CHAPTER 21
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.
"Holloa! 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 22
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 whale-boat, with her last gift— a nightcap 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 merry-making 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 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, Scotch-cap; 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 hardearned 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 the 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 mainyard 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 23
The Lee Shore
Some chapters back, one
Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, newlanded 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 24
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 preeminently 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 De Witt'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 1750 and 1788 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 Cooke 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 empty-handedness, 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 willingly dared. All that is made such a flourish of
in the old South Sea Voyages, those things were but the life-time
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 whalemen 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.*
*See subsequent chapters for
something more on this head.
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.
CHAPTER 25
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 blame-worthy?
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
hairoil, 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 the 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 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 commoners; bear me out in it, O God!
CHAPTER 27
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 whaleboat as if the most deadly encounter
were but a dinner, and his crew all invited guests. He was as particular
about the comfortable arrangements 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
easy-going, 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
into it, serves 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 ringbolts, 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 the 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 literally 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 28
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 warranty 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
mizzen 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 gladhearted
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 29
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, gripping at the iron banister, to help his crippled
way. Some considering 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 old 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 didst 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's 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
daylight."
CHAPTER 30
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 instant the ship shot by the bubble the
sinking pipe made. With slouched hat, Ahab lurchingly paced the planks.
CHAPTER 31
Queen Mab
Next morning Stubb accosted
Flask.
"Such a queer dream, King-Post, I never had. You know
the old man's ivory leg, well I dreamed he kicked me with it; and when I
tried to kick back, upon my soul, my little man, I kicked my leg right
off! And then, presto! Ahab seemed a pyramid, and I like a blazing fool,
kept kicking at it. But what was still more curious, Flask—you know how
curious all dreams are—through all this rage that I was in, I somehow
seemed to be thinking to myself, that after all, it was not much of an
insult, that kick from Ahab. 'Why,' thinks I, 'what's the row? It's not
a real leg, only a false one.' And there's a mighty difference between a
living thump and a dead thump. That's what makes a blow from the hand,
Flask, fifty times more savage to bear than a blow from a cane. The
living member— that makes the living insult, my little man. And thinks I
to myself all the while, mind, while I was stubbing my silly toes
against that cursed pyramid—so confoundedly contradictory was it all,
all the while, I say, I was thinking to myself, 'what's his leg now, but
a cane-. a whale-bone cane. Yes,' thinks I, 'it was only a playful
cudgelling—in fact, only a whaleboning that he gave me— not a base kick.
Besides,' thinks I, 'look at it once; why, the end of it—the foot
part—what a small sort of end it is; whereas, if a broad footed farmer
kicked me, there's a devilish broad insult. But this insult is whittled
down to a point only.' But now comes the greatest joke of the dream,
Flask. While I was battering away at the pyramid, a sort of
badger-haired old merman, with a hump on his back, takes me by the
shoulders, and slews me round. 'What are you 'bout?' says he. Slid! man,
but I was frightened. Such a phiz! But, somehow, next moment I was over
the fright. 'What am I about?' says I at last. 'And what business is
that of yours, I should like to know, Mr. Humpback? Do you want a kick?'
By the lord, Flask, I had no sooner said that, than he turned round his
stern to me, bent over, and dragging up a lot of seaweed he had for a
clout—what do you think, I saw?—why thunder alive, man, his stern was
stuck full of marlinspikes, with the points out. Says I on second
thought, 'I guess I won't kick you, old fellow.' 'Wise Stubb,' said he,
'wise Stubb;' and kept muttering it all the time, a sort of eating of
his own gums like a chimney hag. Seeing he wasn't going to stop saying
over his 'wise Stubb, wise Stubb,' I thought I might as well fall to
kicking the pyramid again. But I had only just lifted my foot for it,
when he roared out, 'Stop that kicking!' 'Halloa,' says I, 'what's the
matter now, old fellow?' 'Look ye here,' says he; 'let's argue the
insult. Captain Ahab kicked ye, didn't he?' 'Yes, he did,' says I—'right
here it was.' 'Very good,' says he—'he used his ivory leg, didn't he?'
'Yes, he did,' says I. 'Well then,' says he, 'wise Stubb, what have you
to complain of? Didn't he kick with right good will? it wasn't a common
pitch pine leg he kicked with, was it? No, you were kicked by a great
man, and with a beautiful ivory leg, Stubb. It's an honor; I consider it
an honor. Listen, wise Stubb. In old England the greatest lords think it
great glory to be slapped by a queen, and made garter-knights of; but,
be your boast, Stubb, that ye were kicked by old Ahab, and made a wise
man of. Remember what I say; be kicked by him; account his kicks honors;
and on no account kick back; for you can't help yourself, wise Stubb.
Don't you see that pyramid?' With that, he all of a sudden seemed
somehow, in some queer fashion, to swim off into the air. I snored;
rolled over; and there I was in my hammock! Now, what do you think of
that dream, Flask?"
"I don't know; it seems a sort of foolish to me, tho.'"
"May be; may be. But it's made a wise man of me, Flask.
D'ye see Ahab standing there, sideways looking over the stern? Well, the
best thing you can do, Flask, is to let the old man alone; never speak
to him, whatever he says. Halloa! What's that he shouts? Hark!"
"Mast-head, there! Look sharp, all of ye! There are
whales hereabouts!
If ye see a white one, split your lungs for him!
"What do you think of that now, Flask? ain't there a
small drop of something queer about that, eh? A white whale—did ye mark
that, man? Look ye—there's something special in the wind. Stand by for
it, Flask. Ahab has that that's bloody on his mind. But, mum; he comes
this way."
CHAPTER 32
Cetology
Already we are boldly launched
upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost in its unshored harborless
immensities. Ere that come to pass; ere the Pequod's weedy hull rolls
side by side with the barnacled hulls of the leviathan; at the outset it
is but well to attend to a matter almost indispensable to a thorough
appreciative understanding of the more special leviathanic revelations
and allusions of all sorts which are to follow.
It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his
broad genera, that I would now fain put before you. Yet is it no easy
task. The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is
here essayed. Listen to what the best and latest authorities have laid
down.
"No branch of Zoology is so much involved as that which
is entitled Cetology," says Captain Scoresby, A.D. 1820.
"It is not my intention, were it in my power, to enter
into the inquiry as to the true method of dividing the cetacea into
groups and families…. Utter confusion exists among the historians of
this animal" (sperm whale), says Surgeon Beale, A.D. 1839.
"Unfitness to pursue our research in the unfathomable
waters."
"Impenetrable veil covering our knowledge of the cetacea."
"A field strewn with thorns." "All these incomplete indications
but serve to torture us naturalists."
Thus speak of the whale, the great Cuvier, and John
Hunter, and Lesson, those lights of zoology and anatomy. Nevertheless,
though of real knowledge there be little, yet of books there are a
plenty; and so in some small degree, with cetology, or the science of
whales. Many are the men, small and great, old and new, landsmen and
seamen, who have at large or in little, written of the whale. Run over a
few:— The Authors of the Bible; Aristotle; Pliny; Aldrovandi; Sir Thomas
Browne; Gesner; Ray; Linnaeus; Rondeletius; Willoughby; Green; Artedi;
Sibbald; Brisson; Marten; Lacepede; Bonneterre; Desmarest; Baron Cuvier;
Frederick Cuvier; John Hunter; Owen; Scoresby; Beale; Bennett; J. Ross
Browne; the Author of Miriam Coffin; Olmstead; and the Rev. T. Cheever.
But to what ultimate generalizing purpose all these have written, the
above cited extracts will show.
Of the names in this list of whale authors only those
following Owen ever saw living whales; and but one of them was a real
professional harpooneer and whaleman. I mean Captain Scoresby. On the
separate subject of the Greenland or right-whale, he is the best
existing authority. But Scoresby knew nothing and says nothing of the
great sperm whale, compared with which the Greenland whale is almost
unworthy mentioning. And here be it said, that the Greenland whale is an
usurper upon the throne of the seas. He is not even by any means the
largest of the whales. Yet, owing to the long priority of his claims,
and the profound ignorance which till some seventy years back, invested
the then fabulous and utterly unknown sperm-whale, and which ignorance
to this present day still reigns in all but some few scientific retreats
and whale-ports; this usurpation has been every way complete. Reference
to nearly all the leviathanic allusions in the great poets of past days,
will satisfy you that the Greenland whale, without one rival, was to
them the monarch of the seas. But the time has at last come for a new
proclamation. This is Charing Cross; hear ye! good people all,—the
Greenland whale is deposed,— the great sperm whale now reigneth!
There are only two books in being which at all pretend
to put the living sperm whale before you, and at the same time, in the
remotest degree succeed in the attempt. Those books are Beale's and
Bennett's; both in their time surgeons to the English South-Sea
whale-ships, and both exact and reliable men. The original matter
touching the sperm whale to be found in their volumes is necessarily
small; but so far as it goes, it is of excellent quality, though mostly
confined to scientific description. As yet, however, the sperm whale,
scientific or poetic, lives not complete in any literature. Far above
all other hunted whales, his is an unwritten life.
Now the various species of whales need some sort of
popular comprehensive classification, if only an easy outline one for
the present, hereafter to be filled in all-outward its departments by
subsequent laborers. As no better man advances to take this matter in
hand, I hereupon offer my own poor endeavors. I promise nothing
complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete must for that
very reason infallibly be faulty. I shall not pretend to a minute
anatomical description of the various species, or—in this space at
least— to much of any description. My object here is simply to project
the draught of a systematization of cetology. I am the architect, not
the builder.
But it is a ponderous task; no ordinary letter-sorter in
the Post-Office is equal to it. To grope down into the bottom of the sea
after them; to have one's hands among the unspeakable foundations, ribs,
and very pelvis of the world; this is a fearful thing. What am I that I
should essay to hook the nose of this leviathan! The awful tauntings in
Job might well appal me. "Will he (the leviathan) make a covenant with
thee? Behold the hope of him is vain! But I have swam through libraries
and sailed through oceans; I have had to do with whales with these
visible hands; I am in earnest; and I will try. There are some
preliminaries to settle.
First: The uncertain, unsettled condition of this
science of Cetology is in the very vestibule attested by the fact, that
in some quarters it still remains a moot point whether a whale be a
fish. In his System of Nature, A.D. 1776, Linnaeus declares, "I hereby
separate the whales from the fish." But of my own knowledge, I know that
down to the year 1850, sharks and shad, alewives and herring, against
Linnaeus's express edict, were still found dividing the possession of
the same seas with the Leviathan.
The grounds upon which Linnaeus would fain have banished
the whales from the waters, he states as follows: "On account of their
warm bilocular heart, their lungs, their movable eyelids, their hollow
ears, penem intrantem feminam mammis lactantem," and finally, "ex lege
naturae jure meritoque." I submitted all this to my friends Simeon Macey
and Charley Coffin, of Nantucket, both messmates of mine in a certain
voyage, and they united in the opinion that the reasons set forth were
altogether insufficient. Charley profanely hinted they were humbug.
Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good
old fashioned ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah
to back me. This fundamental thing settled, the next point is, in what
internal respect does the whale differ from other fish. Above, Linnaeus
has given you those items. But in brief they are these: lungs and warm
blood; whereas, all other fish are lungless and cold blooded.
Next: how shall we define the whale, by his obvious
externals, so as conspicuously to label him for all time to come. To be
short, then, a whale is a spouting fish with a horizontal tail. There
you have him. However contracted, that definition is the result of
expanded meditation. A walrus spouts much like a whale, but the walrus
is not a fish, because he is amphibious. But the last term of the
definition is still more cogent, as coupled with the first. Almost any
one must have noticed that all the fish familiar to landsmen have not a
flat, but a vertical, or up-and-down tail. Whereas, among spouting fish
the tail, though it may be similarly shaped, invariably assumes a
horizontal position.
By the above definition of what a whale is, I do by no
means exclude from the leviathanic brotherhood any sea creature hitherto
identified with the whale by the best informed Nantucketers; nor, on the
other hand, link with it any fish hitherto authoritatively regarded as
alien.* Hence, all the smaller, spouting and horizontal tailed fish must
be included in this ground-plan of Cetology. Now, then, come the grand
divisions of the entire whale host.
*I am aware that down to the
present time, the fish styled Lamatins and Dugongs (Pig-fish and
Sow-fish of the Coffins of Nantucket) are included by many naturalists
among the whales. But as these pig-fish are a noisy, contemptible set,
mostly lurking in the mouths of rivers, and feeding on wet hay, and
especially as they do not spout, I deny their credentials as whales; and
have presented them with their passports to quit the Kingdom of
Cetology.
First: According to magnitude I
divide the whales into three primary BOOKS (subdivisible into CHAPTERS),
and these shall comprehend them all, both small and large.
I. THE FOLIO WHALE; II. the OCTAVO WHALE; III. the
DUODECIMO WHALE.
As the type of the FOLIO I present the Sperm Whale; of
the OCTAVO, the Grampus; of the DUODECIMO, the Porpoise.
FOLIOS. Among these I here include the following
chapters:— I. The Sperm Whale; II. the Right Whale; III. the Fin Back
Whale; IV. the Humpbacked Whale; V. the Razor Back Whale; VI. the
Sulphur Bottom Whale.
BOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER I. (Sperm Whale).—This whale,
among the English of old vaguely known as the Trumpa whale and the
Physeter whale, and the Anvil Headed whale, is the present Cachalot of
the French, and the Pottsfich of the Germans, and the Macrocephalus of
the Long Words. He is, without doubt, the largest inhabitant of the
globe; the most formidable of all whales to encounter; the most majestic
in aspect; and lastly, by far the most valuable in commerce; he being
the only creature from which that valuable substance, spermaceti, is
obtained. All his peculiarities will, in many other places, be enlarged
upon. It is chiefly with his name that I now have to do. Philologically
considered, it is absurd. Some centuries ago, when the Sperm whale was
almost wholly unknown in his own proper individuality, and when his oil
was only accidentally obtained from the stranded fish; in those days
spermaceti, it would seem, was popularly supposed to be derived from a
creature identical with the one then known in England as the Greenland
or Right Whale. It was the idea also, that this same spermaceti was that
quickening humor of the Greenland Whale which the first syllable of the
word literally expresses. In those times, also, spermaceti was
exceedingly scarce, not being used for light, but only as an ointment
and medicament. It was only to be had from the druggists as you nowadays
buy an ounce of rhubarb. When, as I opine, in the course of time, the
true nature of spermaceti became known, its original name was still
retained by the dealers; no doubt to enhance its value by a notion so
strangely significant of its scarcity. And so the appellation must at
last have come to be bestowed upon the whale from which this spermaceti
was really derived.
BOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER II. (Right Whale).—In one
respect this is the most venerable of the leviathans, being the one
first regularly hunted by man. It yields the article commonly known as
whalebone or baleen; and the oil specially known as "whale oil," an
inferior article in commerce. Among the fishermen, he is
indiscriminately designated by all the following titles: The Whale; the
Greenland Whale; the Black Whale; the Great Whale; the True Whale; the
Right Whale. There is a deal of obscurity concerning the Identity of the
species thus multitudinously baptized. What then is the whale, which I
include in the second species of my Folios? It is the Great Mysticetus
of the English naturalists; the Greenland Whale of the English Whalemen;
the Baliene Ordinaire of the French whalemen; the Growlands Walfish of
the Swedes. It is the whale which for more than two centuries past has
been hunted by the Dutch and English in the Arctic seas; it is the whale
which the American fishermen have long pursued in the Indian ocean, on
the Brazil Banks, on the Nor' West Coast, and various other parts of the
world, designated by them Right Whale Cruising Grounds.
Some pretend to see a difference between
the Greenland whale of the English and the right whale of the Americans.
But they precisely agree in all their grand features; nor has there yet
been presented a single determinate fact upon which to ground a radical
distinction. It is by endless subdivisions based upon the most
inconclusive differences, that some departments of natural history
become so repellingly intricate. The right whale will be elsewhere
treated of at some length, with reference to elucidating the sperm
whale.
BOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER III. (Fin-Back).—Under this
head I reckon a monster which, by the various names of Fin-Back,
Tall-Spout, and Long-John, has been seen almost in every sea and is
commonly the whale whose distant jet is so often descried by passengers
crossing the Atlantic, in the New York packet-tracks. In the length he
attains, and in his baleen, the Fin-back resembles the right whale, but
is of a less portly girth, and a lighter color, approaching to olive.
His great lips present a cable-like aspect, formed by the intertwisting,
slanting folds of large wrinkles. His grand distinguishing feature, the
fin, from which he derives his name, is often a conspicuous object. This
fin is some three or four feet long, growing vertically from the hinder
part of the back, of an angular shape, and with a very sharp pointed
end. Even if not the slightest other part of the creature be visible,
this isolated fin will, at times, be seen plainly projecting from the
surface. When the sea is moderately calm, and slightly marked with
spherical ripples, and this gnomon-like fin stands up and casts shadows
upon the wrinkled surface, it may well be supposed that the watery
circle surrounding it somewhat resembles a dial, with its style and wavy
hour-lines graved on it. On that Ahaz-dial the shadow often goes back.
The Fin-Back is not gregarious. He seems a whale-hater, as some men are
man-haters. Very shy; always going solitary; unexpectedly rising to the
surface in the remotest and most sullen waters; his straight and single
lofty jet rising like a tall misanthropic spear upon a barren plain;
gifted with such wondrous power and velocity in swimming, as to defy all
present pursuit from man; this leviathan seems the banished and
unconquerable Cain of his race, bearing for his mark that style upon his
back. From having the baleen in his mouth, the Fin-Back is sometimes
included with the right whale, among a theoretic species denominated
Whalebone whales, that is, whales with baleen. Of these so-called
Whalebone whales, there would seem to be several varieties, most of
which, however, are little known. Broad-nosed whales and beaked whales;
pike-headed whales; bunched whales; under-jawed whales and rostrated
whales, are the fisherman's names for a few sorts.
In connexion with this appellative of
"Whalebone whales," it is of great importance to mention, that however
such a nomenclature may be convenient in facilitating allusions to some
kind of whales, yet it is in vain to attempt a clear classification of
the Leviathan, founded upon either his baleen, or hump, or fin, or
teeth; notwithstanding that those marked parts or features very
obviously seem better adapted to afford the basis for a regular system
of Cetology than any other detached bodily distinctions, which the
whale, in his kinds, presents. How then? The baleen, hump, back-fin, and
teeth; these are things whose peculiarities are indiscriminately
dispersed among all sorts of whales, without any regard to what may be
the nature of their structure in other and more essential particulars.
Thus, the sperm whale and the humpbacked whale, each has a hump; but
there the similitude ceases. Then this same humpbacked whale and the
Greenland whale, each of these has baleen; but there again the
similitude ceases. And it is just the same with the other parts above
mentioned. In various sorts of whales, they form such irregular
combinations; or, in the case of any one of them detached, such an
irregular isolation; as utterly to defy all general methodization formed
upon such a basis. On this rock every one of the whale-naturalists has
split.
But it may possibly be conceived that, in the internal
parts of the whale, in his anatomy—there, at least, we shall be able to
hit the right classification. Nay; what thing, for example, is there in
the Greenland whale's anatomy more striking than his baleen? Yet we have
seen that by his baleen it is impossible correctly to classify the
Greenland whale. And if you descend into the bowels of the various
leviathans, why there you will not find distinctions a fiftieth part as
available to the systematizer as those external ones already enumerated.
What then remains? nothing but to take hold of the whales bodily, in
their entire liberal volume, and boldly sort them that way. And this is
the Bibliographical system here adopted; and it is the only one that can
possibly succeed, for it alone is practicable. To proceed.
BOOK I. (Folio) CHAPTER IV. (Hump Back).—This whale is
often seen on the northern American coast. He has been frequently
captured there, and towed into harbor. He has a great pack on him like a
peddler; or you might call him the Elephant and Castle whale. At any
rate, the popular name for him does not sufficiently distinguish him,
since the sperm whale also has a hump though a smaller one. His oil is
not very valuable. He has baleen. He is the most gamesome and
light-hearted of all the whales, making more gay foam and white water
generally than any other of them.
BOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER V. ( Razor Back).—Of this
whale little is known but his name. I have seen him at a distance off
Cape Horn. Of a retiring nature, he eludes both hunters and
philosophers. Though no coward, he has never yet shown any part of him
but his back, which rises in a long sharp ridge. Let him go. I know
little more of him, nor does anybody else.
BOOK I. (Folio), CHAPTER VI. (Sulphur Bottom).—Another
retiring gentleman, with a brimstone belly, doubtless got by scraping
along the Tartarian tiles in some of his profounder divings. He is
seldom seen; at least I have never seen him except in the remoter
southern seas, and then always at too great a distance to study his
countenance. He is never chased; he would run away with rope-walks of
line. Prodigies are told of him. Adieu, Sulphur Bottom! I can say
nothing more that is true of ye, nor can the oldest Nantucketer.
Thus ends BOOK I. (Folio), and now begins
BOOK II. (Octavo).
OCTAVOES.* These embrace the whales of middling
magnitude, among which at present may be numbered:—I., the Grampus; II.,
the Black Fish; III., the Narwhale; IV., the Thrasher; V., the Killer.
*Why this book of whales is not
denominated the Quarto is very plain. Because, while the whales of this
order, though smaller than those of the former order, nevertheless
retain a proportionate likeness to them in figure, yet the bookbinder's
Quarto volume in its dimensioned form does not preserve the shape of the
Folio volume, but the Octavo volume does.
BOOK II.
