If I had been downright honest with myself, I would have seen
very plainly in my heart that I did but half fancy being committed this way to
so long a voyage, without once laying my eyes on the man who was to be the
absolute dictator of it, so soon as the ship sailed out upon the open sea.
But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be
already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his
suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me. I said
nothing, and tried to think nothing. At last it was given out that some time
next day the ship would certainly sail. So next morning, Queequeg and I took
a very early start.
..






.. < chapter xxi 2 GOING ABOARD >
It was nearly six o'clock, but only grey
imperfect misty dawn, when we drew nigh the wharf. There are some sailors
running ahead there, if I see right, said I to Queequeg, it can't be
shadows; she's off by sunrise, I guess; come on! Avast! cried a voice,
whose owner at the same time coming close behind us, laid a hand upon both our
shoulders, and then insinuating himself between us, stood stooping forward a
little, in the uncertain twilight, strangely peering from Queequeg to me. It
was Elijah. Going aboard? Hands off, will you, said I. Lookee here,
said Queequeg, shaking himself, go 'way! Aint going aboard, then? Yes,
we are, said I, but what business is that of yours? Do you know, Mr.
Elijah, that I consider you a little impertinent? No, no, no; I wasn't
aware of that, said elijah, slowly and wonderingly looking from me to
Queequeg, with the most unaccountable glances. Elijah, said I, you will
oblige my friend and me by withdrawing. We are going to the Indian and Pacific
Oceans, and would prefer not to be detained. Ye be, be ye? Coming back
afore breakfast? He's cracked, Queequeg, said I, come on. Holloa!
cried stationary Elijah, hailing us when we had removed a few paces. Never
mind him, said I, Queequeg, come on. But he stole up to us again, and
suddenly clapping his hand on my shoulder, said — Did ye see anything looking
like men going towards that ship a while ago? Struck by this plain
matter-of-fact question, I answered, saying,
..
Yes, I thought I did see four or five men; but it was too dim to be sure.
Very dim, very dim, said Elijah. Morning to ye. Once more we quitted him;
but once more he came softly after us; and touching my shoulder again, said,
See if you can find 'em now, will ye? Find who? Morning to ye! morning
to ye! he rejoined, again moving off. Oh! I was going to warn ye against
—but never mind, never mind —it's all one, all in the family too; —sharp
frost this morning, ain't it? Good bye to ye. Shan't see ye again very
soon, I guess; unless it's before the Grand Jury. And with these cracked
words he finally departed, leaving me, for the moment, in no small wonderment
at his frantic impudence. At last, stepping on board the Pequod, we found
everything in profound quiet, not a soul moving. The cabin entrance was
locked within; the hatches were all on, and lumbered with coils of rigging.
Going forward to the forecastle, we found the slide of the scuttle open.
Seeing a light, we went down, and found only an old rigger there, wrapped in a
tattered pea-jacket. He was thrown at whole length upon two chests, his face
downwards and inclosed in his folded arms. The profoundest slumber slept
upon him. Those sailors we saw, Queequeg, where can they have gone to?
said I, looking dubiously at the sleeper. But it seemed that, when on the
wharf, Queequeg had not at all noticed what I now alluded to; hence I would
have thought myself to have been optically deceived in that matter, were it
not for Elijah's otherwise inexplicable question. But I beat the thing down;
and again marking the sleeper, jocularly hinted to Queequeg that perhaps we
had best sit up with the body; telling him to establish himself accordingly.
He put his hand upon the sleeper's rear, as though feeling if it was soft
enough; and then, without more ado, sat quietly down there. Gracious!
Queequeg, don't sit there, said I. Oh! perry dood seat, said Queequeg, my
country way; won't hurt him face. Face! said I, call that his face? very
benevolent countenance
..
then; but how hard he breathes, he's heaving himself; get off, Queequeg,
you are heavy, it's grinding the face of the poor. Get off, Queequeg! Look,
he'll twitch you off soon. I wonder he don't wake. Queequeg removed himself
to just beyond the head of the sleeper, and lighted his tomahawk pipe. I sat
at the feet. We kept the pipe passing over the sleeper, from one to the
other. Meanwhile, upon questioning him in his broken fashion, Queequeg gave
me to understand that, in his land, owing to the absence of settees and sofas
of all sorts, the king, chiefs, and great people generally, were in the
custom of fattening some of the lower orders for ottomans; and to furnish a
house comfortably in that respect, you had only to buy up eight or ten lazy
fellows, and lay them round in the piers and alcoves. Besides, it was very
convenient on an excursion; much better than those garden-chairs which are
convertible into walking-sticks; upon occasion, a chief calling his attendant,
and desiring him to make a settee of himself under a spreading tree, perhaps
in some damp marshy place. While narrating these things, every time Queequeg
received the tomahawk from me, he flourished the hatchet-side of it over the
sleeper's head. What's that for, Queequeg? Perry easy, kill-e; oh! perry
easy! He was going on with some wild reminiscences about his tomahawk-pipe,
which, it seemed, had in its two uses both brained his foes and soothed his
soul, when we were directly attracted to the sleeping rigger. The strong
vapor now completely filling the contracted hole, it began to tell upon him.
He breathed with a sort of muffledness; then seemed troubled in the nose;
then revolved over once or twice; then sat up and rubbed his eyes. Holloa!
he breathed at last, who be ye smokers? Shipped men, answered I, when
does she sail? Aye, aye, ye are going in her, be ye? She sails to-day.
The Captain came aboard last night. What Captain? —Ahab? Who but him
indeed?
..
I was going to ask him some further questions concerning Ahab, when we heard a
noise on deck. Halloa! Starbuck's astir, said the rigger. He's a lively
chief mate, that; good man, and a pious; but all alive now, I must turn
to. And so saying he went on deck, and we followed. It was now clear
sunrise. Soon the crew came on board in twos and threes; the riggers
bestirred themselves; the mates were actively engaged; and several of the
shore people were busy in bringing various last things on board. Meanwhile
Captain Ahab remained invisibly enshrined within his cabin.
..






