CHAPTER 51
The
Spirit-Spout
Days, weeks passed, and under
easy sail, the ivory Pequod had slowly swept across four
several cruising-grounds; that off the Azores; off the Cape
de Verdes; on the Plate (so called), being off the mouth of
the Rio de la Plata; and the Carrol Ground, an unstaked,
watery locality, southerly from St. Helena.
It was while
gliding through these latter waters that one serene and
moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls
of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made
what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude; on such a
silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the
white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked
celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising
from the sea. Fedallah first descried this jet. For of these
moonlight nights, it was his wont to mount to the main-mast
head, and stand a look-out there, with the same precision as
if it had been day. And yet, though herds of whales were
seen by night, not one whaleman in a hundred would venture a
lowering for them. You may think with what emotions, then,
the seamen beheld this old Oriental perched aloft at such
unusual hours; his turban and the moon, companions in one
sky. But when, after spending his uniform interval there for
several successive nights without uttering a single sound;
when, after all this silence, his unearthly voice was heard
announcing that silvery, moon-lit jet, every reclining
mariner started to his feet as if some winged spirit had
lighted in the rigging, and hailed the mortal crew. "There
she blows!" Had the trump of judgment blown, they could not
have quivered more; yet still they felt no terror; rather
pleasure. For though it was a most unwonted hour, yet so
impressive was the cry, and so deliriously exciting, that
almost every soul on board instinctively desired a lowering.
Walking the
deck with quick, side-lunging strides, Ahab commanded the
t'gallant sails and royals to be set, and every stunsail
spread. The best man in the ship must take the helm. Then,
with every mast-head manned, the piled-up craft rolled down
before the wind. The strange, upheaving, lifting tendency of
the taffrail breeze filling the hollows of so many sails,
made the buoyant, hovering deck to feel like air beneath the
feet; while still she rushed along, as if two antagonistic
influences were struggling in her—one to mount direct to
heaven, the other to drive yawingly to some horizontal goal.
And had you watched Ahab's face that night, you would have
thought that in him also two different things were warring.
While his one live leg made lively echoes along the deck,
every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. On
life and death this old man walked. But though the ship so
swiftly sped, and though from every eye, like arrows, the
eager glances shot, yet the silvery jet was no more seen
that night. Every sailor swore he saw it once, but not a
second time.
This
midnight-spout had almost grown a forgotten thing, when,
some days after, lo! at the same silent hour, it was again
announced: again it was descried by all; but upon making
sail to overtake it, once more it disappeared as if it had
never been. And so it served us night after night, till no
one heeded it but to wonder at it. Mysteriously jetted into
the clear moonlight, or starlight, as the case might be;
disappearing again for one whole day, or two days, or three;
and somehow seeming at every distinct repetition to be
advancing still further and further in our van, this
solitary jet seemed for ever alluring us on.
Nor with the
immemorial superstition of their race, and in accordance
with the preternaturalness, as it seemed, which in many
things invested the Pequod, were there wanting some of the
seamen who swore that whenever and wherever descried; at
however remote times, or in however far apart latitudes and
longitudes, that unnearable spout was cast by one selfsame
whale; and that whale, Moby Dick. For a time, there reigned,
too, a sense of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition,
as if it were treacherously beckoning us on and on, in order
that the monster might turn round upon us, and rend us at
last in the remotest and most savage seas.
These
temporary apprehensions, so vague but so awful, derived a
wondrous potency from the contrasting serenity of the
weather, in which, beneath all its blue blandness, some
thought there lurked a devilish charm, as for days and days
we voyaged along, through seas so wearily, lonesomely mild,
that all space, in repugnance to our vengeful errand, seemed
vacating itself of life before our urn-like prow.
But, at last,
when turning to the eastward, the Cape winds began howling
around us, and we rose and fell upon the long, troubled seas
that are there; when the ivory-tusked Pequod sharply bowed
to the blast, and gored the dark waves in her madness, till,
like showers of silver chips, the foamflakes flew over her
bulwarks; then all this desolate vacuity of life went away,
but gave place to sights more dismal than before.
Close to our
bows, strange forms in the water darted hither and thither
before us; while thick in our rear flew the inscrutable
sea-ravens. And every morning, perched on our stays, rows of
these birds were seen; and spite of our hootings, for a long
time obstinately clung to the hemp, as though they deemed
our ship some drifting, uninhabited craft; a thing appointed
to desolation, and therefore fit roosting-place for their
homeless selves. And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly
heaved the black sea, as if its vast tides were a
conscience; and the great mundane soul were in anguish and
remorse for the long sin and suffering it had bred.
Cape of Good
Hope, do they call ye? Rather Cape Tormentoto, as called of
yore; for long allured by the perfidious silences that
before had attended us, we found ourselves launched into
this tormented sea, where guilty beings transformed into
those fowls and these fish, seemed condemned to swim on
everlastingly without any haven in store, or beat that black
air without any horizon. But calm, snow-white, and
unvarying; still directing its fountain of feathers to the
sky; still beckoning us on from before, the solitary jet
would at times be descried.
During all
this blackness of the elements, Ahab, though assuming for
the time the almost continual command of the drenched and
dangerous deck, manifested the gloomiest reserve; and more
seldom than ever addressed his mates. In tempestuous times
like these, after everything above and aloft has been
secured, nothing more can be done but passively to await the
issue of the gale. Then Captain and crew become practical
fatalists. So, with his ivory leg inserted into its
accustomed hole, and with one hand firmly grasping a shroud,
Ahab for hours and hours would stand gazing dead to
windward, while an occasional squall of sleet or snow would
all but congeal his very eyelashes together. Meantime, the
crew driven from the forward part of the ship by the
perilous seas that burstingly broke over its bows, stood in
a line along the bulwarks in the waist; and the better to
guard against the leaping waves, each man had slipped
himself into a sort of bowline secured to the rail, in which
he swung as in a loosened belt. Few or no words were spoken;
and the silent ship, as if manned by painted sailors in wax,
day after day tore on through all the swift madness and
gladness of the demoniac waves. By night the same muteness
of humanity before the shrieks of the ocean prevailed; still
in silence the men swung in the bowlines; still wordless
Ahab stood up to the blast. Even when wearied nature seemed
demanding repose he would not seek that repose in his
hammock. Never could Starbuck forget the old man's aspect,
when one night going down into the cabin to mark how the
barometer stood, he saw him with closed eyes sitting
straight in his floor-screwed chair; the rain and
half-melted sleet of the storm from which he had some time
before emerged, still slowly dripping from the unremoved hat
and coat. On the table beside him lay unrolled one of those
charts of tides and currents which have previously been
spoken of. His lantern swung from his tightly clenched hand.
Though the body was erect, the head was thrown back so that
the closed eyes were pointed towards the needle of the
tell-tale that swung from a beam in the ceiling.*
*The cabin-compass is called
the tell-tale, because without going to the compass at the
helm, the Captain, while below, can inform himself of the
course of the ship.
Terrible old man! thought
Starbuck with a shudder, sleeping in this gale, still thou
steadfastly eyest thy purpose.
CHAPTER 52
The Albatross
South-eastward from the Cape,
off the distant Crozetts, a good cruising ground for Right
Whalemen, a sail loomed ahead, the Goney (Albatross) by
name. As she slowly drew nigh, from my lofty perch at the
fore-mast-head, I had a good view of that sight so
remarkable to a tyro in the far ocean fisheries— a whaler at
sea, and long absent from home.
As if the
waves had been fullers, this craft was bleached like the
skeleton of a stranded walrus. All down her sides, this
spectral appearance was traced with long channels of
reddened rust, while all her spars and her rigging were like
the thick branches of trees furred over with hoar-frost.
Only her lower sails were set. A wild sight it was to see
her long-bearded look-outs at those three mast-heads. They
seemed clad in the skins of beasts, so torn and bepatched
the raiment that had survived nearly four years of cruising.
Standing in iron hoops nailed to the mast, they swayed and
swung over a fathomless sea; and though, when the ship
slowly glided close under our stern, we six men in the air
came so nigh to each other that we might almost have leaped
from the mast-heads of one ship to those of the other; yet,
those forlorn-looking fishermen, mildly eyeing us as they
passed, said not one word to our own look-outs, while the
quarter-deck hail was being heard from below.
"Ship ahoy!
Have ye seen the White Whale?"
But as the
strange captain, leaning over the pallid bulwarks, was in
the act of putting his trumpet to his mouth, it somehow fell
from his hand into the sea; and the wind now rising amain,
he in vain strove to make himself heard without it. Meantime
his ship was still increasing the distance between us. While
in various silent ways the seamen of the Pequod were
evincing their observance of this ominous incident at the
first mere mention of the White Whale's name to another
ship, Ahab for a moment paused; it almost seemed as though
he would have lowered a boat to board the stranger, had not
the threatening wind forbade. But taking advantage of his
windward position, he again seized his trumpet, and knowing
by her aspect that the stranger vessel was a Nantucketer and
shortly bound home, he loudly hailed—"Ahoy there! This is
the Pequod, bound round the world! Tell them to address all
future letters to the Pacific ocean! and this time three
years, if I am not at home, tell them to address them to-"
At that moment
the two wakes were fairly crossed, and instantly, then, in
accordance with their singular ways, shoals of small
harmless fish, that for some days before had been placidly
swimming by our side, darted away with what seemed
shuddering fins, and ranged themselves fore and aft with the
stranger's flanks. Though in the course of his continual
voyagings Ahab must often before have noticed a similar
sight, yet, to any monomaniac man, the veriest trifles
capriciously carry meanings.
"Swim away
from me, do ye?" murmured Ahab, gazing over into the water.
There seemed but little in the words, but the tone conveyed
more of deep helpless sadness than the insane old man had
ever before evinced. But turning to the steersman, who thus
far had been holding the ship in the wind to diminish her
headway, he cried out in his old lion voice,—"Up helm! Keep
her off round the world!"
Round the
world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud
feelings; but whereto does all that circumnavigation
conduct? Only through numberless perils to the very point
whence we started, where those that we left behind secure,
were all the time before us.
Were this
world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for
ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and
strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then
there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those
far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that
demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all
human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they
either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us
whelmed.
CHAPTER 53
The Gam
The ostensible reason why Ahab
did not go on board of the whaler we had spoken was this:
the wind and sea betokened storms. But even had this not
been the case, he would not after all, perhaps, have boarded
her—judging by his subsequent conduct on similar
occasions—if so it had been that, by the process of hailing,
he had obtained a negative answer to the question he put.
For, as it eventually turned out, he cared not to consort,
even for five minutes, with any stranger captain, except he
could contribute some of that information he so absorbingly
sought. But all this might remain inadequately estimated,
were not something said here of the peculiar usages of
whaling-vessels when meeting each other in foreign seas, and
especially on a common cruising-ground.
If two
strangers crossing the Pine Barrens in New York State, or
the equally desolate Salisbury Plain in England; if casually
encountering each other in such inhospitable wilds, these
twain, for the life of them, cannot well avoid a mutual
salutation; and stopping for a moment to interchange the
news; and, perhaps, sitting down for a while and resting in
concert: then, how much more natural that upon the
illimitable Pine Barrens and Salisbury Plains of the sea,
two whaling vessels descrying each other at the ends of the
earth—off lone Fanning's Island, or the far away King's
Mills; how much more natural, I say, that under such
circumstances these ships should not only interchange hails,
but come into still closer, more friendly and sociable
contact. And especially would this seem to be a matter of
course, in the case of vessels owned in one seaport, and
whose captains, officers, and not a few of the men are
personally known to each other; and consequently, have all
sorts of dear domestic things to talk about.
For the long
absent ship, the outward-bounder, perhaps, has letters on
board; at any rate, she will be sure to let her have some
papers of a date a year or two later than the last one on
her blurred and thumb-worn files. And in return for that
courtesy, the outward-bound ship would receive the latest
whaling intelligence from the cruising-ground to which she
may be destined, a thing of the utmost importance to her.
And in degree, all this will hold true concerning whaling
vessels crossing each other's track on the cruising-ground
itself, even though they are equally long absent from home.
For one of them may have received a transfer of letters from
some third, and now far remote vessel; and some of those
letters may be for the people of the ship she now meets.
Besides, they would exchange the whaling news, and have an
agreeable chat. For not only would they meet with all the
sympathies of sailors, but likewise with all the peculiar
congenialities arising from a common pursuit and mutually
shared privations and perils.
Nor would
difference of country make any very essential difference;
that is, so long as both parties speak one language, as is
the case with Americans and English. Though, to be sure,
from the small number of English whalers, such meetings do
not very often occur, and when they do occur there. is too
apt to be a sort of shyness between them; for your
Englishman is rather reserved, and your Yankee, he does not
fancy that sort of thing in anybody but himself. Besides,
the English whalers sometimes affect a kind of metropolitan
superiority over the American whalers; regarding the long,
lean Nantucketer, with his nondescript provincialisms, as a
sort of sea-peasant. But where this superiority in the
English whaleman does really consist, it would be hard to
say, seeing that the Yankees in one day, collectively, kill
more whales than all the English, collectively, in ten
years. But this is a harmless little foible in the English
whale-hunters, which the Nantucketer does not take much to
heart; probably, because he knows that he has a few foibles
himself.
So, then, we
see that of all ships separately sailing the sea, the
whalers have most reason to be sociable—and they are so.
Whereas, some merchant ships crossing each other's wake in
the mid-Atlantic, will oftentimes pass on without so much as
a single word of recognition, mutually cutting each other on
the high seas, like a brace of dandies in Broadway; and all
the time indulging, perhaps, in finical criticism upon each
other's rig. As for Men-of-War, when they chance to meet at
sea, they first go through such a string of silly bowings
and scrapings, such a ducking of ensigns, that there does
not seem to be much right-down hearty good-will and
brotherly love about it at all. As touching Slave-ships
meeting, why, they are in such a prodigious hurry, they run
away from each other as soon as possible. And as for
Pirates, when they chance to cross each other's cross-bones,
the first hail is—"How many skulls?"— the same way that
whalers hail—"How many barrels?" And that question once
answered, pirates straightway steer apart, for they are
infernal villains on both sides, and don't like to see
overmuch of each other's villanous likenesses.
But look at
the godly, honest, unostentatious, hospitable, sociable,
free-and-easy whaler! What does the whaler do when she meets
another whaler in any sort of decent weather? She has a
"Gam," a thing so utterly unknown to all other ships that
they never heard of the name even; and if by chance they
should hear of it, they only grin at it, and repeat gamesome
stuff about "spouters" and "blubber-boilers," and such like
pretty exclamations. Why it is that all Merchant-seamen, and
also all Pirates and Man-of-War's men, and Slave-ship
sailors, cherish such a scornful feeling towards
Whale-ships; this is a question it would be hard to answer.
Because, in the case of pirates, say, I should like to know
whether that profession of theirs has any peculiar glory
about it. It sometimes ends in uncommon elevation, indeed;
but only at the gallows. And besides, when a man is elevated
in that odd fashion, he has no proper foundation for his
superior altitude. Hence, I conclude, that in boasting
himself to be high lifted above a whaleman, in that
assertion the pirate has no solid basis to stand on.
But what is a
Gam? You might wear out your index-finger running up and
down the columns of dictionaries, and never find the word,
Dr. Johnson never attained to that erudition; Noah Webster's
ark does not hold it. Nevertheless, this same expressive
word has now for many years been in constant use among some
fifteen thousand true born Yankees. Certainly, it needs a
definition, and should be incorporated into the Lexicon.
With that view, let me learnedly define it.
GAM. NOUN—A
social meeting of two (or more) Whaleships, generally on a
cruising-ground; when, after exchanging hails, they exchange
visits by boats' crews, the two captains remaining, for the
time, on board of one ship, and the two chief mates on the
other.
There is
another little item about Gamming which must not be
forgotten here. All professions have their own little
peculiarities of detail; so has the whale fishery. In a
pirate, man-of-war, or slave ship, when the captain is rowed
anywhere in his boat, he always sits in the stern sheets on
a comfortable, sometimes cushioned seat there, and often
steers himself with a pretty little milliner's tiller
decorated with gay cords and ribbons. But the whale-boat has
no seat astern, no sofa of that sort whatever, and no tiller
at all. High times indeed, if whaling captains were wheeled
about the water on castors like gouty old aldermen in patent
chairs. And as for a tiller, the whale-boat never admits of
any such effeminacy; and therefore as in gamming a complete
boat's crew must leave the ship, and hence as the boat
steerer or harpooneer is of the number, that subordinate is
the steersman upon the occasion, and the captain, having no
place to sit in, is pulled off to his visit all standing
like a pine tree. And often you will notice that being
conscious of the eyes of the whole visible world resting on
him from the sides of the two ships, this standing captain
is all alive to the importance of sustaining his dignity by
maintaining his legs. Nor is this any very easy matter; for
in his rear is the immense projecting steering oar hitting
him now and then in the small of his back, the after-oar
reciprocating by rapping his knees in front. He is thus
completely wedged before and behind, and can only expand
himself sideways by settling down on his stretched legs; but
a sudden, violent pitch of the boat will often go far to
topple him, because length of foundation is nothing without
corresponding breadth. Merely make a spread angle of two
poles, and you cannot stand them up. Then, again, it would
never do in plain sight of the world's riveted eyes, it
would never do, I say, for this straddling captain to be
seen steadying himself the slightest particle by catching
hold of anything with his hands; indeed, as token of his
entire, buoyant self-command, he generally carries his hands
in his trowsers' pockets; but perhaps being generally very
large, heavy hands, he carries them there for ballast.
Nevertheless there have occurred instances, well
authenticated ones too, where the captain has been known for
an uncommonly critical moment or two, in a sudden squall
say—to seize hold of the nearest oarsman's hair, and hold on
there like grim death.
CHAPTER 54
The Town-Ho's
Story
(As told at the Golden Inn)
The Cape of Good Hope, and all
the watery region round about there, is much like some noted
four corners of a great highway, where you meet more
travellers than in any other part.
It was not
very long after speaking the Goney that another
homeward-bound whaleman, the Town-Ho,* was encountered. She
was manned almost wholly by Polynesians. In the short gam
that ensued she gave us strong news of Moby Dick. To some
the general interest in the White Whale was now wildly
heightened by a circumstance of the Town-Ho's story, which
seemed obscurely to involve with the whale a certain
wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called
judgments of God which at times are said to overtake some
men. This latter circumstance, with its own particular
accompaniments, forming what may be called the secret part
of the tragedy about to be narrated, never reached the ears
of Captain Ahab or his mates. For that secret part of the
story was unknown to the captain of the Town-Ho himself. It
was the private property of three confederate white seamen
of that ship, one of whom, it seems, communicated it to
Tashtego with Romish injunctions of secrecy, but the
following night Tashtego rambled in his sleep, and revealed
so much of it in that way, that when he was wakened he could
not well withhold the rest. Nevertheless, so potent an
influence did this thing have on those seamen in the Pequod
who came to the full knowledge of it, and by such a strange
delicacy, to call it so, were they governed in this matter,
that they kept the secret among themselves so that it never
transpired abaft the Pequod's main-mast. Interweaving in its
proper place this darker thread with the story as publicly
narrated on the ship, the whole of this strange affair I now
proceed to put on lasting record.
*The ancient whale-cry upon
first sighting a whale from the mast-head, still used by
whalemen in hunting the famous Gallipagos terrapin.
For my humor's sake, I shall
preserve the style in which I once narrated it at Lima, to a
lounging circle of my Spanish friends, one saint's eve,
smoking upon the thick-gilt tiled piazza of the Golden Inn.
Of those fine cavaliers, the young Dons, Pedro and
Sebastian, were on the closer terms with me; and hence the
interluding questions they occasionally put, and which are
duly answered at the time.
"Some two
years prior to my first learning the events which I am about
rehearsing to you, gentlemen, the Town-Ho, Sperm Whaler of
Nantucket, was cruising in your Pacific here, not very many
days' sail eastward from the eaves of this good Golden Inn.
She was somewhere to the northward of the Line. One morning
upon handling the pumps according to daily usage, it was
observed that she made more water in her hold than common.
They supposed a sword-fish had stabbed her, gentlemen. But
the captain, having some unusual reason for believing that
rare good luck awaited him in those latitudes; and therefore
being very averse to quit them, and the leak not being then
considered at all dangerous, though, indeed, they could not
find it after searching the hold as low down as was possible
in rather heavy weather, the ship still continued her
cruisings, the mariners working at the pumps at wide and
easy intervals; but no good luck came; more days went by and
not only was the leak yet undiscovered, but it sensibly
increased. So much so, that now taking some alarm, the
captain, making all sail, stood away for the nearest harbor
among the islands, there to have his hull hove out and
repaired.
"Though no
small passage was before her, yet, if the commonest chance
favoured, he did not at all fear that his ship would founder
by the way, because his pumps were of the best, and being
periodically relieved at them, those six-and-thirty men of
his could easily keep the ship free; never mind if the leak
should double on her. In truth, well nigh the whole of this
passage being attended by very prosperous breezes, the
Town-Ho had all but certainly arrived in perfect safety at
her port without the occurrence of the least fatality, had
it not been for the brutal overbearing of Radney, the mate,
a Vineyarder, and the bitterly provoked vengeance of
Steelkilt, a Lakeman and desperado from Buffalo.