(Octavo), CHAPTER I. (Grampus).—Though this fish, whose loud sonorous
breathing, or rather blowing, has furnished a proverb to landsmen, is so
well known a denizen of the deep, yet is he not popularly classed among
whales. But possessing all the grand distinctive features of the
leviathan, most naturalists have recognised him for one. He is of
moderate octavo size, varying from fifteen to twenty-five feet in
length, and of corresponding dimensions round the waist. He swims in
herds; he is never regularly hunted, though his oil is considerable in
quantity, and pretty good for light. By some fishermen his approach is
regarded as premonitory of the advance of the great sperm whale.
BOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER II. (Black Fish).—I give the
popular fishermen's names for all these fish, for generally they are the
best. Where any name happens to be vague or inexpressive, I shall say
so, and suggest another. I do so now touching the Black Fish, so called
because blackness is the rule among almost all whales. So, call him the
Hyena Whale, if you please. His voracity is well known and from the
circumstance that the inner angles of his lips are curved upwards, he
carries an everlasting Mephistophelean grin on his face. This whale
averages some sixteen or eighteen feet in length. He is found in almost
all latitudes. He has a peculiar way of showing his dorsal hooked fin in
swimming, which looks something like a Roman nose. When not more
profitably employed, the sperm whale hunters sometimes capture the Hyena
whale, to keep up the supply of cheap oil for domestic employment— as
some frugal housekeepers, in the absence of company, and quite alone by
themselves, burn unsavory tallow instead of odorous wax. Though their
blubber is very thin, some of these whales will yield you upwards of
thirty gallons of oil.
BOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER III. (Narwhale), that is,
Nostril whale.— Another instance of a curiously named whale, so named I
suppose from his peculiar horn being originally mistaken for a peaked
nose. The creature is some sixteen feet in length, while its horn
averages five feet, though some exceed ten, and even attain to fifteen
feet. Strictly speaking, this horn is but a lengthened tusk, growing out
from the jaw in a line a little depressed from the horizontal. But it is
only found on the sinister side, which has an ill effect, giving its
owner something analogous to the aspect of a clumsy left-handed man.
What precise purpose this ivory horn or lance answers, it would be hard
to say. It does not seem to be used like the blade of the sword-fish and
bill-fish; though some sailors tell me that the Narwhale employs it for
a rake in turning over the bottom of the sea for food. Charley Coffin
said it was used for an ice-piercer; for the Narwhale, rising to the
surface of the Polar Sea, and finding it sheeted with ice, thrusts his
horn up, and so breaks through. But you cannot prove either of these
surmises to be correct. My own opinion is, that however this one-sided
horn may really be used by the Narwhale—however that may be—it would
certainly be very convenient to him for a folder in reading pamphlets.
The Narwhale I have heard called the Tusked whale, the Horned whale, and
the Unicorn whale. He is certainly a curious example of the Unicornism
to be found in almost every kingdom of animated nature. From certain
cloistered old authors I have gathered that this same sea-unicorn's horn
was in ancient days regarded as the great antidote against poison, and
as such, preparations of it brought immense prices. It was also
distilled to a volatile salts for fainting ladies the same way that the
horns of the male deer are manufactured into hartshorn. Originally it
was in itself accounted an object of great curiosity. Black Letter tells
me that Sir Martin Frobisher on his return from that voyage, when Queen
Bess did gallantly wave her jewelled hand to him from a window of
Greenwich Palace, as his bold ship sailed down the Thames; "when Sir
Martin returned from that voyage," saith Black Letter, "on bended knees
he presented to her highness a prodigious long horn of the Narwhale,
which for a long period after hung in the castle at Windsor." An Irish
author avers that the Earl of Leicester, on bended knees, did likewise
present to her highness another horn, pertaining to a land beast of the
unicorn nature.
The Narwhale has a very picturesque,
leopard-like look, being of a milk-white ground color, dotted with round
and oblong spots of black. His oil is very superior, clear and fine; but
there is little of it, and he is seldom hunted. He is mostly found in
the circumpolar seas.
BOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER IV. (Killer).—Of this whale
little is precisely known to the Nantucketer, and nothing at all to the
professed naturalists. From what I have seen of him at a distance, I
should say that he was about the bigness of a grampus. He is very
savage—a sort of Feegee fish. He sometimes takes the great Folio whales
by the lip, and hangs there like a leech, till the mighty brute is
worried to death. The Killer is never hunted. I never heard what sort of
oil he has. Exception might be taken to the name bestowed upon this
whale, on the ground of its indistinctness. For we are all killers, on
land and on sea; Bonapartes and Sharks included.
BOOK II. (Octavo), CHAPTER V. (Thrasher).—This
gentleman is famous for his tail which he uses for a ferule in thrashing
his foes. He mounts the Folio whale's back, and as he swims, he works
his passage by flogging him; as some schoolmasters get along in the
world by a similar process. Still less is known of the Thrasher than of
the Killer. Both are outlaws, even in the lawless seas.
Thus ends BOOK II. (Octavo), and begins
BOOK III, (Duodecimo.)
DUODECIMOES.—These include the smaller whales. I. The
Huzza Porpoise.
II. The Algerine Porpoise. III. The Mealy-mouthed Porpoise.
To those who have not chanced specially to study the
subject, it may possibly seem strange, that fishes not commonly
exceeding four or five feet should be marshalled among WHALES—a word,
which, in the popular sense, always conveys an idea of hugeness. But the
creatures set down above as Duodecimoes are infallibly whales, by the
terms of my definition of what a whale is—i.e. a spouting fish, with a
horizontal tail.
BOOK III. (Duodecimo), CHAPTER 1. (Huzza
Porpoise).—This is the common porpoise found almost all over the globe.
The name is of my own bestowal; for there are more than one sort of
porpoises, and something must be done to distinguish them. I call him
thus, because he always swims in hilarious shoals, which upon the broad
sea keep tossing themselves to heaven like caps in a Fourth-of-July
crowd. Their appearance is generally hailed with delight by the mariner.
Full of fine spirits, they invariably come from the breezy billows to
windward. They are the lads that always live before the wind. They are
accounted a lucky omen. If you yourself can withstand three cheers at
beholding these vivacious fish, then heaven help ye; the spirit of godly
gamesomeness is not in ye. A well-fed, plump Huzza Porpoise will yield
you one good gallon of good oil. But the fine and delicate fluid
extracted from his jaws is exceedingly valuable. It is in request among
jewellers and watchmakers. Sailors put it on their hones. Porpoise meat
is good eating, you know. It may never have occurred to you that a
porpoise spouts. Indeed, his spout is so small that it is not very
readily discernible. But the next time you have a chance, watch him; and
you will then see the great Sperm whale himself in miniature.
BOOK III. (Duodecimo), CHAPTER II. (Algerine
Porpoise).—A pirate. Very savage. He is only found, I think, in the
Pacific. He is somewhat larger than the Huzza Porpoise, but much of the
same general make. Provoke him, and he will buckle to a shark. I have
lowered for him many times, but never yet saw him captured.
BOOK III. (Duodecimo), CHAPTER III. (Mealy-mouthed
Porpoise).—The largest kind of Porpoise; and only found in the Pacific,
so far as it is known. The only English name, by which he has hitherto
been designated, is that of the fisher—Right-Whale Porpoise, from the
circumstance that he is chiefly found in the vicinity of that Folio. In
shape, he differs in some degree from the Huzza Porpoise, being of a
less rotund and jolly girth; indeed, he is of quite a neat and
gentleman-like figure. He has no fins on his back (most other porpoises
have), he has a lovely tail, and sentimental Indian eyes of a hazel hue.
But his mealy-mouth spoils all. Though his entire back down to his side
fins is of a deep sable, yet a boundary line, distinct as the mark in a
ship's hull, called the "bright waist," that line streaks him from stem
to stern, with two separate colors, black above and white below. The
white comprises part of his head, and the whole of his mouth, which
makes him look as if he had just escaped from a felonious visit to a
meal-bag. A most mean and mealy aspect! His oil is much like that of the
common porpoise.
Beyond the
DUODECIMO, this system does not proceed, inasmuch as the Porpoise is the
smallest of the whales. Above, you have all the Leviathans of note. But
there are a rabble of uncertain, fugitive, half-fabulous whales, which,
as an American whaleman, I know by reputation, but not personally. I
shall enumerate them by their fore-castle appellations; for possibly
such a list may be valuable to future investigators, who may complete
what I have here but begun. If any of the following whales, shall
hereafter be caught and marked, then he can readily be incorporated into
this System, according to his Folio, Octavo, or Duodecimo magnitude:—
The Bottle-Nose Whale; the Junk Whale; the Pudding-Headed Whale; the
Cape Whale; the Leading Whale; the Cannon Whale; the Scragg Whale; the
Coppered Whale; the Elephant Whale; the Iceberg Whale; the Quog Whale;
the Blue Whale; &c. From Icelandic, Dutch, and old English authorities,
there might be quoted other lists of uncertain whales, blessed with all
manner of uncouth names. But I omit them as altogether obsolete; and can
hardly help suspecting them for mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, but
signifying nothing.
Finally: It was stated at the outset, that this system
would not be here, and at once, perfected. You cannot but plainly see
that I have kept my word. But I now leave my cetological System standing
thus unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with
the cranes still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For
small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones,
true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever
completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the
draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!
CHAPTER 33
The Specksynder
Concerning the officers of the
whale-craft, this seems as good a place as any to set down a little
domestic peculiarity on ship-board, arising from the existence of the
harpooneer class of officers, a class unknown of course in any other
marine than the whale-fleet.
The large importance attached to the harpooneer's
vocation is evinced by the fact, that originally in the old Dutch
Fishery, two centuries and more ago, the command of a whale-ship was not
wholly lodged in the person now called the captain, but was divided
between him and an officer called the Specksynder. Literally this word
means Fat-Cutter; usage, however, in time made it equivalent to Chief
Harpooneer. In those days, the captain's authority was restricted to the
navigation and general management of the vessel; while over the
whale-hunting department and all its concerns, the Specksynder or Chief
Harpooneer reigned supreme. In the British Greenland Fishery, under the
corrupted title of Specksioneer, this old Dutch official is still
retained, but his former dignity is sadly abridged. At present he ranks
simply as senior Harpooneer; and as such, is but one of the captain's
more inferior subalterns. Nevertheless, as upon the good conduct of the
harpooneers the success of a whaling voyage largely depends, and since
in the American Fishery he is not only an important officer in the boat,
but under certain circumstances (night watches on a whaling ground) the
command of the ship's deck is also his; therefore the grand political
maxim of the sea demands, that he should nominally live apart from the
men before the mast, and be in some way distinguished as their
professional superior; though always, by them, familiarly regarded as
their social equal.
Now, the grand distinction drawn between officer and man
at sea, is this—the first lives aft, the last forward. Hence, in
whale-ships and merchantmen alike, the mates have their quarters with
the captain; and so, too, in most of the American whalers the
harpooneers are lodged in the after part of the ship. That is to say,
they take their meals in the captain's cabin, and sleep in a place
indirectly communicating with it.
Though the long period of a Southern whaling voyage (by
far the longest of all voyages now or ever made by man), the peculiar
perils of it, and the community of interest prevailing among a company,
all of whom, high or low, depend for their profits, not upon fixed
wages, but upon their common luck, together with their common vigilance,
intrepidity, and hard work; though all these things do in some cases
tend to beget a less rigorous discipline than in merchantmen generally;
yet, never mind how much like an old Mesopotamian family these whalemen
may, in some primitive instances, live together; for all that, the
punctilious externals, at least, of the quarter-deck are seldom
materially relaxed, and in no instance done away. Indeed, many are the
Nantucket ships in which you will see the skipper parading his
quarter-deck with an elated grandeur not surpassed in any military navy;
nay, extorting almost as much outward homage as if he wore the imperial
purple, and not the shabbiest of pilot-cloth.
And though of all men the moody captain of the Pequod
was the least given to that sort of shallowest assumption; and though
the only homage he ever exacted, was implicit, instantaneous obedience;
though he required no man to remove the shoes from his feet ere stepping
upon the quarter-deck; and though there were times when, owing to
peculiar circumstances connected with events hereafter to be detailed,
he addressed them in unusual terms, whether of condescension or in
terrorem, or otherwise; yet even Captain Ahab was by no means
unobservant of the paramount forms and usages of the sea.
Nor, perhaps, will it fail to be eventually perceived,
that behind those forms and usages, as it were, he sometimes masked
himself; incidentally making use of them for other and more private ends
than they were legitimately intended to subserve. That certain sultanism
of his brain, which had otherwise in a good degree remained
unmanifested; through those forms that same sultanism became incarnate
in an irresistible dictatorship. For be a man's intellectual superiority
what it will, it can never assume the practical, available supremacy
over other men, without the aid of some sort of external arts and
entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or less paltry and base. This
it is, that for ever keeps God's true princes of the Empire from the
world's hustings; and leaves the highest honors that this air can give,
to those men who become famous more through their infinite inferiority
to the choice hidden handful of the Divine Inert, than through their
undoubted superiority over the dead level of the mass. Such large virtue
lurks in these small things when extreme political superstitions invest
them, that in some royal instances even to idiot imbecility they have
imparted potency. But when, as in the case of Nicholas the Czar, the
ringed crown of geographical empire encircles an imperial brain; then,
the plebeian herds crouch abased before the tremendous centralization.
Nor, will the tragic dramatist who would depict mortal indomitableness
in its fullest sweep and direct swing, ever forget a hint, incidentally
so important in his art, as the one now alluded to.
But Ahab, my Captain, still moves before me in all his
Nantucket grimness and shagginess; and in this episode touching Emperors
and Kings, I must not conceal that I have only to do with a poor old
whale-hunter like him; and, therefore, all outward majestical trappings
and housings are denied me. Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it
must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and
featured in the unbodied air!
CHAPTER 34
The Cabin-Table
It is noon; and Dough-Boy, the
steward, thrusting his pale loaf-of-bread face from the cabin-scuttle,
announces dinner to his lord and master who, sitting in the lee
quarter-boat, has just been taking an observation of the sun; and is now
mutely reckoning the latitude on the smooth, medallion-shaped tablet,
reserved for that daily purpose on the upper part of his ivory leg. From
his complete inattention to the tidings, you would think that moody Ahab
had not heard his menial. But presently, catching hold of the mizen
shrouds, he swings himself to the deck, and in an even, unexhilarated
voice, saying, "Dinner, Mr. Starbuck," disappears into the cabin.
When the last echo of his sultan's step has died away,
and Starbuck, the first Emir, has every reason to suppose that he is
seated, then Starbuck rouses from his quietude, takes a few turns along
the planks, and, after a grave peep into the binnacle, says, with some
touch of pleasantness, "Dinner, Mr. Stubb," and descends the scuttle.
The second Emir lounges about the rigging awhile, and then slightly
shaking the main brace, to see whether it will be all right with that
important rope, he likewise takes up the old burden, and with a rapid
"Dinner, Mr. Flask," follows after his predecessors.
But the third Emir, now seeing himself all alone on the
quarter-deck, seems to feel relieved from some curious restraint; for,
tipping all sorts of knowing winks in all sorts of directions, and
kicking off his shoes, he strikes into a sharp but noiseless squall of a
hornpipe right over the Grand Turk's head; and then, by a dexterous
sleight, pitching his cap up into the mizentop for a shelf, he goes down
rollicking so far at least as he remains visible from the deck,
reversing all other processions, by bringing up the rear with music. But
ere stepping into the cabin doorway below, he pauses, ships a new face
altogether, and, then, independent, hilarious little Flask enters King
Ahab's presence, in the character of Abjectus, or the Slave.
It is not the least among the strange things bred by the
intense artificialness of sea-usages, that while in the open air of the
deck some officers will, upon provocation, bear themselves boldly and
defyingly enough towards their commander; yet, ten to one, let those
very officers the next moment go down to their customary dinner in that
same commander's cabin, and straightway their inoffensive, not to say
deprecatory and humble air towards him, as he sits at the head of the
table; this is marvellous, sometimes most comical. Wherefore this
difference? A problem? Perhaps not. To have been Belshazzar, King of
Babylon; and to have been Belshazzar, not haughtily but courteously,
therein certainly must have been some touch of mundane grandeur. But he
who in the rightly regal and intelligent spirit presides over his own
private dinner-table of invited guests, that man's unchallenged power
and dominion of individual influence for the time; that man's royalty of
state transcends Belshazzar's, for Belshazzar was not the greatest. Who
has but once dined his friends, has tasted what it is to be Caesar. It
is a witchery of social czarship which there is no withstanding. Now, if
to this consideration you super-add the official supremacy of a
ship-master, then, by inference, you will derive the cause of that
peculiarity of sea-life just mentioned.
Over his ivory-inlaid table, Ahab presided like a mute,
maned sea-lion on the white coral beach, surrounded by his war-like but
still deferential cubs. In his own proper turn, each officer waited to
be served. They were as little children before Ahab; and yet, in Ahab,
there seemed not to lurk the smallest social arrogance. With one mind,
their intent eyes all fastened upon the old man's knife, as he carved
the chief dish before him. I do not suppose that for the world they
would have profaned that moment with the slightest observation, even
upon so neutral a topic as the weather. No! And when reaching out his
knife and fork, between which the slice of beef was locked, Ahab thereby
motioned Starbuck's plate towards him, the mate received his meat as
though receiving alms; and cut it tenderly; and a little started if,
perchance, the knife grazed against the plate; and chewed it
noiselessly; and swallowed it, not without circumspection. For, like the
Coronation banquet at Frankfort, where the German Emperor profoundly
dines with the seven Imperial Electors, so these cabin meals were
somehow solemn meals, eaten in awful silence; and yet at table old Ahab
forbade not conversation; only he himself was dumb. What a relief it was
to choking Stubb, when a rat made a sudden racket in the hold below. And
poor little Flask, he was the youngest son, and little boy of this weary
family party. His were the shin-bones of the saline beef; his would have
been the drumsticks. For Flask to have presumed to help himself, this
must have seemed to him tantamount to larceny in the first degree. Had
he helped himself at that table, doubtless, never more would he have
been able to hold his head up in this honest world; nevertheless,
strange to say, Ahab never forbade him. And had Flask helped himself,
the chances were Ahab had never so much as noticed it. Least of all, did
Flask presume to help himself to butter. Whether he thought the owners
of the ship denied it to him, on account of its clotting his clear,
sunny complexion; or whether he deemed that, on so long a voyage in such
marketless waters, butter was at a premium, and therefore was not for
him, a subaltern; however it was, Flask, alas! was a butterless man!
Another thing. Flask was the last person down at the
dinner, and Flask is the first man up. Consider! For hereby Flask's
dinner was badly jammed in point of time. Starbuck and Stubb both had
the start of him; and yet they also have the privilege of lounging in
the rear. If Stubb even, who is but a peg higher than Flask, happens to
have but a small appetite, and soon shows symptoms of concluding his
repast, then Flask must bestir himself, he will not get more than three
mouthfuls that day; for it is against holy usage for Stubb to precede
Flask to the deck. Therefore it was that Flask once admitted in private,
that ever since he had arisen to the dignity of an officer, from that
moment he had never known what it was to be otherwise than hungry, more
or less. For what he ate did not so much relieve his hunger, as keep it
immortal in him. Peace and satisfaction, thought Flask, have for ever
departed from my stomach. I am an officer; but, how I wish I could fist
a bit of old-fashioned beef in the fore-castle, as I used to when I was
before the mast. There's the fruits of promotion now; there's the vanity
of glory: there's the insanity of life! Besides, if it were so that any
mere sailor of the Pequod had a grudge against Flask in Flask's official
capacity, all that sailor had to do, in order to obtain ample vengeance,
was to go aft at dinnertime, and get a peep at Flask through the cabin
sky-light, sitting silly and dumfoundered before awful Ahab.
Now, Ahab and his three mates formed what may be called
the first table in the Pequod's cabin. After their departure, taking
place in inverted order to their arrival, the canvas cloth was cleared,
or rather was restored to some hurried order by the pallid steward. And
then the three harpooneers were bidden to the feast, they being its
residuary legatees. They made a sort of temporary servants' hall of the
high and mighty cabin.
In strange contrast to the hardly tolerable constraint
and nameless invisible domineerings of the captain's table, was the
entire care-free license and ease, the almost frantic democracy of those
inferior fellows the harpooneers. While their masters, the mates, seemed
afraid of the sound of the hinges of their own jaws, the harpooneers
chewed their food with such a relish that there was a report to it. They
dined like lords; they filled their bellies like Indian ships all day
loading with spices. Such portentous appetites had Queequeg and
Tashtego, that to fill out the vacancies made by the previous repast,
often the pale Dough-Boy was fain to bring on a great baron of
salt-junk, seemingly quarried out of the solid ox. And if he were not
lively about it, if he did not go with a nimble hop-skip-and-jump, then
Tashtego had an ungentlemanly way of accelerating him by darting a fork
at his back, harpoon-wise. And once Daggoo, seized with a sudden humor,
assisted Dough-Boy's memory by snatching him up bodily, and thrusting
his head into a great empty wooden trencher, while Tashtego, knife in
hand, began laying out the circle preliminary to scalping him. He was
naturally a very nervous, shuddering sort of little fellow, this
bread-faced steward; the progeny of a bankrupt baker and a hospital
nurse. And what with the standing spectacle of the black terrific Ahab,
and the periodical tumultuous visitations of these three savages,
Dough-Boy's whole life was one continual lip-quiver. Commonly, after
seeing the harpooneers furnished with all things they demanded, he would
escape from their clutches into his little pantry adjoining, and
fearfully peep out at them through the blinds of its door, till all was
over.