.. < chapter xxii 12 MERRY CHRISTMAS >
At length, towards noon, upon the
final dismissal of the ship's riggers, and after the Pequod had been hauled
out from the wharf, and after the ever-thoughtful Charity had come off in a
whaleboat, with her last gift —a night-cap for Stubb, the second mate, her
brother-in-law, and a spare bible for the steward — after all this, the two
captains, Peleg and Bildad, issued from the cabin, and turning to the chief
mate, Peleg said: Now, Mr. Starbuck, are you sure everything is right?
Captain Ahab is all ready —just spoke to him —nothing more to be got from
shore, eh? Well, call all hands, then. Muster 'em aft here —blast 'em! No
need of profane words, however great the hurry, Peleg, said Bildad, but
away with thee, friend Starbuck, and do our bidding. How now! Here upon the
very point of starting for the voyage, Captain Peleg and Captain Bildad were
going it with a high hand on the quarter-deck, just as if they were to be
joint-commanders at sea, as well as to all appearances in port. And, as for
Captain Ahab, no sign of him was yet to be seen; Only, they said he was in the
cabin. But then, the idea was,
..
that his presence was by no means necessary in getting the ship under weigh,
and steering her well out to sea. Indeed, as that was not at all his proper
business, but the pilot's; and as he was not yet completely recovered —so
they said —therefore, Captain Ahab stayed below. And all this seemed natural
enough; especially as in the merchant service many captains never show
themselves on deck for a considerable time after heaving up the anchor, but
remain over the cabin table, having a farewell merrymaking with their shore
friends, before they quit the ship for good with the pilot. But there was
not much chance to think over the matter, for Captain Peleg was now all
alive. He seemed to do most of the talking and commanding, and not Bildad.
Aft here, ye sons of bachelors, he cried, as the sailors lingered at the
main-mast. Mr. Starbuck, drive 'em aft. Strike the tent there! —was the
next order. As I hinted before, this whalebone marquee was never pitched
except in port; and on board the Pequod, for thirty years, the order to
strike the tent was well known to be the next thing to heaving up the anchor.
Man the capstan! Blood and thunder! —jump! —was the next command, and the
crew sprang for the handspikes. Now, in getting under weigh, the station
generally occupied by the pilot is the forward part of the ship. And here
Bildad, who, with Peleg, be it known, in addition to his other offices, was
one of the licensed pilots of the port —he being suspected to have got himself
made a pilot in order to save the Nantucket pilot-fee to all the ships he was
concerned in, for he never piloted any other craft —Bildad, I say, might now
be seen actively engaged in looking over the bows for the approaching anchor,
and at intervals singing what seemed a dismal stave of psalmody, to cheer the
hands at the windlass, who roared forth some sort of a chorus about the girls
in Booble Alley, with hearty good will. Nevertheless, not three days
previous, Bildad had told them that no profane songs would be allowed on
board the Pequod, particularly in getting under weigh; and Charity, his
sister, had placed a small choice copy of Watts in each seaman's berth.
Meantime, overseeing the other part of the ship, Captain Peleg
..
ripped and swore astern in the most frightful manner. I almost thought he
would sink the ship before the anchor could be got up; involuntarily I paused
on my handspike, and told Queequeg to do the same, thinking of the perils we
both ran, in starting on the voyage with such a devil for a pilot. I was
comforting myself, however, with the thought that in pious Bildad might be
found some salvation, spite of his seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay;
when I felt a sudden sharp poke in my rear, and turning round, was horrified
at the apparition of Captain Peleg in the act of withdrawing his leg from my
immediate vicinity. That was my first kick. Is that the way they heave in
the marchant service? he roared. Spring, thou sheep-head; spring, and
break thy backbone! why don't ye spring, i say, all of ye—spring! Quohog!
spring, thou chap with the red whiskers; spring there, Scotchcap; spring,
thou green pants. Spring, I say, all of ye, and spring your eyes out! And
so saying, he moved along the windlass, here and there using his leg very
freely, while imperturbable Bildad kept leading off with his psalmody. Thinks
I, Captain Peleg must have been drinking something to-day. At last the anchor
was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It was a short, cold
Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into night, we found
ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us
in ice, as in polished armor. The long rows of teeth on the bulwarks
glistened in the moonlight; and like the white ivory tusks of some huge
elephant, vast curving icicles depended from the bows. Lank Bildad, as pilot,
headed the first watch, and ever and anon, as the old craft deep dived into
the green seas, and sent the shivering frost all over her, and the winds
howled, and the cordage rang, his steady notes were heard, — Sweet fields
beyond the swelling flood, Stand dressed in living green. So to the Jews old
Canaan stood, While Jordan rolled between. Never did those sweet words sound
more sweetly to me than then. They were full of hope and fruition. Spite of
this frigid
..
winter night in the boisterous Atlantic, spite of my wet feet and wetter
jacket, there was yet, it then seemed to me, many a pleasant haven in
store; and meads and glades so eternally vernal, that the grass shot up by
the spring, untrodden, unwilted, remains at midsummer. At last we gained such
an offing, that the two pilots were needed no longer. The stout sail-boat
that had accompanied us began ranging alongside. It was curious and not
unpleasing, how Peleg and Bildad were affected at this juncture, especially
Captain Bildad. For loath to depart, yet; very loath to leave, for good, a
ship bound on so long and perilous a voyage —beyond both stormy Capes; a ship
in which some thousands of his hard earned dollars were invested; a ship, in
which an old shipmate sailed as captain; a man almost as old as he, once
more starting to encounter all the terrors of the pitiless jaw; loath to say
good-bye to a thing so every way brimful of every interest to him, —poor old
Bildad lingered long; paced the deck with anxious strides" ran down into the
cabin to speak another farewell word there; again came on deck, and looked
to windward; looked towards the wide and endless waters, only bounded by the
far-off unseen Eastern Continents; looked towards the land, looked aloft;
looked right and left; looked everywhere and nowhere; and at last,
mechanically coiling a rope upon its pin, convulsively grasped stout Peleg by
the hand, and holding up a lantern, for a moment stood gazing heroically in
his face, as much as to say, Nevertheless, friend Peleg, I can stand it;
yes, I can. As for Peleg himself, he took it more like a philosopher; but
for all his philosophy, there was a tear twinkling in his eye, when the
lantern came too near. And he, too, did not a little run from cabin to deck
—now a word below, and now a word with Starbuck, the chief mate. But, at
last, he turned to his comrade, with a final sort of look about him, — Captain
Bildad —come, old shipmate, we must go. Back the main-yard there! Boat ahoy!