"'Lakeman!—Buffalo! Pray, what is a Lakeman, and where is
Buffalo?' said Don Sebastian, rising in his swinging mat of
grass.
"On the
eastern shore of our Lake Erie, Don; but—I crave your
courtesy—may be, you shall soon hear further of all that.
Now, gentlemen, in square-sail brigs and three-masted ships,
well nigh as large and stout as any that ever sailed out of
your old Callao to far Manilla; this Lakeman, in the
land-locked heart of our America, had yet been nurtured by
all those agrarian freebooting impressions popularly
connected with the open ocean. For in their interflowing
aggregate, those grand fresh-water seas of ours,—Erie, and
Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan,— possess an
ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the ocean's noblest
traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of races and of
climes. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles,
even as the Polynesian waters do; in large part, are shored
by two great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they
furnish long maritime approaches to our numerous territorial
colonies from the East, dotted all round their banks; here
and there are frowned upon by batteries, and by the
goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they have heard the
fleet thunderings of naval victories; at intervals, they
yield their beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted
faces flash from out their peltry wigwams; for leagues and
leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered forests, where
the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic
genealogies; those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of
prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs give robes to
Tartar Emperors; they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo
and Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float
alike the full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of
the State, the steamer, and the beech canoe; they are swept
by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash
the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are, for out of
sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a
midnight ship with all its shrieking crew. Thus, gentlemen,
though an inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean born, and
wild-ocean nurtured; as much of an audacious mariner as any.
And for Radney, though in his infancy he may have laid him
down on the lone Nantucket beach, to nurse at his maternal
sea; though in after life he had long followed our austere
Atlantic and your contemplative Pacific; yet was he quite as
vengeful and full of social quarrel as the backwoods seaman,
fresh from the latitudes of buckhorn handled Bowie-knives.
Yet was this Nantucketer a man with some good-hearted
traits; and this Lakeman, a mariner, who though a sort of
devil indeed, might yet by inflexible firmness, only
tempered by that common decency of human recognition which
is the meanest slave's right; thus treated, this Steelkilt
had long been retained harmless and docile. At all events,
he had proved so thus far; but Radney was doomed and made
mad, and Steelkilt—but, gentlemen, you shall hear.
"It was not
more than a day or two at the furthest after pointing her
prow for her island haven, that the Town-Ho's leak seemed
again increasing, but only so as to require an hour or more
at the pumps every day. You must know that in a settled and
civilized ocean like our Atlantic, for example, some
skippers think little of pumping their whole way across it;
though of a still, sleepy night, should the officer of the
deck happen to forget his duty in that respect, the
probability would be that he and his shipmates would never
again remember it, on account of all hands gently subsiding
to the bottom. Nor in the solitary and savage seas far from
you to the westward, gentlemen, is it altogether unusual for
ships to keep clanging at their pump-handles in full chorus
even for a voyage of considerable length! that is, if it lie
along a tolerably accessible coast, or if any other
reasonable retreat is afforded them. It is only when a leaky
vessel is in some very out of the way part of those waters,
some really landless latitude, that her captain begins to
feel a little anxious.
"Much this way
had it been with the Town-Ho; so when her leak was found
gaining once more, there was in truth some small concern
manifested by several of her company; especially by Radney
the mate. He commanded the upper sails to be well hoisted,
sheeted home anew, and every way expanded to the breeze. Now
this Radney, I suppose, was as little of a coward, and as
little inclined to any sort of nervous apprehensiveness
touching his own person as any fearless, unthinking creature
on land or on sea that you can conveniently imagine,
gentlemen. Therefore when he betrayed this imagine,
solicitude about the safety of the ship, some of the seamen
declared that it was only on account of his being a part
owner in her. So when they were working that evening at the
pumps, there was on this head no small gamesomeness slily
going on among them, as they stood with their feet
continually overflowed by the rippling clear water; clear as
any mountain spring, gentlemen—that bubbling from the pumps
ran across the deck, and poured itself out in steady spouts
at the lee scupper-holes.
"Now, as you
well know, it is not seldom the case in this conventional
world of ours—watery or otherwise; that when a person placed
in command over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very
significantly his superior in general pride of manhood,
straightway against that man he conceives an unconquerable
dislike and bitterness; and if he had a chance he will pull
down and pulverize that subaltern's tower, and make a little
heap of dust of it. Be this conceit of mine as it may,
gentlemen, at all events Steelkilt was a tall and noble
animal with a head like a Roman, and a flowing golden beard
like the tasseled housings of your last viceroy's snorting
charger; and a brain, and a heart, and a soul in him,
gentlemen, which had made Steelkilt Charlemagne, had he been
born son to Charlemagne's father. But Radney, the mate, was
ugly as a mule; yet as hardy, as stubborn, as malicious. He
did not love Steelkilt, and Steelkilt knew it.
"Espying the
mate drawing near as he was toiling at the pump with the
rest, the Lakeman affected not to notice him, but unawed,
went on with his gay banterings.
"'Aye, aye, my
merry lads, it's a lively leak this; hold a cannikin, one of
ye, and let's have a taste. By the Lord, it's worth
bottling! I tell ye what, men, old Rad's investment must go
for it! he had best cut away his part of the hull and tow it
home. The fact is, boys, that sword-fish only began the job;
he's come back again with a gang of ship-carpenters,
saw-fish, and file-fish, and what not; and the whole posse
of 'em are now hard at work cutting and slashing at the
bottom; making improvements, I suppose. If old Rad were here
now, I'd tell him to jump overboard and scatter 'em. They're
playing the devil with his estate, I can tell him. But he's
a simple old soul,—Rad, and a beauty too. Boys, they say the
rest of his property is invested in looking-glasses. I
wonder if he'd give a poor devil like me the model of his
nose.'
"'Damn your
eyes! what's that pump stopping for?' roared Radney,
pretending not to have heard the sailors' talk. 'Thunder
away at it!'
'Aye, aye,
sir,' said Steelkilt, merry as a cricket. 'Lively, boys,
lively, now!' And with that the pump clanged like fifty
fire-engines; the men tossed their hats off to it, and ere
long that peculiar gasping of the lungs was heard which
denotes the fullest tension of life's utmost energies.
"Quitting the
pump at last, with the rest of his band, the Lakeman went
forward all panting, and sat himself down on the windlass;
his face fiery red, his eyes bloodshot, and wiping the
profuse sweat from his brow. Now what cozening fiend it was,
gentlemen, that possessed Radney to meddle with such a man
in that corporeally exasperated state, I know not; but so it
happened. Intolerably striding along the deck, the mate
commanded him to get a broom and sweep down the planks, and
also a shovel, and remove some offensive matters consequent
upon allowing a pig to run at large.
"Now,
gentlemen, sweeping a ship's deck at sea is a piece of
household work which in all times but raging gales is
regularly attended to every evening; it has been known to be
done in the case of ships actually foundering at the time.
Such, gentlemen, is the inflexibility of sea-usages and the
instinctive love of neatness in seamen; some of whom would
not willingly drown without first washing their faces. But
in all vessels this broom business is the prescriptive
province of the boys, if boys there be aboard. Besides, it
was the stronger men in the Town-Ho that had been divided
into gangs, taking turns at the pumps; and being the most
athletic seaman of them all, Steelkilt had been regularly
assigned captain of one of the gangs; consequently he should
have been freed from any trivial business not connected with
truly nautical duties, such being the case with his
comrades. I mention all these particulars so that you may
understand exactly how this affair stood between the two
men.
"But there was
more than this: the order about the shovel was almost as
plainly meant to sting and insult Steelkilt, as though
Radney had spat in his face. Any man who has gone sailor in
a whale-ship will understand this; and all this and
doubtless much more, the Lakeman fully comprehended when the
mate uttered his command. But as he sat still for a moment,
and as he steadfastly looked into the mate's malignant eye
and perceived the stacks of powder-casks heaped up in him
and the slow-match silently burning along towards them; as
he instinctively saw all this, that strange forbearance and
unwillingness to stir up the deeper passionateness in any
already ireful being—a repugnance most felt, when felt at
all, by really valiant men even when aggrieved— this
nameless phantom feeling, gentlemen, stole over Steelkilt.
"Therefore, in
his ordinary tone, only a little broken by the bodily
exhaustion he was temporarily in, he answered him saying
that sweeping the deck was not his business, and he would
not do it. And then, without at all alluding to the shovel,
he pointed to three lads, as the customary sweepers; who,
not being billeted at the pumps, had done little or nothing
all day. To this, Radney replied, with an oath, in a most
domineering and outrageous manner unconditionally
reiterating his command; meanwhile advancing upon the still
seated Lakeman, with an uplifted cooper's club hammer which
he had snatched from a cask near by.
"Heated and
irritated as he was by his spasmodic toil at the pumps, for
all his first nameless feeling of forbearance the sweating
Steelkilt could but ill brook this bearing in the mate; but
somehow still smothering the conflagration within him,
without speaking he remained doggedly rooted to his seat,
till at last the incensed Radney shook the hammer within a
few inches of his face, furiously commanding him to do his
bidding.
"Steelkilt
rose, and slowly retreating round the windlass, steadily
followed by the mate with his menacing hammer, deliberately
repeated his intention not to obey. Seeing, however, that
his forbearance had not the slightest effect, by an awful
and unspeakable intimation with his twisted hand he warned
off the foolish and infatuated man; but it was to no
purpose. And in this way the two went once slowly round the
windlass; when, resolved at last no longer to retreat,
bethinking him that he had now forborne as much as comported
with his humor, the Lakeman paused on the hatches and thus
spoke to the officer:
"'Mr. Radney,
I will not obey you. Take that hammer away, or look to
yourself.' But the predestinated mate coming still closer to
him, where the Lakeman stood fixed, now shook the heavy
hammer within an inch of his teeth; meanwhile repeating a
string of insufferable maledictions. Retreating not the
thousandth part of an inch; stabbing him in the eye with the
unflinching poniard of his glance, Steelkilt, clenching his
right hand behind him and creepingly drawing it back, told
his persecutor that if the hammer but grazed his cheek he
(Steelkilt) would murder him. But, gentlemen, the fool had
been branded for the slaughter by the gods. Immediately the
hammer touched the cheek; the next instant the lower jaw of
the mate was stove in his head; he fell on the hatch
spouting blood like a whale.
"Ere the cry
could go aft Steelkilt was shaking one of the backstays
leading far aloft to where two of his comrades were standing
their mastheads. They were both Canallers.
"'Canallers!'
cried Don Pedro. 'We have seen many whaleships in our
harbors, but never heard of your Canallers. Pardon: who and
what are they?'
"'Canallers,
Don, are the boatmen belonging to our grand
Erie Canal. You must have heard of it.'
"'Nay, Senor;
hereabouts in this dull, warm, most lazy, and hereditary
land, we know but little of your vigorous North.'
"'Aye? Well
then, Don, refill my cup. Your chicha's very fine; and ere
proceeding further I will tell ye what our Canallers are;
for such information may throw side-light upon my story.'
"For three
hundred and sixty miles, gentlemen, through the entire
breadth of the state of New York; through numerous populous
cities and most thriving villages; through long, dismal,
uninhabited swamps, and affluent, cultivated fields,
unrivalled for fertility; by billiard-room and bar-room;
through the holy-of-holies of great forests; on Roman arches
over Indian rivers; through sun and shade; by happy hearts
or broken; through all the wide contrasting scenery of those
noble Mohawk counties; and especially, by rows of snow-white
chapels, whose spires stand almost like milestones, flows
one continual stream of Venetianly corrupt and often lawless
life. There's your true Ashantee, gentlemen; there howl your
pagans; where you ever find them, next door to you; under
the long-flung shadow, and the snug patronizing lee of
churches. For by some curious fatality, as it is often noted
of your metropolitan freebooters that they ever encamp
around the halls of justice, so sinners, gentlemen, most
abound in holiest vicinities.
"'Is that a
friar passing?' said Don Pedro, looking downwards into the
crowded plazza, with humorous concern.
"'Well for our
northern friend, Dame Isabella's Inquisition wanes in Lima,'
laughed Don Sebastian. 'Proceed, Senor.'
"'A moment!
Pardon!' cried another of the company. 'In the name of all
us Limeese, I but desire to express to you, sir sailor, that
we have by no means overlooked your delicacy in not
substituting present Lima for distant Venice in your corrupt
comparison. Oh! do not bow and look surprised: you know the
proverb all along this coast—"Corrupt as Lima." It but bears
out your saying, too; churches more plentiful than
billiard-tables, and for ever open-and "Corrupt as Lima."
So, too, Venice; I have been there; the holy city of the
blessed evangelist, St. Mark!—St. Dominic, purge it! Your
cup! Thanks: here I refill; now, you pour out again.'
"Freely
depicted in his own vocation, gentlemen, the Canaller would
make a fine dramatic hero, so abundantly and picturesquely
wicked is he. Like Mark Antony, for days and days along his
green-turfed, flowery Nile, he indolently floats, openly
toying with his red-cheeked Cleopatra, ripening his apricot
thigh upon the sunny deck. But ashore, all this effeminacy
is dashed. The brigandish guise which the Canaller so
proudly sports; his slouched and gaily-ribboned hat betoken
his grand features. A terror to the smiling innocence of the
villages through which he floats; his swart visage and bold
swagger are not unshunned in cities. Once a vagabond on his
own canal, I have received good turns from one of these
Canallers; I thank him heartily; would fain be not
ungrateful; but it is often one of the prime redeeming
qualities of your man of violence, that at times he has as
stiff an arm to back a poor stranger in a strait, as to
plunder a wealthy one. In sum, gentlemen, what the wildness
of this canal life is, is emphatically evinced by this; that
our wild whale-fishery contains so many of its most finished
graduates, and that scarce any race of mankind, except
Sydney men, are so much distrusted by our whaling captains.
Nor does it at all diminish the curiousness of this matter,
that to many thousands of our rural boys and young men born
along its line, the probationary life of the Grand Canal
furnishes the sole transition between quietly reaping in a
Christian corn-field, and recklessly ploughing the waters of
the most barbaric seas.
"'I see! I
see!' impetuously exclaimed Don Pedro, spilling his
chicha upon his silvery ruffles. 'No need to travel!
The world's one Lima. I had thought, now, that at your
temperate
North the generations were cold and holy as the hills.—
But the story.'
"I had left
off, gentlemen, where the Lakeman shook the backstay. Hardly
had he done so, when he was surrounded by the three junior
mates and the four harpooneers, who all crowded him to the
deck. But sliding down the ropes like baleful comets, the
two Canallers rushed into the uproar, and sought to drag
their man out of it towards the forecastle. Others of the
sailors joined with them in this attempt, and a twisted
turmoil ensued; while standing out of harm's way, the
valiant captain danced up and down with a whale-pike,
calling upon his officers to manhandle that atrocious
scoundrel, and smoke him along to the quarter-deck. At
intervals, he ran close up to the revolving border of the
confusion, and prying into the heart of it with his pike,
sought to prick out the object of his resentment. But
Steelkilt and his desperadoes were too much for them all;
they succeeded in gaining the forecastle deck, where,
hastily slewing about three or four large casks in a line
with the windlass, these sea-Parisians entrenched themselves
behind the barricade.
"'Come out of
that, ye pirates!' roared the captain, now menacing them
with a pistol in each hand, just brought to him by the
steward. 'Come out of that, ye cut-throats!'
"Steelkilt
leaped on the barricade, and striding up and down there,
defied the worst the pistols could do; but gave the captain
to understand distinctly, that his (Steelkilt's) death would
be the signal for a murderous mutiny on the part of all
hands. Fearing in his heart lest this might prove but too
true, the captain a little desisted, but still commanded the
insurgents instantly to return to their duty.
"'Will you
promise not to touch us, if we do?' demanded their
ringleader.
"'Turn to!
turn to!—I make no promise; to your duty!
Do you want to sink the ship, by knocking off at a time like
this?
Turn to!' and he once more raised a pistol.
"'Sink the
ship?' cried Steelkilt. 'Aye, let her sink.
Not a man of us turns to, unless you swear not to raise a
rope-yarn
against us. What say ye, men?' turning to his comrades.
A fierce cheer was their response.
"The Lakeman
now patrolled the barricade, all the while keeping his eye
on the Captain, and jerking out such sentences as these:—
'It's not our fault; we didn't want it; I told him to take
his hammer away; it was boy's business; he might have known
me before this; I told him not to prick the buffalo; I
believe I have broken a finger here against his cursed jaw;
ain't those mincing knives down in the forecastle there,
men? look to those handspikes, my hearties. Captain, by God,
look to yourself; say the word; don't be a fool; forget it
all; we are ready to turn to; treat us decently, and we're
your men; but we won't be flogged.'
"'Turn to! I
make no promises, turn to, I say!'
"'Look ye,
now,' cried the Lakeman, flinging out his arm towards him,
'there are a few of us here (and I am one of them) who have
shipped for the cruise, d'ye see; now as you well know, sir,
we can claim our discharge as soon as the anchor is down; so
we don't want a row; it's not our interest; we want to be
peaceable; we are ready to work, but we won't be flogged.'
"'Turn to!'
roared the Captain.
"Steelkilt
glanced round him a moment, and then said:—'I tell you what
it is now, Captain, rather than kill ye, and be hung for
such a shabby rascal, we won't lift a hand against ye unless
ye attack us; but till you say the word about not flogging
us, we don't do a hand's turn.'
"'Down into
the forecastle then, down with ye, I'll keep ye there till
ye're sick of it. Down ye go.'
"'Shall we?'
cried the ringleader to his men. Most of them were against
it; but at length, in obedience to Steelkilt, they preceded
him down into their dark den, growlingly disappearing, like
bears into a cave.
"As the
Lakeman's bare head was just level with the planks, the
Captain and his posse leaped the barricade, and rapidly
drawing over the slide of the scuttle, planted their group
of hands upon it, and loudly called for the steward to bring
the heavy brass padlock belonging to the companionway.
Then opening
the slide a little, the Captain whispered something down the
crack, closed it, and turned the key upon them—ten in
number— leaving on deck some twenty or more, who thus far
had remained neutral.
"All night a
wide-awake watch was kept by all the officers, forward and
aft, especially about the forecastle scuttle and fore
hatchway; at which last place it was feared the insurgents
might emerge, after breaking through the bulkhead below. But
the hours of darkness passed in peace; the men who still
remained at their duty toiling hard at the pumps, whose
clinking and clanking at intervals through the dreary night
dismally resounded through the ship.
"At sunrise
the Captain went forward, and knocking on the deck, summoned
the prisoners to work; but with a yell they refused. Water
was then lowered down to them, and a couple of handfuls of
biscuit were tossed after it; when again turning the key
upon them and pocketing it, the Captain returned to the
quarter-deck. Twice every day for three days this was
repeated; but on the fourth morning a confused wrangling,
and then a scuffling was heard, as the customary summons was
delivered; and suddenly four men burst up from the
forecastle, saying they were ready to turn to. The fetid
closeness of the air, and a famishing diet, united perhaps
to some fears of ultimate retribution, had constrained them
to surrender at discretion. Emboldened by this, the Captain
reiterated his demand to the rest, but Steelkilt shouted up
to him a terrific hint to stop his babbling and betake
himself where he belonged. On the fifth morning three others
of the mutineers bolted up into the air from the desperate
arms below that sought to restrain them. Only three were
left.
"'Better turn
to, now?' said the Captain with a heartless jeer.
"'Shut us up
again, will ye!' cried Steelkilt.
"Oh!
certainly," said the Captain, and the key clicked.
"It was at
this point, gentlemen, that enraged by the defection of
seven of his former associates, and stung by the mocking
voice that had last hailed him, and maddened by his long
entombment in a place as black as the bowels of despair; it
was then that Steelkilt proposed to the two Canallers, thus
far apparently of one mind with him, to burst out of their
hole at the next summoning of the garrison; and armed with
their keen mincing knives (long, crescentic, heavy
implements with a handle at each end) run amuck from the
bowsprit to the taffrail; and if by any devilishness of
desperation possible, seize the ship. For himself, he would
do this, he said, whether they joined him or not. That was
the last night he should spend in that den. But the scheme
met with no opposition on the part of the other two; they
swore they were ready for that, or for any other mad thing,
for anything in short but a surrender. And what was more,
they each insisted upon being the first man on deck, when
the time to make the rush should come. But to this their
leader as fiercely objected, reserving that priority for
himself; particularly as his two comrades would not yield,
the one to the other, in the matter; and both of them could
not be first, for the ladder would but admit one man at a
time. And here, gentlemen, the foul play of these miscreants
must come out.
"Upon hearing
the frantic project of their leader, each in his own
separate soul had suddenly lighted, it would seem, upon the
same piece of treachery, namely: to be the foremost in
breaking out, in order to be the first of the three, though
the last of the ten, to surrender; and thereby secure
whatever small chance of pardon such conduct might merit.
But when Steelkilt made known his determination still to
lead them to the last, they in some way, by some subtle
chemistry of villany, mixed their before secret treacheries
together; and when their leader fell into a doze, verbally
opened their souls to each other in three sentences; and
bound the sleeper with cords, and gagged him with cords; and
shrieked out for the Captain at midnight.