It was a sight to see Queequeg seated over against
Tashtego, opposing his filed teeth to the Indian's; crosswise to them,
Daggoo seated on the floor, for a bench would have brought his
hearse-plumed head to the low carlines; at every motion of his colossal
limbs, making the low cabin framework to shake, as when an African
elephant goes passenger in a ship. But for all this, the great negro was
wonderfully abstemious, not to say dainty. It seemed hardly possible
that by such comparatively small mouthfuls he could keep up the vitality
diffused through so broad, baronial, and superb a person. But,
doubtless, this noble savage fed strong and drank deep of the abounding
element of air; and through his dilated nostrils snuffed in the sublime
life of the worlds. Not by beef or by bread, are giants made or
nourished. But Queequeg, he had a mortal, barbaric smack of the lip in
eating— an ugly sound enough—so much so, that the trembling Dough-Boy
almost looked to see whether any marks of teeth lurked in his own lean
arms. And when he would hear Tashtego singing out for him to produce
himself, that his bones might be picked, the simple-witted Steward all
but shattered the crockery hanging round him in the pantry, by his
sudden fits of the palsy. Nor did the whetstone which the harpooneers
carried in their pockets, for their lances and other weapons; and with
which whetstones, at dinner, they would ostentatiously sharpen their
knives; that grating sound did not at all tend to tranquillize poor
Dough-Boy. How could he forget that in his Island days, Queequeg, for
one, must certainly have been guilty of some murderous, convivial
indiscretion. Alas! Dough-Boy! hard fares the white waiter who waits
upon cannibals. Not a napkin should he carry on his arm, but a buckler.
In good time, though, to his great delight, the three salt-sea warriors
would rise and depart; to his credulous, fable-mongering ears, all their
martial bones jingling in them at every step, like Moorish scimetars in
scabbards.
But, though these barbarians dined in the cabin, and
nominally lived there; still, being anything but sedentary in their
habits, they were scarcely ever in it except at mealtimes, and just
before sleeping-time, when they passed through it to their own peculiar
quarters.
In this one matter, Ahab seemed no exception to most
American whale captains, who, as a set, rather incline to the opinion
that by rights the ship's cabin belongs to them; and that it is by
courtesy alone that anybody else is, at any time, permitted there. So
that, in real truth, the mates and harpooneers of the Pequod might more
properly be said to have lived out of the cabin than in it. For when
they did enter it, it was something as a streetdoor enters a house;
turning inwards for a moment, only to be turned out the next; and, as a
permanent thing, residing in the open air. Nor did they lose much
hereby; in the cabin was no companionship; socially, Ahab was
inaccessible. Though nominally included in the census of Christendom, he
was still an alien to it. He lived in the world, as the last of the
Grisly Bears lived in settled Missouri. And as when Spring and Summer
had departed, that wild Logan of the woods, burying himself in the
hollow of a tree, lived out the winter there, sucking his own paws; so,
in his inclement, howling old age, Ahab's soul, shut up in the caved
trunk of his body, there fed upon the sullen paws of its gloom!
CHAPTER 35
The Mast-Head
It was during the more pleasant
weather, that in due rotation with the other seamen my first mast-head
came round.
In most American whalemen the mast-heads are manned
almost simultaneously with the vessel's leaving her port; even though
she may have fifteen thousand miles, and more, to sail ere reaching her
proper cruising ground. And if, after a three, four, or five years'
voyage she is drawing nigh home with anything empty in her—say, an empty
vial even— then, her mast-heads are kept manned to the last! and not
till her skysail-poles sail in among the spires of the port, does she
altogether relinquish the hope of capturing one whale more.
Now, as the business of standing mast-heads, ashore or
afloat, is a very ancient and interesting one, let us in some measure
expatiate here. I take it, that the earliest standers of mast-heads were
the old Egyptians; because, in all my researches, I find none prior to
them. For though their progenitors, the builders of Babel, must
doubtless, by their tower, have intended to rear the loftiest mast-head
in all Asia, or Africa either; yet (ere the final truck was put to it)
as that great stone mast of theirs may be said to have gone by the
board, in the dread gale of God's wrath; therefore, we cannot give these
Babel builders priority over the Egyptians. And that the Egyptians were
a nation of mast-head standers, is an assertion based upon the general
belief among archaeologists, that the first pyramids were founded for
astronomical purposes: a theory singularly supported by the peculiar
stairlike formation of all four sides of those edifices; whereby, with
prodigious long upliftings of their legs, those old astronomers were
wont to mount to the apex, and sing out for new stars; even as the
look-outs of a modern ship sing out for a sail, or a whale just bearing
in sight. In Saint Stylites, the famous Christian hermit of old times,
who built him a lofty stone pillar in the desert and spent the whole
latter portion of his life on its summit, hoisting his food from the
ground with a tackle; in him we have a remarkable instance of a
dauntless stander-of-mast-heads; who was not to be driven from his place
by fogs or frosts, rain, hail, or sleet; but valiantly facing everything
out to the last, literally died at his post. Of modern
standers-of-mast-heads we have but a lifeless set; mere stone, iron, and
bronze men; who, though well capable of facing out a stiff gale, are
still entirely incompetent to the business of singing out upon
discovering any strange sight. There is Napoleon; who, upon the top of
the column of Vendome stands with arms folded, some one hundred and
fifty feet in the air; careless, now, who rules the decks below, whether
Louis Philippe, Louis Blanc, or Louis the Devil. Great Washington, too,
stands high aloft on his towering main-mast in Baltimore, and like one
of Hercules' pillars, his column marks that point of human grandeur
beyond which few mortals will go. Admiral Nelson, also, on a capstan of
gun-metal, stands his mast-head in Trafalgar Square; and even when most
obscured by that London smoke, token is yet given that a hidden hero is
there; for where there is smoke, must be fire. But neither great
Washington, nor Napoleon, nor Nelson, will answer a single hail from
below, however madly invoked to befriend by their counsels the
distracted decks upon which they gaze; however it may be surmised, that
their spirits penetrate through the thick haze of the future, and descry
what shoals and what rocks must be shunned.
It may seem unwarrantable to couple in any respect the
mast-head standers of the land with those of the sea; but that in truth
it is not so, is plainly evinced by an item for which Obed Macy, the
sole historian of Nantucket, stands accountable. The worthy Obed tells
us, that in the early times of the whale fishery, ere ships were
regularly launched in pursuit of the game, the people of that island
erected lofty spars along the seacoast, to which the look-outs ascended
by means of nailed cleats, something as fowls go upstairs in a
hen-house. A few years ago this same plan was adopted by the Bay
whalemen of New Zealand, who, upon descrying the game, gave notice to
the ready-manned boats nigh the beach. But this custom has now become
obsolete; turn we then to the one proper mast-head, that of a whale-ship
at sea. The three mast-heads are kept manned from sun-rise to sun-set;
the seamen taking their regular turns (as at the helm), and relieving
each other every two hours. In the serene weather of the tropics it is
exceedingly pleasant the mast-head: nay, to a dreamy meditative man it
is delightful. There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks,
striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while
beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters
of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous
Colossus at old Rhodes. There you stand, lost in the infinite series of
the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently
rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into
languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime
uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras
with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into
unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt
securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what
you shall have for dinner— for all your meals for three years and more
are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable.
In one of those southern whalesmen, on a long three or
four years' voyage, as often happens, the sum of the various hours you
spend at the mast-head would amount to several entire months. And it is
much to be deplored that the place to which you devote so considerable a
portion of the whole term of your natural life, should be so sadly
destitute of anything approaching to a cosy inhabitiveness, or adapted
to breed a comfortable localness of feeling, such as pertains to a bed,
a hammock, a hearse, a sentry box, a pulpit, a coach, or any other of
those small and snug contrivances in which men temporarily isolate
themselves. Your most usual point of perch is the head of the t'
gallant-mast, where you stand upon two thin parallel sticks (almost
peculiar to whalemen) called the t' gallant crosstrees. Here, tossed
about by the sea, the beginner feels about as cosy as he would standing
on a bull's horns. To be sure, in cold weather you may carry your house
aloft with you, in the shape of a watch-coat; but properly speaking the
thickest watch-coat is no more of a house than the unclad body; for as
the soul is glued inside of its fleshy tabernacle, and cannot freely
move about in it, nor even move out of it, without running great risk of
perishing (like an ignorant pilgrim crossing the snowy Alps in winter);
so a watch-coat is not so much of a house as it is a mere envelope, or
additional skin encasing you. You cannot put a shelf or chest of drawers
in your body, and no more can you make a convenience closet of your
watch-coat.
Concerning all this, it is much to be deplored that the
mast-heads of a southern whale ship are unprovided with those enviable
little tents or pulpits, called crow's-nests, in which the look-outs of
a Greenland whaler are protected from the inclement weather of the
frozen seas. In the fireside narrative of Captain Sleet, entitled "A
Voyage among the Icebergs, in quest of the Greenland Whale, and
incidentally for the re-discovery of the Lost Icelandic Colonies of Old
Greenland;" in this admirable volume, all standers of mast-heads are
furnished with a charmingly circumstantial account of the then recently
invented crow's-nest of the Glacier, which was the name of Captain
Sleet's good craft. He called it the Sleet's crow's-nest, in honor of
himself; he being the original inventor and patentee, and free from all
ridiculous false delicacy, and holding that if we call our own children
after our own names (we fathers being the original inventors and
patentees), so likewise should we denominate after ourselves any other
apparatus we may beget. In shape, the Sleet's crow's-nest is something
like a large tierce or pipe; it is open above, however, where it is
furnished with a movable sidescreen to keep to windward of your head in
a hard gale. Being fixed on the summit of the mast, you ascend into it
through a little trap-hatch in the bottom. On the after side, or side
next the stern of the ship, is a comfortable seat, with a locker
underneath for umbrellas, comforters, and coats. In front is a leather
rack, in which to keep your speaking trumpet, pipe, telescope, and other
nautical conveniences. When Captain Sleet in person stood his mast-head
in this crow's-nest of his, he tells us that he always had a rifle with
him (also fixed in the rack), together with a powder flask and shot, for
the purpose of popping off the stray narwhales, or vagrant sea unicorns
infesting those waters; for you cannot successfully shoot at them from
the deck owing to the resistance of the water, but to shoot down upon
them is a very different thing. Now, it was plainly a labor of love for
Captain Sleet to describe, as he does, all the little detailed
conveniences of his crow's-nest; but though he so enlarges upon many of
these, and though he treats us to a very scientific account of his
experiments in this crow's-nest, with a small compass he kept there for
the purpose of counteracting the errors resulting from what is called
the "local attraction" of all binnacle magnets; an error ascribable to
the horizontal vicinity of the iron in the ship's planks, and in the
Glacier's case, perhaps, to there having been so many broken-down
blacksmiths among her crew; I say, that though the Captain is very
discreet and scientific here, yet, for all his learned "binnacle
deviations," "azimuth compass observations," and "approximate errors,"
he knows very well, Captain Sleet, that he was not so much immersed in
those profound magnetic meditations, as to fail being attracted
occasionally towards that well replenished little case-bottle, so nicely
tucked in on one side of his crow's nest, within easy reach of his hand.
Though, upon the whole, I greatly admire and even love the brave, the
honest, and learned Captain; yet I take it very ill of him that he
should so utterly ignore that case-bottle, seeing what a faithful friend
and comforter it must have been, while with mittened fingers and hooded
head he was studying the mathematics aloft there in that bird's nest
within three or four perches of the pole.
But if we Southern whale-fishers are not so snugly
housed aloft as Captain Sleet and his Greenlandmen were; yet that
disadvantage is greatly counter-balanced by the widely contrasting
serenity of those seductive seas in which we South fishers mostly float.
For one, I used to lounge up the rigging very leisurely, resting in the
top to have a chat with Queequeg, or any one else off duty whom I might
find there; then ascending a little way further, and throwing a lazy leg
over the top-sail yard, take a preliminary view of the watery pastures,
and so at last mount to my ultimate destination.
Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit
that I kept but sorry guard. With the problem of the universe revolving
in me, how could I—being left completely to myself at such a
thought-engendering altitude—how could I but lightly hold my obligations
to observe all whaleships' standing orders, "Keep your weather eye open,
and sing out every time."
And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye
ship-owners of Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries
any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable
meditativeness; and who offers to ship with the Phaedon instead of
Bowditch in his head. Beware of such an one, I say: your whales must be
seen before they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist
will tow you ten wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of
sperm the richer. Nor are these monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays,
the whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and
absent-minded young men, disgusted with the corking care of earth, and
seeking sentiment in tar and blubber. Childe Harold not unfrequently
perches himself upon the mast-head of some luckless disappointed
whale-ship, and in moody phrase ejaculates:—
"Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!
Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain."
Very often do the captains of such ships take those
absent-minded young philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not
feeling sufficient "interest" in the voyage; half-hinting that they are
so hopelessly lost to all honorable ambition, as that in their secret
souls they would rather not see whales than otherwise. But all in vain;
those young Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect;
they are short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They
have left their opera-glasses at home.
"Why, thou monkey," said a harpooneer to one of these
lads, "we've been cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not
raised a whale yet. Whales are scarce as hen's teeth whenever thou art
up here." Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of
them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness
of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the
blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his
identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of
that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and
every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him;
every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems
to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the
soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy
spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and
space; like Crammer's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a
part of every shore the round globe over.
There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life
imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the
sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream
is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and
your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover.
And perhaps, at midday, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled
shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no
more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!
CHAPTER 36
The Quarter-Deck
(Enter Ahab: Then, all)
It was not a great while after
the affair of the pipe, that one morning shortly after breakfast, Ahab,
as was his wont, ascended the cabin-gangway to the deck. There most
sea-captains usually walk at that hour, as country gentlemen, after the
same meal, take a few turns in the garden.
Soon his steady, ivory stride was heard, as to and fro
he paced his old rounds, upon planks so familiar to his tread, that they
were all over dented, like geological stones, with the peculiar mark of
his walk. Did you fixedly gaze, too, upon that ribbed and dented brow;
there also, you would see still stranger foot-prints—the foot-prints of
his one unsleeping, ever-pacing thought.
But on the occasion in question, those dents looked
deeper, even as his nervous step that morning left a deeper mark. And,
so full of his thought was Ahab, that at every uniform turn that he
made, now at the main-mast and now at the binnacle, you could almost see
that thought turn in him as he turned, and pace in him as he paced; so
completely possessing him, indeed, that it all but seemed the inward
mould of every outer movement.
"D'ye mark him, Flask?" whispered Stubb; "the chick
that's in him pecks the shell. 'Twill soon be out."
The hours wore on;—Ahab now shut up within his cabin;
anon, pacing the deck, with the same intense bigotry of purpose in his
aspect.
It drew near the close of day. Suddenly he came to a
halt by the bulwarks, and inserting his bone leg into the auger-hole
there, and with one hand grasping a shroud, he ordered Starbuck to send
everybody aft.
"Sir!" said the mate, astonished at an order seldom or
never given on ship-board except in some extraordinary case.
"Send everybody aft," repeated Ahab. "Mast-heads, there!
come down!"
When the entire ship's company were assembled, and with
curious and not wholly unapprehensive faces, were eyeing him, for he
looked not unlike the weather horizon when a storm is coming up, Ahab,
after rapidly glancing over the bulwarks, and then darting his eyes
among the crew, started from his standpoint; and as though not a soul
were nigh him resumed his heavy turns upon the deck. With bent head and
half-slouched hat he continued to pace, unmindful of the wondering
whispering among the men; till Stubb cautiously whispered to Flask, that
Ahab must have summoned them there for the purpose of witnessing a
pedestrian feat. But this did not last long. Vehemently pausing, he
cried:—
"What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?"
"Sing out for him!" was the impulsive rejoinder from a
score of clubbed voices.
"Good!" cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones;
observing the hearty animation into which his unexpected question had so
magnetically thrown them.
"And what do ye next, men?"
"Lower away, and after him!"
"And what tune is it ye pull to, men?"
"A dead whale or a stove boat!"
More and more strangely and fiercely glad and approving,
grew the countenance of the old man at every shout; while the mariners
began to gaze curiously at each other, as if marvelling how it was that
they themselves became so excited at such seemingly purposeless
questions.
But, they were all eagerness again, as Ahab, now
half-revolving in his pivot-hole, with one hand reaching high up a
shroud, and tightly, almost convulsively grasping it, addressed them
thus:—
"All ye mast-headers have before now heard me give
orders about a white whale. Look ye! d'ye see this Spanish ounce of
gold?"—holding up a broad bright coin to the sun—"it is a sixteen dollar
piece, men. D'ye see it? Mr. Starbuck, hand me yon top-maul."
While the mate was getting the hammer, Ahab, without
speaking, was slowly rubbing the gold piece against the skirts of his
jacket, as if to heighten its lustre, and without using any words was
meanwhile lowly humming to himself, producing a sound so strangely
muffled and inarticulate that it seemed the mechanical humming of the
wheels of his vitality in him.
Receiving the top-maul from Starbuck, he advanced
towards the main-mast with the hammer uplifted in one hand, exhibiting
the gold with the other, and with a high raised voice exclaiming:
"Whosoever of ye raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and
a crooked jaw; whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed whale, with
three holes punctured in his starboard fluke—look ye, whosoever of ye
raises me that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my
boys!"
"Huzza! huzza!" cried the seamen, as with swinging
tarpaulins they hailed the act of nailing the gold to the mast.
"It's a white whale, I say," resumed Ahab, as he threw
down the topmaul: "a white whale. Skin your eyes for him, men; look
sharp for white water; if ye see but a bubble, sing out."
All this while Tashtego, Daggoo, and Queequeg had looked
on with even more intense interest and surprise than the rest, and at
the mention of the wrinkled brow and crooked jaw they had started as if
each was separately touched by some specific recollection.
"Captain Ahab," said Tashtego, "that white whale must be
the same that some call Moby Dick."
"Moby Dick?" shouted Ahab. "Do ye know the white whale
then, Tash?"
"Does he fan-tail a little curious, sir, before he goes
down?" said the Gay-Header deliberately.
"And has he a curious spout, too," said Daggoo, "very
bushy, even for a parmacetty, and mighty quick, Captain Ahab?"
"And he have one, two, tree—oh! good many iron in him
hide, too, Captain," cried Queequeg disjointedly, "all twiske-tee
be-twisk, like him—him-" faltering hard for a word, and screwing his
hand round and round as though uncorking a bottle—"like him—him-"
"Corkscrew!" cried Ahab, "aye, Queequeg, the harpoons
lie all twisted and wrenched in him; aye, Daggoo, his spout is a big
one, like a whole shock of wheat, and white as a pile of our Nantucket
wool after the great annual sheep-shearing; aye, Tashtego, and he
fan-tails like a split jib in a squall. Death and devils! men, it is
Moby Dick ye have seen— Moby Dick—Moby Dick!"
"Captain Ahab," said Starbuck, who, with Stubb and
Flask, had thus far been eyeing his superior with increasing surprise,
but at last seemed struck with a thought which somewhat explained all
the wonder. "Captain Ahab, I have heard of Moby Dick—but it was not Moby
Dick that took off thy leg?"
"Who told thee that?" cried Ahab; then pausing, "Aye,
Starbuck; aye, my hearties all round; it was Moby Dick that dismasted
me; Moby Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now. Aye,
aye," he shouted with a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a
heart-stricken moose; "Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale that
razeed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!" Then
tossing both arms, with measureless imprecations he shouted out: "Aye,
aye! and I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round
the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up.
And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on
both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black
blood and rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it,
now? I think ye do look brave."
"Aye, aye!" shouted the harpooneers and seamen, running
closer to the excited old man: "A sharp eye for the White Whale; a sharp
lance for Moby Dick!"
"God bless ye," he seemed to half sob and half shout.
"God bless ye, men. Steward! go draw the great measure of grog.
But what's this long face about, Mr. Starbuck; wilt thou not
chase the white whale! art not game for Moby Dick?"
"I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of
Death too,
Captain Ahab, if it fairly comes in the way of the business we follow;
but I came here to hunt whales, not my commander's vengeance.
How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it,
Captain Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market."
"Nantucket market! Hoot! But come closer, Starbuck; thou
requirest a little lower layer. If money's to be the measurer, man, and
the accountants have computed their great counting-house the globe, by
girdling it with guineas, one to every three parts of an inch; then, let
me tell thee, that my vengeance will fetch a great premium here!"
"He smites his chest," whispered Stubb, "what's that
for? methinks it rings most vast, but hollow."
"Vengeance on a dumb brute!" cried Starbuck, "that
simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a
dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous."
"Hark ye yet again—the little lower layer. All visible
objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the
living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning
thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the
unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can
the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me,
the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think
there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see
in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That
inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent,
or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk
not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For
could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a
sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not
my master, man, is even that fair play. Who's over me? Truth hath no
confines. Take off thine eye! more intolerable than fiends' glarings is
a doltish stare! So, so; thou reddenest and palest; my heat has melted
thee to anger-glow. But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat, that
thing unsays itself. There are men from whom warm words are small
indignity. I meant not to incense thee. Let it go. Look! see yonder
Turkish cheeks of spotted tawn—living, breathing pictures painted by the
sun. The Pagan leopards—the unrecking and unworshipping things, that
live; and seek, and give no reasons for the torrid life they feel! The
crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab, in this matter
of the whale? See Stubb! he laughs! See yonder Chilian! he snorts to
think of it. Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one tost sapling
cannot, Starbuck! And what is it? Reckon it. 'Tis but to help strike a
fin; no wondrous feat for Starbuck. What is it more? From this one poor
hunt, then, the best lance out of all Nantucket, surely he will not hang
back, when every foremast-hand has clutched a whetstone. Ah!
constrainings seize thee; I see! the billow lifts thee! Speak, but
speak!—Aye, aye! thy silence, then, that voices thee. (Aside) Something
shot from my dilated nostrils, he has inhaled it in his lungs. Starbuck
now is mine; cannot oppose me now, without rebellion."