Stand by to come close alongside, now! Careful, careful! —come, Bildad, boy
—say your last. Luck to ye, Starbuck —luck to ye, Mr. Stubb —luck to ye,
..
Mr. Flask —good-bye, and good luck to ye all —and this day three years I'll
have a hot supper smoking for ye in old Nantucket. Hurrah and away! God
bless ye, and have ye in His holy keeping, men, murmured old Bildad, almost
incoherently. I hope ye'll have fine weather now, so that Captain Ahab may
soon be moving among ye —a pleasant sun is all he needs, and ye'll have
plenty of them in the tropic voyage ye go. Be careful in the hunt, ye mates.
Don't stave the boats needlessly, ye harpooneers; good white cedar plank is
raised full three per cent. within the year. Don't forget your prayers,
either. Mr Starbuck, mind that cooper don't waste the spare staves. Oh! the
sail-needles are in the green locker! Don't whale it too much a' Lord's days,
men; but don't miss a fair chance either, that's rejecting Heaven's good
gifts. Have an eye to the molasses tierce, Mr. Stubb; it was a little leaky,
I thought. If ye touch at the islands, Mr. Flask, beware of fornication.
Good-bye, good-bye! Don't keep that cheese too long down in the hold, Mr.
Starbuck; it'll spoil. Be careful with the butter —twenty cents the pound it
was, and mind ye, if— Come, come, Captain Bildad; stop palavering, —away!
and with that, Peleg hurried him over the side, and both dropt into the
boat. Ship and boat diverged; the cold, damp night breeze blew between; a
screaming gull flew overhead; the two hulls wildly rolled; we gave three
heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic.
..






.. < chapter xxiii 28 THE LEE SHORE >
Some chapters back, one Bulkington was
spoken of, a tall, new-landed mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn.
When on that shivering winter's night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows
into the cold malicious waves, who should I see
..
standing at her helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and
fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years'
dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another
tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest
things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this
six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that
it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along
the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in
the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends,
all that's kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is
that ship's direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of
land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and
through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing,
fights 'gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all
the lashed sea's landlessness again; for refuge's sake forlornly rushing into
peril; her only friend her bitterest foe! Know ye, now, Bulkington?
Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep,
earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open
independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth
conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore? But as in landlessness
alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God —so, better is
it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the
lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven
crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take
heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray
of thy ocean-perishing —straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!
..






.. < chapter xxiv 2 THE ADVOCATE >
As Queequeg and I are now fairly embarked
in this business of whaling; and as this business of whaling has somehow come
to be regarded among landsmen as a rather unpoetical and disreputable
pursuit; therefore, I am all anxiety to convince ye, ye landsmen, of the
injustice hereby done to us hunters of whales. In the first place, it may be
deemed almost superfluous to establish the fact, that among people at large,
the business of whaling is not accounted on a level with what are called the
liberal professions. If a stranger were introduced into any miscellaneous
metropolitan society, it would but slightly advance the general opinion of
his merits, were he presented to the company as a harpooneer, say; and if in
emulation of the naval officers he should append the initials S. W. F. (Sperm
Whale Fishery) to his visiting card, such a procedure would be deemed
pre-eminently presuming and ridiculous. Doubtless one leading reason why the
world declines honoring us whalemen, is this: they think that, at best, our
vocation amounts to a butchering sort of business; and that when actively
engaged therein, we are surrounded by all manner of defilements. Butchers we
are, that is true. But butchers, also, and butchers of the bloodiest badge
have been all Martial Commanders whom the world invariably delights to honor.
And as for the matter of the alleged uncleanliness of our business, ye shall
soon be initiated into certain facts hitherto pretty generally unknown, and
which, upon the whole, will triumphantly plant the sperm whale-ship at least
among the cleanliest things of this tidy earth. But even granting the charge
in question to be true; what disordered slippery decks of a whale-ship are
comparable to the unspeakable carrion of those battle-fields from which so
many soldiers return to drink in all ladies' plaudits? And if the
..
idea of peril so much enhances the popular conceit of the soldier's
profession; let me assure ye that many a veteran who has freely marched up to
a battery, would quickly recoil at the apparition of the sperm whale's vast
tail, fanning into eddies the air over his head. For what are the
comprehensible terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and
wonders of God! But, though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it
unwittingly pay us the profoundest homage; yea, an all-abounding adoration!
for almost all the tapers, lamps, and candles that burn round the globe,
burn, as before so many shrines, to our glory! But look at this matter in
other lights; weigh it in all sorts of scales; see what we whalemen are, and
have been. Why did the Dutch in DeWitt's time have admirals of their whaling
fleets? Why did Louis XVI. of France, at his own personal expense, fit out
whaling ships from Dunkirk, and politely invite to that town some score or two
of families from our own island of Nantucket? Why did Britain between the
years
and
pay to her whalemen in bounties upwards of 1,000,000
pounds? And lastly, how comes it that we whalemen of America now outnumber
all the rest of the banded whalemen in the world; sail a navy of upwards of
seven hundred vessels; manned by eighteen thousand men; yearly consuming 00824,000,000 of dollars; the ships worth, at the time of sailing, 20,000,000
dollars; and every year importing into our harbors a well reaped harvest of 00847,000,000 dollars. How comes all this, if there be not something puissant in
whaling? But this is not the half; look again. I freely assert, that the
cosmopolite philosopher cannot, for his life, point out one single peaceful
influence, which within the last sixty years has operated more potentially
upon the whole broad world, taken in one aggregate, than the high and mighty
business of whaling. One way and another, it has begotten events so
remarkable in themselves, and so continuously momentous in their sequential
issues, that whaling may well be regarded as that Egyptian mother, who bore
offspring themselves pregnant from her womb. It would be a hopeless, endless
task to catalogue all these things. Let a handful suffice. For many
..