"Thinking
murder at hand, and smelling in the dark for the blood, he
and all his armed mates and harpooneers rushed for the
forecastle. In a few minutes the scuttle was opened, and,
bound hand and foot, the still struggling ringleader was
shoved up into the air by his perfidious allies, who at once
claimed the honor of securing a man who had been fully ripe
for murder. But all these were collared, and dragged along
the deck like dead cattle; and, side by side, were seized up
into the mizzen rigging, like three quarters of meat, and
there they hung till morning. 'Damn ye,' cried the Captain,
pacing to and fro before them, 'the vultures would not touch
ye, ye villains!'
"At sunrise he
summoned all hands; and separating those who had rebelled
from those who had taken no part in the mutiny, he told the
former that he had a good mind to flog them all
round—thought, upon the while, he would do so—he ought
to—justice demanded it; but for the present, considering
their timely surrender, he would let them go with a
reprimand, which he accordingly administered in the
vernacular.
"'But as for
you, ye carrion rogues,' turning to the three men in the
rigging—'for you, I mean to mince ye up for the try-pots;'
and, seizing a rope, he applied it with all his might to the
backs of the two traitors, till they yelled no more, but
lifelessly hung their heads sideways, as the two crucified
thieves are drawn.
"'My wrist is
sprained with ye!' he cried, at last; 'but there is still
rope enough left for you, my fine bantam, that wouldn't give
up. Take that gag from his mouth, and let us hear what he
can say for himself.'
"For a moment
the exhausted mutineer made a tremulous motion of his
cramped jaws, and then painfully twisting round his head,
said in a sort of hiss, 'What I say is this—and mind it
well—- if you flog me, I murder you!'
"'Say ye so?
then see how ye frighten me'—and the Captain drew off with
the rope to strike.
"'Best not,'
hissed the Lakeman.
"'But I
must,'—and the rope was once more drawn back for the stroke.
"Steelkilt
here hissed out something, inaudible to all but the Captain;
who, to the amazement of all hands, started back, paced the
deck rapidly two or three times, and then suddenly throwing
down his rope, said, 'I won't do it—let him go— cut him
down: d'ye hear?'
But as the
junior mates were hurrying to execute the order, a pale man,
with a bandaged head, arrested them—Radney the chief mate.
Ever since the blow, he had lain in his berth; but that
morning, hearing the tumult on the deck, he had crept out,
and thus far had watched the whole scene. Such was the state
of his mouth, that he could hardly speak; but mumbling
something about his being willing and able to do what the
captain dared not attempt, he snatched the rope and advanced
to his pinioned foe.
"'You are a
coward!' hissed the Lakeman.
"'So I am, but
take that.' The mate was in the very act of striking, when
another hiss stayed his uplifted arm. He paused: and then
pausing no more, made good his word, spite of Steelkilt's
threat, whatever that might have been. The three men were
then cut down, all hands were turned to, and, sullenly
worked by the moody seamen, the iron pumps clanged as
before.
"Just after
dark that day, when one watch had retired below, a clamor
was heard in the forecastle; and the two trembling traitors
running up, besieged the cabin door, saying they durst not
consort with the crew. Entreaties, cuffs, and kicks could
not drive them back, so at their own instance they were put
down in the ship's run for salvation. Still, no sign of
mutiny reappeared among the rest. On the contrary, it
seemed, that mainly at Steelkilt's instigation, they had
resolved to maintain the strictest peacefulness, obey all
orders to the last, and, when the ship reached port, desert
her in a body. But in order to insure the speediest end to
the voyage, they all agreed to another thing—namely, not to
sing out for whales, in case any should be discovered. For,
spite of her leak, and spite of all her other perils, the
Town-Ho still maintained her mast-heads, and her captain was
just as willing to lower for a fish that moment, as on the
day his craft first struck the cruising ground; and Radney
the mate was quite as ready to change his berth for a boat,
and with his bandaged mouth seek to gag in death the vital
jaw of the whale.
"But though
the Lakeman had induced the seamen to adopt this sort of
passiveness in their conduct, he kept his own counsel (at
least till all was over) concerning his own proper and
private revenge upon the man who had stung him in the
ventricles of his heart. He was in Radney the chief mate's
watch; and as if the infatuated man sought to run more than
half way to meet his doom, after the scene at the rigging,
he insisted, against the express counsel of the captain,
upon resuming the head of his watch at night. Upon this, and
one or two other circumstances, Steelkilt systematically
built the plan of his revenge.
"During the
night, Radney had an unseaman-like way of sitting on the
bulwarks of the quarterdeck, and leaning his arm upon the
gunwale of the boat which was hoisted up there, a little
above the ship's side. In this attitude, it was well known,
he sometimes dozed. There was a considerable vacancy between
the boat and the ship, and down between this was the sea.
Steelkilt calculated his time, and found that his next trick
at the helm would come round at two o'clock, in the morning
of the third day from that in which he had been betrayed. At
his leisure, he employed the interval in braiding something
very carefully in his watches below.
"'What are you
making there?' said a shipmate.
"'What do you
think? what does it look like?'
"'Like a
lanyard for your bag; but it's an odd one, seems to me.'
'Yes, rather
oddish,' said the Lakeman, holding it at arm's length before
him; 'but I think it will answer. Shipmate, I haven't enough
twine,—have you any?'
"But there was
none in the forecastle.
"'Then I must
get some from old Rad;' and he rose to go aft.
"'You don't
mean to go a begging to him!' said a sailor.
"'Why not? Do
you think he won't do me a turn, when it's to help himself
in the end, shipmate?' and going to the mate, he looked at
him quietly, and asked him for some twine to mend his
hammock. It was given him—neither twine nor lanyard were
seen again; but the next night an iron ball, closely netted,
partly rolled from the pocket of the Lakeman's monkey
jacket, as he was tucking the coat into his hammock for a
pillow. Twenty-four hours after, his trick at the silent
helm— nigh to the man who was apt to doze over the grave
always ready dug to the seaman's hand—that fatal hour was
then to come; and in the fore-ordaining soul of Steelkilt,
the mate was already stark and stretched as a corpse, with
his forehead crushed in.
"But,
gentlemen, a fool saved the would-be murderer from the
bloody deed he had planned. Yet complete revenge he had, and
without being the avenger. For by a mysterious fatality,
Heaven itself seemed to step in to take out of his hands
into its own the damning thing he would have done.
"It was just
between daybreak and sunrise of the morning of the second
day, when they were washing down the decks, that a stupid
Teneriffe man, drawing water in the main-chains, all at once
shouted out, 'There she rolls! there she rolls!' Jesu, what
a whale! It was Moby Dick.
"'Moby Dick!'
cried Don Sebastian; 'St. Dominic! Sir sailor, but do whales
have christenings? Whom call you Moby Dick?'
"'A very
white, and famous, and most deadly immortal monster, Don;—
but that would be too long a story.'
"'How? how?'
cried all the young Spaniards, crowding.
"'Nay, Dons,
Dons—nay, nay! I cannot rehearse that now.
Let me get more into the air, Sirs.'
"'The chicha!
the chicha!' cried Don Pedro; 'our vigorous friend looks
faint;—fill up his empty glass!'
"No need,
gentlemen; one moment, and I proceed.—Now, gentlemen, so
suddenly perceiving the snowy whale within fifty yards of
the ship— forgetful of the compact among the crew—in the
excitement of the moment, the Teneriffe man had
instinctively and involuntarily lifted his voice for the
monster, though for some little time past it had been
plainly beheld from the three sullen mast-heads. All was now
a phrensy. 'The White Whale—the White Whale!' was the cry
from captain, mates, and harpooneers, who, undeterred by
fearful rumours, were all anxious to capture so famous and
precious a fish; while the dogged crew eyed askance, and
with curses, the appalling beauty of the vast milky mass,
that lit up by a horizontal spangling sun, shifted and
glistened like a living opal in the blue morning sea.
Gentlemen, a strange fatality pervades the whole career of
these events, as if verily mapped out before the world
itself was charted. The mutineer was the bowsman of the
mate, and when fast to a fish, it was his duty to sit next
him, while Radney stood up with his lance in the prow, and
haul in or slacken the line, at the word of command.
Moreover, when the four boats were lowered, the mate's got
the start; and none howled more fiercely with delight than
did Steelkilt, as he strained at his oar. After a stiff
pull, their harpooneer got fast, and, spear in hand, Radney
sprang to the bow. He was always a furious man, it seems, in
a boat. And now his bandaged cry was, to beach him on the
whale's topmost back. Nothing loath, his bowsman hauled him
up and up, through a blinding foam that blent two
whitenesses together; till of a sudden the boat struck as
against a sunken ledge, and keeling over, spilled out the
standing mate. That instant, as he fell on the whale's
slippery back, the boat righted, and was dashed aside by the
swell, while Radney was tossed over into the sea, on the
other flank of the whale. He struck out through the spray,
and, for an instant, was dimly seen through that veil,
wildly seeking to remove himself from the eye of Moby Dick.
But the whale rushed round in a sudden maelstrom; seized the
swimmer between his jaws; and rearing high up with him,
plunged headlong again, and went down.
"Meantime, at
the first tap of the boat's bottom, the Lakeman had
slackened the line, so as to drop astern from the whirlpool;
calmly looking on, he thought his own thoughts. But a
sudden, terrific, downward jerking of the boat, quickly
brought his knife to the line. He cut it; and the whale was
free. But, at some distance, Moby Dick rose again, with some
tatters of Radney's red woollen shirt, caught in the teeth
that had destroyed him. All four boats gave chase again; but
the whale eluded them, and finally wholly disappeared.
"In good time,
the Town-Ho reached her port—a savage, solitary place— where
no civilized creature resided. There, headed by the Lakeman,
all but five or six of the foremastmen deliberately deserted
among the palms; eventually, as it turned out, seizing a
large double war-canoe of the savages, and setting sail for
some other harbor.
"The ship's
company being reduced to but a handful, the captain called
upon the Islanders to assist him in the laborious business
of heaving down the ship to stop the leak. But to such
unresting vigilance over their dangerous allies was this
small band of whites necessitated, both by night and by day,
and so extreme was the hard work they underwent, that upon
the vessel being ready again for sea, they were in such a
weakened condition that the captain durst not put off with
them in so heavy a vessel. After taking counsel with his
officers, he anchored the ship as far off shore as possible;
loaded and ran out his two cannon from the bows; stacked his
muskets on the poop; and warning the Islanders not to
approach the ship at their peril, took one man with him, and
setting the sail of his best whale-boat, steered straight
before the wind for Tahiti, five hundred miles distant, to
procure a reinforcement to his crew.
"On the fourth
day of the sail, a large canoe was descried, which seemed to
have touched at a low isle of corals. He steered away from
it; but the savage craft bore down on him; and soon the
voice of Steelkilt hailed him to heave to, or he would run
him under water. The captain presented a pistol. With one
foot on each prow of the yoked war-canoes, the Lakeman
laughed him to scorn; assuring him that if the pistol so
much as clicked in the lock, he would bury him in bubbles
and foam.
"'What do you
want of me?' cried the captain.
"'Where are
you bound? and for what are you bound?' demanded Steelkilt;
'no lies.'
"'I am bound
to Tahiti for more men.'
"'Very good.
Let me board you a moment—I come in peace.' With that he
leaped from the canoe, swam to the boat; and climbing the
gunwale, stood face to face with the captain.
"'Cross your
arms, sir; throw back your head. Now, repeat after me. As
soon as Steelkilt leaves me, I swear to beach this boat on
yonder island, and remain there six days. If I do not, may
lightning strike me!'
"'A pretty
scholar,' laughed the Lakeman. 'Adios, Senor!' and leaping
into the sea, he swam back to his comrades.
"Watching the
boat till it was fairly beached, and drawn up to the roots
of the cocoa-nut trees, Steelkilt made sail again, and in
due time arrived at Tahiti, his own place of destination.
There, luck befriended him; two ships were about to sail for
France, and were providentially in want of precisely that
number of men which the sailor headed. They embarked, and so
for ever got the start of their former captain, had he been
at all minded to work them legal retribution.
"Some ten days
after the French ships sailed, the whale-boat arrived, and
the captain was forced to enlist some of the more civilized
Tahitians, who had been somewhat used to the sea. Chartering
a small native schooner, he returned with them to his
vessel; and finding all right there, again resumed his
cruisings.
"Where
Steelkilt now is, gentlemen, none know; but upon the island
of Nantucket, the widow of Radney still turns to the sea
which refuses to give up its dead; still in dreams sees the
awful white whale that destroyed him.
"'Are you
through?' said Don Sebastian, quietly.
"'I am, Don.'
"'Then I
entreat you, tell me if to the best of your own convictions,
this your story is in substance really true? It is so
passing wonderful! Did you get it from an unquestionable
source? Bear with me if I seem to press.'
"'Also bear
with all of us, sir sailor; for we all join in
Don Sebastian's suit,' cried the company, with exceeding
interest.
"'Is there a
copy of the Holy Evangelists in the Golden Inn, gentlemen?'
"'Nay,' said
Don Sebastian; 'but I know a worthy priest near by, who will
quickly procure one for me. I go for it; but are you well
advised? this may grow too serious.'
"'Will you be
so good as to bring the priest also, Don?'
"'Though there
are no Auto-da-Fe's in Lima now,' said one of the company to
another; 'I fear our sailor friend runs risks of the
archiepiscopacy. Let us withdraw more out of the moonlight.
I see no need of this.'
"'Excuse me
for running after you, Don Sebastian; but may I also beg
that you will be particular in procuring the largest sized
Evangelists you can.'
'This is the priest, he brings
you the Evangelists,' said Don Sebastian, gravely, returning
with a tall and solemn figure.
"'Let me
remove my hat. Now, venerable priest, further into the
light, and hold the Holy Book before me that I may touch it.
"'So help me
Heaven, and on my honor the story I have told ye, gentlemen,
is in substance and its great items, true. I know it to be
true; it happened on this ball; I trod the ship; I knew the
crew; I have seen and talked with Steelkilt since the death
of Radney."
CHAPTER 55
Of the
Monstrous Pictures of Whales
I shall ere long paint to you
as well as one can without canvas, something like the true
form of the whale as he actually appears to the eye of the
whaleman when in his own absolute body the whale is moored
alongside the whaleship so that he can be fairly stepped
upon there. It may be worth while, therefore, previously to
advert to those curious imaginary portraits of him which
even down to the present day confidently challenge the faith
of the landsman. It is time to set the world right in this
matter, by proving such pictures of the whale all wrong.
It may be that
the primal source of all those pictorial delusions will be
found among the oldest Hindoo, Egyptian, and Grecian
sculptures. For ever since those inventive but unscrupulous
times when on the marble panellings of temples, the
pedestals of statues, and on shields, medallions, cups, and
coins, the dolphin was drawn in scales of chain-armor like
Saladin's, and a helmeted head like St. George's; ever since
then has something of the same sort of license prevailed,
not only in most popular pictures of the whale, but in many
scientific presentations of him.
Now, by all
odds, the most ancient extant portrait anyways purporting to
be the whale's, is to be found in the famous cavern-pagoda
of Elephants, in India. The Brahmins maintain that in the
almost endless sculptures of that immemorial pagoda, all the
trades and pursuits, every conceivable avocation of man,
were prefigured ages before any of them actually came into
being. No wonder then, that in some sort our noble
profession of whaling should have been there shadowed forth.
The Hindoo whale referred to, occurs in a separate
department of the wall, depicting the incarnation of Vishnu
in the form of leviathan, learnedly known as the Matse
Avatar. But though this sculpture is half man and half
whale, so as only to give the tail of the latter, yet that
small section of him is all wrong. It looks more like the
tapering tail of an anaconda, than the broad palms of the
true whale's majestic flukes.
But go to the
old Galleries, and look now at a great Christian painter's
portrait of this fish; for he succeeds no better than the
antediluvian Hindoo. It is Guido's picture of Perseus
rescuing Andromeda from the sea-monster or whale. Where did
Guido get the model of such a strange creature as that? Nor
does Hogarth, in painting the same scene in his own "Perseus
Descending," make out one whit better. The huge corpulence
of that Hogarthian monster undulates on the surface,
scarcely drawing one inch of water. It has a sort of howdah
on its back, and its distended tusked mouth into which the
billows are rolling, might be taken for the Traitors' Gate
leading from the Thames by water into the Tower. Then, there
are the Prodromus whales of the old Scotch Sibbald, and
Jonah's whale, as depicted in the prints of old Bibles and
the cuts of old primers. What shall be said of these? As for
the book-binder's whale winding like a vine-stalk round the
stock of a descending anchor— as stamped and gilded on the
backs and titlepages of many books both old and new—that is
a very picturesque but purely fabulous creature, imitated, I
take it, from the like figures on antique vases. Though
universally denominated a dolphin, I nevertheless call this
book-binder's fish an attempt at a whale; because it was so
intended when the device was first introduced. It was
introduced by an old Italian publisher somewhere about the
15th century, during the Revival of Learning; and in those
days, and even down to a comparatively late period, dolphins
were popularly supposed to be a species of the Leviathan.
In the
vignettes and other embellishments of some ancient books you
will at times meet with very curious touches at the whale,
where all manner of spouts, jets d'eau, hot springs and
cold, Saratoga and Baden-Baden, come bubbling up from his
unexhausted brain. In the title-page of the original edition
of the "Advancement of Learning" you will find some curious
whales.
But quitting
all these unprofessional attempts, let us glance at those
pictures of leviathan purporting to be sober, scientific
delineations, by those who know. In old Harris's collection
of voyages there are some plates of whales extracted from a
Dutch book of voyages, A.D. 1671, entitled "A Whaling Voyage
to Spitzbergen in the ship Jonas in the Whale, Peter
Peterson of Friesland, master." In one of those plates the
whales, like great rafts of logs, are represented lying
among ice-isles, with white bears running over their living
backs. In another plate, the prodigious blunder is made of
representing the whale with perpendicular flukes.
Then again,
there is an imposing quarto, written by one Captain Colnett,
a Post Captain in the English navy, entitled "A Voyage round
Cape Horn into the South Seas, for the purpose of extending
the Spermaceti Whale Fisheries." In this book is an outline
purporting to be a "Picture of a Physeter or Spermaceti
whale, drawn by scale from one killed on the coast of
Mexico, August, 1793, and hoisted on deck." I doubt not the
captain had this veracious picture taken for the benefit of
his marines. To mention but one thing about it, let me say
that it has an eye which applied, according to the
accompanying scale, to a full grown sperm whale, would make
the eye of that whale a bow-window some five feet long. Ah,
my gallant captain, why did ye not give us Jonah looking out
of that eye!
Nor are the
most conscientious compilations of Natural History for the
benefit of the young and tender, free from the same
heinousness of mistake. Look at that popular work
"Goldsmith's Animated Nature." In the abridged London
edition of 1807, there are plates of an alleged "whale" and
a "narwhale." I do not wish to seem inelegant, but this
unsightly whale looks much like an amputated sow; and, as
for the narwhale, one glimpse at it is enough to amaze one,
that in this nineteenth century such a hippogriff could be
palmed for genuine upon any intelligent public of
schoolboys.
Then, again,
in 1825, Bernard Germain, Count de Lacepede, a great
naturalist, published a scientific systemized whale book,
wherein are several pictures of the different species of the
Leviathan. All these are not only incorrect, but the picture
of the Mysticetus or Greenland whale (that is to say the
Right whale), even Scoresby, a long experienced man as
touching that species, declares not to have its counterpart
in nature.
But the
placing of the cap-sheaf to all this blundering business was
reserved for the scientific Frederick Cuvier, brother to the
famous Baron. In 1836, he published a Natural History of
Whales, in which he gives what he calls a picture of the
Sperm Whale. Before showing that picture to any Nantucketer,
you had best provide for your summary retreat from
Nantucket. In a word, Frederick Cuvier's Sperm Whale is not
a Sperm Whale, but a squash. Of course, he never had the
benefit of a whaling voyage (such men seldom have), but
whence he derived that picture, who can tell? Perhaps he got
it as his scientific predecessor in the same field,
Desmarest, got one of his authentic abortions; that is, from
a Chinese drawing. And what sort of lively lads with the
pencil those Chinese are, many queer cups and saucers inform
us.
As for the
sign-painters' whales seen in the streets hanging over the
shops of oil-dealers, what shall be said of them? They are
generally Richard III. whales, with dromedary humps, and
very savage; breakfasting on three or four sailor tarts,
that is whaleboats full of mariners: their deformities
floundering in seas of blood and blue paint.
But these
manifold mistakes in depicting the whale are not so very
surprising after all. Consider! Most of the scientific
drawings have been taken from the stranded fish; and these
are about as correct as a drawing of a wrecked ship, with
broken back, would correctly represent the noble animal
itself in all its undashed pride of hull and spars. Though
elephants have stood for their full-lengths, the living
Leviathan has never yet fairly floated himself for his
portrait. The living whale, in his full majesty and
significance, is only to be seen at sea in unfathomable
waters; and afloat the vast bulk of him is out of sight,
like a launched line-of-battle ship; and out of that element
it is a thing eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist
him bodily into the air, so as to preserve all his mighty
swells and undulations. And, not to speak of the highly
presumable difference of contour between a young suckling
whale and a full-grown Platonian Leviathan; yet, even in the
case of one of those young sucking whales hoisted to a
ship's deck, such is then the outlandish, eel-like,
limbered, varying shape of him, that his precise expression
the devil himself could not catch.