"God keep me!—keep us all!" murmured Starbuck, lowly.
But in his joy at the enchanted, tacit acquiescence of
the mate, Ahab did not hear his foreboding invocation; nor yet the low
laugh from the hold; nor yet the presaging vibrations of the winds in
the cordage; nor yet the hollow flap of the sails against the masts, as
for a moment their hearts sank in. For again Starbuck's downcast eyes
lighted up with the stubbornness of life; the subterranean laugh died
away; the winds blew on; the sails filled out; the ship heaved and
rolled as before. Ah, ye admonitions and warnings! why stay ye not when
ye come? But rather are ye predictions than warnings, ye shadows! Yet
not so much predictions from without, as verifications of the fore-going
things within. For with little external to constrain us, the innermost
necessities in our being, these still drive us on.
"The measure! the measure!" cried Ahab.
Receiving the brimming pewter, and turning to the
harpooneers, he ordered them to produce their weapons. Then ranging them
before him near the capstan, with their harpoons in their hands, while
his three mates stood at his side with their lances, and the rest of the
ship's company formed a circle round the group; he stood for an instant
searchingly eyeing every man of his crew. But those wild eyes met his,
as the bloodshot eyes of the prairie wolves meet the eye of their
leader, ere he rushes on at their head in the trail of the bison; but,
alas! only to fall into the hidden snare of the Indian.
"Drink and pass!" he cried, handing the heavy charged
flagon to the nearest seaman. "The crew alone now drink. Round with it,
round! Short draughts—long swallows, men; 'tis hot as Satan's hoof. So,
so; it goes round excellently. It spiralizes in ye; forks out at the
serpent-snapping eye. Well done; almost drained. That way it went, this
way it comes. Hand it me—here's a hollow! Men, ye seem the years; so
brimming life is gulped and gone. Steward, refill!
"Attend now, my braves. I have mustered ye all round
this capstan; and ye mates, flank me with your lances; and ye
harpooneers, stand there with your irons; and ye, stout mariners, ring
me in, that I may in some sort revive a noble custom of my fisherman
fathers before me. O men, you will yet see that—Ha! boy, come back? bad
pennies come not sooner. Hand it me. Why, now, this pewter had run
brimming again, wert not thou St. Vitus' imp—away, thou ague!
"Advance, ye mates! Cross your lances full before me.
Well done! Let me touch the axis." So saying, with extended arm, he
grasped the three level, radiating lances at their crossed centre; while
so doing, suddenly and nervously twitched them; meanwhile glancing
intently from Starbuck to Stubb; from Stubb to Flask. It seemed as
though, by some nameless, interior volition, he would fain have shocked
into them the same fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of
his own magnetic life. The three mates quailed before his strong,
sustained, and mystic aspect. Stubb and Flask looked sideways from him;
the honest eye of Starbuck fell downright.
"In vain!" cried Ahab; "but, maybe, 'tis well. For did
ye three but once take the full-forced shock, then mine own electric
thing, that had perhaps expired from out me. Perchance, too, it would
have dropped ye dead. Perchance ye need it not. Down lances! And now, ye
mates, I do appoint ye three cupbearers to my three pagan kinsmen there—
yon three most honorable gentlemen and noblemen, my valiant harpooneers.
Disdain the task? What, when the great Pope washes the feet of beggars,
using his tiara for ewer? Oh, my sweet cardinals! your own
condescension, that shall bend ye to it. I do not order ye; ye will it.
Cut your seizings and draw the poles, ye harpooneers!"
Silently obeying the order, the three harpooneers now
stood with the detached iron part of their harpoons, some three feet
long, held, barbs up, before him.
"Stab me not with that keen steel! Cant them; cant them
over! know ye not the goblet end? Turn up the socket! So, so; now, ye
cup-bearers, advance. The irons! take them; hold them while I fill!"
Forthwith, slowly going from one officer to the other, he brimmed the
harpoon sockets with the fiery waters from the pewter.
"Now, three to three, ye stand. Commend the murderous
chalices! Bestow them, ye who are now made parties to this indissoluble
league. Ha! Starbuck! but the deed is done! Yon ratifying sun now waits
to sit upon it. Drink, ye harpooneers! drink and swear, ye men that man
the deathful whaleboat's bow— Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we
do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!" The long, barbed steel goblets were
lifted; and to cries and maledictions against the white whale, the
spirits were simultaneously quaffed down with a hiss. Starbuck paled,
and turned, and shivered. Once more, and finally, the replenished pewter
went the rounds among the frantic crew; when, waving his free hand to
them, they all dispersed; and Ahab retired within his cabin.
CHAPTER 37
Sunset
The cabin; by the stern windows;
Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out.
I leave a white and turbid wake;
pale waters, paler cheeks, where'er I sail. The envious billows sidelong
swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass.
Yonder, by the ever-brimming goblet's rim, the warm
waves blush like wine. The gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun—
slow dived from noon—goes down; my soul mounts up! she wearies with her
endless hill. Is, then, the crown too heavy that I wear? this Iron Crown
of Lombardy. Yet is it bright with many a gem; I the wearer, see not its
far flashings; but darkly feel that I wear that, that dazzlingly
confounds. 'Tis iron—that I know—not gold. 'Tis split, too—that I feel;
the jagged edge galls me so, my brain seems to beat against the solid
metal; aye, steel skull, mine; the sort that needs no helmet in the most
brain-battering fight!
Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the sunrise
nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it
lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne'er enjoy.
Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned,
most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise! Good
night—good night! (waving his hand, he moves from the window.)
'Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find one
stubborn, at the least; but my one cogged circle fits into all their
various wheels, and they revolve. Or, if you will, like so many
ant-hills of powder, they all stand before me; and I their match. Oh,
hard! that to fire others, the match itself must needs be wasting! What
I've dared, I've willed; and what I've willed, I'll do! They think me
mad— Starbuck does; but I'm demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild
madness that's only calm to comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I
should be dismembered; and—Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I
will dismember my dismemberer. Now, then, be the prophet and the
fulfiller one. That's more than ye, ye great gods, ever were. I laugh
and hoot at ye, ye cricket-players, ye pugilists, ye deaf Burkes and
blinded Bendigoes! I will not say as schoolboys do to bullies—Take some
one of your own size; don't pommel me! No, ye've knocked me down, and I
am up again; but ye have run and hidden. Come forth from behind your
cotton bags! I have no long gun to reach ye. Come, Ahab's compliments to
ye; come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me,
else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my
fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to
run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains,
under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's
an angle to the iron way!
CHAPTER 38
Dusk
By the Mainmast; Starbuck
leaning against it.
My soul is more than matched;
she's over-manned; and by a madman! Insufferable sting, that sanity
should ground arms on such a field! But he drilled deep down, and
blasted all my reason out of me! I think I see his impious end; but feel
that I must help him to it. Will I, nill I, the ineffable thing has tied
me to him; tows me with a cable I have no knife to cut. Horrible old
man! Who's over him, he cries;—aye, he would be a democrat to all above;
look, how he lords it over all below! Oh! I plainly see my miserable
office,— to obey, rebelling; and worse yet, to hate with touch of pity!
For in his eyes I read some lurid woe would shrivel me up, had I it. Yet
is there hope. Time and tide flow wide. The hated whale has the round
watery world to swim in, as the small gold-fish has its glassy globe.
His heaven-insulting purpose, God may wedge aside. I would up heart,
were it not like lead. But my whole clock's run down; my heart the
all-controlling weight, I have no key to lift again.
[A burst of revelry from the
forecastle.]
Oh, God! to sail with such a
heathen crew that have small touch of human mothers in them! Whelped
somewhere by the sharkish sea. The white whale is their demigorgon.
Hark! the infernal orgies! that revelry is forward! mark the unfaltering
silence aft! Methinks it pictures life. Foremost through the sparkling
sea shoots on the gay, embattled, bantering bow, but only to drag dark
Ahab after it, where he broods within his sternward cabin, builded over
the dead water of the wake, and further on, hunted by its wolfish
gurglings. The long howl thrills me through! Peace! ye revellers, and
set the watch! Oh, life! 'tis in an hour like this, with soul beat down
and held to knowledge,— as wild, untutored things are forced to feed—Oh,
life! 'tis now that I do feel the latent horror in thee! but 'tis not
me! that horror's out of me, and with the soft feeling of the human in
me, yet will I try to fight ye, ye grim, phantom futures! Stand by me,
hold me, bind me, O ye blessed influences!
CHAPTER 39
First Night Watch
(Stubb solus, and mending a
brace.)
Ha! ha! ha! ha! hem! clear my
throat!—I've been thinking over it ever since, and that ha, ha's the
final consequence. Why so? Because a laugh's the wisest, easiest answer
to all that's queer; and come what will, one comfort's always left— that
unfailing comfort is, it's all predestinated. I heard not all his talk
with Starbuck; but to my poor eye Starbuck then looked something as I
the other evening felt. Be sure the old Mogul has fixed him, too. I
twigged it, knew it; had had the gift, might readily have prophesied
it—for when I clapped my eye upon his skull I saw it. Well, Stubb, wise
Stubb— that's my title—well, Stubb, what of it, Stubb? Here's a carcase.
I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it
laughing. Such a waggish leering as lurks in all your horribles! I feel
funny. Fa, la! lirra, skirra! What's my juicy little pear at home doing
now? Crying its eyes out?— Giving a party to the last arrived
harpooneers, I dare say, gay as a frigate's pennant, and so am I—fa, la!
lirra, skirra! Oh—
We'll drink to-night with hearts as light,
To love, as gay and fleeting
As bubbles that swim, on the beaker's brim,
And break on the lips while meeting.
A brave stave that—who calls?
Mr. Starbuck? Aye, aye, sir—
(Aside) he's my superior, he has his too, if I'm not mistaken.—
Aye, aye, sir, just through with this job—coming.
CHAPTER 40
Midnight, Forecastle
HARPOONEERS AND SAILORS
(Foresail rises
and discovers the watch standing, lounging, leaning, and lying in
various attitudes, all singing in chorus.)
Farewell and adieu to you, Spanish ladies!
Farewell and adieu to you, ladies of Spain!
Our captain's commanded.—
1ST NANTUCKET SAILOR
Oh, boys, don't be sentimental. it's bad
for the digestion!
Take a tonic, follow me! (Sings, and all follow)
Our captain stood upon the deck,
A spy-glass in his hand,
A viewing of those gallant whales
That blew at every strand.
Oh, your tubs in your boats, my boys,
And by your braces stand,
And we'll have one of those fine whales,
Hand, boys, over hand!
So, be cheery, my lads! may your hearts never fail!
While the bold harpooneer is striking the whale!
MATE'S VOICE FROM THE QUARTER-DECK
Eight bells there, forward!
2ND NANTUCKET SAILOR
Avast the chorus! Eight bells there! d'ye
hear, bell-boy? Strike the bell eight, thou Pip! thou blackling! and let
me call the watch. I've the sort of mouth for that—the hogshead mouth.
So, so, (thrusts his head down the scuttle,) Star-bo-l-e-e-n-s, a-h-o-y!
Eight bells there below! Tumble up!
DUTCH SAILOR
Grand snoozing to-night, maty; fat night
for that. I mark this in our old
Mogul's wine; it's quite as deadening to some as filliping to others.
We sing; they sleep—aye, lie down there, like ground-tier butts.
At 'em again! There, take this copper-pump, and hail 'em through it.
Tell 'em to avast dreaming of their lassies. Tell 'em it's
the resurrection; they must kiss their last, and come to judgment.
That's the way—that's it; thy throat ain't spoiled with
eating Amsterdam butter.
FRENCH SAILOR
Hist, boys! let's have a jig or two
before we ride to anchor in Blanket Bay. What say ye? There comes the
other watch. Stand by all legs! Pip! little Pip! hurrah with your
tambourine!
PIP (Sulky and sleepy)
Don't know where it is.
FRENCH SAILOR
Beat thy belly, then, and wag thy ears.
Jig it, men, I say;
merry's the word; hurrah! Damn me, won't you dance?
Form, now, Indian-file, and gallop into the double-shuffle?
Throw yourselves! Legs! legs!
ICELAND SAILOR
I don't like your floor, maty; it's too
springy to my taste. I'm used to ice-floors. I'm sorry to throw cold
water on the subject; but excuse me.
MALTESE SAILOR
Me too; where's your girls? Who but a
fool would take his left hand by his right, and say to himself, how d'ye
do? Partners! I must have partners!
SICILIAN SAILOR
Aye; girls and a green!—then I'll hop
with ye; yea, turn grasshopper!
LONG-ISLAND SAILOR
Well, well, ye sulkies, there's plenty
more of us.
Hoe corn when you may, say I. All legs go to harvest soon.
Ah! here comes the music; now for it!
AZORE SAILOR (Ascending, and pitching the tambourine up
the scuttle.)
Here you are, Pip; and there's the windlass-bits; up you
mount! Now, boys!
(The half of them dance to the tambourine; some go
below; some sleep or lie among the coils of rigging. Oaths a-plenty.)
AZORE SAILOR (Dancing)
Go it, Pip! Bang it, bell-boy! Rig it, dig it, stig it,
quig it, bell-boy! Make fire-flies; break the jinglers!
PIP
Jinglers, you say?—there goes another,
dropped off; I pound it so.
CHINA SAILOR
Rattle thy teeth, then, and pound away;
make a pagoda of thyself.
FRENCH SAILOR
Merry-mad! Hold up thy hoop, Pip, till I
jump through it!
Split jibs! tear yourselves! Tashtego ( Quietly smoking.)
That's a white man; he calls that fun: humph! I save my
sweat.
OLD MANX SAILOR
I wonder whether those jolly lads bethink
them of what they are dancing over. I'll dance over your grave, I
will—that's the bitterest threat of your night-women, that beat
head-winds round corners. O Christ! to think of the green navies and the
green-skulled crews! Well, well; belike the whole world's a ball, as you
scholars have it; and so 'tis right to make one ballroom of it. Dance
on, lads, you're young; I was once.
3D NANTUCKET SAILOR
Spell oh!—whew! this is worse than
pulling after whales in a calm— give us a whiff, Tash.
(They cease dancing, and gather in clusters. Meantime
the sky darkens— the wind rises.)
LASCAR SAILOR
By Brahma! boys, it'll be douse sail
soon. The sky-born, high-tide
Ganges turned to wind! Thou showest thy black brow, Seeva!
MALTESE SAILOR (Reclining and shaking his cap)
It's the waves—the snow's caps turn to jig it now.
They'll shake their tassels soon. Now would all the waves were women,
then I'd go drown, and chassee with them evermore! There's naught so
sweet on earth—heaven may not match it!— as those swift glances of warm,
wild bosoms in the dance, when the over-arboring arms hide such ripe,
bursting grapes.
SICILIAN SAILOR (Reclining)
Tell me not of it! Hark ye, lad—fleet interlacings of
the limbs— lithe swayings—coyings—flutterings! lip! heart! hip! all
graze: unceasing touch and go! not taste, observe ye, else come satiety.
Eh, Pagan? (Nudging.)
TAHITAN SAILOR (Reclining on a mat)
Hail, holy nakedness of our dancing girls!—the
Heeva-Heeva! Ah! low veiled, high palmed Tahiti! I still rest me on thy
mat, but the soft soil has slid! I saw thee woven in the wood, my mat!
green the first day I brought ye thence; now worn and wilted quite. Ah
me!—not thou nor I can bear the change! How then, if so be transplanted
to yon sky? Hear I the roaring streams from Pirohitee's peak of spears,
when they leap down the crags and drown the villages?—The blast, the
blast! Up, spine, and meet it! (Leaps to his feet.)
PORTUGUESE SAILOR
How the sea rolls swashing 'gainst the
side! Stand by for reefing, hearties! the winds are just crossing
swords, pell-mell they'll go lunging presently.
DANISH SAILOR
Crack, crack, old ship! so long as thou
crackest, thou holdest! Well done! The mate there holds ye to it
stiffly. He's no more afraid than the isle fort at Cattegat, put there
to fight the Baltic with storm-lashed guns, on which the sea-salt cakes!
4TH NANTUCKET SAILOR
He has his orders, mind ye that. I heard
old Ahab tell him he must always kill a squall, something as they burst
a waterspout with a pistol— fire your ship right into it!
ENGLISH SAILOR
Blood! but that old man's a grand old
cove! We are the lads to hunt him up his whale!
ALL
Aye! aye!
OLD MANX SAILOR
How the three pines shake! Pines are the
hardest sort of tree to live when shifted to any other soil, and here
there's none but the crew's cursed clay. Steady, helmsman! steady. This
is the sort of weather when brave hearts snap ashore, and keeled hulls
split at sea. Our captain has his birthmark; look yonder, boys, there's
another in the sky lurid—like, ye see, all else pitch black.
DAGGOO
What of that? Who's afraid of black's
afraid of me!
I'm quarried out of it!
SPANISH SAILOR
(Aside.) He wants to bully, ah!—the old
grudge makes me touchy (Advancing.) Aye, harpooneer, thy race is the
undeniable dark side of mankind—devilish dark at that. No offence.
DAGGOO (Grimly)
None.
ST. JAGO'S SAILOR
That Spaniard's mad or drunk. But that
can't be, or else in his one case our old Mogul's fire-waters are
somewhat long in working.
5TH NANTUCKET SAILOR
What's that I saw—lightning? Yes.
SPANISH SAILOR
No; Daggoo showing his teeth.
DAGGOO (Springing)
Swallow thine, mannikin! White skin, white liver!
SPANISH SAILOR (Meeting him)
Knife thee heartily! big frame, small spirit!
ALL
A row! a row! a row!
TASHTEGO (With a whiff)
A row a'low, and a row aloft—Gods and men—both brawlers!
Humph!
BELFAST SAILOR
A row! arrah a row! The Virgin be
blessed, a row!
Plunge in with ye!
ENGLISH SAILOR
Fair play! Snatch the Spaniard's knife! A
ring, a ring!
OLD MANX SAILOR
Ready formed. There! the ringed horizon.
In that ring Cain struck Abel. Sweet work, right work! No? Why then,
God, mad'st thou the ring?
MATE'S VOICE FROM THE QUARTER-DECK
Hands by the halyards! in top-gallant
sails! Stand by to reef topsails!
ALL
The squall! the squall! jump, my jollies!
(They scatter.)
PIP (Shrinking under the
windlass)
Jollies? Lord help such jollies! Crish, crash! there
goes the jib-stay! Blang-whang! God! Duck lower, Pip, here comes the
royal yard! It's worse than being in the whirled woods, the last day of
the year! Who'd go climbing after chestnuts now? But there they go, all
cursing, and here I don't. Fine prospects to 'em; they're on the road to
heaven. Hold on hard! Jimmini, what a squall! But those chaps there are
worse yet— they are your white squalls, they. White squalls? white
whale, shirr! shirr! Here have I heard all their chat just now, and the
white whale—shirr! shirr!—but spoken of once! and only this evening—it
makes me jingle all over like my tambourine— that anaconda of an old man
swore 'em in to hunt him! Oh! thou big white God aloft there somewhere
in yon darkness, have mercy on this small black boy down here; preserve
him from all men that have no bowels to feel fear!
CHAPTER 41
Moby Dick
I, Ishmael, was one of that
crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with
theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my
oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetical
feeling was in me; Ahab's quenchless feud seemed mine. With greedy ears
I learned the history of that murderous monster against whom I and all
the others had taken our oaths of violence and revenge.
For some time past, though at intervals only, the
unaccompanied, secluded White Whale had haunted those uncivilized seas
mostly frequented by the Sperm Whale fishermen. But not all of them knew
of his existence; only a few of them, comparatively, had knowingly seen
him; while the number who as yet had actually and knowingly given battle
to him, was small indeed. For, owing to the large number of
whale-cruisers; the disorderly way they were sprinkled over the entire
watery circumference, many of them adventurously pushing their quest
along solitary latitudes, so as seldom or never for a whole twelvemonth
or more on a stretch, to encounter a single news-telling sail of any
sort; the inordinate length of each separate voyage; the irregularity of
the times of sailing from home; all these, with other circumstances,
direct and indirect, long obstructed the spread through the whole
world-wide whaling-fleet of the special individualizing tidings
concerning Moby Dick. It was hardly to be doubted, that several vessels
reported to have encountered, at such or such a time, or on such or such
a meridian, a Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude and malignity, which
whale, after doing great mischief to his assailants, has completely
escaped them; to some minds it was not an unfair presumption, I say,
that the whale in question must have been no other than Moby Dick. Yet
as of late the Sperm Whale fishery had been marked by various and not
unfrequent instances of great ferocity, cunning, and malice in the
monster attacked; therefore it was, that those who by accident
ignorantly gave battle to Moby Dick; such hunters, perhaps, for the most
part, were content to ascribe the peculiar terror he bred, more, as it
were, to the perils of the Sperm Whale fishery at large, than to the
individual cause. In that way, mostly, the disastrous encounter between
Ahab and the whale had hitherto been popularly regarded.
And as for those who, previously hearing of the White
Whale, by chance caught sight of him; in the beginning of the thing they
had every one of them, almost, as boldly and fearlessly lowered for him,
as for any other whale of that species. But at length, such calamities
did ensue in these assaults— not restricted to sprained wrists and
ankles, broken limbs, or devouring amputations—but fatal to the last
degree of fatality; those repeated disastrous repulses, all accumulating
and piling their terrors upon Moby Dick; those things had gone far to
shake the fortitude of many brave hunters, to whom the story of the
White Whale had eventually come.