years past the whale-ship has been the pioneer in ferreting out the remotest
and least known parts of the earth. She has explored seas and archipelagoes
which had no chart, where no Cook or Vancouver had ever sailed. If American
and european men-of-war now peacefully ride in once savage harbors, let them
fire salutes to the honor and glory of the whale-ship, which originally showed
them the way, and first interpreted between them and the savages. They may
celebrate as they will the heroes of Exploring Expeditions, your Cookes,
Your Krusensterns; but I say that scores of anonymous Captains have sailed
out of Nantucket, that were as great, and greater than your Cooke and your
Krusenstern. For in their succorless emptyhandedness, they, in the
heathenish sharked waters, and by the beaches of unrecorded, javelin islands,
battled with virgin wonders and terrors that Cooke with all his marines and
muskets would not willingly have dared. All that is made such a flourish of
in the old South Sea Voyages, those things were but the lifetime commonplaces
of our heroic Nantucketers. Often, adventures which Vancouver dedicates three
chapters to, these men accounted unworthy of being set down in the ship's
common log. Ah, the world! Oh, the world! Until the whale fishery rounded
Cape Horn, no commerce but colonial, scarcely any intercourse but colonial,
was carried on between Europe and the long line of the opulent Spanish
provinces on the Pacific coast. It was the whaleman who first broke through
the jealous policy of the Spanish crown, touching those colonies; and, if
space permitted, it might be distinctly shown how from those whalemen at last
eventuated the liberation of Peru, Chili, and Bolivia from the yoke of Old
Spain, and the establishment of the eternal democracy in those parts. That
great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia, was given to the
enlightened world by the whaleman. After its first blunder-born discovery by
a Dutchman, all other ships long shunned those shores as pestiferously
barbarous; but the whale-ship touched there. The whale-ship is the true
mother of that now mighty colony. Moreover, in the infancy of the first
Australian settlement, the emigrants were several times saved
..
from starvation by the benevolent biscuit of the whale-ship luckily dropping
an anchor in their waters. The uncounted isles of all Polynesia confess the
same truth, and do commercial homage to the whale-ship, that cleared the way
for the missionary and the merchant, and in many cases carried the primitive
missionaries to their first destinations. If that double-bolted land, Japan,
is ever to become hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone to whom the credit
will be due; for already she is on the threshold. But if, in the face of all
this, you still declare that whaling has no aesthetically noble associations
connected with it, then am I ready to shiver fifty lances with you there,
and unhorse you with a split helmet every time. The whale has no famous
author, and whaling no famous chronicler, you will say. The whale no
famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler? Who wrote the first
account of our Leviathan? Who but mighty Job! And who composed the first
narrative of a whaling-voyage? Who, but no less a prince than Alfred the
Great, who, with his own royal pen, took down the words from Other, the
Norwegian whale-hunter of those times! And who pronounced our glowing eulogy
in Parliament? Who, but Edmund Burke! True enough, but then whalemen
themselves are poor devils; they have no good blood in their veins. No good
blood in their veins? They have something better than royal blood there.
The grandmother of Benjamin Franklin was Mary Morrel" afterwards, by marriage,
Mary Folger, one of the old settlers of Nantucket, and the ancestress to a
long line of Folgers and harpooneers —all kith and kin to noble Benjamin
—this day darting the barbed iron from one side of the world to the other.
Good again; but then all confess that somehow whaling is not respectable.
Whaling not respectable? Whaling is imperial! By old English statutory
law, the whale is declared a royal fish.
..
Oh, that's only nominal! The whale himself has never figured in any grand
imposing way. The whale never figured in any grand imposing way? In
one of the mighty triumphs given to a Roman general upon his entering the
world's capital, the bones of a whale, brought all the way from the Syrian
coast, were the most conspicuous object in the cymballed procession. Grant
it, since you cite it; but, say what you will, there is no real dignity in
whaling. No dignity in whaling? The dignity of our calling the very
heavens attest. Cetus is a constellation in the South! No more! Drive down
your hat in presence of the Czar, and take it off to Queequeg! No more! I
know a man that, in his lifetime, has taken three hundred and fifty whales. I
account that man more honorable than that great captain of antiquity who
boasted of taking as many walled towns. And, as for me, if, by any
possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall
ever deserve any real repute in that small but high hushed world which I might
not be unreasonably ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do anything that,
upon the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left undone; if, at
my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS.
in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honor and the glory to
whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
..
See subsequent chapters for something more on this head.
..
See subsequent chapters for something more on this head.
..






.. < chapter xxv 27 POSTSCRIPT >
In behalf of the dignity of whaling, I
would fain advance naught but substantiated facts. But after embattling his
facts, an advocate who should wholly suppress a not unreasonable
..
surmise, which might tell eloquently upon his cause —such an advocate, would
he not be blameworthy? It is well known that at the coronation of kings and
queens, even modern ones, a certain curious process of seasoning them for
their functions is gone through. There is a saltcellar of state, so called,
and there may be a caster of state. How they use the salt, precisely —who
knows? Certain I am, however, that a king's head is solemnly oiled at his
coronation, even as a head of salad. Can it be, though, that they anoint it
with a view of making its interior run well, as they anoint machinery? Much
might be ruminated here, concerning the essential dignity of this regal
process, because in common life we esteem but meanly and contemptibly a
fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably smells of that anointing. In truth,
a mature man who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got
a quoggy spot in him somewhere. As a general rule, he can't amount to much in
his totality. But the only thing to be considered here, is this —what kind
of oil is used at coronations? Certainly it cannot be olive oil, nor macassar
oil, nor castor oil, nor bear's oil, nor train oil, nor cod-liver oil. What
then can it possibly be, but sperm oil in its unmanufactured, unpolluted
state, the sweetest of all oils? Think of that, ye loyal Britons! we
whalemen supply your kings and queens with coronation stuff!
..