But it may be
fancied, that from the naked skeleton of the stranded whale,
accurate hints may be derived touching his true form. Not at
all. For it is one of the more curious things about this
Leviathan, that his skeleton gives very little idea of his
general shape. Though Jeremy Bentham's skeleton, which hangs
for candelabra in the library of one of his executors,
correctly conveys the idea of a burly-browed utilitarian old
gentleman, with all Jeremy's other leading personal
characteristics; yet nothing of this kind could be inferred
from any leviathan's articulated bones. In fact, as the
great Hunter says, the mere skeleton of the whale bears the
same relation to the fully invested and padded animal as the
insect does to the chrysalis that so roundingly envelopes
it. This peculiarity is strikingly evinced in the head, as
in some part of this book will be incidentally shown. It is
also very curiously displayed in the side fin, the bones of
which almost exactly answer to the bones of the human hand,
minus only the thumb. This fin has four regular
bone-fingers, the index, middle, ring, and little finger.
But all these are permanently lodged in their fleshy
covering, as the human fingers in an artificial covering.
"However recklessly the whale may sometimes serve us," said
humorous Stubb one day, "he can never be truly said to
handle us without mittens."
For all these
reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs
conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in
the world which must remain unpainted to the last. True, one
portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another, but none
can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness.
So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the
whale really looks like. And the only mode in which you can
derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by
going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small
risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it
seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your
curiosity touching this Leviathan.
CHAPTER 56
Of the Less
Erroneous Pictures of Whales and the True Pictures of
Whaling Scenes
In connexion with the
monstrous pictures of whales, I am strongly tempted here to
enter upon those still more monstrous stories of them which
are to be found in certain books, both ancient and modern,
especially in Pliny, Purchas, Hackluyt, Harris, Cuvier, &c.
But I pass that matter by.
I know of only
four published outlines of the great Sperm Whale; Colnett's,
Huggins's, Frederick Cuvier's, and Beale's. In the previous
chapter Colnett and Cuvier have been referred to. Huggins's
is far better than theirs; but, by great odds, Beale's is
the best. All Beale's drawings of this whale are good,
excepting the middle figure in the picture of three whales
in various attitudes, capping his second chapter. His
frontispiece, boats attacking Sperm Whales, though no doubt
calculated to excite the civil scepticism of some parlor
men, is admirably correct and life-like in its general
effect. Some of the Sperm Whale drawings in J. Ross Browne
are pretty correct in contour; but they are wretchedly
engraved. That is not his fault though.
Of the Right
Whale, the best outline pictures are in Scoresby; but they
are drawn on too small a scale to convey a desirable
impression. He has but one picture of whaling scenes, and
this is a sad deficiency, because it is by such pictures
only, when at all well done, that you can derive anything
like a truthful idea of the living whale as seen by his
living hunters.
But, taken for
all in all, by far the finest, though in some details not
the most correct, presentations of whales and whaling scenes
to be anywhere found, are two large French engravings, well
executed, and taken from paintings by one Garnery.
Respectively, they represent attacks on the Sperm and Right
Whale. In the first engraving a noble Sperm Whale is
depicted in full majesty of might, just risen beneath the
boat from the profundities of the ocean, and bearing high in
the. air upon his back the terrific wreck of the stoven
planks. The prow of the boat is partially unbroken, and is
drawn just balancing upon the monster's spine; and standing
in that prow, for that one single incomputable flash of
time, you behold an oarsman, half shrouded by the incensed
boiling spout of the whale, and in the act of leaping, as if
from a precipice. The action of the whole thing is
wonderfully good and true. The half-emptied line-tub floats
on the whitened sea; the wooden poles of the spilled
harpoons obliquely bob in it; the heads of the swimming crew
are scattered about the whale in contrasting expressions of
affright; while in the black stormy distance the ship is
bearing down upon the scene. Serious fault might be found
with the anatomical details of this whale, but let that
pass; since, for the life of me, I could not draw so good a
one.
In the second
engraving, the boat is in the act of drawing alongside the
barnacled flank of a large running Right Whale, that rolls
his black weedy bulk in the sea like some mossy rock-slide
from the Patagonian cliffs. His jets are erect, full, and
black like soot; so that from so abounding a smoke in the
chimney, you would think there must be a brave supper
cooking in the great bowels below. Sea fowls are pecking at
the small crabs, shell-fish, and other sea candies and
maccaroni, which the Right Whale sometimes carries on his
pestilent back. And all the while the thick-lipped leviathan
is rushing through the deep, leaving tons of tumultuous
white curds in his wake, and causing the slight boat to rock
in the swells like a skiff caught nigh the paddle-wheels of
an ocean steamer. Thus, the fore-ground is all raging
commotion; but behind, in admirable artistic contrast, is
the glassy level of a sea becalmed, the drooping unstarched
sails of the powerless ship, and the inert mass of a dead
whale, a conquered fortress, with the flag of capture lazily
hanging from the whale-pole inserted into his spout-hole.
Who Garnery
the painter is, or was, I know not. But my life for it he
was either practically conversant with his subject, or else
marvellously tutored by some experienced whaleman. The
French are the lads for painting action. Go and gaze upon
all the paintings in Europe, and where will you find such a
gallery of living and breathing commotion on canvas, as in
that triumphal hall at Versailles; where the beholder fights
his way, pell-mell, through the consecutive great battles of
France; where every sword seems a flash of the Northern
Lights, and the successive armed kings and Emperors dash by,
like a charge of crowned centaurs? Not wholly unworthy of a
place in that gallery, are these sea battle-pieces of
Garnery.
The natural
aptitude of the French for seizing the picturesqueness of
things seems to be peculiarly evinced in what paintings and
engravings they have of their whaling scenes. With not one
tenth of England's experience in the fishery, and not the
thousandth part of that of the Americans, they have
nevertheless furnished both nations with the only finished
sketches at all capable of conveying the real spirit of the
whale hunt. For the most part, the English and American
whale draughtsmen seem entirely content with presenting the
mechanical outline of things, such as the vacant profile of
the whale; which, so far as picturesqueness of effect is
concerned, is about tantamount to sketching the profile of a
pyramid. Even Scoresby, the justly renowned Right whaleman,
after giving us a stiff full length of the Greenland whale,
and three or four delicate miniatures of narwhales and
porpoises, treats us to a series of classical engravings of
boat hooks, chopping knives, and grapnels; and with the
microscopic diligence of a Leuwenhoeck submits to the
inspection of a shivering world ninety-six fac-similes of
magnified Arctic snow crystals. I mean no disparagement to
the excellent voyager (I honor him for a veteran), but in so
important a matter it was certainly an oversight not to have
procured for every crystal a sworn affidavit taken before a
Greenland Justice of the Peace.
In addition to
those fine engravings from Garnery, there are two other
French engravings worthy of note, by some one who subscribes
himself "H. Durand." One of them, though not precisely
adapted to our present purpose, nevertheless deserves
mention on other accounts. It is a quiet noon-scene among
the isles of the Pacific; a French whaler anchored, inshore,
in a calm, and lazily taking water on board; the loosened
sails of the ship, and the long leaves of the palms in the
background, both drooping together in the breezeless air.
The effect is very fine, when considered with reference to
its presenting the hardy fishermen under one of their few
aspects of oriental repose. The other engraving is quite a
different affair: the ship hove-to upon the open sea, and in
the very heart of the Leviathanic life, with a Right Whale
alongside; the vessel (in the act of cutting-in) hove over
to the monster as if to a quay; and a boat, hurriedly
pushing off from this scene of activity, is about giving
chase to whales in the distance. The harpoons and lances lie
levelled for use; three oarsmen are just setting the mast in
its hole; while from a sudden roll of the sea, the little
craft stands half-erect out of the water, like a rearing
horse. From the ship, the smoke of the torments of the
boiling whale is going up like the smoke over a village of
smithies; and to windward, a black cloud, rising up with
earnest of squalls and rains, seems to quicken the activity
of the excited seamen.
CHAPTER 57
Of Whales in
Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in
Mountains; in Stars
On Tower-hill, as you go down
to the London docks, you may have seen a crippled beggar (or
kedger, as the sailors say) holding a painted board before
him, representing the tragic scene in which he lost his leg.
There are three whales and three boats; and one of the boats
(presumed to contain the missing leg in all its original
integrity) is being crunched by the jaws of the foremost
whale. Any time these ten years, they tell me, has that man
held up that picture, and exhibited that stump to an
incredulous world. But the time of his justification has now
come. His three whales are as good whales as were ever
published in Wapping, at any rate; and his stump as
unquestionable a stump as any you will find in the western
clearings. But, though for ever mounted on that stump, never
a stump-speech does the poor whaleman make; but, with
downcast eyes, stands ruefully contemplating his own
amputation.
Throughout the
Pacific, and also in Nantucket, and New Bedford, and Sag
Harbor, you will come across lively sketches of whales and
whaling-scenes, graven by the fishermen themselves on Sperm
Whale-teeth, or ladies' busks wrought out of the Right
Whale-bone, and other like skrimshander articles, as the
whalemen call the numerous little ingenious contrivances
they elaborately carve out of the rough material, in their
hours of ocean leisure. Some of them have little boxes of
dentistical-looking implements, specially intended for the
skrimshandering business. But, in general, they toil with
their jack-knives alone; and, with that almost omnipotent
tool of the sailor, they will turn you out anything you
please, in the way of a mariner's fancy.
Long exile
from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man
to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is
called savagery. Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage
as an Iroquois. I myself am a savage, owning no allegiance
but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready at any moment to
rebel against him.
Now, one of
the peculiar characteristics of the savage in his domestic
hours, is his wonderful patience of industry. An ancient
Hawaiian war-club or spear-paddle, in its full multiplicity
and elaboration of carving, is as great a trophy of human
perseverance as a Latin lexicon. For, with but a bit of
broken sea-shell or a shark's tooth, that miraculous
intricacy of wooden net-work has been achieved; and it has
cost steady years of steady application.
As with the
Hawaiian savage, so with the white sailor-savage. With the
same marvellous patience, and with the same single shark's
tooth, of his one poor jack-knife, he will carve you a bit
of bone sculpture, not quite as workmanlike, but as close
packed in its maziness of design, as the Greek savage,
Achilles's shield; and full of barbaric spirit and
suggestiveness, as the prints of that fine old Dutch savage,
Albert Durer.
Wooden whales,
or whales cut in profile out of the small dark slabs of the
noble South Sea war-wood, are frequently met with in the
forecastles of American whalers. Some of them are done with
much accuracy.
At some old
gable-roofed country houses you will see brass whales hung
by the tail for knockers to the road-side door. When the
porter is sleepy, the anvil-headed whale would be best. But
these knocking whales are seldom remarkable as faithful
essays. On the spires of some old-fashioned churches you
will see sheet-iron whales placed there for weathercocks;
but they are so elevated, and besides that are to all
intents and purposes so labelled with "Hands off!" you
cannot examine them closely enough to decide upon their
merit.
In bony, ribby
regions of the earth, where at the base of high broken
cliffs masses of rock lie strewn in fantastic groupings upon
the plain, you will often discover images as of the
petrified forms of the Leviathan partly merged in grass,
which of a windy day breaks against them in a surf of green
surges.
Then, again,
in mountainous countries where the traveller is continually
girdled by amphitheatrical heights; here and there from some
lucky point of view you will catch passing glimpses of the
profiles of whales defined along the undulating ridges. But
you must be a thorough whaleman, to see these sights; and
not only that, but if you wish to return to such a sight
again, you must be sure and take the exact intersecting
latitude and longitude of your first stand-point, else so
chance-like are such observations of the hills, that your
precise, previous stand-point would require a laborious
re-discovery; like the Solomon islands, which still remain
incognita, though once high-ruffed Mendanna trod them and
old Figuera chronicled them.
Nor when
expandingly lifted by your subject, can you fail to trace
out great whales in the starry heavens, and boats in pursuit
of them; as when long filled with thoughts of war the
Eastern nations saw armies locked in battle among the
clouds. Thus at the North have I chased Leviathan round and
round the Pole with the revolutions of the bright points
that first defined him to me. And beneath the effulgent
Antarctic skies I have boarded the Argo-Navis, and joined
the chase against the starry Cetus far beyond the utmost
stretch of Hydrus and the Flying Fish.
With a
frigate's anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons
for spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the
topmost skies, to see whether the fabled heavens with all
their countless tents really lie encamped beyond my mortal
sight!
CHAPTER 58
Brit
Steering north-eastward from
the Crozetts, we fell in with vast meadows of brit, the
minute, yellow substance, upon which the Right Whale largely
feeds. For leagues and leagues it undulated round us, so
that we seemed to be sailing through boundless fields of
ripe and golden wheat.
On the second
day, numbers of Right Whales were seen, who, secure from the
attack of a Sperm-Whaler like the Pequod, with open jaws
sluggishly swam through the brit, which, adhering to the
fringing fibres of that wondrous Venetian blind in their
mouths, was in that manner separated from the water that
escaped at the lips.
As morning
mowers, who side by side slowly and seethingly advance their
scythes through the long wet grass of marshy meads; even so
these monsters swam, making a strange, grassy, cutting
sound; and leaving behind them endless swaths of blue upon
the yellow sea.*
*That part of the sea known
among whalemen as the "Brazil Banks" does not bear that name
as the Banks of Newfoundland do, because of there being
shallows and soundings there, but because of this remarkable
meadow-like appearance, caused by the vast drifts of brit
continually floating in those latitudes, where the Right
Whale is often chased.
But it was only the sound they
made as they parted the brit which at all reminded one of
mowers. Seen from the mast-heads, especially when they
paused and were stationary for a while, their vast black
forms looked more like lifeless masses of rock than anything
else. And as in the great hunting countries of India, the
stranger at a distance will sometimes pass on the plains
recumbent elephants without knowing them to be such, taking
them for bare, blackened elevations of the soil; even so,
often, with him, who for the first time beholds this species
of the leviathans of the sea. And even when recognized at
last, their immense magnitude renders it very hard really to
believe that such bulky masses of overgrowth can possibly be
instinct, in all parts, with the same sort of life that
lives in a dog or a horse.
Indeed. in
other respects, you can hardly regard any creatures of the
deep with the same feelings that you do those of the shore.
For though some old naturalists have maintained that all
creatures of the land are of their kind in the sea; and
though taking a broad general view of the thing, this may
very well be; yet coming to specialties, where, for example,
does the ocean furnish any fish that in disposition answers
to the sagacious kindness of the dog? The accursed shark
alone can in any generic respect be said to bear comparative
analogy to him.
But though, to
landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the seas have
ever been regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and
repelling; though we know the sea to be an everlasting terra
incognita, so that Columbus sailed over numberless unknown
worlds to discover his one superficial western one; though,
by vast odds, the most terrific of all mortal disasters have
immemorially and indiscriminately befallen tens and hundreds
of thousands of those who have gone upon the waters; though
but a moment's consideration will teach that, however baby
man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in
a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet
for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will
insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest,
stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the continual
repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that
sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally
belongs to it.
The first boat
we read of, floated on an ocean, that with Portuguese
vengeance had whelmed a whole world without leaving so much
as a widow. That same ocean rolls now; that same ocean
destroyed the wrecked ships of last year. Yea, foolish
mortals, Noah's flood is not yet subsided; two thirds of the
fair world it yet covers.
Wherein differ
the sea and the land, that a miracle upon one is not a
miracle upon the other? Preternatural terrors rested upon
the Hebrews, when under the feet of Korah and his company
the live ground opened and swallowed them up for ever; yet
not a modern sun ever sets, but in precisely the same manner
the live sea swallows up ships and crews.
But not only
is the sea such a foe to man who is an alien to it, but it
is also a fiend to its own off-spring; worse than the
Persian host who murdered his own guests; sparing not the
creatures which itself hath spawned. Like a savage tigress
that tossing in the jungle overlays her own cubs, so the sea
dashes even the mightiest whales against the rocks, and
leaves them there side by side with the split wrecks of
ships. No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting
and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its
rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe.
Consider the
subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide
under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously
hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also
the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most
remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many
species of sharks. Consider once more, the universal
cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each
other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.
Consider all
this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile
earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you
not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as
this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the
soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and
joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known
life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst
never return!
CHAPTER 59
Squid
Slowly wading through the
meadows of brit, the Pequod still held on her way
north-eastward towards the island of Java; a gentle air
impelling her keel, so that in the surrounding serenity her
three tall tapering masts mildly waved to that languid
breeze, as three mild palms on a plain. And still, at wide
intervals in the silvery night, the lonely, alluring jet
would be seen.
But one
transparent blue morning, when a stillness almost
preternatural spread over the sea, however unattended with
any stagnant calm; when the long burnished sun-glade on the
waters seemed a golden finger laid across them, enjoining
some secrecy; when the slippered waves whispered together as
they softly ran on; in this profound hush of the visible
sphere a strange spectre was seen by Daggoo from the
main-mast-head.
In the
distance, a great white mass lazily rose, and rising higher
and higher, and disentangling itself from the azure, at last
gleamed before our prow like a snow-slide, new slid from the
hills. Thus glistening for a moment, as slowly it subsided,
and sank. Then once more arose, and silently gleamed. It
seemed not a whale; and yet is this Moby Dick? thought
Daggoo. Again the phantom went down, but on re-appearing
once more, with a stiletto-like cry that startled every man
from his nod, the negro yelled out—"There! there again!
there she breaches! right ahead! The White Whale, the White
Whale!"
Upon this, the
seamen rushed to the yard-arms, as in swarming-time the bees
rush to the boughs. Bare-headed in the sultry sun, Ahab
stood on the bowsprit, and with one hand pushed far behind
in readiness to wave his orders to the helmsman, cast his
eager glance in the direction indicated aloft by the
outstretched motionless arm of Daggoo.
Whether the
flitting attendance of the one still and solitary jet had
gradually worked upon Ahab, so that he was now prepared to
connect the ideas of mildness and repose with the first
sight of the particular whale he pursued; however this was,
or whether his eagerness betrayed him; whichever way it
might have been, no sooner did he distinctly perceive the
white mass, than with a quick intensity he instantly gave
orders for lowering.
The four boats
were soon on the water; Ahab's in advance, and all swiftly
pulling towards their prey. Soon it went down, and while,
with oars suspended, we were awaiting its reappearance, lo!
in the same spot where it sank, once more it slowly rose.
Almost forgetting for the moment all thoughts of Moby Dick,
we now gazed at the most wondrous phenomenon which the
secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind. A vast pulpy
mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing
cream-color, lay floating on the water, innumerable long
arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting
like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any
hapless object within reach. No perceptible face or front
did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or
instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly,
formless, chance-like apparition of life.
As with a low
sucking sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck still
gazing at the agitated waters where it had sunk, with a wild
voice exclaimed—"Almost rather had I seen Moby Dick and
fought him, than to have seen thee, thou white ghost!"
"What was it,
Sir?" said Flask.
"The great
live squid, which, they say, few whale-ships ever beheld,
and returned to their ports to tell of it."
But Ahab said
nothing; turning his boat, he sailed back to the vessel; the
rest as silently following.
Whatever
superstitions the sperm whalemen in general have connected
with the sight of this object, certain it is, that a glimpse
of it being so very unusual, that circumstance has gone far
to invest it with portentousness. So rarely is it beheld,
that though one and all of them declare it to be the largest
animated thing in the ocean, yet very few of them have any
but the most vague ideas concerning its true nature and
form; notwithstanding, they believe it to furnish to the
sperm whale his only food. For though other species of
whales find their food above water, and may be seen by man
in the act of feeding, the spermaceti whale obtains his
whole food in unknown zones below the surface; and only by
inference is it that any one can tell of what, precisely,
that food consists. At times, when closely pursued, he will
disgorge what are supposed to be the detached arms of the
squid; some of them thus exhibited exceeding twenty and
thirty feet in length. They fancy that the monster to which
these arms belonged ordinarily clings by them to the bed of
the ocean; and that the sperm whale, unlike other species,
is supplied with teeth in order to attack and tear it.
There seems
some ground to imagine that the great Kraken of Bishop
Pontoppodan may ultimately resolve itself into Squid. The
manner in which the Bishop describes it, as alternately
rising and sinking, with some other particulars he narrates,
in all this the two correspond. But much abatement is
necessary with respect to the incredible bulk he assigns it.
By some
naturalists who have vaguely heard rumors of the mysterious
creature, here spoken of, it is included among the class of
cuttle-fish, to which, indeed, in certain external respects
it would seem to belong, but only as the Anak of the tribe.
CHAPTER 60
The Line
With reference to the whaling
scene shortly to be described, as well as for the better
understanding of all similar scenes elsewhere presented, I
have here to speak of the magical, sometimes horrible
whale-line.
The line
originally used in the fishery was of the best hemp,
slightly vapored with tar, not impregnated with it, as in
the case of ordinary ropes; for while tar, as ordinarily
used, makes the hemp more pliable to the rope-maker, and
also renders the rope itself more convenient to the sailor
for common ship use; yet, not only would the ordinary
quantity too much stiffen the whale-line for the close
coiling to which it must be subjected; but as most seamen
are beginning to learn, tar in general by no means adds to
the rope's durability or strength, however much it may give
it compactness and gloss.