Nor did wild rumors of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and
still the more horrify the true histories of these deadly encounters.
For not only do fabulous rumors naturally grow out of the very body of
all surprising terrible events,—as the smitten tree gives birth to its
fungi; but, in maritime life, far more than in that of terra firma, wild
rumors abound, wherever there is any adequate reality for them to cling
to. And as the sea surpasses the land in this matter, so the whale
fishery surpasses every other sort of maritime life, in the
wonderfulness and fearfulness of the rumors which sometimes circulate
there. For not only are whalemen as a body unexempt from that ignorance
and superstitiousness hereditary to all sailors; but of all sailors,
they are by all odds the most directly brought into contact with
whatever is appallingly astonishing in the sea; face to face they not
only eye its greatest marvels, but, hand to jaw, give battle to them.
Alone, in such remotest waters, that though you sailed a thousand miles,
and passed a thousand shores, you would not come to any chiselled
hearth-stone, or aught hospitable beneath that part of the sun; in such
latitudes and longitudes, pursuing too such a calling as he does, the
whaleman is wrapped by influences all tending to make his fancy pregnant
with many a mighty birth. No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume
from the mere transit over the wildest watery spaces, the outblown
rumors of the White Whale did in the end incorporate with themselves all
manner of morbid hints, and half-formed foetal suggestions of
supernatural agencies, which eventually invested Moby Dick with new
terrors unborrowed from anything that visibly appears. So that in many
cases such a panic did he finally strike, that few who by those rumors,
at least, had heard of the White Whale, few of those hunters were
willing to encounter the perils of his jaw.
But there were still other and more vital practical
influences at work. Nor even at the present day has the original
prestige of the Sperm Whale, as fearfully distinguished from all other
species of the leviathan, died out of the minds of the whalemen as a
body. There are those this day among them, who, though intelligent and
courageous enough in offering battle to the Greenland or Right whale,
would perhaps—either from professional inexperience, or incompetency, or
timidity, decline a contest with the Sperm Whale; at any rate, there are
plenty of whalemen, especially among those whaling nations not sailing
under the American flag, who have never hostilely encountered the Sperm
Whale, but whose sole knowledge of the leviathan is restricted to the
ignoble monster primitively pursued in the North; seated on their
hatches, these men will hearken with a childish fireside interest and
awe, to the wild, strange tales of Southern whaling. Nor is the
preeminent tremendousness of the great Sperm Whale anywhere more
feelingly comprehended, than on board of those prows which stem him.
And as if the now tested reality of his might had in
former legendary times thrown its shadow before it; we find some book
naturalists— Olassen and Povelson—declaring the Sperm Whale not only to
be a consternation to every other creature in the sea, but also to be so
incredibly ferocious as continually to be athirst for human blood. Nor
even down to so late a time as Cuvier's, were these or almost similar
impressions effaced. For in his Natural History, the Baron himself
affirms that at sight of the Sperm Whale, all fish (sharks included) are
"struck with the most lively terrors," and "often in the precipitancy of
their flight dash themselves against the rocks with such violence as to
cause instantaneous death." And however the general experiences in the
fishery may amend such reports as these; yet in their full terribleness,
even to the bloodthirsty item of Povelson, the superstitious belief in
them is, in some vicissitudes of their vocation, revived in the minds of
the hunters.
So that overawed by the rumors and portents concerning
him, not a few of the fishermen recalled, in reference to Moby Dick, the
earlier days of the Sperm Whale fishery, when it was oftentimes hard to
induce long practised Right whalemen to embark in the perils of this new
and daring warfare; such men protesting that although other leviathans
might be hopefully pursued, yet to chase and point lances at such an
apparition as the Sperm Whale was not for mortal man. That to attempt
it, would be inevitably to be torn into a quick eternity. On this head,
there are some remarkable documents that may be consulted.
Nevertheless, some there were, who even in the face of
these things were ready to give chase to Moby Dick; and a still greater
number who, chancing only to hear of him distantly and vaguely, without
the specific details of any certain calamity, and without superstitious
accompaniments were sufficiently hardy not to flee from the battle if
offered.
One of the wild suggestions referred to, as at last
coming to be linked with the White Whale in the minds of the
superstitiously inclined, was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was
ubiquitous; that he had actually been encountered in opposite latitudes
at one and the same instant of time.
Nor, credulous as such minds must have been, was this
conceit altogether without some faint show of superstitious probability.
For as the secrets of the currents in the seas have never yet been
divulged, even to the most erudite research; so the hidden ways of the
Sperm Whale when beneath the surface remain, in great part,
unaccountable to his pursuers; and from time to time have originated the
most curious and contradictory speculations regarding them, especially
concerning the mystic modes whereby, after sounding to a great depth, he
transports himself with such vast swiftness to the most widely distant
points.
It is a thing well known to both American and English
whale-ships, and as well a thing placed upon authoritative record years
ago by Scoresby, that some whales have been captured far north in the
Pacific, in whose bodies have been found the barbs of harpoons darted in
the Greenland seas. Nor is it to be gainsaid, that in some of these
instances it has been declared that the interval of time between the two
assaults could not have exceeded very many days. Hence, by inference, it
has been believed by some whalemen, that the Nor' West Passage, so long
a problem to man, was never a problem to the whale. So that here, in the
real living experience of living men, the prodigies related in old times
of the inland Strello mountain in Portugal (near whose top there was
said to be a lake in which the wrecks of ships floated up to the
surface); and that still more wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain
near Syracuse (whose waters were believed to have come from the Holy
Land by an underground passage); these fabulous narrations are almost
fully equalled by the realities of the whalemen.
Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as
these; and knowing that after repeated, intrepid assaults, the White
Whale had escaped alive; it cannot be much matter of surprise that some
whalemen should go still further in their superstitions; declaring Moby
Dick not only ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity
in time); that though groves of spears should be planted in his flanks,
he would still swim away unharmed; or if indeed he should ever be made
to spout thick blood, such a sight would be but a ghastly deception; for
again in unensanguined billows hundreds of leagues away, his unsullied
jet would once more be seen.
But even stripped of these supernatural surmisings,
there was enough in the earthly make and incontestable character of the
monster to strike the imagination with unwonted power. For, it was not
so much his uncommon bulk that so much distinguished him from other
sperm whales, but, as was elsewhere thrown out—a peculiar snow-white
wrinkled forehead, and a high, pyramidical white hump. These were his
prominent features; the tokens whereby, even in the limitless, uncharted
seas, he revealed his identity, at a long distance, to those who knew
him.
The rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted, and
marbled with the same shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had gained his
distinctive appellation of the White Whale; a name, indeed, literally
justified by his vivid aspect, when seen gliding at high noon through a
dark blue sea, leaving a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all spangled
with golden gleamings.
Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable
hue, nor yet his deformed lower jaw, that so much invested the whale
with natural terror, as that unexampled, intelligent malignity which,
according to specific accounts, he had over and over again evinced in
his assaults. More than all, his treacherous retreats struck more of
dismay than perhaps aught else. For, when swimming before his exulting
pursuers, with every apparent symptom of alarm, he had several times
been known to turn around suddenly, and, bearing down upon them, either
stave their boats to splinters, or drive them back in consternation to
their ship.
Already several fatalities had attended his chase. But
though similar disasters, however little bruited ashore, were by no
means unusual in the fishery; yet, in most instances, such seemed the
White Whale's infernal aforethought of ferocity, that every dismembering
or death that he caused, was not wholly regarded as having been
inflicted by an unintelligent agent.
Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted
fury the minds of his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid
the chips of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they
swam out of the white curds of the whale's direful wrath into the
serene, exasperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a
bridal.
His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both
whirling in the eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his
broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his
foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life
of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly
sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped
away Ahab's leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned
Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming
malice. Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that
almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against
the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at
last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all
his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam
before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies
which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on
with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has
been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians
ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east
reverenced in their statue devil;— Ahab did not fall down and worship it
like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white
whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most
maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth
with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all
the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were
visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He
piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and
hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest
had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.
It is not probable that this monomania in him took its
instant rise at the precise time of his bodily dismemberment. Then, in
darting at the monster, knife in hand, he had but given loose to a
sudden, passionate, corporal animosity; and when he received the stroke
that tore him, he probably but felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but
nothing more. Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards home,
and for long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched
together in one hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling
Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled
into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad. That it was only
then, on the homeward voyage, after the encounter, that the final
monomania seized him, seems all but certain from the fact that, at
intervals during the passage, he was a raving lunatic; and, though
unlimbed of a leg, yet such vital strength yet lurked in his Egyptian
chest, and was moreover intensified by his delirium, that his mates were
forced to lace him fast, even there, as he sailed, raving in his
hammock. In a strait-jacket, he swung to the mad rockings of the gales.
And, when running into more sufferable latitudes, the ship, with mild
stun'sails spread, floated across the tranquil tropics, and, to all
appearances, the old man's delirium seemed left behind him with the Cape
Horn swells, and he came forth from his dark den into the blessed light
and air; even then, when he bore that firm, collected front, however
pale, and issued his calm orders once again; and his mates thanked God
the direful madness was now gone; even then, Ahab, in his hidden self,
raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing.
When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some
still subtler form. Ahab's full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly
contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows
narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But, as in his
narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab's broad madness had been
left behind; so in that broad madness, not one jot of his great natural
intellect had perished. That before living agent, now became the living
instrument. If such a furious trope may stand, his special lunacy
stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its
concentred cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from having lost
his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a thousand fold
more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one
reasonable object.
This is much; yet Ahab's larger, darker, deeper part
remains unhinted. But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is
profound. Winding far down from within the very heart of this spiked
Hotel de Cluny where we here stand—however grand and wonderful, now quit
it;— and take your way, ye nobler, sadder souls, to those vast Roman
halls of Thermes; where far beneath the fantastic towers of man's upper
earth, his root of grandeur, his whole awful essence sits in bearded
state; an antique buried beneath antiquities, and throned on torsoes! So
with a broken throne, the great gods mock that captive king; so like a
Caryatid, he patient sits, upholding on his frozen brow the piled
entablatures of ages. Wind ye down there, ye prouder, sadder souls!
question that proud, sad king! A family likeness! aye, he did beget ye,
ye young exiled royalties; and from your grim sire only will the old
State-secret come.
Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this,
namely; all my means are sane, my motive and my object mad. Yet without
power to kill, or change, or shun the fact; he likewise knew that to
mankind he did now long dissemble; in some sort, did still. But that
thing of his dissembling was only subject to his perceptibility, not to
his will determinate. Nevertheless, so well did he succeed in that
dissembling, that when with ivory leg he stepped ashore at last, no
Nantucketer thought him otherwise than but naturally grieved, and that
to the quick, with the terrible casualty which had overtaken him.
The report of his undeniable delirium at sea was
likewise popularly ascribed to a kindred cause. And so too, all the
added moodiness which always afterwards, to the very day of sailing in
the Pequod on the present voyage, sat brooding on his brow. Nor is it so
very unlikely, that far from distrusting his fitness for another whaling
voyage, on account of such dark symptoms, the calculating people of that
prudent isle were inclined to harbor the conceit, that for those very
reasons he was all the better qualified and set on edge, for a pursuit
so full of rage and wildness as the bloody hunt of whales. Gnawed within
and scorched without, with the infixed, unrelenting fangs of some
incurable idea; such an one, could he be found, would seem the very man
to dart his iron and lift his lance against the most appalling of all
brutes. Or, if for any reason thought to be corporeally incapacitated
for that, yet such an one would seem superlatively competent to cheer
and howl on his underlings to the attack. But be all this as it may,
certain it is, that with the mad secret of his unabated rage bolted up
and keyed in him, Ahab had purposely sailed upon the present voyage with
the one only and all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had
any one of his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was
lurking in him then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls
have wrenched the ship from such a fiendish man! They were bent on
profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from the
mint. He was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural
revenge.
Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man,
chasing with curses a Job's whale round the world, at the head of a
crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and
cannibals—morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided
virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of
indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in
Flask. Such a crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by
some infernal fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge. How it was
that they so aboundingly responded to the old man's ire—by what evil
magic their souls were possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost
theirs; the White Whale as much their insufferable foe as his; how all
this came to be—what the White Whale was to them, or how to their
unconscious understandings, also, in some dim, unsuspected way, he might
have seemed the gliding great demon of the seas of life,— all this to
explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go. The subterranean
miner that works in us all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft by
the ever shifting, muffled sound of his pick? Who does not feel the
irresistible arm drag? What skiff in tow of a seventy-four can stand
still? For one, I gave myself up to the abandonment of the time and the
place; but while yet all a-rush to encounter the whale, could see naught
in that brute but the deadliest ill.
CHAPTER 42
The Whiteness of The Whale
What the white whale was to
Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains
unsaid.
Aside from those more obvious considerations touching
Moby Dick, which could not but occasionally awaken in any man's soul
some alarm, there was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror
concerning him, which at times by its intensity completely overpowered
all the rest; and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I
almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the
whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me. But how can I
hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain
myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught.
Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly
enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in
marbles, japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some
way recognised a certain royal preeminence in this hue; even the
barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu placing the title "Lord of the White
Elephants" above all their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion;
and the modern kings of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in
the royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a
snow-white charger; and the great Austrian Empire, Caesarian, heir to
overlording Rome, having for the imperial color the same imperial hue;
and though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself,
giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; and
though, besides, all this, whiteness has been even made significant of
gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and
though in other mortal sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is
made the emblem of many touching, noble things— the innocence of brides,
the benignity of age; though among the Red Men of America the giving of
the white belt of wampum was the deepest pledge of honor; though in many
climes, whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the
Judge, and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by
milk-white steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of the most
august religions it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness
and power; by the Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame being
held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove
himself being made incarnate in a snow-white bull; and though to the
noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was by
far the holiest festival of their theology, that spotless, faithful
creature being held the purest envoy they could send to the Great Spirit
with the annual tidings of their own fidelity; and though directly from
the Latin word for white, all Christian priests derive the name of one
part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the
cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is
specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of our Lord; though
in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the redeemed, and
the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the great-white
throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet for all
these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable,
and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea
of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness
which affrights in blood.
This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of
whiteness, when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with
any object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest
bounds. Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the
tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the
transcendent horrors they are? That ghastly whiteness it is which
imparts such an abhorrent mildness, even more loathsome than terrific,
to the dumb gloating of their aspect. So that not the fierce-fanged
tiger in his heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded
bear or shark.*
*With reference to the Polar
bear, it may possibly be urged by him who would fain go still deeper
into this matter, that it is not the whiteness, separately regarded,
which heightens the intolerable hideousness of that brute; for,
analysed, that heightened hideousness, it might be said, only rises from
the circumstance, that the irresponsible ferociousness of the creature
stands invested in the fleece of celestial innocence and love; and
hence, by bringing together two such opposite emotions in our minds, the
Polar bear frightens us with so unnatural a contrast. But even assuming
all this to be true; yet, were it not for the whiteness, you would not
have that intensified terror.
As for the white shark, the white gliding ghostliness of
repose in that creature, when beheld in his ordinary moods, strangely
tallies with the same quality in the Polar quadruped. This peculiarity
is most vividly hit by the French in the name they bestow upon that
fish. The Romish mass for the dead begins with "Requiem eternam"
(eternal rest), whence Requiem denominating the mass itself, and any
other funeral music. Now, in allusion to the white, silent stillness of
death in this shark, and the mild deadliness of his habits, the French
call him Requin.
Bethink thee of the albatross,
whence come those clouds of spiritual wonderment and pale dread, in
which that white phantom sails in all imaginations? Not Coleridge first
threw that spell; but God's great, unflattering laureate, Nature.*
*I remember the first albatross
I ever saw. It was during a prolonged gale, in waters hard upon the
Antarctic seas. From my forenoon watch below, I ascended to the
overclouded deck; and there, dashed upon the main hatches, I saw a
regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and with a hooked, Roman
bill sublime. At intervals, it arched forth its vast archangel wings, as
if to embrace some holy ark. Wondrous flutterings and throbbings shook
it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some king's ghost in
supernatural distress. Through its inexpressible, strange eyes,
methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God. As Abraham before
the angels, I bowed myself; the white thing was so white, its wings so
wide, and in those for ever exiled waters, I had lost the miserable
warping memories of traditions and of towns. Long I gazed at that
prodigy of plumage. I cannot tell, can only hint, the things that darted
through me then. But at last I awoke; and turning, asked a sailor what
bird was this. A goney, he replied. Goney! never had heard that name
before; is it conceivable that this glorious thing is utterly unknown to
men ashore! never! But some time after, I learned that goney was some
seaman's name for albatross. So that by no possibility could Coleridge's
wild Rhyme have had aught to do with those mystical impressions which
were mine, when I saw that bird upon our deck. For neither had I then
read the Rhyme, nor knew the bird to be an albatross. Yet, in saying
this, I do but indirectly burnish a little brighter the noble merit of
the poem and the poet.
I assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of
the bird chiefly lurks the secret of the spell; a truth the more evinced
in this, that by a solecism of terms there are birds called grey
albatrosses; and these I have frequently seen, but never with such
emotions as when I beheld the Antarctic fowl.
But how had the mystic thing been caught? Whisper it
not, and I will tell; with a treacherous hook and line, as the fowl
floated on the sea. At last the Captain made a postman of it; tying a
lettered, leathern tally round its neck, with the ship's time and place;
and then letting it escape. But I doubt not, that leathern tally, meant
for man, was taken off in Heaven, when the white fowl flew to join the
wing-folding, the invoking, and adoring cherubim!
Most famous in our Western
annals and Indian traditions is that of the White Steed of the Prairies;
a magnificent milk-white charger, large-eyed, small-headed,
bluff-chested, and with the dignity of a thousand monarchs in his lofty,
overscorning carriage. He was the elected Xerxes of vast herds of wild
horses, whose pastures in those days were only fenced by the Rocky
Mountains and the Alleghanies. At their flaming head he westward trooped
it like that chosen star which every evening leads on the hosts of
light. The flashing cascade of his mane, the curving comet of his tail,
invested him with housings more resplendent than gold and silver-beaters
could have furnished him. A most imperial and archangelical apparition
of that unfallen, western world, which to the eyes of the old trappers
and hunters revived the glories of those primeval times when Adam walked
majestic as a god, bluff-bowed and fearless as this mighty steed.
Whether marching amid his aides and marshals in the van of countless
cohorts that endlessly streamed it over the plains, like an Ohio; or
whether with his circumambient subjects browsing all around at the
horizon, the White Steed gallopingly reviewed them with warm nostrils
reddening through his cool milkiness; in whatever aspect he presented
himself, always to the bravest Indians he was the object of trembling
reverence and awe. Nor can it be questioned from what stands on
legendary record of this noble horse, that it was his spiritual
whiteness chiefly, which so clothed him with divineness; and that this
divineness had that in it which, though commanding worship, at the same
time enforced a certain nameless terror.
But there are other instances where this whiteness loses
all that accessory and strange glory which invests it in the White Steed
and Albatross.
What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels
and often shocks the eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own
kith and kin! It is that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed
by the name he bears. The Albino is as well made as other men— has no
substantive deformity—and yet this mere aspect of all-pervading
whiteness makes him more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion.
Why should this be so?
Nor, in quite other aspects, does Nature in her least
palpable but not the less malicious agencies, fail to enlist among her
forces this crowning attribute of the terrible. From its snowy aspect,
the gauntleted ghost of the Southern Seas has been denominated the White
Squall. Nor, in some historic instances, has the art of human malice
omitted so potent an auxiliary. How wildly it heightens the effect of
that passage in Froissart, when, masked in the snowy symbol of their
faction, the desperate White Hoods of Ghent murder their bailiff in the
market-place!
Nor, in some things, does the common, hereditary
experience of all mankind fail to bear witness to the supernaturalism of
this hue. It cannot well be doubted, that the one visible quality in the
aspect of the dead which most appals the gazer, is the marble pallor
lingering there; as if indeed that pallor were as much like the badge of
consternation in the other world, as of mortal trepidation here. And
from that pallor of the dead, we borrow the expressive hue of the shroud
in which we wrap them. Nor even in our superstitions do we fail to throw
the same snowy mantle round our phantoms; all ghosts rising in a
milk-white fog—Yea, while these terrors seize us, let us add, that even
the king of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on his
pallid horse.
Therefore, in his other moods, symbolize whatever grand
or gracious thing he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its
profoundest idealized significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to
the soul.
But though without dissent this point be fixed, how is
mortal man to account for it? To analyse it, would seem impossible. Can
we, then, by the citation of some of those instances wherein this thing
of whiteness—though for the time either wholly or in great part stripped
of all direct associations calculated to impart to it aught fearful, but
nevertheless, is found to exert over us the same sorcery, however
modified;— can we thus hope to light upon some chance clue to conduct us
to the hidden cause we seek?
Let us try. But in a matter like this, subtlety appeals
to subtlety, and without imagination no man can follow another into
these halls. And though, doubtless, some at least of the imaginative
impressions about to be presented may have been shared by most men, yet
few perhaps were entirely conscious of them at the time, and therefore
may not be able to recall them now.
Why to the man of untutored ideality, who happens to be
but loosely acquainted with the peculiar character of the day, does the
bare mention of Whitsuntide marshal in the fancy such long, dreary,
speechless processions of slow-pacing pilgrims, down-cast and hooded
with new-fallen snow? Or to the unread, unsophisticated Protestant of
the Middle American States, why does the passing mention of a White
Friar or a White Nun, evoke such an eyeless statue in the soul?