.. < chapter xxvi 26 KNIGHTS AND SQUIRES >
The chief mate of the Pequod was
Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and a Quaker by descent. He was a long,
earnest man, and though born on an icy coast, seemed well adapted to endure
hot latitudes, his flesh being hard as twice-baked biscuit. Transported to
the Indies, his live blood would not spoil like bottled
..
ale. He must have been born in some time of general drought and famine, or
upon one of those fast days for which his state is famous. Only some thirty
arid summers had he seen; those summers had dried up all his physical
superfluousness. But this, his thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the
token of wasting anxieties and cares, than it seemed the indication of any
bodily blight. It was merely the condensation of the man. He was by no
means ill-looking; quite the contrary. His pure tight skin was an excellent
fit; and closely wrapped up in it, and embalmed with inner health and
strength, like a revivified Egyptian, this Starbuck seemed prepared to endure
for long ages to come, and to endure always, as now; for be it Polar snow or
torrid sun, like a patent chronometer, his interior vitality was warranted to
do well in all climates. Looking into his eyes, you seemed to see there the
yet lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted
through life. A staid, steadfast man, whose life for the most part was a
telling pantomime of action, and not a tame chapter of sounds. Yet, for all
his hardy sobriety and fortitude, there were certain qualities in him which
at times affected, and in some cases seemed well nigh to overbalance all the
rest. Uncommonly conscientious for a seaman, and endued with a deep natural
reverence, the wild watery loneliness of his life did therefore strongly
incline him to superstition; but to that sort of superstition, which in some
organizations seems rather to spring, somehow, from intelligence than from
ignorance. Outward portents and inward presentiments were his. And if at
times these things bent the welded iron of his soul, much more did his
far-away domestic memories of his young Cape wife and child, tend to bend him
still more from the original ruggedness of his nature, and open him still
further to those latent influences which, in some honest-hearted men,
restrain the gush of dare-devil daring, so often evinced by others in the more
perilous vicissitudes of the fishery. I will have no man in my boat, said
starbuck, who is not afraid of a whale. by this, he seemed to mean, not only
that the most reliable and useful courage was that which arises from the fair
estimation of the encountered peril, but that an utterly fearless man is a
far more dangerous comrade than a coward.
..
Aye, aye, said Stubb, the second mate, Starbuck, there, is as careful a
man as you'll find anywhere in this fishery. But we shall ere long see what
that word careful precisely means when used by a man like Stubb, or almost
any other whale hunter. Starbuck was no crusader after perils; in him
courage was not a sentiment; but a thing simply useful to him, and always
at hand upon all mortally practical occasions. Besides, he thought, perhaps,
that in this business of whaling, courage was one of the great staple outfits
of the ship, like her beef and her bread, and not to be foolishly wasted.
Wherefore he had no fancy for lowering for whales after sun-down; nor for
persisting in fighting a fish that too much persisted in fighting him. For,
thought Starbuck, I am here in this critical ocean to kill whales for my
living, and not to be killed by them for theirs; and that hundreds of men had
been so killed Starbuck well knew. What doom was his own father's? Where, in
the bottomless deeps, could he find the torn limbs of his brother? With
memories like these in him, and, moreover, given to a certain
superstitiousness, as has been said; the courage of this Starbuck which
could, nevertheless, still flourish, must indeed have been extreme. But it
was not in reasonable nature that a man so organized, and with such terrible
experiences and remembrances as he had; it was not in nature that these
things should fail in latently engendering an element in him, which, under
suitable circumstances, would break out from its confinement, and burn all his
courage up. And brave as he might be, it was that sort of bravery chiefly,
visible in some intrepid men, which, while generally abiding firm in the
conflict with seas, or winds, or whales, or any of the ordinary irrational
horrors of the world, yet cannot withstand those more terrific, because more
spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of
an enraged and mighty man. But were the coming narrative to reveal, in any
instance, the complete abasement of poor Starbuck's fortitude, scarce might I
have the heart to write it; for it is a thing most sorrowful, nay shocking,
to expose the fall of valor in the soul. Men may seem detestable as joint
stock-companies and nations; knaves,
..
fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but
man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing
creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run
to throw their costliest robes. That immaculate manliness we feel within
ourselves, so far within us, that it remains intact though all the outer
character seem gone; bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle
of a valor-ruined man. Nor can piety itself, at such a shameful sight,
completely stifle her upbraidings against the permitting stars. But this
august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but that
abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Thou shalt see it shining
in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity
which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God
absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence,
our divine equality! If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and
castaways, I shall hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round
them tragic graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased,
among them all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall
touch that workman's arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread a
rainbow over his disastrous set of sun; then against all mortal critics bear
me out in it, thou just spirit of equality, which hast spread one royal
mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out in it, thou great democratic
God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the pale, poetic
pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves of finest gold, the
stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who didst pick up Andrew
Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst
thunder him higher than a throne! Thou who, in all Thy mighty, earthly
marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from the kingly commons; bear
me out in it, O God!
..






.. < chapter xxvii 2 KNIGHTS AND SQUIRES >
Stubb was the second mate. He
was a native of Cape Cod; and hence, according to local usage, was called a
Cape-Cod-man. A happy-go-lucky; neither craven nor valiant; taking perils as
they came with an indifferent air; and while engaged in the most imminent
crisis of the chase, toiling away, calm and collected as a journeyman joiner
engaged for the year. Good-humored, easy, and careless, he presided over his
whale-boat as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his crew
all invited guests. He was as particular about the comfortable arrangement of
his part of the boat, as an old stage-driver is about the snugness of his box.
When close to the whale, in the very death-lock of the fight, he handled his
unpitying lance coolly and off-handedly, as a whistling tinker his hammer.
He would hum over his old rigadig tunes while flank and flank with the most
exasperated monster. Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted the jaws of
death into an easy chair. What he thought of death itself, there is no
telling. Whether he ever thought of it at all, might be a question; but, if
he ever did chance to cast his mind that way after a comfortable dinner, no
doubt, like a good sailor, he took it to be a sort of call of the watch to
tumble aloft, and bestir themselves there, about something which he would find
out when he obeyed the order, and not sooner. What, perhaps, with other
things, made Stubb such an easygoing, unfearing man, so cheerily trudging off
with the burden of life in a world full of grave peddlers, all bowed to the
ground with their packs; what helped to bring about that almost impious
good-humor of his; that thing must have been his pipe. For, like his nose,
his short, black little pipe was one of the regular features of his face. You
would almost as soon have expected him to turn out of his bunk without his
nose as without his pipe.
..
He kept a whole row of pipes there ready loaded, stuck in a rack, within easy
reach of his hand; and, whenever he turned in, he smoked them all out in
succession, lighting one from the other to the end of the chapter; then
loading them again to be in readiness anew. For, when Stubb dressed, instead
of first putting his legs into his trowsers, he put his pipe into his mouth.