Of late years
the Manilla rope has in the American fishery almost entirely
superseded hemp as a material for whale-lines; for, though
not so durable as hemp, it is stronger, and far more soft
and elastic; and I will add (since there is an aesthetics in
all things), is much more handsome and becoming to the boat,
than hemp. Hemp is a dusky, dark fellow, a sort of Indian;
but Manilla is as a golden-haired Circassian to behold.
The whale-line
is only two thirds of an inch in thickness. At first sight,
you would not think it so strong as it really is. By
experiment its one and fifty yarns will each suspend a
weight of one hundred and twenty pounds; so that the whole
rope will bear a strain nearly equal to three tons. In
length, the common sperm whale-line measures something over
two hundred fathoms. Towards the stern of the boat it is
spirally coiled away in the tub, not like the worm-pipe of a
still though, but so as to form one round, cheese-shaped
mass of densely bedded "sheaves," or layers of concentric
spiralizations, without any hollow but the "heart," or
minute vertical tube formed at the axis of the cheese. As
the least tangle or kink in the coiling would, in running
out, infallibly take somebody's arm, leg, or entire body
off, the utmost precaution is used in stowing the line in
its tub. Some harpooneers will consume almost an entire
morning in this business, carrying the line high aloft and
then reeving it downwards through a block towards the tub,
so as in the act of coiling to free it from all possible
wrinkles and twists.
In the English
boats two tubs are used instead of one; the same line being
continuously coiled in both tubs. There is some advantage in
this; because these twin-tubs being so small they fit more
readily into the boat, and do not strain it so much;
whereas, the American tub, nearly three feet in diameter and
of proportionate depth, makes a rather bulky freight for a
craft whose planks are but one-half inch in thickness; for
the bottom of the whale-boat is like critical ice, which
will bear up a considerable distributed weight, but not very
much of a concentrated one. When the painted canvas cover is
clapped on the american line-tub, the boat looks as if it
were pulling off with a prodigious great wedding-cake to
present to the whales.
Both ends of
the line are exposed; the lower end terminating in an
eye-splice or loop coming up from the bottom against the
side of the tub, and hanging over its edge completely
disengaged from everything. This arrangement of the lower
end is necessary on two accounts. First: In order to
facilitate the fastening to it of an additional line from a
neighboring boat, in case the stricken whale should sound so
deep as to threaten to carry off the entire line originally
attached to the harpoon. In these instances, the whale of
course is shifted like a mug of ale, as it were, from the
one boat to the other; though the first boat always hovers
at hand to assist its consort. Second: This arrangement is
indispensable for common safety's sake; for were the lower
end of the line in any way attached to the boat, and were
the whale then to run the line out to the end almost in a
single, smoking minute as he sometimes does, he would not
stop there, for the doomed boat would infallibly be dragged
down after him into the profundity of the sea; and in that
case no town-crier would ever find her again.
Before
lowering the boat for the chase, the upper end of the line
is taken aft from the tub, and passing round the loggerhead
there, is again carried forward the entire length of the
boat, resting crosswise upon the loom or handle of every
man's oar, so that it jogs against his wrist in rowing; and
also passing between the men, as they alternately sit at the
opposite gunwales, to the leaded chocks or grooves in the
extreme pointed prow of the boat, where a wooden pin or
skewer the size of a common quill, prevents it from slipping
out. From the chocks it hangs in a slight festoon over the
bows, and is then passed inside the boat again; and some ten
or twenty fathoms (called box-line) being coiled upon the
box in the bows, it continues its way to the gunwale still a
little further aft, and is then attached to the short-warp—
the rope which is immediately connected with the harpoon;
but previous to that connexion, the short-warp goes through
sundry mystifications too tedious to detail.
Thus the
whale-line folds the whole boat in its complicated coils,
twisting and writhing around it in almost every direction.
All the oarsmen are involved in its perilous contortions; so
that to the timid eye of the landsman, they seem as Indian
jugglers, with the deadliest snakes sportively festooning
their limbs. Nor can any son of mortal woman, for the first
time, seat himself amid those hempen intricacies, and while
straining his utmost at the oar, bethink him that at any
unknown instant the harpoon may be darted, and all these
horrible contortions be put in play like ringed lightnings;
he cannot be thus circumstanced without a shudder that makes
the very marrow in his bones to quiver in him like a shaken
jelly. Yet habit—strange thing! what cannot habit
accomplish?—Gayer sallies, more merry mirth, better jokes,
and brighter repartees, you never heard over your mahogany,
than you will hear over the half-inch white cedar of the
whaleboat, when thus hung in hangman's nooses; and, like the
six burghers of Calais before King Edward, the six men
composing the crew pull into the jaws of death, with a
halter around every neck, as you may say.
Perhaps a very
little thought will now enable you to account for those
repeated whaling disasters—some few of which are casually
chronicled—of this man or that man being taken out of the
boat by the line, and lost. For, when the line is darting
out, to be seated then in the boat, is like being seated in
the midst of the manifold whizzings of a steam-engine in
full play, when every flying beam, and shaft, and wheel, is
grazing you. It is worse; for you cannot sit motionless in
the heart of these perils, because the boat is rocking like
a cradle, and you are pitched one way and the other, without
the slightest warning; and only by a certain self-adjusting
buoyancy and simultaneousness of volition and action, can
you escape being made a Mazeppa of, and run away with where
the all-seeing sun himself could never pierce you out.
Again: as the
profound calm which only apparently precedes and prophesies
of the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself;
for, indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelope of the
storm; and contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless
rifle holds the fatal powder, and the ball, and the
explosion; so the graceful repose of the line, as it
silently serpentines about the oarsmen before being brought
into actual play— this is a thing which carries more of true
terror than any other aspect of this dangerous affair. But
why say more? All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are
born with halters round their necks; but it is only when
caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals
realize the silent, subtle, everpresent perils of life. And
if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat,
you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than
though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not
a harpoon, by your side.
CHAPTER 61
Stubb Kills a
Whale
If to Starbuck the apparition
of the Squid was a thing of portents, to Queequeg it was
quite a different object.
"When you see
him 'quid," said the savage, honing his harpoon in the bow
of his hoisted boat, "then you quick see him 'parm whale."
The next day
was exceedingly still and sultry, and with nothing special
to engage them, the Pequod's crew could hardly resist the
spell of sleep induced by such a vacant sea. For this part
of the Indian Ocean through which we then were voyaging is
not what whalemen call a lively ground; that is, it affords
fewer glimpses of porpoises, dolphins, flying-fish, and
other vivacious denizens of more stirring waters, than those
off the Rio de la Plata, or the in-shore ground off Peru.
It was my turn
to stand at the foremast-head; and with my shoulders leaning
against the slackened royal shrouds, to and fro I idly
swayed in what seemed an enchanted air. No resolution could
withstand it; in that dreamy mood losing all consciousness,
at last my soul went out of my body; though my body still
continued to sway as a pendulum will, long after the power
which first moved it is withdrawn.
Ere
forgetfulness altogether came over me, I had noticed that
the seamen at the main and mizzen mast-heads were already
drowsy. So that at last all three of us lifelessly swung
from the spars, and for every swing that we made there was a
nod from below from the slumbering helmsman. The waves, too,
nodded their indolent crests; and across the wide trance of
the sea, east nodded to west, and the sun over all.
Suddenly
bubbles seemed bursting beneath my closed eyes; like vices
my hands grasped the shrouds; some invisible, gracious
agency preserved me; with a shock I came back to life. And
lo! close under our lee, not forty fathoms off, a gigantic
Sperm Whale lay rolling in the water like the capsized hull
of a frigate, his broad, glossy back, of an Ethiopian hue,
glistening in the sun's rays like a mirror. But lazily
undulating in the trough of the sea, and ever and anon
tranquilly spouting his vapory jet, the whale looked like a
portly burgher smoking his pipe of a warm afternoon. But
that pipe, poor whale, was thy last. As if struck by some
enchanter's wand, the sleepy ship and every sleeper in it
all at once started into wakefulness; and more than a score
of voices from all parts of the vessel, simultaneously with
the three notes from aloft, shouted forth the accustomed
cry, as the great fish slowly and regularly spouted the
sparkling brine into the air.
"Clear away
the boats! Luff!" cried Ahab. And obeying his own order, he
dashed the helm down before the helmsman could handle the
spokes.
The sudden
exclamations of the crew must have alarmed the whale; and
ere the boats were down, majestically turning, he swam away
to the leeward, but with such a steady tranquillity, and
making so few ripples as he swam, that thinking after all he
might not as yet be alarmed, Ahab gave orders that not an
oar should be used, and no man must speak but in whispers.
So seated like Ontario Indians on the gunwales of the boats,
we swiftly but silently paddled along; the calm not
admitting of the noiseless sails being set. Presently, as we
thus glided in chase, the monster perpendicularly flitted
his tail forty feet into the air, and then sank out of sight
like a tower swallowed up.
"There go
flukes!" was the cry, an announcement immediately followed
by Stubb's producing his match and igniting his pipe, for
now a respite was granted. After the full interval of his
sounding had elapsed, the whale rose again, and being now in
advance of the smoker's boat, and much nearer to it than to
any of the others, Stubb counted upon the honor of the
capture. It was obvious, now, that the whale had at length
become aware of his pursuers. All silence of cautiousness
was therefore no longer of use. Paddles were dropped, and
oars came loudly into play. And still puffing at his pipe,
Stubb cheered on his crew to the assault.
Yes, a mighty
change had come over the fish. All alive to his jeopardy, he
was going "head out"; that part obliquely projecting from
the mad yeast which he brewed.*
*It will be seen in some other
place of what a very light substance the entire interior of
the sperm whale's enormous head consists. Though apparently
the most massive, it is by far the most buoyant part about
him. So that with ease he elevates it in the air, and
invariably does so when going at his utmost speed. Besides,
such is the breadth of the upper part of the front of his
head, and such the tapering cut-water formation of the lower
part, that by obliquely elevating his head, he thereby may
be said to transform himself from a bluff-bowed sluggish
galliot into a sharppointed New York pilot-boat.
"Start her, start her, my men!
Don't hurry yourselves; take plenty of time—but start her;
start her like thunder-claps, that's all," cried Stubb,
spluttering out the smoke as he spoke. "Start her, now; give
'em the long and strong stroke, Tashtego. Start her, Tash,
my boy— start her, all; but keep cool, keep cool—cucumbers
is the word— easy, easy—only start her like grim death and
grinning devils, and raise the buried dead perpendicular out
of their graves, boys— that's all. Start her!"
"Woo-hoo!
Wa-hee!" screamed the Gay-Header in reply, raising some old
war-whoop to the skies; as every oarsman in the strained
boat involuntarily bounced forward with the one tremendous
leading stroke which the eager Indian gave.
But his wild
screams were answered by others quite as wild. "Kee-hee!
Kee-hee!" yelled Daggoo, straining forwards and backwards on
his seat, like a pacing tiger in his cage.
"Ka-la!
Koo-loo!" howled Queequeg, as if smacking his lips over a
mouthful of Grenadier's steak. And thus with oars and yells
the keels cut the sea. Meanwhile, Stubb, retaining his place
in the van, still encouraged his men to the onset, all the
while puffing the smoke from his mouth. Like desperadoes
they tugged and they strained, till the welcome cry was
heard—"Stand up, Tashtego!—give it to him!" The harpoon was
hurled. "Stern all!" The oarsmen backed water; the same
moment something went hot and hissing along every one of
their wrists. It was the magical line. An instant before,
Stubb had swiftly caught two additional turns with it round
the loggerhead, whence, by reason of its increased rapid
circlings, a hempen blue smoke now jetted up and mingled
with the steady fumes from his pipe. As the line passed
round and round the loggerhead; so also, just before
reaching that point, it blisteringly passed through and
through both of Stubb's hands, from which the hand-cloths,
or squares of quilted canvas sometimes worn at these times,
had accidentally dropped. It was like holding an enemy's
sharp two-edged sword by the blade, and that enemy all the
time striving to wrest it out of your clutch.
"Wet the line!
wet the line!" cried Stubb to the tub oarsman (him seated by
the tub) who, snatching off his hat, dashed the sea-water
into it.* More turns were taken, so that the line began
holding its place. The boat now flew through the boiling
water like a shark all fins. Stubb and Tashtego here changed
places—stem for stern—a staggering business truly in that
rocking commotion.
*Partly to show the
indispensableness of this act, it may here be stated, that,
in the old Dutch fishery, a mop was used to dash the running
line with water; in many other ships, a wooden piggin, or
bailer, is set apart for that purpose. Your hat, however, is
the most convenient.
From the vibrating line
extending the entire length of the upper part of the boat,
and from its now being more tight than a harpstring, you
would have thought the craft had two keels—one cleaving the
water, the other the air—as the boat churned on through both
opposing elements at once. A continual cascade played at the
bows; a ceaseless whirling eddy in her wake; and, at the
slightest motion from within, even but of a little finger,
the vibrating, cracking craft canted over her spasmodic
gunwale into the sea. Thus they rushed; each man with might
and main clinging to his seat, to prevent being tossed to
the foam; and the tall form of Tashtego at the steering oar
crouching almost double, in order to bring down his centre
of gravity. Whole Atlantics and Pacifics seemed passed as
they shot on their way, till at length the whale somewhat
slackened his flight.
"Haul in—haul
in!" cried Stubb to the bowsman! and, facing round towards
the whale, all hands began pulling the boat up to him, while
yet the boat was being towed on. Soon ranging up by his
flank, Stubb, firmly planting his knee in the clumsy cleat,
darted dart after dart into the flying fish; at the word of
command, the boat alternately sterning out of the way of the
whale's horrible wallow, and then ranging up for another
fling.
The red tide
now poured from all sides of the monster like brooks down a
hill. His tormented body rolled not in brine but in blood,
which bubbled and seethed for furlongs behind in their wake.
The slanting sun playing upon this crimson pond in the sea,
sent back its reflection into every face, so that they all
glowed to each other like red men. And all the while, jet
after jet of white smoke was agonizingly shot from the
spiracle of the whale, and vehement puff after puff from the
mouth of the excited headsman; as at every dart, hauling in
upon his crooked lance (by the line attached to it), Stubb
straightened it again and again, by a few rapid blows
against the gunwale, then again and again sent it into the
whale.
"Pull up—pull
up!" he now cried to the bowsman, as the waning whale
relaxed in his wrath. "Pull up!—close to!" and the boat
ranged along the fish's flank. When reaching far over the
bow, Stubb slowly churned his long sharp lance into the
fish, and kept it there, carefully churning and churning, as
if cautiously seeking to feel after some gold watch that the
whale might have swallowed, and which he was fearful of
breaking ere he could hook it out. But that gold watch he
sought was the innermost life of the fish. And now it is
struck; for, starting from his trance into that unspeakable
thing called his "flurry," the monster horribly wallowed in
his blood, overwrapped himself in impenetrable, mad, boiling
spray, so that the imperilled craft, instantly dropping
astern, had much ado blindly to struggle out from that
phrensied twilight into the clear air of the day.
And now
abating in his flurry, the whale once more rolled out into
view! surging from side to side; spasmodically dilating and
contracting his spout-hole, with sharp, cracking, agonized
respirations. At last, gush after gush of clotted red gore,
as if it had been the purple lees of red wine, shot into the
frightened air; and falling back again, ran dripping down
his motionless flanks into the sea. His heart had burst!
"He's dead,
Mr. Stubb," said Daggoo.
"Yes; both
pipes smoked out!" and withdrawing his own from his mouth,
Stubb scattered the dead ashes over the water; and, for a
moment, stood thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had
made.
CHAPTER 62
The Dart
A word concerning an incident
in the last chapter.
According to
the invariable usage of the fishery, the whale-boat pushes
off from the ship, with the headsman or whale-killer as
temporary steersman, and the harpooneer or whale-fastener
pulling the foremost oar, the one known as the
harpooneer-oar. Now it needs a strong, nervous arm to strike
the first iron into the fish; for often, in what is called a
long dart, the heavy implement has to be flung to the
distance of twenty or thirty feet. But however prolonged and
exhausting the chase, the harpooneer is expected to pull his
oar meanwhile to the uttermost; indeed, he is expected to
set an example of superhuman activity to the rest, not only
by incredible rowing, but by repeated loud and intrepid
exclamations; and what it is to keep shouting at the top of
one's compass, while all the other muscles are strained and
half started— what that is none know but those who have
tried it. For one, I cannot bawl very heartily and work very
recklessly at one and the same time. In this straining,
bawling state, then, with his back to the fish, all at once
the exhausted harpooneer hears the exciting cry—"Stand up,
and give it to him!" He now has to drop and secure his oar,
turn round on his centre half way, seize his harpoon from
the crotch, and with what little strength may remain, he
essays to pitch it somehow into the whale. No wonder, taking
the whole fleet of whalemen in a body, that out of fifty
fair chances for a dart, not five are successful; no wonder
that so many hapless harpooneers are madly cursed and
disrated; no wonder that some of them actually burst their
blood-vessels in the boat; no wonder that some sperm
whalemen are absent four years with four barrels; no wonder
that to many ship owners, whaling is but a losing concern;
for it is the harpooneer that makes the voyage, and if you
take the breath out of his body how can you expect to find
it there when most wanted!
Again, if the
dart be successful, then at the second critical instant,
that is, when the whale starts to run, the boatheader and
harpooneer likewise start to running fore and aft, to the
imminent jeopardy of themselves and every one else. It is
then they change places; and the headsman, the chief officer
of the little craft, takes his proper station in the bows of
the boat.
Now, I care
not who maintains the contrary, but all this is both foolish
and unnecessary. The headsman should stay in the bows from
first to last; he should both dart the harpoon and the
lance, and no rowing whatever should be expected of him,
except under circumstances obvious to any fisherman. I know
that this would sometimes involve a slight loss of speed in
the chase; but long experience in various whalemen of more
than one nation has convinced me that in the vast majority
of failures in the fishery, it has not by any means been so
much the speed of the whale as the before described
exhaustion of the harpooneer that has caused them.
To insure the
greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooneers of this
world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not
from out of toil.
CHAPTER 63
The Crotch
Out of the trunk, the branches
grow; out of them, the twigs.
So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters.
The crotch
alluded to on a previous page deserves independent mention.
It is a notched stick of a peculiar form, some two feet in
length, which is perpendicularly inserted into the starboard
gunwale near the bow, for the purpose of furnishing a rest
for the wooden extremity of the harpoons, whose other naked,
barbed end slopingly projects from the prow. Thereby the
weapon is instantly at hand to its hurler, who snatches it
up as readily from its rest as a backwoodsman swings his
rifle from the wall. It is customary to have two harpoons
reposing in the crotch, respectively called the first and
second irons.
But these two
harpoons, each by its own cord, are both connected with the
line; the object being this: to dart them both, if possible,
one instantly after the other into the same whale; so that
if, in the coming drag, one should draw out, the other may
still retain a hold. It is a doubling of the chances. But it
very often happens that owing to the instantaneous, violent,
convulsive running of the whale upon receiving the first
iron, it becomes impossible for the harpooneer, however
lightning-like in his movements, to pitch the second iron
into him. Nevertheless, as the second iron is already
connected with the line, and the line is running, hence that
weapon must, at all events, be anticipatingly tossed out of
the boat, somehow and somewhere; else the most terrible
jeopardy would involve all hands. Tumbled into the water, it
accordingly is in such cases; the spare coils of box line
(mentioned in a preceding chapter) making this feat, in most
instances, prudently practicable. But this critical act is
not always unattended with the saddest and most fatal
casualties.
Furthermore:
you must know that when the second iron is thrown overboard,
it thenceforth becomes a dangling, sharp-edged terror,
skittishly curvetting about both boat and whale, entangling
the lines, or cutting them, and making a prodigious
sensation in all directions. Nor, in general, is it possible
to secure it again until the whale is fairly captured and a
corpse.
Consider, now,
how it must be in the case of four boats all engaging one
unusually strong, active, and knowing whale; when owing to
these qualities in him, as well as to the thousand
concurring accidents of such an audacious enterprise, eight
or ten loose second irons may be simultaneously dangling
about him. For, of course, each boat is supplied with
several harpoons to bend on to the line should the first one
be ineffectually darted without recovery. All these
particulars are faithfully narrated here, as they will not
fail to elucidate several most important however intricate
passages, in scenes hereafter to be painted.
CHAPTER 64
Stubb's Supper
Stubb's whale had been killed
some distance from the ship. It was a calm; so, forming a
tandem of three boats, we commenced the slow business of
towing the trophy to the Pequod. And now, as we eighteen men
with our thirty-six arms, and one hundred and eighty thumbs
and fingers, slowly toiled hour after hour upon that inert,
sluggish corpse in the sea; and it seemed hardly to budge at
all, except at long intervals; good evidence was hereby
furnished of the enormousness of the mass we moved. For,
upon the great canal of Hang-Ho, or whatever they call it,
in China, four or five laborers on the foot-path will draw a
bulky freighted junk at the rate of a mile an hour; but this
grand argosy we towed heavily forged along, as if laden with
piglead in bulk.
Darkness came
on; but three lights up and down in the Pequod's
main-rigging dimly guided our way; till drawing nearer we
saw Ahab dropping one of several more lanterns over the
bulwarks. Vacantly eyeing the heaving whale for a moment, he
issued the usual orders for securing it for the night, and
then handing his lantern to a seaman, went his way into the
cabin, and did not come forward again until morning.