Or what is there apart from the traditions of dungeoned
warriors and kings (which will not wholly account for it) that makes the
White Tower of London tell so much more strongly on the imagination of
an untravelled American, than those other storied structures, its
neighbors— the Byward Tower, or even the Bloody? And those sublimer
towers, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, whence, in peculiar moods,
comes that gigantic ghostliness over the soul at the bare mention of
that name, while the thought of Virginia's Blue Ridge is full of a soft,
dewy, distant dreaminess? Or why, irrespective of all latitudes and
longitudes, does the name of the White Sea exert such a spectralness
over the fancy, while that of the Yellow Sea lulls us with mortal
thoughts of long lacquered mild afternoons on the waves, followed by the
gaudiest and yet sleepiest of sunsets? Or, to choose a wholly
unsubstantial instance, purely addressed to the fancy, why, in reading
the old fairy tales of Central Europe, does "the tall pale man" of the
Hartz forests, whose changeless pallor unrestingly glides through the
green of the groves— why is this phantom more terrible than all the
whooping imps of the Blocksburg?
Nor is it, altogether, the remembrance of her
cathedral-toppling earthquakes; nor the stampedoes of her frantic seas;
nor the tearlessness of arid skies that never rain; nor the sight of her
wide field of leaning spires, wrenched cope-stones, and crosses all
adroop (like canted yards of anchored fleets); and her suburban avenues
of house-walls lying over upon each other, as a tossed pack of cards;—
it is not these things alone which make tearless Lima, the strangest,
saddest city thou can'st see. For Lima has taken the white veil; and
there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro,
this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever new; admits not the cheerful
greenness of complete decay; spreads over her broken ramparts the rigid
pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its own distortions.
I know that, to the common apprehension, this phenomenon
of whiteness is not confessed to be the prime agent in exaggerating the
terror of objects otherwise terrible; nor to the unimaginative mind is
there aught of terror in those appearances whose awfulness to another
mind almost solely consists in this one phenomenon, especially when
exhibited under any form at all approaching to muteness or universality.
What I mean by these two statements may perhaps be respectively
elucidated by the following examples.
First: The mariner, when drawing nigh the coasts of
foreign lands, if by night he hear the roar of breakers, starts to
vigilance, and feels just enough of trepidation to sharpen all his
faculties; but under precisely similar circumstances, let him be called
from his hammock to view his ship sailing through a midnight sea of
milky whiteness— as if from encircling headlands shoals of combed white
bears were swimming round him, then he feels a silent, superstitious
dread; the shrouded phantom of the whitened waters is horrible to him as
a real ghost; in vain the lead assures him he is still off soundings;
heart and helm they both go down; he never rests till blue water is
under him again. Yet where is the mariner who will tell thee, "Sir, it
was not so much the fear of striking hidden rocks, as the fear of that
hideous whiteness that so stirred me?"
Second: To the native Indian of Peru, the continual
sight of the snowhowdahed Andes conveys naught of dread, except,
perhaps, in the mere fancying of the eternal frosted desolateness
reigning at such vast altitudes, and the natural conceit of what a
fearfulness it would be to lose oneself in such inhuman solitudes. Much
the same is it with the backwoodsman of the West, who with comparative
indifference views an unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow, no
shadow of tree or twig to break the fixed trance of whiteness. Not so
the sailor, beholding the scenery of the Antarctic seas; where at times,
by some infernal trick of legerdemain in the powers of frost and air,
he, shivering and half shipwrecked, instead of rainbows speaking hope
and solace to his misery, views what seems a boundless churchyard
grinning upon him with its lean ice monuments and splintered crosses.
But thou sayest, methinks this white-lead chapter about
whiteness is but a white flag hung out from a craven soul; thou
surrenderest to a hypo, Ishmael.
Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled in some
peaceful valley of Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey— why is
it that upon the sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo robe
behind him, so that he cannot even see it, but only smells its wild
animal muskiness—why will he start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw
the ground in phrensies of affright? There is no remembrance in him of
any gorings of wild creatures in his green northern home, so that the
strange muskiness he smells cannot recall to him anything associated
with the experience of former perils; for what knows he, this New
England colt, of the black bisons of distant Oregon?
No; but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the
instinct of the knowledge of the demonism in the world. Though thousands
of miles from Oregon, still when he smells that savage musk, the
rending, goring bison herds are as present as to the deserted wild foal
of the prairies, which this instant they may be trampling into dust.
Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the
bleak rustlings of the festooned frosts of mountains; the desolate
shiftings of the windrowed snows of prairies; all these, to Ishmael, are
as the shaking of that buffalo robe to the frightened colt!
Though neither knows where lie the nameless things of
which the mystic sign gives forth such hints; yet with me, as with the
colt, somewhere those things must exist. Though in many of its aspects
this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were
formed in fright.
But not yet have we solved the incantation of this
whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and
more strange and far more portentous—why, as we have seen, it is at once
the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the
Christian's Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in
things the most appalling to mankind.
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the
heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from
behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths
of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much
a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the
concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a
dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a
colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we
consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other
earthly hues—every stately or lovely emblazoning— the sweet tinges of
sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and
the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits,
not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so
that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose
allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we
proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces
every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains
white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon
matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own
blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a
leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored
and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes
himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect
around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol.
Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt? ..
CHAPTER 43
Hark!
"HIST! Did you hear that noise,
Cabaco?
It was the middle-watch: a fair moonlight; the seamen
were standing in a cordon, extending from one of the fresh-water butts
in the waist, to the scuttle-butt near the taffrail. In this manner,
they passed the buckets to fill the scuttle-butt. Standing, for the most
part, on the hallowed precincts of the quarter-deck, they were careful
not to speak or rustle their feet. From hand to hand, the buckets went
in the deepest silence, only broken by the occasional flap of a sail,
and the steady hum of the unceasingly advancing keel.
It was in the midst of this repose, that Archy, one of
the cordon, whose post was near the after-hatches, whispered to his
neighbor, a Cholo, the words above.
"Hist! did you hear that noise, Cabaco?"
"Take the bucket, will ye, Archy? what noise d'ye mean?"
"There it is again—under the hatches—don't you hear it—a
cough— it sounded like a cough."
"Cough be damned! Pass along that return bucket."
"There again—there it is!—it sounds like two or three
sleepers turning over, now!"
"Caramba! have done, shipmate, will ye? It's the three
soaked biscuits ye eat for supper turning over inside of ye—nothing
else. Look to the bucket!"
"Say what ye will, shipmate; I've sharp ears."
"Aye, you are the chap, ain't ye, that heard the hum of
the old Quakeress's knitting-needles fifty miles at sea from Nantucket;
you're the chap."
"Grin away; we'll see what turns up. Hark ye, Cabaco,
there is somebody down in the after-hold that has not yet been seen on
deck; and I suspect our old Mogul knows something of it too. I heard
Stubb tell Flask, one morning watch, that there was something of that
sort in the wind."
"Tish! the bucket!"
CHAPTER 44
The Chart
Had you followed Captain Ahab
down into his cabin after the squall that took place on the night
succeeding that wild ratification of his purpose with his crew, you
would have seen him go to a locker in the transom, and bringing out a
large wrinkled roll of yellowish sea charts, spread them before him on
his screwed-down table. Then seating himself before it, you would have
seen him intently study the various lines and shadings which there met
his eye; and with slow but steady pencil trace additional courses over
spaces that before were blank. At intervals, he would refer to piles of
old log-books beside him, wherein were set down the seasons and places
in which, on various former voyages of various ships, sperm whales had
been captured or seen.
While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in
chains over his head, continually rocked with the motion of the ship,
and for ever threw shifting gleams and shadows of lines upon his
wrinkled brow, till it almost seemed that while he himself was marking
out lines and courses on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was
also tracing lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of his
forehead.
But it was not this night in particular that, in the
solitude of his cabin, Ahab thus pondered over his charts. Almost every
night they were brought out; almost every night some pencil marks were
effaced, and others were substituted. For with the charts of all four
oceans before him, Ahab was threading a maze of currents and eddies,
with a view to the more certain accomplishment of that monomaniac
thought of his soul.
Now, to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of
the leviathans, it might seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek out
one solitary creature in the unhooped oceans of this planet. But not so
did it seem to Ahab, who knew the sets of all tides and currents; and
thereby calculating the driftings of the sperm whale's food; and, also
calling to mind the regular, ascertained seasons for hunting him in
particular latitudes; could arrive at reasonable surmises, almost
approaching to certainties, concerning the timeliest day to be upon this
or that ground in search of his prey.
So assured, indeed, is the fact concerning the
periodicalness of the sperm whale's resorting to given waters, that many
hunters believe that, could he be closely observed and studied
throughout the world; were the logs for one voyage of the entire whale
fleet carefully collated, then the migrations of the sperm whale would
be found to correspond in invariability to those of the herring-shoals
or the flights of swallows. On this hint, attempts have been made to
construct elaborate migratory charts of the sperm whale.*
*Since the above was written,
the statement is happily borne out by an official circular, issued by
Lieutenant Maury, of the National Observatory, Washington, April 16th,
1851. By that circular, it appears that precisely such a chart is in
course of completion; and portions of it are presented in the circular.
"This chart divides the ocean into districts of five degrees of latitude
by five degrees of longitude; perpendicularly through each of which
districts are twelve columns for the twelve months; and horizontally
through each of which districts are three lines; one to show the number
of days that have been spent in each month in every district, and the
two others to show the number of days in which whales, sperm or right,
have been seen."
Besides, when making a passage
from one feeding-ground to another, the sperm whales, guided by some
infallible instinct—say, rather, secret intelligence from the
Deity—mostly swim in veins, as they are called; continuing their way
along a given ocean-line with such undeviating exactitude, that no ship
ever sailed her course, by any chart, with one tithe of such marvellous
precision. Though, in these cases, the direction taken by any one whale
be straight as a surveyor's parallel, and though the line of advance be
strictly confined to its own unavoidable, straight wake, yet the
arbitrary vein in which at these times he is said to swim, generally
embraces some few miles in width (more or less, as the vein is presumed
to expand or contract); but never exceeds the visual sweep from the
whale-ship's mast-heads, when circumspectly gliding along this magic
zone. The sum is, that at particular seasons within that breadth and
along that path, migrating whales may with great confidence be looked
for.
And hence not only at substantiated times, upon well
known separate feeding-grounds, could Ahab hope to encounter his prey;
but in crossing the widest expanses of water between those grounds he
could, by his art, so place and time himself on his way, as even then
not to be wholly without prospect of a meeting.
There was a circumstance which at first sight seemed to
entangle his delirious but still methodical scheme. But not so in the
reality, perhaps. Though the gregarious sperm whales have their regular
seasons for particular grounds, yet in general you cannot conclude that
the herds which haunted such and such a latitude or longitude this year,
say, will turn out to be identically the same with those that were found
there the preceding season; though there are peculiar and unquestionable
instances where the contrary of this has proved true. In general, the
same remark, only within a less wide limit, applies to the solitaries
and hermits among the matured, aged sperm whales. So that though Moby
Dick had in a former year been seen, for example, on what is called the
Seychelle ground in the Indian ocean, or Volcano Bay on the Japanese
Coast; yet it did not follow that were the Pequod to visit either of
those spots at any subsequent corresponding season, she would infallibly
encounter him there. So, too, with some other feeding-grounds, where he
had at times revealed himself. But all these seemed only his casual
stopping-places and ocean-inns, so to speak, not his places of prolonged
abode. And where Ahab's chances of accomplishing his object have
hitherto been spoken of, allusion has only been made to whatever
way-side, antecedent, extra prospects were his, ere a particular set
time or place were attained, when all possibilities would become
probabilities, and, as Ahab fondly thought, every possibility the next
thing to a certainty. That particular set time and place were conjoined
in the one technical phrase—the Season-on-the-Line. For there and then,
for several consecutive years, Moby Dick had been periodically descried,
lingering in those waters for awhile, as the sun, in its annual round,
loiters for a predicted interval in any one sign of the Zodiac. There it
was, too, that most of the deadly encounters with the white whale had
taken place; there the waves were storied with his deeds; there also was
that tragic spot where the monomaniac old man had found the awful motive
to his vengeance. But in the cautious comprehensiveness and unloitering
vigilance with which Ahab threw his brooding soul into this unfaltering
hunt, he would not permit himself to rest all his hopes upon the one
crowning fact above mentioned, however flattering it might be to those
hopes; nor in the sleeplessness of his vow could he so tranquillize his
unquiet heart as to postpone all intervening quest.
Now, the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very
beginning of the Season-on-the-Line. No possible endeavor then could
enable her commander to make the great passage southwards, double Cape
Horn, and then running down sixty degrees of latitude arrive in the
equatorial Pacific in time to cruise there. Therefore, he must wait for
the next ensuing season. Yet the premature hour of the Pequod's sailing
had, perhaps, been correctly selected by Ahab, with a view to this very
complexion of things. Because, an interval of three hundred and
sixty-five days and nights was before him; an interval which, instead of
impatiently enduring ashore, he would spend in a miscellaneous hunt; if
by chance the White Whale, spending his vacation in seas far remote from
his periodical feeding-grounds, should turn up his wrinkled brow off the
Persian Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay, or China Seas, or in any other
waters haunted by his race. So that Monsoons, Pampas, Nor-Westers,
Harmattans, Trades; any wind but the Levanter and Simoon, might blow
Moby Dick into the devious zig-zag world-circle of the Pequod's
circumnavigating wake.
But granting all this; yet, regarded discreetly and
coolly, seems it not but a mad idea, this; that in the broad boundless
ocean, one solitary whale, even if encountered, should be thought
capable of individual recognition from his hunter, even as a
white-bearded Mufti in the thronged thoroughfares of Constantinople?
Yes. For the peculiar snow-white brow of Moby Dick, and his snow-white
hump, could not but be unmistakable. And have I not tallied the whale,
Ahab would mutter to himself, as after poring over his charts till long
after midnight he would throw himself back in reveries—tallied him, and
shall he escape? His broad fins are bored, and scalloped out like a lost
sheep's ear! And here, his mad mind would run on in a breathless race;
till a weariness and faintness of pondering came over him! and in the
open air of the deck he would seek to recover his strength. Ah, God!
what trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one
unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes
with his own bloody nails in his palms.
Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and
intolerably vivid dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense
thoughts through the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies,
and whirled them round and round and round in his blazing brain, till
the very throbbing of his life-spot became insufferable anguish; and
when, as was sometimes the case, these spiritual throes in him heaved
his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from
which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned
him to leap down among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath
him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes
Ahab would burst from his state room, as though escaping from a bed that
was on fire. Yet these, perhaps, instead of being the unsuppressable
symptoms of some latent weakness, or fright at his own resolve, were but
the plainest tokens of its intensity. For, at such times, crazy Ahab,
the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the white whale; this
Ahab that had gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused him
to burst from it in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living
principle or soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time dissociated
from the characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its
outer vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the
scorching contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it
was no longer an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued
with the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab's case,
yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose;
that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against
gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its
own. Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which
it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered
birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes,
when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a
vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light,
to be sure, but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness in
itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in
thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a
vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature
he creates.
CHAPTER 45
The Affidavit
So far as what there may be of a
narrative in this book; and, indeed, as indirectly touching one or two
very interesting and curious particulars in the habits of sperm whales,
the foregoing chapter, in its earlier part, is as important a one as
will be found in this volume; but the leading matter of it requires to
be still further and more familiarly enlarged upon, in order to be
adequately understood, and moreover to take away any incredulity which a
profound ignorance of the entire subject may induce in some minds, as to
the natural verity of the main points of this affair.
I care not to perform this part of my task methodically;
but shall be content to produce the desired impression by separate
citations of items, practically or reliably known to me as a whaleman;
and from these citations, I take it— the conclusion aimed at will
naturally follow of itself.
First: I have personally known three instances where a
whale, after receiving a harpoon, has effected a complete escape; and,
after an interval (in one instance of three years), has been again
struck by the same hand, and slain; when the two irons, both marked by
the same private cypher, have been taken from the body. In the instance
where three years intervened between the flinging of the two harpoons;
and I think it may have been something more than that; the man who
darted them happening, in the interval, to go in a trading ship on a
voyage to Africa, went ashore there, joined a discovery party, and
penetrated far into the interior, where he travelled for a period of
nearly two years, often endangered by serpents, savages, tigers,
poisonous miasmas, with all the other common perils incident to
wandering in the heart of unknown regions. Meanwhile, the whale he had
struck must also have been on its travels; no doubt it had thrice
circumnavigated the globe, brushing with its flanks all the coasts of
Africa; but to no purpose. This man and this whale again came together,
and the one vanquished the other. I say I, myself, have known three
instances similar to this; that is in two of them I saw the whales
struck; and, upon the second attack, saw the two irons with the
respective marks cut in them, afterwards taken from the dead fish. In
the three-year instance, it so fell out that I was in the boat both
times, first and last, and the last time distinctly recognized a
peculiar sort of huge mole under the whale's eye, which I had observed
there three years previous. I say three years, but I am pretty sure it
was more than that. Here are three instances, then, which I personally
know the truth of; but I have heard of many other instances from persons
whose veracity in the matter there is no good ground to impeach.
Secondly: It is well known in the Sperm Whale Fishery,
however ignorant the world ashore may be of it, that there have been
several memorable historical instances where a particular whale in the
ocean has been at distant times and places popularly cognisable. Why
such a whale became thus marked was not altogether and originally owing
to his bodily peculiarities as distinguished from other whales; for
however peculiar in that respect any chance whale may be, they soon put
an end to his peculiarities by killing him, and boiling him down into a
peculiarly valuable oil. No: the reason was this: that from the fatal
experiences of the fishery there hung a terrible prestige of
perilousness about such a whale as there did about Rinaldo Rinaldini,
insomuch that most fishermen were content to recognise him by merely
touching their tarpaulins when he would be discovered lounging by them
on the sea, without seeking to cultivate a more intimate acquaintance.
Like some poor devils ashore that happen to known an irascible great
man, they make distant unobtrusive salutations to him in the street,
lest if they pursued the acquaintance further, they might receive a
summary thump for their presumption.
But not only did each of these famous whales enjoy great
individual celebrity—nay, you may call it an oceanwide renown; not only
was he famous in life and now is immortal in forecastle stories after
death, but he was admitted into all the rights, privileges, and
distinctions of a name; had as much a name indeed as Cambyses or Caesar.
Was it not so, O Timor Tom! thou famed leviathan, scarred like an
iceberg, who so long did'st lurk in the Oriental straits of that name,
whose spout was oft seen from the palmy beach of Ombay? Was it not so, O
New Zealand Jack! thou terror of all cruisers that crossed their wakes
in the vicinity of the Tattoo Land? Was it not so, O Morquan! King of
Japan, whose lofty jet they say at times assumed the semblance of a
snow-white cross against the sky? Was it not so, O Don Miguel! thou
Chilian whale, marked like an old tortoise with mystic hieroglyphics
upon the back! In plain prose, here are four whales as well known to the
students of Cetacean History as Marius or Sylla to the classic scholar.
But this is not all. New Zealand Tom and Don Miguel,
after at various times creating great havoc among the boats of different
vessels, were finally gone in quest of, systematically hunted out,
chased and killed by valiant whaling captains, who heaved up their
anchors with that express object as much in view, as in setting out
through the Narragansett Woods, Captain Butler of old had it in his mind
to capture that notorious murderous savage Annawon, the headmost warrior
of the Indian King Philip.
I do not know where I can find a better place than just
here, to make mention of one or two other things, which to me seem
important, as in printed form establishing in all respects the
reasonableness of the whole story of the White Whale, more especially
the catastrophe. For this is one of those disheartening instances where
truth requires full as much bolstering as error. So ignorant are most
landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world,
that without some hints touching the plain facts, historical and
otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous
fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable
allegory.
First: Though most men have some vague flitting ideas of
the general perils of the grand fishery, yet they have nothing like a
fixed, vivid conception of those perils, and the frequency with which
they recur. One reason perhaps is, that not one in fifty of the actual
disasters and deaths by casualties in the fishery, ever finds a public
record at home, however transient and immediately forgotten that record.
Do you suppose that that poor fellow there, who this moment perhaps
caught by the whale-line off the coast of New Guinea, is being carried
down to the bottom of the sea by the sounding leviathan— do you suppose
that that poor fellow's name will appear in the newspaper obituary you
will read to-morrow at your breakfast? No: because the mails are very
irregular between here and New Guinea. In fact, did you ever hear what
might be called regular news direct or indirect from New Guinea? Yet I
will tell you that upon one particular voyage which I made to the
Pacific, among many others we spoke thirty different ships, every one of
which had had a death by a whale, some of them more than one, and three
that had each lost a boat's crew. For God's sake, be economical with
your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of
man's blood was spilled for it.
Secondly: People ashore have indeed some indefinite idea
that a whale is an enormous creature of enormous power; but I have ever
found that when narrating to them some specific example of this two-fold
enormousness, they have significantly complimented me upon my
facetiousness; when, I declare upon my soul, I had no more idea of being
facetious than Moses, when he wrote the history of the plagues of Egypt.
But fortunately the special point I here seek can be
established upon testimony entirely independent of my own. That point is
this: The Sperm Whale is in some cases sufficiently powerful, knowing,
and judiciously malicious, as with direct aforethought to stave in,
utterly destroy, and sink a large ship; and what is more, the Sperm
Whale has done it.