I say this continual smoking must have been one cause, at least, of his
peculiar disposition; for every one knows that this earthly air, whether
ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless miseries of the
numberless mortals who have died exhaling it; and as in time of the cholera,
some people go about with a camphorated handkerchief to their mouths; so,
likewise, against all mortal tribulations, Stubb's tobacco smoke might have
operated as a sort of disinfecting agent. The third mate was Flask, a native
of Tisbury, in Martha's Vineyard. A short, stout, ruddy young fellow, very
pugnacious concerning whales, who somehow seemed to think that the great
Leviathans had personally and hereditarily affronted him; and therefore it
was a sort of point of honor with him, to destroy them whenever encountered.
So utterly lost was he to all sense of reverence for the many marvels of their
majestic bulk and mystic ways; and so dead to anything like an apprehension
of any possible danger from encountering them; that in his poor opinion, the
wondrous whale was but a species of magnified mouse, or at least water-rat,
requiring only a little circumvention and some small application of time and
trouble in order to kill and boil. This ignorant, unconscious fearlessness of
his made him a little waggish in the matter of whales; he followed these
fish for the fun of it; and a three years' voyage round Cape Horn was only a
jolly joke that lasted that length of time. As a carpenter's nails are
divided into wrought nails and cut nails; so mankind may be similarly divided.
Little Flask was one of the wrought ones; made to clinch tight and last
long. They called him King-Post on board of the Pequod; because, in form,
he could be well likened to the short, square timber known by that name in
Arctic whalers; and which by the means of many radiating side timbers
inserted in it, served to brace the ship against the icy concussions of those
battering seas. Now these three mates —Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, were
..
momentous men. They it was who by universal prescription commanded three of
the Pequod's boats as headsmen. In that grand order of battle in which
Captain Ahab would probably marshal his forces to descend on the whales,
these three headsmen were as captains of companies. Or, being armed with
their long keen whaling spears, they were as a picked trio of lancers; even
as the harpooneers were flingers of javelins. And since in this famous
fishery, each mate or headsman, like a Gothic Knight of old, is always
accompanied by his boat-steerer or harpooneer, who in certain conjunctures
provides him with a fresh lance, when the former one has been badly twisted,
or elbowed in the assault; and moreover, as there generally subsists between
the two, a close intimacy and friendliness; it is therefore but meet, that in
this place we set down who the Pequod's harpooneers were, and to what
headsman each of them belonged. first of all was queequeg, whom Starbuck, the
chief mate, had selected for his squire. But Queequeg is already known. Next
was Tashtego, an unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most westerly promontory of
Martha's Vineyard, where there still exists the last remnant of a village of
red men, which has long supplied the neighboring island of Nantucket with
many of her most daring harpooneers. In the fishery, they usually go by the
generic name of Gay-Headers. Tashtego's long, lean, sable hair, his high
cheek bones, and black rounding eyes —for an Indian, Oriental in their
largeness, but Antarctic in their glittering expression —all this
sufficiently proclaimed him an inheritor of the unvitiated blood of those
proud warrior hunters, who, in quest of the great New England moose, had
scoured, bow in hand, the aboriginal forests of the main. But no longer
snuffing in the trail of the wild beasts of the woodland, Tashtego now
hunted in the wake of the great whales of the sea; the unerring harpoon of
the son fitly replacing the infallible arrow of the sires. To look at the
tawny brawn of his lithe snaky limbs, you would almost have credited the
superstitions of some of the earlier Puritans, and half believed this wild
Indian to be a son of the Prince of the Powers of the Air. Tashtego was Stubb
the second mate's squire. Third among the harpooneers was Daggoo, a gigantic,
coal-black
..
negro-savage, with a lion-like tread —an Ahasuerus to behold. Suspended from
his ears were two golden hoops, so large that the sailors called them
ring-bolts, and would talk of securing the top-sail halyards to them. In his
youth Daggoo had voluntarily shipped on board of a whaler, lying in a lonely
bay on his native coast. And never having been anywhere in the world but in
Africa, Nantucket, and the pagan harbors most frequented by whalemen; and
having now led for many years the bold life of the fishery in the ships of
owners uncommonly heedful of what manner of men they shipped; daggoo retained
all his barbaric virtues, and erect as a giraffe, moved about the decks in
all the pomp of six feet five in his socks. There was a corporeal humility
in looking up at him; and a white man standing before him seemed a white flag
come to beg truce of a fortress. Curious to tell, this imperial negro,
Ahasuerus Daggoo, was the Squire of little Flask, who looked like a chess-man
beside him. As for the residue of the Pequod's company, be it said, that at
the present day not one in two of the many thousand men before the mast
employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans born, though pretty
nearly all the officers are. Herein it is the same with the American whale
fishery as with the American army and military and merchant navies, and the
engineering forces employed in the construction of the American Canals and
Railroads. The same, I say, because in all these cases the native American
liberally provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying
the muscles. No small number of these whaling seamen belong to the Azores,
where the outward bound Nantucket whalers frequently touch to augment their
crews from the hardy peasants of those rocky shores. In like manner, the
Greenland whalers sailing out of Hull or London, put in at the Shetland
Islands, to receive the full complement of their crew. Upon the passage
homewards, they drop them there again. How it is, there is no telling, but
Islanders seem to make the best whalemen. They were nearly all Islanders in
the Pequod, Isolatoes too, I call such, not acknowledging the common
continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his
own. Yet now, federated along one keel, what a set these Isolatoes were! An
Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the
..
isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab in the
pequod to lay the world's grievances before that bar from which not very many
of them ever come back. Black Little Pip —he never did —oh, no! he went
before. Poor Alabama boy! On the grim Pequod's forecastle, ye shall ere
long see him, beating his tambourine; prelusive of the eternal time, when
sent for, to the great quarter-deck on high, he was bid strike in with
angels, and beat his tambourine in glory; called a coward here, hailed a
hero there!
..






.. < chapter xxviii 11 AHAB >
For several days after leaving Nantucket,
nothing above hatches was seen of Captain Ahab. The mates regularly relieved
each other at the watches, and for aught that could be seen to the contrary,
they seemed to be the only commanders of the ship; only they sometimes issued
from the cabin with orders so sudden and peremptory, that after all it was
plain they but commanded vicariously. Yes, their supreme lord and dictator
was there, though hitherto unseen by any eyes not permitted to penetrate into
the now sacred retreat of the cabin. Every time I ascended to the deck from my
watches below, I instantly gazed aft to mark if any strange face were
visible; for my first vague disquietude touching the unknown captain, now in
the seclusion of the sea, became almost a perturbation. This was strangely
heightened at times by the ragged Elijah's diabolical incoherences uninvitedly
recurring to me, with a subtle energy I could not have before conceived of.