Though, in
overseeing the pursuit of this whale, Captain Ahab had
evinced his customary activity, to call it so; yet now that
the creature was dead, some vague dissatisfaction, or
impatience, or despair, seemed working in him; as if the
sight of that dead body reminded him that Moby Dick was yet
to be slain; and though a thousand other whales were brought
to his ship, all that would not one jot advance his grand,
monomaniac object. Very soon you would have thought from the
sound on the Pequod's decks, that all hands were preparing
to cast anchor in the deep; for heavy chains are being
dragged along the deck, and thrust rattling out of the
port-holes. But by those clanking links, the vast corpse
itself, not the ship, is to be moored. Tied by the head to
the stern, and by the tail to the bows, the whale now lies
with its black hull close to the vessel's, and seen through
the darkness of the night, which obscured the spars and
rigging aloft, the two—ship and whale, seemed yoked together
like colossal bullocks, whereof one reclines while the other
remains standing.*
*A little item may as well be
related here. The strongest and most reliable hold which the
ship has upon the whale when moored alongside, is by the
flukes or tail; and as from its greater density that part is
relatively heavier than any other (excepting the side-fins),
its flexibility even in death, causes it to sink low beneath
the surface; so that with the hand you cannot get at it from
the boat, in order to put the chain round it. But this
difficulty is ingeniously overcome: a small, strong line is
prepared with a wooden float at its outer end, and a weight
in its middle, while the other end is secured to the ship.
By adroit management the wooden float is made to rise on the
other side of the mass, so that now having girdled the
whale, the chain is readily made to follow suit; and being
slipped along the body, is at last locked fast round the
smallest part of the tail, at the point of junction with its
broad flukes or lobes.
If moody Ahab was now all
quiescence, at least so far as could be known on deck,
Stubb, his second mate, flushed with conquest, betrayed an
unusual but still good-natured excitement. Such an unwonted
bustle was he in that the staid Starbuck, his official
superior, quietly resigned to him for the time the sole
management of affairs. One small, helping cause of all this
liveliness in Stubb, was soon made strangely manifest. Stubb
was a high liver; he was somewhat intemperately fond of the
whale as a flavorish thing to his palate.
"A steak, a
steak, ere I sleep! You, Daggoo! overboard you go, and cut
me one from his small!"
Here be it
known, that though these wild fishermen do not, as a general
thing, and according to the great military maxim, make the
enemy defray the current expenses of the war (at least
before realizing the proceeds of the voyage), yet now and
then you find some of these Nantucketers who have a genuine
relish for that particular part of the Sperm Whale
designated by Stubb; comprising the tapering extremity of
the body.
About midnight
that steak was cut and cooked; and lighted by two lanterns
of sperm oil, Stubb stoutly stood up to his spermaceti
supper at the capstan-head, as if that capstan were a
sideboard. Nor was Stubb the only banqueter on whale's flesh
that night. Mingling their mumblings with his own
mastications, thousands on thousands of sharks, swarming
round the dead leviathan, smackingly feasted on its fatness.
The few sleepers below in their bunks were often startled by
the sharp slapping of their tails against the hull, within a
few inches of the sleepers' hearts. Peering over the side
you could just see them (as before you heard them) wallowing
in the sullen, black waters, and turning over on their backs
as they scooped out huge globular pieces of the whale of the
bigness of a human head. This particular feat of the shark
seems all but miraculous. How at such an apparently
unassailable surface, they contrive to gouge out such
symmetrical mouthfuls, remains a part of the universal
problem of all things. The mark they thus leave on the
whale, may best be likened to the hollow made by a carpenter
in countersinking for a screw.
Though amid
all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks
will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship's decks, like
hungry dogs round a table where red meat is being carved,
ready to bolt down every killed man that is tossed to them;
and though, while the valiant butchers over the deck-table
are thus cannibally carving each other's live meat with
carving-knives all gilded and tasselled, the sharks, also,
with their jewel-hilted mouths, are quarrelsomely carving
away under the table at the dead meat; and though, were you
to turn the whole affair upside down, it would still be
pretty much the same thing, that is to say, a shocking
sharkish business enough for all parties; and though sharks
also are the invariable outriders of all slave ships
crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to
be handy in case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a
dead slave to be decently buried; and though one or two
other like instances might be set down, touching the set
terms, places, and occasions, when sharks do most socially
congregate, and most hilariously feast; yet is there no
conceivable time or occasion when you will find them in such
countless numbers, and in gayer or more jovial spirits, than
around a dead sperm whale, moored by night to a whaleship at
sea. If you have never seen that sight, then suspend your
decision about the propriety of devil-worship, and the
expediency of conciliating the devil.
But, as yet,
Stubb heeded not the mumblings of the banquet that was going
on so nigh him, no more than the sharks heeded the smacking
of his own epicurean lips.
"Cook,
cook!—where's that old Fleece?" he cried at length, widening
his legs still further, as if to form a more secure base for
his supper; and, at the same time darting his fork into the
dish, as if stabbing with his lance; "cook, you cook!— sail
this way, cook!"
The old black,
not in any very high glee at having been previously routed
from his warm hammock at a most unseasonable hour, came
shambling along from his galley, for, like many old blacks,
there was something the matter with his knee-pans, which he
did not keep well scoured like his other pans; this old
Fleece, as they called him, came shuffling and limping
along, assisting his step with his tongs, which, after a
clumsy fashion, were made of straightened iron hoops; this
old Ebony floundered along, and in obedience to the word of
command, came to a dead stop on the opposite side of Stubb's
sideboard; when, with both hands folded before him, and
resting on his two-legged cane, he bowed his arched back
still further over, at the same time sideways inclining his
head, so as to bring his best ear into play.
"Cook," said
Stubb, rapidly lifting a rather reddish morsel to his mouth,
"don't you think this steak is rather overdone? You've been
beating this steak too much, cook; it's too tender. Don't I
always say that to be good, a whale-steak must be tough?
There are those sharks now over the side, don't you see they
prefer it tough and rare? What a shindy they are kicking up!
Cook, go and talk to 'em; tell 'em they are welcome to help
themselves civilly, and in moderation, but they must keep
quiet. Blast me, if I can hear my own voice. Away, cook, and
deliver my message. Here, take this lantern," snatching one
from his sideboard; "now then, go and preach to them!"
Sullenly
taking the offered lantern, old Fleece limped across the
deck to the bulwarks; and then, with one hand drooping his
light low over the sea, so as to get a good view of his
congregation, with the other hand he solemnly flourished his
tongs, and leaning far over the side in a mumbling voice
began addressing the sharks, while Stubb, softly crawling
behind, overheard all that was said.
"Fellow-critters: I'se ordered here to say dat you must stop
dat dam noise dare. You hear? Stop dat dam smackin' ob de
lips! Massa Stubb say dat you can fill your dam bellies up
to de hatchings, but by Gor! you must stop dat dam racket!"
"Cook," here
interposed Stubb, accompanying the word with a sudden slap
on the shoulder,—Cook! why, damn your eyes, you mustn't
swear that way when you're preaching. That's no way to
convert sinners, Cook! Who dat? Den preach to him yourself,"
sullenly turning to go.
No, Cook; go
on, go on."
"Well, den,
Belubed fellow-critters:"—
"Right!"
exclaimed Stubb, approvingly, "coax 'em to it, try that,"
and Fleece continued.
"Do you is all
sharks, and by natur wery woracious, yet I zay to you,
fellow-critters, dat dat woraciousness—'top dat dam slappin'
ob de tail! How you tink to hear, 'spose you keep up such a
dam slapping and bitin' dare?"
"Cook," cried
Stubb, collaring him, "I won't have that swearing.
Talk to 'em gentlemanly."
Once more the
sermon proceeded.
"Your
woraciousness, fellow-critters. I don't blame ye so much
for; dat is natur, and can't be helped; but to gobern dat
wicked natur, dat is de pint. You is sharks, sartin; but if
you gobern de shark in you, why den you be angel; for all
angel is not'ing more dan de shark well goberned. Now, look
here, bred'ren, just try wonst to be cibil, a helping
yourselbs from dat whale. Don't be tearin' de blubber out
your neighbour's mout, I say. Is not one shark dood right as
toder to dat whale? And, by Gor, none on you has de right to
dat whale; dat whale belong to some one else. I know some o'
you has berry brig mout, brigger dan oders; but den de brig
mouts sometimes has de small bellies; so dat de brigness of
de mout is not to swallar wid, but to bit off de blubber for
de small fry ob sharks, dat can't get into de scrouge to
help demselves."
"Well done,
old Fleece!" cried Stubb, "that's Christianity; go on."
"No use goin'
on; de dam willains will keep a scrougin' and slappin' each
oder, Massa Stubb; dey don't hear one word; no use
a-preaching to such dam g'uttons as you call 'em, till dare
bellies is full, and dare bellies is bottomless; and when
dey do get 'em full, dey wont hear you den; for den dey sink
in de sea, go fast to sleep on de coral, and can't hear
noting at all, no more, for eber and eber."
"Upon my soul,
I am about of the same opinion; so give the benediction,
Fleece, and I'll away to my supper."
Upon this,
Fleece, holding both hands over the fishy mob, raised his
shrill voice, and cried—
"Cussed
fellow-critters! Kick up de damndest row as ever you can;
fill your dam bellies 'till dey bust—and den die."
"Now, cook,"
said Stubb, resuming his supper at the capstan; Stand just
where you stood before, there, over against me, and pay
particular attention."
"All
'dention," said Fleece, again stooping over upon his tongs
in the desired position.
"Well," said
Stubb, helping himself freely meanwhile;
"I shall now go back to the subject of this steak.
In the first place, how old are you, cook?"
"What dat do
wid de 'teak, " said the old black, testily.
"Silence! How
old are you, cook?"
"'Bout ninety,
dey say," he gloomily muttered.
And have you
have lived in this world hard upon one hundred years, cook,
and don't know yet how to cook a whale-steak?" rapidly
bolting another mouthful at the last word, so that that
morsel seemed a continuation of the question. "Where were
you born, cook?"
"'Hind de
hatchway, in ferry-boat, goin' ober de Roanoke."
"Born in a
ferry-boat! That's queer, too. But I want to know what
country you were born in, cook!"
"Didn't I say
de Roanoke country?" he cried sharply.
"No, you
didn't, cook; but I'll tell you what I'm coming to, cook.
You must go home and be born over again; you don't know how
to cook a whale-steak yet."
"Bress my
soul, if I cook noder one," he growled, angrily, turning
round to depart.
"Come back
here, cook;—here, hand me those tongs;—now take that bit of
steak there, and tell me if you think that steak cooked as
it should be? Take it, I say"—holding the tongs towards
him—"take it, and taste it."
Faintly
smacking his withered lips over it for a moment, the old
negro muttered, "Best cooked 'teak I eber taste; joosy,
berry joosy."
"Cook," said
Stubb, squaring himself once more; "do you belong to the
church?"
"Passed one
once in Cape-Down," said the old man sullenly.
"And you have
once in your life passed a holy church in Cape-Town, where
you doubtless overheard a holy parson addressing his hearers
as his beloved fellow-creatures, have you, cook! And yet you
come here, and tell me such a dreadful lie as you did just
now, eh?" said Stubb. "Where do you expect to go to, cook?"
"Go to bed
berry soon," he mumbled, half-turning as he spoke.
"Avast! heave
to! I mean when you die, cook. It's an awful question.
Now what's your answer?"
"When dis old
brack man dies," said the negro slowly, changing his whole
air and demeanor, "he hisself won't go nowhere; but some
bressed angel will come and fetch him."
"Fetch him?
How? In a coach and four, as they fetched Elijah?
And fetch him where?"
"Up dere,"
said Fleece, holding his tongs straight over his head, and
keeping it there very solemnly.
"So, then, you
expect to go up into our main-top, do you, cook, when you
are dead? But don't you know the higher you climb, the
colder it gets? Main-top, eh?"
"Didn't say
dat t'all," said Fleece, again in the sulks.
"You said up
there, didn't you? and now look yourself, and see where your
tongs are pointing. But, perhaps you expect to get into
heaven by crawling through the lubber's hole, cook; but, no,
no, cook, you don't get there, except you go the regular
way, round by the rigging. It's a ticklish business, but
must be done, or else it's no go. But none of us are in
heaven yet. Drop your tongs, cook, and hear my orders. Do ye
hear? Hold your hat in one hand, and clap t'other a'top of
your heart, when I'm giving my orders, cook. What! that your
heart, there?— that's your gizzard! Aloft! aloft!—that's
it—now you have it. Hold it there now, and pay attention."
"All
'dention," said the old black, with both hands placed as
desired, vainly wriggling his grizzled head, as if to get
both ears in front at one and the same time.
"Well then,
cook, you see this whale-steak of yours was so very bad,
that I have put it out of sight as soon as possible; you see
that, don't you? Well, for the future, when you cook another
whale-steak for my private table here, the capstan, I'll
tell you what to do so as not to spoil it by overdoing. Hold
the steak in one hand, and show a live coal to it with the
other; that done, dish it; d'ye hear? And now to-morrow,
cook, when we are cutting in the fish, be sure you stand by
to get the tips of his fins; have them put in pickle. As for
the ends of the flukes, have them soused, cook. There, now
ye may go."
But Fleece had
hardly got three paces off, when he was recalled.
"Cook, give me
cutlets for supper to-morrow night in the mid-watch. D'ye
hear? away you sail then.—Halloa! stop! make a bow before
you go.— Avast heaving again! Whale-balls for
breakfast—don't forget."
"Wish, by gor!
whale eat him, 'stead of him eat whale. I'm bressed if he
ain't more of shark dan Massa Shark hisself," muttered the
old man, limping away; with which sage ejaculation he went
to his hammock.
CHAPTER 65
The Whale as a
Dish
That mortal man should feed
upon the creature that feeds his lamp, and, like Stubb, eat
him by his own light, as you may say; this seems so
outlandish a thing that one must needs go a little into the
history and philosophy of it.
It is upon
record, that three centuries ago the tongue of the Right
Whale was esteemed a great delicacy in France, and commanded
large prices there. Also, that in Henry VIIIth's time, a
certain cook of the court obtained a handsome reward for
inventing an admirable sauce to be eaten with barbacued
porpoises, which, you remember, are a species of whale.
Porpoises, indeed, are to this day considered fine eating.
The meat is made into balls about the size of billiard
balls, and being well seasoned and spiced might be taken for
turtle-balls or veal balls. The old monks of Dunfermline
were very fond of them. They had a great porpoise grant from
the crown.
The fact is,
that among his hunters at least, the whale would by all
hands be considered a noble dish, were there not so much of
him; but when you come to sit down before a meat-pie nearly
one hundred feet long, it takes away your appetite. Only the
most unprejudiced of men like Stubb, nowadays partake of
cooked whales; but the Esquimaux are not so fastidious. We
all know how they live upon whales, and have rare old
vintages of prime old train oil. Zogranda, one of their most
famous doctors, recommends strips of blubber for infants, as
being exceedingly juicy and nourishing. And this reminds me
that certain Englishmen, who long ago were accidentally left
in Greenland by a whaling vessel— that these men actually
lived for several months on the mouldy scraps of whales
which had been left ashore after trying out the blubber.
Among the Dutch whalemen these scraps are called "fritters";
which, indeed, they greatly resemble, being brown and crisp,
and smelling something like old Amsterdam housewives'
dough-nuts or oly-cooks, when fresh. They have such an
eatable look that the most self-denying stranger can hardly
keep his hands off.
But what
further depreciates the whale as a civilized dish, is his
exceeding richness. He is the great prize ox of the sea, too
fat to be delicately good. Look at his hump, which would be
as fine eating as the buffalo's (which is esteemed a rare
dish), were it not such a solid pyramid of fat. But the
spermaceti itself, how bland and creamy that is; like the
transparent, half jellied, white meat of a cocoanut in the
third month of its growth, yet far too rich to supply a
substitute for butter. Nevertheless, many whalemen have a
method of absorbing it into some other substance, and then
partaking of it. In the long try watches of the night it is
a common thing for the seamen to dip their ship-biscuit into
the huge oil-pots and let them fry there awhile. Many a good
supper have I thus made.
In the case of
a small Sperm Whale the brains are accounted a fine dish.
The casket of the skull is broken into with an axe, and the
two plump, whitish lobes being withdrawn (precisely
resembling two large puddings), they are then mixed with
flour, and cooked into a most delectable mess, in flavor
somewhat resembling calves' head, which is quite a dish
among some epicures; and every one knows that some young
bucks among the epicures, by continually dining upon calves'
brains, by and by get to have a little brains of their own,
so as to be able to tell a calf's head from their own heads;
which, indeed, requires uncommon discrimination. And that is
the reason why a young buck with an intelligent looking
calf's head before him, is somehow one of the saddest sights
you can see. The head looks a sort of reproachfully at him,
with an "Et tu Brute!" expression.
It is not,
perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively
unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with
abhorrence; that appears to result, in some way, from the
consideration before mentioned: i.e. that a man should eat a
newly murdered thing of the sea, and eat it too by its own
light. But no doubt the first man that ever murdered an ox
was regarded as a murderer; perhaps he was hung; and if he
had been put on his trial by oxen, he certainly would have
been; and he certainly deserved it if any murderer does. Go
to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of
live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds.
Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal's jaw?
Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more
tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary
in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more
tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of
judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand,
who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their
bloated livers in thy pate-de-foie-gras.
But Stubb, he
eats the whale by its own light, does he? and that is adding
insult to injury, is it? Look at your knife-handle, there,
my civilized and enlightened gourmand, dining off that roast
beef, what is that handle made of?—what but the bones of the
brother of the very ox you are eating? And what do you pick
your teeth with, after devouring that fat goose? With a
feather of the same fowl. And with what quill did the
Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty to
Ganders formally indite his circulars? It is only within the
last month or two that that society passed a resolution to
patronize nothing but steel pens.
CHAPTER 66
The Shark
Massacre
When in the Southern Fishery a
captured Sperm Whale, after long and weary toil, is brought
alongside late at night, it is not, as a general thing at
least, customary to proceed at once to the business of
cutting him in. For that business is an exceedingly
laborious one; is not very soon completed; and requires all
hands to set about it. Therefore, the common usage is to
take in all sail; lash the helm a'lee; and then send every
one below to his hammock till daylight, with the reservation
that, until that time, anchor-watches shall be kept; that
is, two and two for an hour, each couple, the crew in
rotation shall mount the deck to see that all goes well.
But sometimes,
especially upon the Line in the Pacific, this plan will not
answer at all; because such incalculable hosts of sharks
gather round the moored carcase, that were he left so for
six hours, say, on a stretch, little more than the skeleton
would be visible by morning. In most other parts of the
ocean, however, where these fish do not so largely abound,
their wondrous voracity can be at times considerably
diminished, by vigorously stirring them up with sharp
whaling-spades, a procedure notwithstanding, which, in some
instances, only seems to tickle them into still greater
activity. But it was not thus in the present case with the
Pequod's sharks; though, to be sure, any man unaccustomed to
such sights, to have looked over her side that night, would
have almost thought the whole round sea was one huge cheese,
and those sharks the maggots in it.
Nevertheless,
upon Stubb setting the anchor-watch after his supper was
concluded; and when, accordingly Queequeg and a forecastle
seaman came on deck, no small excitement was created among
the sharks; for immediately suspending the cutting stages
over the side, and lowering three lanterns, so that they
cast long gleams of light over the turbid sea, these two
mariners, darting their long whaling-spades,* kept up an
incessant murdering of the sharks, by striking the keen
steel deep into their skulls, seemingly their only vital
part. But in the foamy confusion of their mixed and
struggling hosts, the marksmen could not always hit their
mark; and this brought about new revelations of the
incredible ferocity of the foe. They viciously snapped, not
only at each other's disembowelments, but like flexible
bows, bent round, and bit their own; till those entrails
seemed swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to
be oppositely voided by the gaping wound. Nor was this all.
It was unsafe to meddle with the corpses and ghosts of these
creatures. A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality seemed
to lurk in their very joints and bones, after what might be
called the individual life had departed. Killed and hoisted
on deck for the sake of his skin, one of these sharks almost
took poor Queequeg's hand off, when he tried to shut down
the dead lid of his murderous jaw.
*The whaling-spade used for
cutting-in is made of the very best steel; is about the
bigness of a man's spread hand; and in general shape,
corresponds to the garden implement after which it is named;
only its sides are perfectly flat, and its upper end
considerably narrower than the lower. This weapon is always
kept as sharp as possible; and when being used is
occasionally honed, just like a razor. In its socket, a
stiff pole, from twenty to thirty feet long, is inserted for
a handle.
"Queequeg no care what god
made him shark," said the savage, agonizingly lifting his
hand up and down; "wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; but de
god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin."
CHAPTER 67
Cutting In
It was a Saturday night, and
such a Sabbath as followed! Ex officio professors of Sabbath
breaking are all whalemen. The ivory Pequod was turned into
what seemed a shamble; every sailor a butcher. You would
have thought we were offering up ten thousand red oxen to
the sea gods.