First: In the year 1820 the ship Essex, Captain Pollard,
of Nantucket, was cruising in the Pacific Ocean. One day she saw spouts,
lowered her boats, and gave chase to a shoal of sperm whales. Ere long,
several of the whales were wounded; when, suddenly, a very large whale
escaping from the boats, issued from the shoal, and bore directly down
upon the ship. Dashing his forehead against her hull, he so stove her
in, that in less than "ten minutes" she settled down and fell over. Not
a surviving plank of her has been seen since. After the severest
exposure, part of the crew reached the land in their boats. Being
returned home at last, Captain Pollard once more sailed for the Pacific
in command of another ship, but the gods shipwrecked him again upon
unknown rocks and breakers; for the second time his ship was utterly
lost, and forthwith forswearing the sea, he has never attempted it
since. At this day Captain Pollard is a resident of Nantucket. I have
seen Owen Chace, who was chief mate of the Essex at the time of the
tragedy; I have read his plain and faithful narrative; I have conversed
with his son; and all this within a few miles of the scene of the
catastrophe.*
*The following are extracts from
Chace's narrative: "Every fact seemed to warrant me in concluding that
it was anything but chance which directed his operations; he made two
several attacks upon the ship, at a short interval between them, both of
this catastrophe I have never chanced to their direction, were
calculated to do us the whale hunters I have now and then heard casual
allusions to it.
Thirdly: Some eighteen or twenty years ago Commodore
J—-then commanding an American sloop-of-war of the first class, happened
to be dining with a party of whaling captains, on board a Nantucket ship
in the harbor of Oahu, Sandwich Islands. Conversation turning upon
whales, the Commodore was pleased to be sceptical touching the amazing
strength ascribed to them by the professional gentlemen present. He
peremptorily denied for example, that any whale could so smite his stout
sloop-of-war as to cause her to leak so much as a thimbleful. Very good;
but there is more coming. Some weeks later, the Commodore set sail in
this impregnable craft for Valparaiso. But he was stopped on the way by
a portly sperm whale, that begged a few moments' confidential business
with him. That business consisted in fetching the Commodore's craft such
a thwack, that with all his pumps going he made straight for the nearest
port to heave down and repair. I am not superstitious, but I consider
the Commodore's interview with that whale as providential. Was not Saul
of Tarsus converted from unbelief by a similar fright? I tell you, the
sperm whale will stand no nonsense.
I will now refer you to Langsdorff's Voyages for a
little circumstance in point, peculiarly interesting to the writer
hereof. Langsdorff, you must know by the way, was attached to the
Russian Admiral Krusenstern's famous Discovery Expedition in the
beginning of the present century. Captain Langsdorff thus begins his
seventeenth chapter:
"By the thirteenth of May our ship was ready to sail,
and the next day we were out in the open sea, on our way to Ochotsh. The
weather was very clear and fine, but so intolerably cold that we were
obliged to keep on our fur clothing. For some days we had very little
wind; it was not till the nineteenth that a brisk gale from the
northwest sprang up. An uncommonly large whale, the body of which was
larger than the ship itself, lay almost at the surface of the water, but
was not perceived by any one on board till the moment when the ship,
which was in full sail, was almost upon him, so that it was impossible
to prevent its striking against him. We were thus placed in the most
imminent danger, as this gigantic creature, setting up its back, raised
the ship three feet at least out of the water. The masts reeled, and the
sails fell altogether, while we who were below all sprang instantly upon
the deck, concluding that we had struck upon some rock; instead of this
we saw the monster sailing off with the utmost gravity and solemnity.
Captain D'Wolf applied immediately to the pumps to examine whether or
not the vessel had received any damage from the shock, but we found that
very happily it had escaped entirely uninjured."
Now, the Captain D'Wolf here alluded to as commanding
the ship in question, is a New Englander, who, after a long life of
unusual adventures as a sea-captain, this day resides in the village of
Dorchester near Boston. I have the honor of being a nephew of his. I
have particularly questioned him concerning this passage in Langsdorff.
He substantiates every word. The ship, however, was by no means a large
one: a Russian craft built on the Siberian coast, and purchased by my
uncle after bartering away the vessel in which he sailed from home.
In that up and down manly book of old-fashioned
adventure, so full, too, of honest wonders—the voyage of Lionel Wafer,
one of ancient Dampier's old chums—I found a little matter set down so
like that just quoted from Langsdorff, that I cannot forbear inserting
it here for a corroborative example, if such be needed.
Lionel, it seems, was on his way to "John Ferdinando,"
as he calls the modern Juan Fernandes. "In our way thither," he says,
"about four o'clock in the morning, when we were about one hundred and
fifty leagues from the Main of America, our ship felt a terrible shock,
which put our men in such consternation that they could hardly tell
where they were or what to think; but every one began to prepare for
death. And, indeed, the shock was so sudden and violent, that we took it
for granted the ship had struck against a rock; but when the amazement
was a little over, we cast the lead, and sounded, but found no ground. …
The suddenness of the shock made the guns leap in their carriages, and
several of the men were shaken out of their hammocks. Captain Davis, who
lay with his head on a gun, was thrown out of his cabin!" Lionel then
goes on to impute the shock to an earthquake, and seems to substantiate
the imputation by stating that a great earthquake, somewhere about that
time, did actually do great mischief along the Spanish land. But I
should not much wonder if, in the darkness of that early hour of the
morning, the shock was after all caused by an unseen whale vertically
bumping the hull from beneath.
I might proceed with several more examples, one way or
another known to me, of the great power and malice at times of the sperm
whale. In more than one instance, he has been known, not only to chase
the assailing boats back to their ships, but to pursue the ship itself,
and long withstand all the lances hurled at him from its decks. The
English ship Pusie Hall can tell a story on that head; and, as for his
strength, let me say, that there have been examples where the lines
attached to a running sperm whale have, in a calm, been transferred to
the ship, and secured there! the whale towing her great hull through the
water, as a horse walks off with a cart. Again, it is very often
observed that, if the sperm whale, once struck, is allowed time to
rally, he then acts, not so often with blind rage, as with wilful,
deliberate designs of destruction to his pursuers; nor is it without
conveying some eloquent indication of his character, that upon being
attacked he will frequently open his mouth, and retain it in that dread
expansion for several consecutive minutes. But I must be content with
only one more and a concluding illustration; a remarkable and most
significant one, by which you will not fail to see, that not only is the
most marvellous event in this book corroborated by plain facts of the
present day, but that these marvels (like all marvels) are mere
repetitions of the ages; so that for the millionth time we say amen with
Solomon—Verily there is nothing new under the sun.
In the sixth Christian century lived Procopius, a
Christian magistrate of Constantinople, in the days when Justinian was
Emperor and Belisarius general. As many know, he wrote the history of
his own times, a work every way of uncommon value. By the best
authorities, he has always been considered a most trustworthy and
unexaggerating historian, except in some one or two particulars, not at
all affecting the matter presently to be mentioned.
Now, in this history of his, Procopius mentions that,
during the term of his prefecture at Constantinople, a great sea-monster
was captured in the neighboring Propontis, or Sea of Marmora, after
having destroyed vessels at intervals in those waters for a period of
more than fifty years. A fact thus set down in substantial history
cannot easily be gainsaid. Nor is there any reason it should be. Of what
precise species this sea-monster was, is not mentioned. But as he
destroyed ships, as well as for other reasons, he must have been a
whale; and I am strongly inclined to think a sperm whale. And I will
tell you why. For a long time I fancied that the sperm whale had been
always unknown in the Mediterranean and the deep waters connecting with
it. Even now I am certain that those seas are not, and perhaps never can
be, in the present constitution of things, a place for his habitual
gregarious resort. But further investigations have recently proved to
me, that in modern times there have been isolated instances of the
presence of the sperm whale in the Mediterranean. I am told, on good
authority, that on the Barbary coast, a Commodore Davis of the British
navy found the skeleton of a sperm whale. Now, as a vessel of war
readily passes through the Dardanelles, hence a sperm whale could, by
the same route, pass out of the Mediterranean into the Propontis.
In the Propontis, as far as I can learn, none of that
peculiar substance called brit is to be found, the aliment of the right
whale. But I have every reason to believe that the food of the sperm
whale— squid or cuttle-fish—lurks at the bottom of that sea, because
large creatures, but by no means the largest of that sort, have been
found at its surface. If, then, you properly put these statements
together, and reason upon them a bit, you will clearly perceive that,
according to all human reasoning, Procopius's sea-monster, that for half
a century stove the ships of a Roman Emperor, must in all probability
have been a sperm whale.
CHAPTER 46
Surmises
Though, consumed with the hot
fire of his purpose, Ahab in all his thoughts and actions ever had in
view the ultimate capture of Moby Dick; though he seemed ready to
sacrifice all mortal interests to that one passion; nevertheless it may
have been that he was by nature and long habituation far too wedded to a
fiery whaleman's ways, altogether to abandon the collateral prosecution
of the voyage. Or at least if this were otherwise, there were not
wanting other motives much more influential with him. It would be
refining too much, perhaps, even considering his monomania, to hint that
his vindictiveness towards the White Whale might have possibly extended
itself in some degree to all sperm whales, and that the more monsters he
slew by so much the more he multiplied the chances that each
subsequently encountered whale would prove to be the hated one he
hunted. But if such an hypothesis be indeed exceptionable, there were
still additional considerations which, though not so strictly according
with the wildness of his ruling passion, yet were by no means incapable
of swaying him.
To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all
tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of
order. He knew, for example, that however magnetic his ascendency in
some respects was over Starbuck, yet that ascendency did not cover the
complete spiritual man any more than mere corporeal superiority involves
intellectual mastership; for to the purely spiritual, the intellectual
but stand in a sort of corporeal relation. Starbuck's body and
Starbuck's coerced will were Ahab's, so long as Ahab kept his magnet at
Starbuck's brain; still he knew that for all this the chief mate, in his
soul, abhorred his captain's quest, and could he, would joyfully
disintegrate himself from it, or even frustrate it. It might be that a
long interval would elapse ere the White Whale was seen. During that
long interval Starbuck would ever be apt to fall into open relapses of
rebellion against his captain's leadership, unless some ordinary,
prudential, circumstantial influences were brought to bear upon him. Not
only that, but the subtle insanity of Ahab respecting Moby Dick was
noways more significantly manifested than in his superlative sense and
shrewdness in foreseeing that, for the present, the hunt should in some
way be stripped of that strange imaginative impiousness which naturally
invested it; that the full terror of the voyage must be kept withdrawn
into the obscure background (for few men's courage is proof against
protracted meditation unrelieved by action); that when they stood their
long night watches, his officers and men must have some nearer things to
think of than Moby Dick. For however eagerly and impetuously the savage
crew had hailed the announcement of his quest; yet all sailors of all
sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable— they live in the
varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness— and when retained
for any object remote and blank in the pursuit, however promissory of
life and passion in the end, it is above all things requisite that
temporary interests and employments should intervene and hold them
healthily suspended for the final dash.
Nor was Ahab unmindful of another thing. In times of
strong emotion mankind disdain all base considerations; but such times
are evanescent. The permanent constitutional condition of the
manufactured man, thought Ahab, is sordidness. Granting that the White
Whale fully incites the hearts of this my savage crew, and playing round
their savageness even breeds a certain generous knight-errantism in
them, still, while for the love of it they give chase to Moby Dick, they
must also have food for their more common, daily appetites. For even the
high lifted and chivalric Crusaders of old times were not content to
traverse two thousand miles of land to fight for their holy sepulchre,
without committing burglaries, picking pockets, and gaining other pious
perquisites by the way. Had they been strictly held to their one final
and romantic object— that final and romantic object, too many would have
turned from in disgust. I will not strip these men, thought Ahab, of all
hopes of cash—aye, cash. They may scorn cash now; but let some months go
by, and no perspective promise of it to them, and then this same
quiescent cash all at once mutinying in them, this same cash would soon
cashier Ahab.
Nor was there wanting still another precautionary motive
more related to Ahab personally. Having impulsively, it is probable, and
perhaps somewhat prematurely revealed the prime but private purpose of
the Pequod's voyage, Ahab was now entirely conscious that, in so doing,
he had indirectly laid himself open to the unanswerable charge of
usurpation; and with perfect impunity, both moral and legal, his crew if
so disposed, and to that end competent, could refuse all further
obedience to him, and even violently wrest from him the command. From
even the barely hinted imputation of usurpation, and the possible
consequences of such a suppressed impression gaining ground, Ahab must
of course have been most anxious to protect himself. That protection
could only consist in his own predominating brain and heart and hand,
backed by a heedful, closely calculating attention to every minute
atmospheric influence which it was possible for his crew to be subjected
to.
For all these reasons then, and others perhaps too
analytic to be verbally developed here, Ahab plainly saw that he must
still in a good degree continue true to the natural, nominal purpose of
the Pequod's voyage; observe all customary usages; and not only that,
but force himself to evince all his well known passionate interest in
the general pursuit of his profession.
Be all this as it may, his voice was now often heard
hailing the three mastheads and admonishing them to keep a bright
look-out, and not omit reporting even a porpoise. This vigilance was not
long without reward.
CHAPTER 47
The Mat-Maker
It was a cloudy, sultry
afternoon; the seamen were lazily lounging about the decks, or vacantly
gazing over into the lead-colored waters. Queequeg and I were mildly
employed weaving what is called a sword-mat, for an additional lashing
to our boat. So still and subdued and yet somehow preluding was all the
scene, and such an incantation of revelry lurked in the air, that each
silent sailor seemed resolved into his own invisible self.
I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at
the mat. As I kept passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline
between the long yarns of the warp, using my own hand for the shuttle,
and as Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid his heavy oaken
sword between the threads, and idly looking off upon the water,
carelessly and unthinkingly drove home every yarn; I say so strange a
dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea,
only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed
as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle
mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed
threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning,
unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the
crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed
necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle
and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads. Meantime,
Queequeg's impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof
slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be;
and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding
contrast in the final aspect of the completed fabric; this savage's
sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and
woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chance— aye, chance, free
will, and necessity—no wise incompatible— all interweavingly working
together. The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its
ultimate course— its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending
to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads;
and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of
necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though
thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the
last featuring blow at events.
Thus we were weaving and weaving
away when I started at a sound so strange, long drawn, and musically
wild and unearthly, that the ball of free will dropped from my hand, and
I stood gazing up at the clouds whence that voice dropped like a wing.
High aloft in the cross-trees was that mad Gay-Header, Tashtego. His
body was reaching eagerly forward, his hand stretched out like a wand,
and at brief sudden intervals he continued his cries. To be sure the
same sound was that very moment perhaps being heard all over the seas,
from hundreds of whalemen's look-outs perched as high in the air; but
from few of those lungs could that accustomed old cry have derived such
a marvellous cadence as from Tashtego the Indian's.
As he stood hovering over you half suspended in air, so
wildly and eagerly peering towards the horizon, you would have thought
him some prophet or seer beholding the shadows of Fate, and by those
wild cries announcing their coming.
"There she blows! there! there! there! she blows! she
blows!"
"Where-away?"
"On the lee-beam, about two miles off! a school of
them!"
Instantly all was commotion.
The Sperm Whale blows as a clock ticks, with the same
undeviating and reliable uniformity. And thereby whalemen distinguish
this fish from other tribes of his genus.
"There go flukes!" was now the cry from Tashtego; and
the whales disappeared.
"Quick, steward!" cried Ahab. "Time! time!"
Dough-Boy hurried below, glanced at the watch, and
reported the exact minute to Ahab.
The ship was now kept away from the wind, and she went
gently rolling before it. Tashtego reporting that the whales had gone
down heading to leeward, we confidently looked to see them again
directly in advance of our bows. For that singular craft at times
evinced by the Sperm Whale when, sounding with his head in one
direction, he nevertheless, while concealed beneath the surface, mills
around, and swiftly swims off in the opposite quarter—this deceitfulness
of his could not now be in action; for there was no reason to suppose
that the fish seen by Tashtego had been in any way alarmed, or indeed
knew at all of our vicinity. One of the men selected for
shipkeepers—that is, those not appointed to the boats, by this time
relieved the Indian at the main-mast head. The sailors at the fore and
mizzen had come down; the line tubs were fixed in their places; the
cranes were thrust out; the mainyard was backed, and the three boats
swung over the sea like three samphire baskets over high cliffs. Outside
of the bulwarks their eager crews with one hand clung to the rail, while
one foot was expectantly poised on the gunwale. So look the long line of
man-of-war's men about to throw themselves on board an enemy's ship.
But at this critical instant a sudden exclamation was
heard that took every eye from the whale. With a start all glared at
dark Ahab, who was surrounded by five dusky phantoms that seemed fresh
formed out of air.
CHAPTER 48
The First Lowering
The phantoms, for so they then
seemed, were flitting on the other side of the deck, and, with a
noiseless celerity, were casting loose the tackles and bands of the boat
which swung there. This boat had always been deemed one of the spare
boats, though technically called the captain's, on account of its
hanging from the starboard quarter. The figure that now stood by its
bows was tall and swart, with one white tooth evilly protruding from its
steel-like lips. A rumpled Chinese jacket of black cotton funereally
invested him, with wide black trowsers of the same dark stuff. But
strangely crowning this ebonness was a glistening white plaited turban,
the living hair braided and coiled round and round upon his head. Less
swart in aspect, the companions of this figure were of that vivid,
tiger-yellow complexion peculiar to some of the aboriginal natives of
the Manillas;—a race notorious for a certain diabolism of subtilty, and
by some honest white mariners supposed to be the paid spies and secret
confidential agents on the water of the devil, their lord, whose
counting-room they suppose to be elsewhere.
While yet the wondering ship's company were gazing upon
these strangers,
Ahab cried out to the white-turbaned old man at their head,
"All ready there, Fedallah?"
"Ready," was the half-hissed reply.
"Lower away then; d'ye hear?" shouting across the deck.
"Lower away there, I say."
Such was the thunder of his voice, that spite of their
amazement the men sprang over the rail; the sheaves whirled round in the
blocks; with a wallow, the three boats dropped into the sea; while, with
a dexterous, off-handed daring, unknown in any other vocation, the
sailors, goat-like, leaped down the rolling ship's side into the tossed
boats below.
Hardly had they pulled out from under the ship's lee,
when a fourth keel, coming from the windward side, pulled round under
the stern, and showed the five strangers rowing Ahab, who, standing
erect in the stern, loudly hailed Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, to spread
themselves widely, so as to cover a large expanse of water. But with all
their eyes again riveted upon the swart Fedallah and his crew, the
inmates of the other boats obeyed not the command.
"Captain Ahab?-" said Starbuck.
"Spread yourselves," cried Ahab; "give way, all four
boats.
Thou, Flask, pull out more to leeward!"
"Aye, aye, sir," cheerily cried little King-Post,
sweeping round his great steering oar. "Lay back!" addressing his crew.
"There!—there!— there again! There she blows right ahead, boys!—lay
back!
"Never heed yonder yellow boys, Archy."
"Oh, I don't mind'em, sir," said Archy; "I knew it all
before now.
Didn't I hear 'em in the hold? And didn't I tell Cabaco here of it?
What say ye, Cabaco? They are stowaways, Mr. Flask."
"Pull, pull, my fine hearts-alive; pull, my children;
pull, my little ones," drawlingly and soothingly sighed Stubb to his
crew, some of whom still showed signs of uneasiness. "Why don't you
break your backbones, my boys? What is it you stare at? Those chaps in
yonder boat? Tut! They are only five more hands come to help us never
mind from where the more the merrier. Pull, then, do pull; never mind
the brimstone devils are good fellows enough. So, so; there you are now;
that's the stroke for a thousand pounds; that's the stroke to sweep the
stakes! Hurrah for the gold cup of sperm oil, my heroes! Three cheers,
men—all hearts alive! Easy, easy; don't be in a hurry— don't be in a
hurry. Why don't you snap your oars, you rascals? Bite something, you
dogs! So, so, so, then:—softly, softly! That's it—that's it! long and
strong. Give way there, give way! The devil fetch ye, ye ragamuffin
rapscallions; ye are all asleep. Stop snoring, ye sleepers, and pull.
Pull, will ye? pull, can't ye? pull, won't ye? Why in the name of
gudgeons and ginger-cakes don't ye pull?—pull and break something! pull,
and start your eyes out! Here," whipping out the sharp knife from his
girdle; "every mother's son of ye draw his knife, and pull with the
blade between his teeth. That's it—that's it. Now ye do something; that
looks like it, my steel-bits. Start her— start her, my silverspoons!
Start her, marling-spikes!"
Stubb's exordium to his crew is given here at large,
because he had rather a peculiar way of talking to them in general, and
especially in inculcating the religion of rowing. But you must not
suppose from this specimen of his sermonizings that he ever flew into
downright passions with his congregation. Not at all; and therein
consisted his chief peculiarity. He would say the most terrific things
to his crew, in a tone so strangely compounded of fun and fury, and the
fury seemed so calculated merely as a spice to the fun, that no oarsman
could hear such queer invocations without pulling for dear life, and yet
pulling for the mere joke of the thing. Besides he all the time looked
so easy and indolent himself, so loungingly managed his steering-oar,
and so broadly gaped— open-mouthed at times—that the mere sight of such
a yawning commander, by sheer force of contrast, acted like a charm upon
the crew. Then again, Stubb was one of those odd sort of humorists,
whose jollity is sometimes so curiously ambiguous, as to put all
inferiors on their guard in the matter of obeying them.
In obedience to a sign from Ahab, Starbuck was now
pulling obliquely across Stubb's bow; and when for a minute or so the
two boats were pretty near to each other, Stubb hailed the mate.