But poorly could I withstand them, much as in other moods I was almost ready
to smile at the solemn whimsicalities of that outlandish prophet of the
wharves. But whatever it was of apprehensiveness or uneasiness —to call it so
—which I felt, yet whenever I came to look about me in the ship, it seemed
against all warrantry to
..
cherish such emotions. For though the harpooneers, with the great body of
the crew, were a far more barbaric, heathenish, and motley set than any of the
tame merchant-ship companies which my previous experiences had made me
acquainted with, still I ascribed this —and rightly ascribed it —to the
fierce uniqueness of the very nature of that wild Scandinavian vocation in
which I had so abandonedly embarked. But it was especially the aspect of the
three chief officers of the ship, the mates, which was most forcibly
calculated to allay these colorless misgivings, and induce confidence and
cheerfulness in every presentment of the voyage. Three better, more likely
sea-officers and men, each in his own different way, could not readily be
found, and they were every one of them Americans; a Nantucketer, a
Vineyarder, a Cape man. Now, it being Christmas when the ship shot from out
her harbor, for a space we had biting Polar weather, though all the time
running away from it to the southward; and by every degree and minute of
latitude which we sailed, gradually leaving that merciless winter, and all
its intolerable weather behind us. It was one of those less lowering, but
still grey and gloomy enough mornings of the transition, when with a fair wind
the ship was rushing through the water with a vindictive sort of leaping and
melancholy rapidity, that as I mounted to the deck at the call of the forenoon
watch, so soon as I levelled my glance towards the taffrail, foreboding
shivers ran over me. Reality outran apprehension; Captain Ahab stood upon
his quarter-deck. There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him,
nor of the recovery from any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake,
when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them,
or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His whole
high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable
mould, like Cellini's cast Perseus. Threading its way out from among his grey
hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck,
till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly
whitish. It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the
straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning
..
tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and
grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off into the soil,
leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded. Whether that mark was born
with him, or whether it was the scar left by some desperate wound, no one
could certainly say. By some tacit consent, throughout the voyage little or no
allusion was made to it, especially by the mates. But once Tashtego's
senior, an old Gay-Head Indian among the crew, superstitiously asserted that
not till he was full forty years old did Ahab become that way branded, and
then it came upon him, not in the fury of any mortal fray, but in an
elemental strife at sea. Yet, this wild hint seemed inferentially negatived,
by what a grey Manxman insinuated, an old sepulchral man, who, having never
before sailed out of Nantucket, had never ere this laid eye upon wild Ahab.
Nevertheless, the old sea-traditions, the immemorial credulities, popularly
invested this old Manxman with preternatural powers of discernment. So that
no white sailor seriously contradicted him when he said that if ever Captain
Ahab should be tranquilly laid out —which might hardly come to pass, so he
muttered —then, whoever should do that last office for the dead, would find a
birth-mark on him from crown to sole. So powerfully did the whole grim aspect
of Ahab affect me, and the livid brand which streaked it, that for the first
few moments I hardly noted that not a little of this overbearing grimness was
owing to the barbaric white leg upon which he partly stood. It had previously
come to me that this ivory leg had at sea been fashioned from the polished
bone of the sperm whale's jaw. Aye, he was dismasted off Japan, said the
old Gay-Head Indian once; but like his dismasted craft, he shipped another
mast without coming home for it. he has a quiver of 'em. I was struck with
the singular posture he maintained. Upon each side of the Pequod's quarter
deck, and pretty close to the mizen shrouds, there was an auger hole, bored
about half an inch or so, into the plank. His bone leg steadied in that hole;
one arm elevated, and holding by a shroud; Captain Ahab stood erect, looking
straight out beyond the ship's ever-pitching prow. There was an infinity of
firmest fortitude, a determinate unsurrenderable
..
wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance. Not
a word he spoke; nor did his officers say aught to him; though by all their
minutest gestures and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not
painful, consciousness of being under a troubled master-eye. And not only
that, but moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his
face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe. Ere
long, from his first visit in the air, he withdrew into his cabin. But after
that morning, he was every day visible to the crew; either standing in his
pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory stool he had; or heavily walking the
deck. As the sky grew less gloomy; indeed, began to grow a little genial, he
became still less and less a recluse; as if, when the ship had sailed from
home, nothing but the dead wintry bleakness of the sea had then kept him so
secluded. And, by and by, it came to pass, that he was almost continually in
the air; but, as yet, for all that he said, or perceptibly did, on the at
last sunny deck, he seemed as unnecessary there as another mast. But the
Pequod was only making a passage now; not regularly cruising; nearly all
whaling preparatives needing supervision the mates were fully competent to,
so that there was little or nothing, out of himself, to employ or excite Ahab,
now; and thus chase away, for that one interval, the clouds that layer upon
layer were piled upon his brow, as ever all clouds choose the loftiest peaks
to pile themselves upon. Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling
persuasiveness of the pleasant, holiday weather we came to, seemed gradually
to charm him from his mood. For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls,
April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest,
ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green
sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants; so Ahab did, in the end, a
little respond to the playful allurings of that girlish air. More than once
did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any other man, would
have soon flowered out in a smile.
..






.. < chapter xxix 2 ENTER AHAB; TO HIM, STUBB >
Some days elapsed, and ice
and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now went rolling through the bright Quito
spring, which, at sea, almost perpetually reigns on the threshold of the
eternal August of the Tropic. The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed,
overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet,
heaped up —flaked up, with rose-water snow. The starred and stately nights
seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the
memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns! For
sleeping man, 'twas hard to choose between such winsome days and such
seducing nights. But all the witcheries of that unwaning weather did not
merely lend new spells and potencies to the outward world. Inward they turned
upon the soul, especially when the still mild hours of eve came on; then,
memory shot her crystals as the clear ice most forms of noiseless twilights.