In the first
place, the enormous cutting tackles, among other ponderous
things comprising a cluster of blocks generally painted
green, and which no single man can possibly lift—this vast
bunch of grapes was swayed up to the main-top and firmly
lashed to the lower mast-head, the strongest point anywhere
above a ship's deck. The end of the hawser-like rope winding
through these intricacies, was then conducted to the
windlass, and the huge lower block of the tackles was swung
over the whale; to this block the great blubber hook,
weighing some one hundred pounds, was attached. And now
suspended in stages over the side, Starbuck and Stubb, the
mates, armed with their long spades, began cutting a hole in
the body for the insertion of the hook just above the
nearest of the two side-fins. This done, a broad,
semicircular line is cut round the hole, the hook is
inserted, and the main body of the crew striking up a wild
chorus, now commence heaving in one dense crowd at the
windlass. When instantly, the entire ship careens over on
her side; every bolt in her starts like the nailheads of an
old house in frosty weather; she trembles, quivers, and nods
her frighted mast-heads to the sky. More and more she leans
over to the whale, while every gasping heave of the windlass
is answered by a helping heave from the billows; till at
last, a swift, startling snap is heard; with a great swash
the ship rolls upwards and backwards from the whale, and the
triumphant tackle rises into sight dragging after it the
disengaged semicircular end of the first strip of blubber.
Now as the blubber envelopes the whale precisely as the rind
does an orange, so is it stripped off from the body
precisely as an orange is sometimes stripped by spiralizing
it. For the strain constantly kept up by the windlass
continually keeps the whale rolling over and over in the
water, and as the blubber in one strip uniformly peels off
along the line called the "scarf," simultaneously cut by the
spades of Starbuck and Stubb, the mates; and just as fast as
it is thus peeled off, and indeed by that very act itself,
it is all the time being hoisted higher and higher aloft
till its upper end grazes the main-top; the men at the
windlass then cease heaving, and for a moment or two the
prodigious blood-dripping mass sways to and fro as if let
down from the sky, and every one present must take good heed
to dodge it when it swings, else it may box his ears and
pitch him headlong overboard.
One of the
attending harpooneers now advances with a long, keen weapon
called a boarding-sword, and watching his chance he
dexterously slices out a considerable hole in the lower part
of the swaying mass. Into this hole, the end of the second
alternating great tackle is then hooked so as to retain a
hold upon the blubber, in order to prepare for what follows.
Whereupon, this accomplished swordsman, warning all hands to
stand off, once more makes a scientific dash at the mass,
and with a few sidelong, desperate, lunging, slicings,
severs it completely in twain; so that while the short lower
part is still fast, the long upper strip, called a
blanket-piece, swings clear, and is all ready for lowering.
The heavers forward now resume their song, and while the one
tackle is peeling and hoisting a second strip from the
whale, the other is slowly slackened away, and down goes the
first strip through the main hatchway right beneath, into an
unfurnished parlor called the blubber-room. Into this
twilight apartment sundry nimble hands keep coiling away the
long blanket-piece as if it were a great live mass of
plaited serpents. And thus the work proceeds; the two
tackles hoisting and lowering simultaneously; both whale and
windlass heaving, the heavers singing, the blubber-room
gentlemen coiling, the mates scarfing, the ship straining,
and all hands swearing occasionally, by way of assuaging the
general friction.
CHAPTER 68
The Blanket
I have given no small
attention to that not unvexed subject, the skin of the
whale. I have had controversies about it with experienced
whalemen afloat, and learned naturalists ashore. My original
opinion remains unchanged; but it is only an opinion.
The question
is, what and where is the skin of the whale. Already you
know what his blubber is. That blubber is something of the
consistence of firm, close-grained beef, but tougher, more
elastic and compact, and ranges from eight or ten to twelve
and fifteen inches in thickness.
Now, however
preposterous it may at first seem to talk of any creature's
skin as being of that sort of consistence and thickness, yet
in point of fact these are no arguments against such a
presumption; because you cannot raise any other dense
enveloping layer from the whale's body but that same
blubber; and the outermost enveloping layer of any animal,
if reasonably dense, what can that be but the skin? True,
from the unmarred dead body of the whale, you may scrape off
with your hand an infinitely thin, transparent substance,
somewhat resembling the thinnest shreds of isinglass, only
it is almost as flexible and soft as satin; that is,
previous to being dried, when it not only contracts and
thickens, but becomes rather hard and brittle. I have
several such dried bits, which I use for marks in my
whale-books. It is transparent, as I said before; and being
laid upon the printed page, I have sometimes pleased myself
with fancying it exerted a magnifying influence. At any
rate, it is pleasant to read about whales through their own
spectacles, as you may say. But what I am driving at here is
this. That same infinitely thin, isinglass substance, which,
I admit, invests the entire body of the whale, is not so
much to be regarded as the skin of the creature, as the skin
of the skin, so to speak; for it were simply ridiculous to
say, that the proper skin of the tremendous whale is thinner
and more tender than the skin of a new-born child. But no
more of this.
Assuming the
blubber to be the skin of the whale; then, when this skin,
as in the case of a very large Sperm Whale, will yield the
bulk of one hundred barrels of oil; and, when it is
considered that, in quantity, or rather weight, that oil, in
its expressed state, is only three fourths, and not the
entire substance of the coat; some idea may hence be had of
the enormousness of that animated mass, a mere part of whose
mere integument yields such a lake of liquid as that.
Reckoning ten barrels to the ton, you have ten tons for the
net weight of only three quarters of the stuff of the
whale's skin.
In life, the
visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among
the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all
over obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless
straight marks in thick array, something like those in the
finest Italian line engravings. But these marks do not seem
to be impressed upon the isinglass substance above
mentioned, but seem to be seen through it, as if they were
engraved upon the body itself. Nor is this all. In some
instances, to the quick, observant eye, those linear marks,
as in a veritable engraving, but afford the ground for far
other delineations. These are hieroglyphical; that is, if
you call those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids
hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to use in the
present connexion. By my retentive memory of the
hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale in particular, I was much
struck with a plate representing the old Indian characters
chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks
of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the
mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable. This allusion to
the Indian rocks reminds me of another thing. Besides all
the other phenomena which the exterior of the Sperm Whale
presents, he not seldom displays the back, and more
especially his flanks, effaced in great part of the regular
linear appearance, by reason of numerous rude scratches,
altogether of an irregular, random aspect. I should say that
those New England rocks on the seacoast, which Agassiz
imagines to bear the marks of violent scraping contact with
vast floating icebergs—I should say, that those rocks must
not a little resemble the Sperm Whale in this particular. It
also seems to me that such scratches in the whale are
probably made by hostile contact with other whales; for I
have most remarked them in the large, full-grown bulls of
the species.
A word or two
more concerning this matter of the skin or blubber of the
whale. It has already been said, that it is stript from him
in long pieces, called blanket-pieces. Like most sea-terms,
this one is very happy and significant. For the whale is
indeed wrapt up in his blubber as in a real blanket or
counterpane; or, still better, an Indian poncho slipt over
his head, and skirting his extremity. It is by reason of
this cosy blanketing of his body, that the whale is enabled
to keep himself comfortable in all weathers, in all seas,
times, and tides. What would become of a Greenland whale,
say, in those shuddering, icy seas of the North, if
unsupplied with his cosy surtout? True, other fish are found
exceedingly brisk in those Hyperborean waters; but these, be
it observed, are your cold-blooded, lungless fish, whose
very bellies are refrigerators; creatures, that warm
themselves under the lee of an iceberg, as a traveller in
winter would bask before an inn fire; whereas, like man, the
whale has lungs and warm blood. Freeze his blood, and he
dies. How wonderful is it then—except after explanation—that
this great monster, to whom corporeal warmth is as
indispensable as it is to man; how wonderful that he should
be found at home, immersed to his lips for life in those
Arctic waters! where, when seamen fall overboard, they are
sometimes found, months afterwards, perpendicularly frozen
into the hearts of fields of ice, as a fly is found glued in
amber. But more surprising is it to know, as has been proved
by experiment, that the blood of a Polar whale is warmer
than that of a Borneo negro in summer.
It does seem
to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong
individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and
the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire
and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm
among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of
it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the
Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the great
whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine
own.
But how easy
and how hopeless to teach these fine things! Of erections,
how few are domed like St. Peter's! of creatures, how few
vast as the whale!
CHAPTER 69
The Funeral
Haul in the chains! Let the
carcase go astern!
The vast
tackles have now done their duty. The peeled white body of
the beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre; though
changed in hue, it has not perceptibly lost anything in
bulk. It is still colossal. Slowly it floats more and more
away, the water round it torn and splashed by the insatiate
sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious flights of
screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting
poniards in the whale.The vast white headless phantom floats
further and further from the ship, and every rod that it so
floats, what seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods of
fowls, augment the murderous din. For hours and hours from
the almost stationary ship that hideous sight is seen.
Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair face
of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that
great mass of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite
perspectives.
There's a most
doleful and most mocking funeral! The sea-vultures all in
pious mourning, the air-sharks all punctiliously in black or
speckled. In life but few of them would have helped the
whale, I ween, if peradventure he had needed it; but upon
the banquet of his funeral they most piously do pounce. Oh,
horrible vulturism of earth! from which not the mightiest
whale is free.
Nor is this
the end. Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful ghost
survives and hovers over it to scare. Espied by some timid
man-of-war or blundering discovery-vessel from afar, when
the distance obscuring the swarming fowls, nevertheless
still shows the white mass floating in the sun, and the
white spray heaving high against it; straightway the whale's
unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in the
log—shoals, rocks, and breakers hereabouts: beware! And for
years afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping
over it as silly sheep leap over a vacuum, because their
leader originally leaped there when a stick was held.
There's your law of precedents; there's your utility of
traditions; there's the story of your obstinate survival of
old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even
hovering in the air! There's orthodoxy!
Thus, while in
the life the great whale's body may have been a real terror
to his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless
panic to a world.
Are you a
believer in ghosts, my friend? There are other ghosts than
the Cock-Lane one, and far deeper men than Doctor Johnson
who believe in them.
CHAPTER 70
The Sphynx
It should not have been
omitted that previous to completely stripping the body of
the leviathan, he was beheaded. Now, the beheading of the
Sperm Whale is a scientific anatomical feat, upon which
experienced whale surgeons very much pride themselves: and
not without reason.
Consider that
the whale has nothing that can properly be called a neck; on
the contrary, where his head and body seem to join, there,
in that very place, is the thickest part of him. Remember,
also, that the surgeon must operate from above, some eight
or ten feet intervening between him and his subject, and
that subject almost hidden in a discolored, rolling, and
oftentimes tumultuous and bursting sea. Bear in mind, too,
that under these untoward circumstances he has to cut many
feet deep in the flesh; and in that subterraneous manner,
without so much as getting one single peep into the
ever-contracting gash thus made, he must skilfully steer
clear of all adjacent, interdicted parts, and exactly divide
the spine at a critical point hard by its insertion into the
skull. Do you not marvel, then, at Stubb's boast, that he
demanded but ten minutes to behead a sperm whale?
When first
severed, the head is dropped astern and held there by a
cable till the body is stripped. That done, if it belong to
a small whale it is hoisted on deck to be deliberately
disposed of. But, with a full grown leviathan this is
impossible; for the sperm whale's head embraces nearly one
third of his entire bulk, and completely to suspend such a
burden as that, even by the immense tackles of a whaler,
this were as vain a thing as to attempt weighing a Dutch
barn in jewellers' scales.
The Pequod's
whale being decapitated and the body stripped, the head was
hoisted against the ship's side—about half way out of the
sea, so that it might yet in great part be buoyed up by its
native element. And there with the strained craft steeply
leaning over to it, by reason of the enormous downward drag
from the lower mast-head, and every yard-arm on that side
projecting like a crane over the waves; there, that
blood-dripping head hung to the Pequod's waist like the
giant Holofernes's from the girdle of Judith.
When this last
task was accomplished it was noon, and the seamen went below
to their dinner. Silence reigned over the before tumultuous
but now deserted deck. An intense copper calm, like a
universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its
noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea.
A short space
elapsed, and up into this noiselessness came Ahab alone from
his cabin. Taking a few turns on the quarter-deck, he paused
to gaze over the side, then slowly getting into the
main-chains he took Stubb's long spade still remaining there
after the whale's decapitation and striking it into the
lower part of the half-suspended mass, placed its other end
crutchwise under one arm, and so stood leaning over with
eyes attentively fixed on this head.
It was a black
and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so
intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx's in the desert.
"Speak, thou vast and venerable head," muttered Ahab,
"which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there
lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us
the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast
dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now
gleams, has moved amid this world's foundations. Where
unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and
anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth
is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there,
in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home.
Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by
many a sailor's side, where sleepless mothers would give
their lives to lay them down. Thou saw'st the locked lovers
when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they
sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when
heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw'st the murdered mate
when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he
fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his
murderers still sailed on unharmed— while swift lightnings
shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a
righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head!
thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an
infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!"
"Sail ho!"
cried a triumphant voice from the main-mast-head.
"Aye? Well,
now, that's cheering," cried Ahab, suddenly erecting
himself, while whole thunder-clouds swept aside from his
brow. "That lively cry upon this deadly calm might almost
convert a better man.—Where away?"
"Three points
on the starboard bow, sir, and bringing down her breeze to
us!
"Better and
better, man. Would now St. Paul would come along that way,
and to my breezelessness bring his breeze! O Nature, and O
soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked
analogies; not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter,
but has its cunning duplicate in mind."
CHAPTER 71
The Jeroboam's
Story
Hand in hand, ship and breeze
blew on; but the breeze came faster than the ship, and soon
the Pequod began to rock.
By and by,
through the glass the stranger's boats and manned mast-heads
proved her a whale-ship. But as she was so far to windward,
and shooting by, apparently making a passage to some other
ground, the Pequod could not hope to reach her. So the
signal was set to see what response would be made.
Here be it
said, that like the vessels of military marines, the ships
of the American Whale Fleet have each a private signal; all
which signals being collected in a book with the names of
the respective vessels attached, every captain is provided
with it. Thereby, the whale commanders are enabled to
recognise each other upon the ocean, even at considerable
distance, and with no small facility.
The Pequod's
signal was at last responded to by the stranger's setting
her own; which proved the ship to be the Jeroboam of
Nantucket. Squaring her yards, she bore down, ranged abeam
under the Pequod's lee, and lowered a boat; it soon drew
nigh; but, as the side-ladder was being rigged by Starbuck's
order to accommodate the visiting captain, the stranger in
question waved his hand from his boat's stern in token of
that proceeding being entirely unnecessary. It turned out
that the Jeroboam had a malignant epidemic on board, and
that Mayhew, her captain, was fearful of infecting the
Pequod's company. For, though himself and the boat's crew
remained untainted, and though his ship was half a
rifle-shot off, and an incorruptible sea and air rolling and
flowing between; yet conscientiously adhering to the timid
quarantine of the land, he peremptorily refused to come into
direct contact with the Pequod.
But this did
by no means prevent all communications. Preserving an
interval of some few yards between itself and the ship, the
Jeroboam's boat by the occasional use of its oars contrived
to keep parallel to the Pequod, as she heavily forged
through the sea (for by this time it blew very fresh), with
her main-topsail aback; though, indeed, at times by the
sudden onset of a large rolling wave, the boat would be
pushed some way ahead; but would be soon skilfully brought
to her proper bearings again. Subject to this, and other the
like interruptions now and then, a conversation was
sustained between the two parties; but at intervals not
without still another interruption of a very different sort.
Pulling an oar
in the Jeroboam's boat, was a man of a singular appearance,
even in that wild whaling life where individual notabilities
make up all totalities. He was a small, short, youngish man,
sprinkled all over his face with freckles, and wearing
redundant yellow hair. A long-skirted, cabalistically-cut
coat of a faded walnut tinge enveloped him; the overlapping
sleeves of which were rolled up on his wrists. A deep,
settled, fanatic delirium was in his eyes.
So soon as
this figure had been first descried, Stubb had exclaimed—
"That's he! that's he!—the long-togged scaramouch the
Town-Ho's company told us of!" Stubb here alluded to a
strange story told of the Jeroboam, and a certain man among
her crew, some time previous when the Pequod spoke the
Town-Ho. According to this account and what was subsequently
learned, it seemed that the scaramouch in question had
gained a wonderful ascendency over almost everybody in the
Jeroboam. His story was this:
He had been
originally nurtured among the crazy society of Neskyeuna
Shakers, where he had been a great prophet; in their
cracked, secret meetings having several times descended from
heaven by the way of a trapdoor, announcing the speedy
opening of the seventh vial, which he carried in his
vest-pocket; but, which, instead of containing gunpowder,
was supposed to be charged with laudanum. A strange,
apostolic whim having seized him, he had left Neskyeuna for
Nantucket, where, with that cunning peculiar to craziness,
he assumed a steady, common sense exterior, and offered
himself as a green-hand candidate for the Jeroboam's whaling
voyage. They engaged him; but straightway upon the ship's
getting out of sight of land, his insanity broke out in a
freshet. He announced himself as the archangel Gabriel, and
commanded the captain to jump overboard. He published his
manifesto, whereby he set himself forth as the deliverer of
the isles of the sea and vicar-general of all Oceanica. The
unflinching earnestness with which he declared these
things;—the dark, daring play of his sleepless, excited
imagination, and all the preternatural terrors of real
delirium, united to invest this Gabriel in the minds of the
majority of the ignorant crew, with an atmosphere of
sacredness. Moreover, they were afraid of him. As such a
man, however, was not of much practical use in the ship,
especially as he refused to work except when he pleased, the
incredulous captain would fain have been rid of him; but
apprised that that individual's intention was to land him in
the first convenient port, the archangel forthwith opened
all his seals and vials—devoting the ship and all hands to
unconditional perdition, in case this intention was carried
out. So strongly did he work upon his disciples among the
crew, that at last in a body they went to the captain and
told him if Gabriel was sent from the ship, not a man of
them would remain. He was therefore forced to relinquish his
plan. Nor would they permit Gabriel to be any way
maltreated, say or do what he would; so that it came to pass
that Gabriel had the complete freedom of the ship. The
consequence of all this was, that the archangel cared little
or nothing for the captain and mates; and since the epidemic
had broken out, he carried a higher hand than ever;
declaring that the plague, as he called it, was at his sole
command; nor should it be stayed but according to his good
pleasure. The sailors, mostly poor devils, cringed, and some
of them fawned before him; in obedience to his instructions,
sometimes rendering him personal homage, as to a god. Such
things may seem incredible; but, however wondrous, they are
true. Nor is the history of fanatics half so striking in
respect to the measureless self-deception of the fanatic
himself, as his measureless power of deceiving and
bedevilling so many others. But it is time to return to the
Pequod.
"I fear not
thy epidemic, man," said Ahab from the bulwarks, to Captain
Mayhew, who stood in the boat's stern; "come on board."
But now
Gabriel started to his feet.
"Think, think
of the fevers, yellow and bilious!
Beware of the horrible plague!"
"Gabriel!
Gabriel!" cried Captain Mayhew; "thou must either-" But that
instant a headlong wave shot the boat far ahead, and its
seethings drowned all speech.
"Hast thou
seen the White Whale?" demanded Ahab, when the boat drifted
back.
"Think, think
of thy whale-boat, stoven and sunk!
Beware of the horrible tail!"
"I tell thee
again, Gabriel, that-" But again the boat tore ahead as if
dragged by fiends. Nothing was said for some moments, while
a succession of riotous waves rolled by which by one of
those occasional caprices of the seas were tumbling, not
heaving it. Meantime, the hoisted sperm whale's head jogged
about very violently, and Gabriel was seen eyeing it with
rather more apprehensiveness than his archangel nature
seemed to warrant.
When this
interlude was over, Captain Mayhew began a dark story
concerning Moby Dick; not, however, without frequent
interruptions from Gabriel, whenever his name was mentioned,
and the crazy sea that seemed leagued with him.
It seemed that
the Jeroboam had not long left home, when upon speaking a
whale-ship, her people were reliably apprised of the
existence of Moby Dick, and the havoc he had made. Greedily
sucking in this intelligence, Gabriel solemnly warned the
captain against attacking the White Whale, in case the
monster should be seen; in his gibbering insanity,
pronouncing the White Whale to be no less a being than the
Shaker God incarnated; the Shakers receiving the Bible. But
when, some year or two afterwards, Moby Dick was fairly
sighted from the mast-heads, Macey, the chief mate, burned
with ardor to encounter him; and the captain himself being
not unwilling to let him have the opportunity, despite all
the archangel's denunciations and forewarnings, Macey
succeeded in persuading five men to man his boat. With them
he pushed off; and, after much weary pulling, and many
perilous, unsuccessful onsets, he at last succeeded in
getting one iron fast. Meantime, Gabriel, ascending to the
main-royal mast-head, was tossing one arm in frantic
gestures, and hurling forth prophecies of speedy doom to the
sacrilegious assailants of his divinity. Now, while Macey,
the mate, was standing up in his boat's bow, and with all
the reckless energy of his tribe was venting his wild
exclamations upon the whale, and essaying to get a fair
chance for his poised lance, lo! a broad white shadow rose
from the sea; by its quick, fanning motion, temporarily
taking the breath out of the bodies of the oarsmen. Next
instant, the luckless mate, so full of furious life, was
smitten bodily into the air, and making a long arc in his
descent, fell into the sea at the distance of about fifty
yards. Not a chip of the boat was harmed, nor a hair of any
oarsman's head; but the mate for ever sank.