"Mr. Starbuck! larboard boat there, ahoy! a word with
ye, sir, if ye please!"
"Halloa!" returned Starbuck, turning round not a single
inch as he spoke; still earnestly but whisperingly urging his crew; his
face set like a flint from Stubb's.
"What think ye of those yellow boys, sir!
"Smuggled on board, somehow, before the ship sailed.
(Strong, strong, boys!)" in a whisper to his crew, then speaking out
loud again: "A sad business, Mr. Stubb! (seethe her, seethe her, my
lads!) but never mind, Mr. Stubb, all for the best. Let all your crew
pull strong, come what will. (Spring, my men, spring!) There's hogsheads
of sperm ahead, Mr. Stubb, and that's what ye came for. (Pull, my boys!)
Sperm, sperm's the play! This at least is duty; duty and profit hand in
hand."
"Aye, aye, I thought as much," soliloquized Stubb, when
the boats diverged, "as soon as I clapt eye on 'em, I thought so. Aye,
and that's what he went into the after hold for, so often, as Dough-Boy
long suspected. They were hidden down there. The White Whale's at the
bottom of it. Well, well, so be it! Can't be helped! All right! Give way
men! It ain't the White Whale to-day! Give way!"
Now the advent of these outlandish strangers at such a
critical instant as the lowering of the boats from the deck, this had
not unreasonably awakened a sort of superstitious amazement in some of
the ship's company; but Archy's fancied discovery having some time
previous got abroad among them, though indeed not credited then, this
had in some small measure prepared them for the event. It took off the
extreme edge of their wonder; and so what with all this and Stubb's
confident way of accounting for their appearance, they were for the time
freed from superstitious surmisings; though the affair still left
abundant room for all manner of wild conjectures as to dark Ahab's
precise agency in the matter from the beginning. For me, I silently
recalled the mysterious shadows I had seen creeping on board the Pequod
during the dim Nantucket dawn, as well as the enigmatical hintings of
the unaccountable Elijah.
Meantime, Ahab, out of hearing of his officers, having
sided the furthest to windward, was still ranging ahead of the other
boats; a circumstance bespeaking how potent a crew was pulling him.
Those tiger yellow creatures of his seemed all steel and whalebone; like
five trip-hammers they rose and fell with regular strokes of strength,
which periodically started the boat along the water like a horizontal
burst boiler out of a Mississippi steamer. As for Fedallah, who was seen
pulling the harpooneer oar, he had thrown aside his black jacket, and
displayed his naked chest with the whole part of his body above the
gunwale, clearly cut against the alternating depressions of the watery
horizon; while at the other end of the boat Ahab, with one arm, like a
fencer's, thrown half backward into the air, as if to counterbalance any
tendency to trip; Ahab was seen steadily managing his steering oar as in
a thousand boat lowerings ere the White Whale had torn him. All at once
the outstretched arm gave a peculiar motion and then remained fixed,
while the boat's five oars were seen simultaneously peaked. Boat and
crew sat motionless on the sea. Instantly the three spread boats in the
rear paused on their way. The whales had irregularly settled bodily down
into the blue, thus giving no distantly discernible token of the
movement, though from his closer vicinity Ahab had observed it.
"Every man look out along his oars!" cried Starbuck.
"Thou, Queequeg, stand up!"
Nimbly springing up on the triangular raised box in the
bow, the savage stood erect there, and with intensely eager eyes gazed
off towards the spot where the chase had last been descried. Likewise
upon the extreme stern of the boat where it was also triangularly
platformed level with the gunwale, Starbuck himself was seen coolly and
adroitly balancing himself to the jerking tossings of his chip of a
craft, and silently eyeing the vast blue eye of the sea.
Not very far distant Flask's boat was also lying
breathlessly still; its commander recklessly standing upon the top of
the loggerhead, a stout sort of post rooted in the keel, and rising some
two feet above the level of the stern platform. It is used for catching
turns with the whale line. Its top is not more spacious than the palm of
a man's hand, and standing upon such a base as that, Flask seemed
perched at the mast-head of some ship which had sunk to all but her
trucks. But little King-Post was small and short, and at the same time
little King-Post was full of a large and tall ambition, so that this
logger head stand-point of his did by no means satisfy King-Post.
"I can't see three seas off; tip us up an oar there, and
let me onto that."
Upon this, Daggoo, with either hand upon the gunwale to
steady his way, swiftly slid aft, and then erecting himself volunteered
his lofty shoulders for a pedestal.
"Good a mast-head as any, sir. Will you mount?"
"That I will, and thank ye very much, my fine fellow;
only I wish you fifty feet taller."
Whereupon planting his feet firmly against two opposite
planks of the boat, the gigantic negro, stooping a little, presented his
flat palm to Flask's foot, and then putting Flask's hand on his
hearse-plumed head and bidding him spring as he himself should toss,
with one dexterous fling landed the little man high and dry on his
shoulders. And here was Flask now standing, Daggoo with one lifted arm
furnishing him with a breastband to lean against and steady himself by.
At any time it is a strange sight to the tyro to see
with what wondrous habitude of unconscious skill the whaleman will
maintain an erect posture in his boat, even when pitched about by the
most riotously perverse and cross-running seas. Still more strange to
see him giddily perched upon the logger head itself, under such
circumstances. But the sight of little Flask mounted upon gigantic
Daggoo was yet more curious; for sustaining himself with a cool,
indifferent, easy, unthought of, barbaric majesty, the noble negro to
every roll of the sea harmoniously rolled his fine form. On his broad
back, flaxen-haired Flask seemed a snow-flake. The bearer looked nobler
than the rider. Though truly vivacious, tumultuous, ostentatious little
Flask would now and then stamp with impatience; but not one added heave
did he thereby give to the negro's lordly chest. So have I seen Passion
and Vanity stamping the living magnanimous earth, but the earth did not
alter her tides and her seasons for that.
Meanwhile Stubb, the third mate, betrayed no such
far-gazing solicitudes. The whales might have made one of their regular
soundings, not a temporary dive from mere fright; and if that were the
case, Stubb, as his wont in such cases, it seems, was resolved to solace
the languishing interval with his pipe. He withdrew it from his hatband,
where he always wore it aslant like a feather. He loaded it, and rammed
home the loading with his thumb-end; but hardly had he ignited his match
across the rough sandpaper of his hand, when Tashtego, his harpooneer,
whose eyes had been setting to windward like two fixed stars, suddenly
dropped like light from his erect attitude to his seat, crying out in a
quick phrensy of hurry, "Down, down all, and give way!—there they are!"
To a landsman, no whale, nor any sign of a herring,
would have been visible at that moment; nothing but a troubled bit of
greenish white water, and thin scattered puffs of vapor hovering over
it, and suffusingly blowing off to leeward, like the confused scud from
white rolling billows. The air around suddenly vibrated and tingled, as
it were, like the air over intensely heated plates of iron. Beneath this
atmospheric waving and curling, and partially beneath a thin layer of
water, also, the whales were swimming. Seen in advance of all the other
indications, the puffs of vapor they spouted, seemed their forerunning
couriers and detached flying outriders.
All four boats were now in keen pursuit of that one spot
of troubled water and air. But it bade far to outstrip them; it flew on
and on, as a mass of interblending bubbles borne down a rapid stream
from the hills.
"Pull, pull, my good boys," said Starbuck, in the lowest
possible but intensest concentrated whisper to his men; while the sharp
fixed glance from his eyes darted straight ahead of the bow, almost
seemed as two visible needles in two unerring binnacle compasses. He did
not say much to his crew, though, nor did his crew say anything to him.
Only the silence of the boat was at intervals startlingly pierced by one
of his peculiar whispers, now harsh with command, now soft with
entreaty.
How different the loud little King-Post. "Sing out and
say something, my hearties. Roar and pull, my thunderbolts! Beach me,
beach me on their black backs, boys; only do that for me, and I'll sign
over to you my Martha's Vineyard plantation, boys; including wife and
children, boys. Lay me on—lay me on! O Lord, Lord! but I shall go stark,
staring mad! See! see that white water!" And so shouting, he pulled his
hat from his head, and stamped up and down on it; then picking it up,
flirted it far off upon the sea; and finally fell to rearing and
plunging in the boat's stern like a crazed colt from the prairie.
"Look at that chap now," philosophically drawled Stubb,
who, with his unlighted short pipe, mechanically retained between his
teeth, at a short distance, followed after—"He's got fits, that Flask
has. Fits? yes, give him fits—that's the very word—pitch fits into 'em.
Merrily, merrily, hearts-alive. Pudding for supper, you know;— merry's
the word. Pull, babes—pull, sucklings—pull, all. But what the devil are
you hurrying about? Softly, softly, and steadily, my men. Only pull, and
keep pulling; nothing more. Crack all your backbones, and bite your
knives in two—that's all. Take it easy—why don't ye take it easy, I say,
and burst all your livers and lungs!"
But what it was that inscrutable Ahab said to that
tiger-yellow crew of his—these were words best omitted here; for you
live under the blessed light of the evangelical land. Only the infidel
sharks in the audacious seas may give ear to such words, when, with
tornado brow, and eyes of red murder, and foam-glued lips, Ahab leaped
after his prey.
Meanwhile, all the boats tore on. The repeated specific
allusions of Flask to "that whale," as he called the fictitious monster
which he declared to be incessantly tantalizing his boat's bow with its
tail—these allusions of his were at times so vivid and life-like, that
they would cause some one or two of his men to snatch a fearful look
over his shoulder. But this was against all rule; for the oarsmen must
put out their eyes, and ram a skewer through their necks; usages
announcing that they must have no organs but ears; and no limbs but
arms, in these critical moments.
It was a sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast
swells of the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as
they rolled along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless
bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip
for an instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost
seemed threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the
watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the
top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other
side;—all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooneers, and the
shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory
Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a wild
hen after her screaming brood;—all this was thrilling. Not the raw
recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever heat of his
first battle; not the dead man's ghost encountering the first unknown
phantom in the other world;— neither of these can feel stranger and
stronger emotions than that man does, who for the first time finds
himself pulling into the charmed, churned circle of the hunted sperm
whale.
The dancing white water made by the chase was now
becoming more and more visible, owing to the increasing darkness of the
dun cloud-shadows flung upon the sea. The jets of vapor no longer
blended, but tilted everywhere to right and left; the whales seemed
separating their wakes. The boats were pulled more apart; Starbuck
giving chase to three whales running dead to leeward. Our sail was now
set, and, with the still rising wind, we rushed along; the boat going
with such madness through the water, that the lee oars could scarcely be
worked rapidly enough to escape being torn from the row-locks.
Soon we were running through a suffusing wide veil of
mist; neither ship nor boat to be seen.
"Give way, men," whispered Starbuck, drawing still
further aft the sheet of his sail; "there is time to kill a fish yet
before the squall comes. There's white water again!—close to! Spring!"
Soon after, two cries in quick succession on each side
of us denoted that the other boats had got fast; but hardly were they
overheard, when with a lightning-like hurtling whisper Starbuck said:
"Stand up!" and Queequeg, harpoon in hand, sprang to his feet.
Though not one of the oarsmen was then facing the life
and death peril so close to them ahead, yet with their eyes on the
intense countenance of the mate in the stern of the boat, they knew that
the imminent instant had come; they heard, too, an enormous wallowing
sound as of fifty elephants stirring in their litter. Meanwhile the boat
was still booming through the mist, the waves curling and hissing around
us like the erected crests of enraged serpents.
"That's his hump. There, there, give it to him!"
whispered Starbuck.
A short rushing sound leaped out of the boat; it was the
darted iron of Queequeg. Then all in one welded commotion came an
invisible push from astern, while forward the boat seemed striking on a
ledge; the sail collapsed and exploded; a gush of scalding vapor shot up
near by; something rolled and tumbled like an earthquake beneath us. The
whole crew were half suffocated as they were tossed helter-skelter into
the white curdling cream of the squall. Squall, whale, and harpoon had
all blended together; and the whale, merely grazed by the iron, escaped.
Though completely swamped, the boat was nearly unharmed.
Swimming round it we picked up the floating oars, and lashing them
across the gunwale, tumbled back to our places. There we sat up to our
knees in the sea, the water covering every rib and plank, so that to our
downward gazing eyes the suspended craft seemed a coral boat grown up to
us from the bottom of the ocean.
The wind increased to a howl; the waves dashed their
bucklers together; the whole squall roared, forked, and crackled around
us like a white fire upon the prairie, in which unconsumed, we were
burning; immortal in these jaws of death! In vain we hailed the other
boats; as well roar to the live coals down the chimney of a flaming
furnace as hail those boats in that storm. Meanwhile the driving scud,
rack, and mist, grew darker with the shadows of night; no sign of the
ship could be seen. The rising sea forbade all attempts to bale out the
boat. The oars were useless as propellers, performing now the office of
life-preservers. So, cutting the lashing of the waterproof match keg,
after many failures Starbuck contrived to ignite the lamp in the
lantern; then stretching it on a waif pole, handed it to Queequeg as the
standard-bearer of this forlorn hope. There, then, he sat, holding up
that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness. There,
then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly
holding up hope in the midst of despair.
Wet, drenched through, and shivering cold, despairing of
ship or boat, we lifted up our eyes as the dawn came on. The mist still
spread over the sea, the empty lantern lay crushed in the bottom of the
boat. Suddenly Queequeg started to his feet, hollowing his hand to his
ear. We all heard a faint creaking, as of ropes and yards hitherto
muffled by the storm. The sound came nearer and nearer; the thick mists
were dimly parted by a huge, vague form. Affrighted, we all sprang into
the sea as the ship at last loomed into view, bearing right down upon us
within a distance of not much more than its length.
Floating on the waves we saw the abandoned boat, as for
one instant it tossed and gaped beneath the ship's bows like a chip at
the base of a cataract; and then the vast hull rolled over it, and it
was seen no more till it came up weltering astern. Again we swam for it,
were dashed against it by the seas, and were at last taken up and safely
landed on board. Ere the squall came close to, the other boats had cut
loose from their fish and returned to the ship in good time. The ship
had given us up, but was still cruising, if haply it might light upon
some token of our perishing,— an oar or a lance pole.
CHAPTER 49
The Hyena
There are certain queer times
and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes
this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he
but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's
expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth
while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and
persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how
knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun
flints. And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden
disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to
him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed
by the unseen and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood
I am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme
tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what
just before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems
but a part of the general joke. There is nothing like the perils of
whaling to breed this free and easy sort of genial, desperado
philosophy; and with it I now regarded this whole voyage of the Pequod,
and the great White Whale its object.
"Queequeg," said I, when they had dragged me, the last
man, to the deck, and I was still shaking myself in my jacket to fling
off the water; "Queequeg, my fine friend, does this sort of thing often
happen?" Without much emotion, though soaked through just like me, he
gave me to understand that such things did often happen.
"Mr. Stubb," said I, turning to that worthy, who,
buttoned up in his oil-jacket, was now calmly smoking his pipe in the
rain; "Mr. Stubb, I think I have heard you say that of all whalemen you
ever met, our chief mate, Mr. Starbuck, is by far the most careful and
prudent. I suppose then, that going plump on a flying whale with your
sail set in a foggy squall is the height of a whaleman's discretion?"
"Certain. I've lowered for whales from a leaking ship in
a gale off Cape Horn."
"Mr. Flask," said I, turning to little King-Post, who
was standing close by; "you are experienced in these things, and I am
not. Will you tell me whether it is an unalterable law in this fishery,
Mr. Flask, for an oarsman to break his own back pulling himself
back-foremost into death's jaws?"
"Can't you twist that smaller?" said Flask. "Yes, that's
the law. I should like to see a boat's crew backing water up to a whale
face foremost. Ha, ha! the whale would give them squint for squint, mind
that!"
Here then, from three impartial witnesses, I had a
deliberate statement of the entire case. Considering, therefore, that
squalls and capsizings in the water and consequent bivouacks on the
deep, were matters of common occurrence in this kind of life;
considering that at the superlatively critical instant of going on to
the whale I must resign my life into the hands of him who steered the
boat— oftentimes a fellow who at that very moment is in his
impetuousness upon the point of scuttling the craft with his own frantic
stampings; considering that the particular disaster to our own
particular boat was chiefly to be imputed to Starbuck's driving on to
his whale almost in the teeth of a squall, and considering that
Starbuck, notwithstanding, was famous for his great heedfulness in the
fishery; considering that I belonged to this uncommonly prudent
Starbuck's boat; and finally considering in what a devil's chase I was
implicated, touching the White Whale: taking all things together, I say,
I thought I might as well go below and make a rough draft of my will.
"Queequeg," said I, "come along, you shall be my lawyer, executor, and
legatee."
It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be
tinkering at their last wills and testaments, but there are no people in
the world more fond of that diversion. This was the fourth time in my
nautical life that I had done the same thing. After the ceremony was
concluded upon the present occasion, I felt all the easier; a stone was
rolled away from my heart. Besides, all the days I should now live would
be as good as the days that Lazarus lived after his resurrection; a
supplementary clean gain of so many months or weeks as the case may be.
I survived myself; my death and burial were locked up in my chest. I
looked round me tranquilly and contentedly, like a quiet ghost with a
clean conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug family vault.
Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the
sleeves of my frock, here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and
destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost.
CHAPTER 50
Ahab's Boat and Crew. Fedallah
"Who would have thought it,
Flask!" cried Stubb; "if I had but one leg you would not catch me in a
boat, unless maybe to stop the plug-hole with my timber toe. Oh! he's a
wonderful old man!"
"I don't think it so strange, after all, on that
account," said Flask. "If his leg were off at the hip, now, it would be
a different thing. That would disable him; but he has one knee, and good
part of the other left, you know."
"I don't know that, my little man; I never yet saw him
kneel."
Among whale-wise people it has
often been argued whether, considering the paramount importance of his
life to the success of the voyage, it is right for a whaling captain to
jeopardize that life in the active perils of the chase. So Tamerlane's
soldiers often argued with tears in their eyes, whether that invaluable
life of his ought to be carried into the thickest of the fight.
But with Ahab the question assumed a modified aspect.
Considering that with two legs man is but a hobbling wight in all times
of danger; considering that the pursuit of whales is always under great
and extraordinary difficulties; that every individual moment, indeed,
then comprises a peril; under these circumstances is it wise for any
maimed man to enter a whale-boat in the hunt? As a general thing, the
joint-owners of the Pequod must have plainly thought not.
Ahab well knew that although his friends at home would
think little of his entering a boat in certain comparatively harmless
vicissitudes of the chase, for the sake of being near the scene of
action and giving his orders in person, yet for Captain Ahab to have a
boat actually apportioned to him as a regular headsman in the hunt—above
all for Captain Ahab to be supplied with five extra men, as that same
boat's crew, he well knew that such generous conceits never entered the
heads of the owners of the Pequod. Therefore he had not solicited a
boat's crew from them, nor had he in any way hinted his desires on that
head. Nevertheless he had taken private measures of his own touching all
that matter. Until Cabaco's published discovery, the sailors had little
foreseen it, though to be sure when, after being a little while out of
port, all hands had concluded the customary business of fitting the
whaleboats for service; when some time after this Ahab was now and then
found bestirring himself in the matter of making thole-pins with his own
hands for what was thought to be one of the spare boats, and even
solicitously cutting the small wooden skewers, which when the line is
running out are pinned over the groove in the bow: when all this was
observed in him, and particularly his solicitude in having an extra coat
of sheathing in the bottom of the boat, as if to make it better
withstand the pointed pressure of his ivory limb; and also the anxiety
he evinced in exactly shaping the thigh board, or clumsy cleat, as it is
sometimes called, the horizontal piece in the boat's bow for bracing the
knee against in darting or stabbing at the whale; when it was observed
how often he stood up in that boat with his solitary knee fixed in the
semi-circular depression in the cleat, and with the carpenter's chisel
gouged out a little here and straightened it a little there; all these
things, I say, had awakened much interest and curiosity at the time. But
almost everybody supposed that this particular preparative heedfulness
in Ahab must only be with a view to the ultimate chase of Moby Dick; for
he had already revealed his intention to hunt that mortal monster in
person. But such a supposition did by no means involve the remotest
suspicion as to any boat's crew being assigned to that boat.
Now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained
soon waned away; for in a whaler wonders soon wane. Besides, now and
then such unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations come up from
the unknown nooks and ash-holes of the earth to man these floating
outlaws of whalers; and the ships themselves often pick up such queer
castaway creatures found tossing about the open sea on planks, bits of
wreck, oars, whaleboats, canoes, blown-off Japanese junks, and what not;
that Beelzebub himself might climb up the side and step down into the
cabin to chat with the captain, and it would not create any unsubduable
excitement in the forecastle.
But be all this as it may, certain it is that while the
subordinate phantoms soon found their place among the crew, though still
as it were somehow distinct from them, yet that hair-turbaned Fedallah
remained a muffled mystery to the last. Whence he came in a mannerly
world like this, by what sort of unaccountable tie he soon evinced
himself to be linked with Ahab's peculiar fortunes; nay, so far as to
have some sort of a half-hinted influence; Heaven knows, but it might
have been even authority over him; all this none knew. But one cannot
sustain an indifferent air concerning Fedallah. He was such a creature
as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their
dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide
among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles
to the east of the continent— those insulated, immemorial, unalterable
countries, which even in these modern days still preserve much of the
ghostly aboriginalness of earth's primal generations, when the memory of
the first man was a distinct recollection, and all men his descendants,
unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as real phantoms, and asked of
the sun and the moon why they were created and to what end; when though,
according to Genesis, the angels indeed consorted with the daughters of
men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Robbins, indulged in mundane
amours.