And all these subtle agencies, more and more they wrought on Ahab's texture.
Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man
has to do with aught that looks like death. among sea-commanders, the old
greybeards will oftenest leave their berths to visit the night-cloaked deck.
It was so with Ahab; only that now, of late, he seemed so much to live in
the open air, that truly speaking, his visits were more to the cabin, than
from, the cabin to the planks. It feels like going down into one's tomb,
—he would mutter to himself, — for an old captain like me to be descending
this narrow scuttle, to go to my grave-dug berth. So, almost every
twenty-four hours, when the watches of the night were set, and the band on
deck sentinelled the slumbers of the band below; and when if a rope was to be
hauled upon the forecastle, the sailors flung it not rudely down, as by day,
..
but with some cautiousness dropt it to its place, for fear of disturbing
their slumbering shipmates; when this sort of steady quietude would begin to
prevail, habitually, the silent steersman would watch the cabin-scuttle; and
ere long the old man would emerge, griping at the iron banister, to help his
crippled way. Some considerating touch of humanity was in him; for at times
like these, he usually abstained from patrolling the quarter-deck; because to
his wearied mates, seeking repose within six inches of his ivory heel, such
would have been the reverberating crack and din of that bony step, that their
dreams would have been of the crunching teeth of sharks. But once, the mood
was on him too deep for common regardings; and as with heavy, lumber-like
pace he was measuring the ship from taffrail to mainmast, Stubb, the odd
second mate, came up from below, and with a certain unassured, deprecating
humorousness, hinted that if Captain Ahab was pleased to walk the planks,
then, no one could say nay; but there might be some way of muffling the
noise; hinting something indistinctly and hesitatingly about a globe of tow,
and the insertion into it, of the ivory heel. Ah! Stubb, thou did'st not
know Ahab then. Am I a cannon-ball, Stubb, said Ahab, that thou wouldst
wad me that fashion? But go thy ways; I had forgot. Below to thy nightly
grave; where such as ye sleep between shrouds, to use ye to the filling one
at last. —Down, dog, and kennel! Starting at the unforeseen concluding
exclamation of the so suddenly scornful old man, Stubb was speechless a
moment; then said excitedly, I am not used to be spoken to that way, sir;
I do but less than half like it, sir. Avast! gritted Ahab between his set
teeth, and violently moving away, as if to avoid some passionate temptation.
No, sir; not yet, said Stubb, emboldened, I will not tamely be called a
dog, sir. Then be called ten times a donkey, and a mule, and an ass, and
begone, or I'll clear the world of thee! As he said this, Ahab advanced upon
him with such overbearing terrors in his aspect, that Stubb involuntarily
retreated. I was never served so before without giving a hard blow for it,
muttered Stubb, as he found himself descending the cabin-scuttle.
..
It's very queer. Stop, Stubb; somehow, now, I don't well know whether to go
back and strike him, or —what's that? — down here on my knees and pray for
him? Yes, that was the thought coming up in me; but it would be the first
time I ever did pray. It's queer; very queer; and he's queer too; aye,
take him fore and aft, he's about the queerest old man Stubb ever sailed
with. How he flashed at me! —his eyes like powder-pans! is he mad? Anyway
there's something on his mind, as sure as there must be something on a deck
when it cracks. He aint in his bed now, either, more than three hours out of
the twenty-four; and he don't sleep then. Didn't that Dough-Boy, the
steward, tell me that of a morning he always finds the old man's hammock
clothes all rumpled and tumbled, and the sheets down at the foot, and the
coverlid almost tied into knots, and the pillow a sort of frightful hot, as
though a baked brick had been on it? A hot old man! I guess he's got what
some folks ashore call a conscience; it's a kind of Tic-Dolly-row they say
—worse nor a toothache. Well, well; I don't know what it is, but the Lord
keep me from catching it. He's full of riddles; I wonder what he goes into
the after hold for, every night, as Dough-Boy tells me he suspects; what's
that for, I should like to know? Who's made appointments with him in the hold?
Ain't that queer, now? But there's no telling, it's the old game —Here goes
for a snooze. Damn me, it's worth a fellow's while to be born into the
world, if only to fall right asleep. And now that I think of it, that's
about the first thing babies do, and that's a sort of queer, too. Damn me,
but all things are queer, come to think of 'em. But that's against my
principles. Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can,
is my twelfth — So here goes again. But how's that? didn't he call me a dog?
blazes! he called me ten times a donkey, and piled a lot of jackasses on
top of that! He might as well have kicked me, and done with it. Maybe he
did kick me, and I didn't observe it, I was so taken all aback with his brow,
somehow. It flashed like a bleached bone. What the devil's the matter with
me? I don't stand right on my legs. Coming afoul of that old man has a sort
of turned me wrong side out. By the Lord, I must have been dreaming, though
—How? how? how? —but the only way's
..
to stash it; so here goes to hammock again; and in the morning, I'll see how
this plaguey juggling thinks over by day-light.
..






.. < chapter xxx 4 THE PIPE >
When Stubb had departed, Ahab stood for a
while leaning over the bulwarks; and then, as had been usual with him of
late, calling a sailor of the watch, he sent him below for his ivory stool,
and also his pipe. lighting the pipe at the binnacle lamp and planting the
stool on the weather side of the deck, he sat and smoked. In old Norse times,
the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were fabricated, saith tradition,
of the tusks of the narwhale. How could one look at Ahab then, seated on that
tripod of bones, without bethinking him of the royalty it symbolized? For a
Khan of the plank, and a king of the sea, and a great lord of Leviathans was
Ahab. Some moments passed, during which the thick vapor came from his mouth
in quick and constant puffs, which blew back again into his face. How now,
he soliloquized at last, withdrawing the tube, this smoking no longer
soothes. Oh, my pipe! hard must it go with me if thy charm be gone! Here
have I been unconsciously toiling, not pleasuring, —aye, and ignorantly
smoking to windward all the while; to windward, and with such nervous
whiffs, as if, like the dying whale, my final jets were the strongest and
fullest of trouble. What business have I with this pipe? This thing that is
meant for sereneness, to send up mild white vapors among mild white hairs,
not among torn iron-grey locks like mine. I'll smoke no more— He tossed the
still lighted pipe into the sea. The fire hissed in the waves; the same