It is well to
parenthesize here, that of the fatal accidents in the
Sperm-Whale Fishery, this kind is perhaps almost as frequent
as any. Sometimes, nothing is injured but the man who is
thus annihilated; oftener the boat's bow is knocked off, or
the thigh-board, on which the headsman stands, is torn from
its place and accompanies the body. But strangest of all is
the circumstance, that in more instances than one, when the
body has been recovered, not a single mark of violence is
discernible the man being stark dead.
The whole
calamity, with the falling form of Macey, was plainly
descried from the ship. Raising a piercing shriek—"The vial!
the vial!" Gabriel called off the terror-stricken crew from
the further hunting of the whale. This terrible event
clothed the archangel with added influence; because his
credulous disciples believed that he had specifically
fore-announced it, instead of only making a general
prophecy, which any one might have done, and so have chanced
to hit one of many marks in the wide margin allowed. He
became a nameless terror to the ship.
Mayhew having
concluded his narration, Ahab put such questions to him,
that the stranger captain could not forbear inquiring
whether he intended to hunt the White Whale, if opportunity
should offer. To which Ahab answered—"Aye." Straightway,
then, Gabriel once more started to his feet, glaring upon
the old man, and vehemently exclaimed, with downward pointed
finger—"Think, think of the blasphemer— dead, and down
there!—beware of the blasphemer's end!"
Ahab stolidly
turned aside; then said to Mayhew, "Captain, I have just
bethought me of my letter-bag; there is a letter for one of
thy officers, if I mistake not. Starbuck, look over the
bag."
Every
whale-ship takes out a goodly number of letters for various
ships, whose delivery to the persons to whom they may be
addressed, depends upon the mere chance of encountering them
in the four oceans. Thus, most letters never reach their
mark; and many are only received after attaining an age of
two or three years or more.
Soon Starbuck
returned with a letter in his hand. It was sorely tumbled,
damp, and covered with a dull, spotted, green mould, in
consequence of being kept in a dark locker of the cabin. Of
such a letter, Death himself might well have been the
post-boy.
"Can'st not
read it?" cried Ahab. "Give it me, man. Aye, aye, aye it's
but a dim scrawl;—what's this?" As he was studying it out,
Starbuck took a long cutting-spade pole, and with his knife
slightly split the end, to insert the letter there, and in
that way, hand it to the boat, without its coming any closer
to the ship.
Meantime, Ahab
holding the letter, muttered, "Mr. Har— yes, Mr. Harry—(a
woman's pinny hand,—the man's wife, I'll wager)—Aye—Mr.
Harry Macey, Ship Jeroboam; why it's Macey, and he's dead!"
"Poor fellow!
poor fellow! and from his wife," sighed Mayhew; "but let me
have it."
"Nay, keep it
thyself," cried Gabriel to Ahab; "thou art soon going that
way."
"Curses
throttle thee!" yelled Ahab. "Captain Mayhew, stand by now
to receive it"; and taking the fatal missive from Starbuck's
hands, he caught it in the slit of the pole, and reached it
over towards the boat. But as he did so, the oarsmen
expectantly desisted from rowing; the boat drifted a little
towards the ship's stern; so that, as if by magic, the
letter suddenly ranged along with Gabriel's eager hand. He
clutched it in an instant, seized the boat-knife, and
impaling the letter on it, sent it thus loaded back into the
ship. It fell at Ahab's feet. Then Gabriel shrieked out to
his comrades to give way with their oars, and in that manner
the mutinous boat rapidly shot away from the Pequod.
As, after this
interlude, the seamen resumed their work upon the jacket of
the whale, many strange things were hinted in reference to
this wild affair.
CHAPTER 72
The
Monkey-Rope
In the tumultuous business of
cutting-in and attending to a whale, there is much running
backwards and forwards among the crew. Now hands are wanted
here, and then again hands are wanted there. There is no
staying in any one place; for at one and the same time
everything has to be done everywhere. It is much the same
with him who endeavors the description of the scene. We must
now retrace our way a little. It was mentioned that upon
first breaking ground in the whale's back, the blubber-hook
was inserted into the original hole there cut by the spades
of the mates. But how did so clumsy and weighty a mass as
that same hook get fixed in that hole? It was inserted there
by my particular friend Queequeg, whose duty it was, as
harpooneer, to descend upon the monster's back for the
special purpose referred to. But in very many cases,
circumstances require that the harpooneer shall remain on
the whale till the whole tensing or stripping operation is
concluded. The whale, be it observed, lies almost entirely
submerged, excepting the immediate parts operated upon. So
down there, some ten feet below the level of the deck, the
poor harpooneer flounders about, half on the whale and half
in the water, as the vast mass revolves like a tread-mill
beneath him. On the occasion in question, Queequeg figured
in the Highland costume— a shirt and socks—in which to my
eyes, at least, he appeared to uncommon advantage; and no
one had a better chance to observe him, as will presently be
seen.
Being the
savage's bowsman, that is, the person who pulled the bow-oar
in his boat (the second one from forward), it was my
cheerful duty to attend upon him while taking that
hard-scrabble scramble upon the dead whale's back. You have
seen Italian organ-boys holding a dancing-ape by a long
cord. Just so, from the ship's steep side, did I hold
Queequeg down there in the sea, by what is technically
called in the fishery a monkey-rope, attached to a strong
strip of canvas belted round his waist.
It was a
humorously perilous business for both of us. For, before we
proceed further, it must be said that the monkey-rope was
fast at both ends; fast to Queequeg's broad canvas belt, and
fast to my narrow leather one. So that for better or for
worse, we two, for the time, were wedded; and should poor
Queequeg sink to rise no more, then both usage and honor
demanded, that instead of cutting the cord, it should drag
me down in his wake. So, then, an elongated Siamese ligature
united us. Queequeg was my own inseparable twin brother; nor
could I any way get rid of the dangerous liabilities which
the hempen bond entailed.
So strongly
and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then, that
while earnestly watching his motions, I seemed distinctly to
perceive that my own individuality was now merged in a joint
stock company of two; that my free will had received a
mortal wound; and that another's mistake or misfortune might
plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster and death.
Therefore, I saw that here was a sort of interregnum in
Providence; for its even-handed equity never could have so
gross an injustice. And yet still further pondering—while I
jerked him now and then from between the whale and ship,
which would threaten to jam him—still further pondering, I
say, I saw that this situation of mine was the precise
situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in most
cases, he, one way or other, has this Siamese connexion with
a plurality of other mortals. If your banker breaks, you
snap; if your apothecary by mistake sends you poison in your
pills, you die. True, you may say that, by exceeding
caution, you may possibly escape these and the multitudinous
other evil chances of life. But handle Queequeg's
monkey-rope heedfully as I would, sometimes he jerked it so,
that I came very near sliding overboard. Nor could I
possibly forget that, do what I would, I only had the
management of one end of it.*
*The monkey-rope is found in
all whalers; but it was only in the Pequod that the monkey
and his holder were ever tied together. This improvement
upon the original usage was introduced by no less a man than
Stubb, in order to afford to the imperilled harpooneer the
strongest possible guarantee for the faithfulness and
vigilance of his monkey-rope holder.
I have hinted that I would
often jerk poor Queequeg from between the whale and the
ship—where he would occasionally fall, from the incessant
rolling and swaying of both. But this was not the only
jamming jeopardy he was exposed to. Unappalled by the
massacre made upon them during the night, the sharks now
freshly and more keenly allured by the before pent blood
which began to flow from the carcass—the rabid creatures
swarmed round it like bees in a beehive.
And right in
among those sharks was Queequeg; who often pushed them aside
with his floundering feet. A thing altogether incredible
were it not that attracted by such prey as a dead whale, the
otherwise miscellaneously carnivorous shark will seldom
touch a man.
Nevertheless,
it may well be believed that since they have such a ravenous
finger in the pie, it is deemed but wise to look sharp to
them. Accordingly, besides the monkey-rope, with which I now
and then jerked the poor fellow from too close a vicinity to
the maw of what seemed a peculiarly ferocious shark—he was
provided with still another protection. Suspended over the
side in one of the stages, Tashtego and Daggoo continually
flourished over his head a couple of keen whale-spades,
wherewith they slaughtered as many sharks as they could
reach. This procedure of theirs, to be sure, was very
disinterested and benevolent of them. They meant Queequeg's
best happiness, I admit; but in their hasty zeal to befriend
him, and from the circumstance that both he and the sharks
were at times half hidden by the blood-muddled water, those
indiscreet spades of theirs would come nearer amputating a
leg than a tall. But poor Queequeg, I suppose, straining and
gasping there with that great iron hook—poor Queequeg, I
suppose, only prayed to his Yojo, and gave up his life into
the hands of his gods.
Well, well, my
dear comrade and twin-brother, thought I, as I drew in and
then slacked off the rope to every swell of the sea— what
matters it, after all? Are you not the precious image of
each and all of us men in this whaling world? That unsounded
ocean you gasp in, is Life; those sharks, your foes; those
spades, your friends; and what between sharks and spades you
are in a sad pickle and peril, poor lad.
But courage!
there is good cheer in store for you, Queequeg. For now, as
with blue lips and blood-shot eyes the exhausted savage at
last climbs up the chains and stands all dripping and
involuntarily trembling over the side; the steward advances,
and with a benevolent, consolatory glance hands him—what?
Some hot Cognac? No! hands him, ye gods! hands him a cup of
tepid ginger and water!
"Ginger? Do I
smell ginger?" suspiciously asked Stubb, coming near. "Yes,
this must be ginger," peering into the as yet untasted cup.
Then standing as if incredulous for a while, he calmly
walked towards the astonished steward slowly saying,
"Ginger? ginger? and will you have the goodness to tell me,
Mr. Dough-Boy, where lies the virtue of ginger? Ginger! is
ginger the sort of fuel you use, Dough-boy, to kindle a fire
in this shivering cannibal? Ginger!—what the devil is
ginger?— sea-coal? firewood?—lucifer
matches?—tinder?—gunpowder?—what the devil is ginger, I say,
that you offer this cup to our poor Queequeg here."
"There is some
sneaking Temperance Society movement about this business,"
he suddenly added, now approaching Starbuck, who had just
come from forward. "Will you look at that kannakin, sir;
smell of it, if you please." Then watching the mate's
countenance, he added, "The steward, Mr. Starbuck, had the
face to offer that calomel and jalap to Queequeg, there,
this instant off the whale. Is the steward an apothecary,
sir? and may I ask whether this is the sort of bitters by
which he blows back the life into a half-drowned man?"
"I trust not,"
said Starbuck, "it is poor stuff enough."
"Aye, aye,
steward," cried Stubb, "we'll teach you to drug it
harpooneer; none of your apothecary's medicine here; you
want to poison us, do ye? You have got out insurances on our
lives and want to give way with their oars, and pocket the
proceeds, do ye?"
"It was not
me," cried Dough-Boy, "it was Aunt Charity that brought the
ginger on board; and bade me never give the harpooneers any
spirits, but only this ginger-jub—so she called it."
"Ginger-jub!
you gingerly rascal! take that! and run along with ye to the
lockers, and get something better. I hope I do no wrong, Mr.
Starbuck. It is the captain's orders— grog for the
harpooneer on a whale."
"Enough,"
replied Starbuck, "only don't hit him again, but-"
"Oh, I never
hurt when I hit, except when I hit a whale or something of
that sort; and this fellow's a weazel. What were you about
saying, sir?"
"Only this: go
down with him, and get what thou wantest thyself."
When Stubb
reappeared, he came with a dark flask in one hand, and a
sort of tea-caddy in the other. The first contained strong
spirits, and was handed to Queequeg; the second was Aunt
Charity's gift, and that was freely given to the waves.
CHAPTER 73
Stubb and
Flask Kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk Over Him
It must be borne in mind that
all this time we have a Sperm Whale's prodigious head
hanging to the Pequod's side. But we must let it continue
hanging there a while till we can get a chance to attend to
it. For the present other matters press, and the best we can
do now for the head, is to pray heaven the tackles may hold.
Now, during
the past night and forenoon, the Pequod had gradually
drifted into a sea, which, by its occasional patches of
yellow brit, gave unusual tokens of the vicinity of Right
Whales, a species of the Leviathan that but few supposed to
be at this particular time lurking anywhere near. And though
all hands commonly disdained the capture of those inferior
creatures; and though the Pequod was not commissioned to
cruise for them at all, and though she had passed numbers of
them near the Crozetts without lowering a boat; yet now that
a Sperm Whale had been brought alongside and beheaded, to
the surprise of all, the announcement was made that a Right
Whale should be captured that day, if opportunity offered.
Nor was this
long wanting. Tall spouts were seen to leeward; and two
boats, Stubb's and Flask's, were detached in pursuit.
Pulling further and further away, they at last became almost
invisible to the men at the masthead. But suddenly in the
distance, they saw a great heap of tumultuous white water,
and soon after news came from aloft that one or both the
boats must be fast. An interval passed and the boats were in
plain sight, in the act of being dragged right towards the
ship by the towing whale. So close did the monster come to
the hull, that at first it seemed as if he meant it malice;
but suddenly going down in a maelstrom, within three rods of
the planks, he wholly disappeared from view, as if diving
under the keel. "Cut, cut!" was the cry from the ship to the
boats, which, for one instant, seemed on the point of being
brought with a deadly dash against the vessel's side. But
having plenty of line yet in the tubs, and the whale not
sounding very rapidly, they paid out abundance of rope, and
at the same time pulled with all their might so as to get
ahead of the ship. For a few minutes the struggle was
intensely critical; for while they still slacked out the
tightened line in one direction, and still plied their oars
in another, the contending strain threatened to take them
under. But it was only a few feet advance they sought to
gain. And they stuck to it till they did gain it; when
instantly, a swift tremor was felt running like lightning
along the keel, as the strained line, scraping beneath the
ship, suddenly rose to view under her bows, snapping and
quivering; and so flinging off its drippings, that the drops
fell like bits of broken glass on the water, while the whale
beyond also rose to sight, and once more the boats were free
to fly. But the fagged whale abated his speed, and blindly
altering his course, went round the stern of the ship towing
the two boats after him, so that they performed a complete
circuit.
Meantime, they
hauled more and more upon their lines, till close flanking
him on both sides, Stubb answered Flask with lance for
lance; and thus round and round the Pequod the battle went,
while the multitudes of sharks that had before swum round
the Sperm Whale's body, rushed to the fresh blood that was
spilled, thirstily drinking at every new gash, as the eager
Israelites did at the new bursting fountains that poured
from the smitten rock.
At last his
spout grew thick, and with a frightful roll and vomit, he
turned upon his back a corpse.
While the two
headsmen were engaged in making fast cords to his flukes,
and in other ways getting the mass in readiness for towing,
some conversation ensued between them.
"I wonder what
the old man wants with this lump of foul lard," said Stubb,
not without some disgust at the thought of having to do with
so ignoble a leviathan.
"Wants with
it?" said Flask, coiling some spare line in the boat's bow,
"did you never hear that the ship which but once has a Sperm
Whale's head hoisted on her starboard side, and at the same
time a Right Whale's on the larboard; did you never hear,
Stubb, that that ship can never afterwards capsize?"
"Why not?
"I don't know,
but I heard that gamboge ghost of a Fedallah saying so, and
he seems to know all about ships' charms. But I sometimes
think he'll charm the ship to no good at last. I don't half
like that chap, Stubb. Did you ever notice how that tusk of
his is a sort of carved into a snake's head, Stubb?"
"Sink him! I
never look at him at all; but if ever I get a chance of a
dark night, and he standing hard by the bulwarks, and no one
by; look down there, Flask"—pointing into the sea with a
peculiar motion of both hands—"Aye, will I! Flask, I take
that Fedallah to be the devil in disguise. Do you believe
that cock and bull story about his having been stowed away
on board ship? He's the devil, I say. The reason why you
don't see his tail, is because he tucks it up out of sight;
he carries it coiled away in his pocket, I guess. Blast him!
now that I think of it, he's always wanting oakum to stuff
into the toes of his boots."
"He sleeps in
his boots, don't he? He hasn't got any hammock; but I've
seen him lay of nights in a coil of rigging."
"No doubt, and
it's because of his cursed tail; he coils it down, do ye
see, in the eye of the rigging."
"What's the
old man have so much to do with him for?"
"Striking up a
swap or a bargain, I suppose."
"Bargain?—about what?"
"Why, do ye
see, the old man is hard bent after that White Whale, and
the devil there is trying to come round him, and get him to
swap away his silver watch, or his soul, or something of
that sort, and then he'll surrender Moby Dick."
"Pooh! Stubb,
you are skylarking; how can Fedallah do that?"
"I don't know,
Flask, but the devil is a curious chap, and a wicked one, I
tell ye. Why, they say as how he went a sauntering into the
old flag-ship once, switching his tail about devilish easy
and gentlemanlike, and inquiring if the old governor was at
home. Well, he was at home, and asked the devil what he
wanted. The devil, switching his hoofs, up and says, 'I want
John.' 'What for?' says the old governor. 'What business is
that of yours,' says the devil, getting mad,—'I want to use
him.' 'Take him,' says the governor— and by the Lord, Flask,
if the devil didn't give John the Asiatic cholera before he
got through with him, I'll eat this whale in one mouthful.
But look sharp—ain't you all ready there? Well, then, pull
ahead, and let's get the whale alongside."
"I think I
remember some such story as you were telling," said Flask,
when at last the two boats were slowly advancing with their
burden towards the ship, "but I can't remember where."
"Three
Spaniards? Adventures of those three bloody-minded
soldadoes?
Did ye read it there, Flask? I guess ye did?"
"No: never saw
such a book; heard of it, though. But now, tell me, Stubb,
do you suppose that that devil you was speaking of just now,
was the same you say is now on board the Pequod?"
"Am I the same
man that helped kill this whale? Doesn't the devil live for
ever; who ever heard that the devil was dead? Did you ever
see any parson a wearing mourning for the devil? And if the
devil has a latch-key to get into the admiral's cabin, don't
you suppose he can crawl into a porthole? Tell me that, Mr.
Flask?"
"How old do
you suppose Fedallah is, Stubb?"
"Do you see
that mainmast there?" pointing to the ship; "well, that's
the figure one; now take all the hoops in the Pequod's hold,
and string 'em along in a row with that mast, for oughts, do
you see; well, that wouldn't begin to be Fedallah's age. Nor
all the coopers in creation couldn't show hoops enough to
make oughts enough."
"But see here,
Stubb, I thought you a little boasted just now, that you
meant to give Fedallah a sea-toss, if you got a good chance.
Now, if he's so old as all those hoops of yours come to, and
if he is going to live for ever, what good will it do to
pitch him overboard— tell me that?
"Give him a
good ducking, anyhow."
"But he'd
crawl back."
"Duck him
again; and keep ducking him."
"Suppose he
should take it into his head to duck you, though— yes, and
drown you—what then?"
"I should like
to see him try it; I'd give him such a pair of black eyes
that he wouldn't dare to show his face in the admiral's
cabin again for a long while, let alone down in the orlop
there, where he lives, and hereabouts on the upper decks
where he sneaks so much. Damn the devil, Flask; do you
suppose I'm afraid of the devil? Who's afraid of him, except
the old governor who daresn't catch him and put him in
double-darbies, as he deserves, but lets him go about
kidnapping people; aye, and signed a bond with him, that all
the people the devil kidnapped, he'd roast for him? There's
a governor!"
"Do you
suppose Fedallah wants to kidnap Captain Ahab?"
"Do I suppose
it? You'll know it before long, Flask. But I am going now to
keep a sharp look-out on him; and if I see anything very
suspicious going on, I'll just take him by the nape of his
neck, and say—Look here, Beelzebub, you don't do it; and if
he makes any fuss, by the Lord I'll make a grab into his
pocket for his tail, take it to the capstan, and give him
such a wrenching and heaving, that his tail will come short
off at the stump—do you see; and then, I rather guess when
he finds himself docked in that queer fashion, he'll sneak
off without the poor satisfaction of feeling his tail
between his legs."
"And what will
you do with the tail, Stubb?"
"Do with it?
Sell it for an ox whip when we get home;—what else?"
"Now, do you
mean what you say, and have been saying all along, Stubb?"
"Mean or not
mean, here we are at the ship."
The boats were
here hailed, to tow the whale on the larboard side, where
fluke chains and other necessaries were already prepared for
securing him.
"Didn't I tell
you so?" said Flask; "yes, you'll soon see this right
whale's head hoisted up opposite that parmacety's."
In good time,
Flask's saying proved true. As before, the Pequod steeply
leaned over towards the sperm whale's head, now, by the
counterpoise of both heads, she regained her even keel;
though sorely strained, you may well believe. So, when on
one side you hoist in Locke's head, you go over that way;
but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant's and you come
back again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds for
ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! throw all these
thunder-heads overboard, and then you will float light and
right.
In disposing
of the body of a right whale, when brought alongside the
ship, the same preliminary proceedings commonly take place
as in the case of a sperm whale; only, in the latter
instance, the head is cut off whole, but in the former the
lips and tongue are separately removed and hoisted on deck,
with all the well known black bone attached to what is
called the crown-piece. But nothing like this, in the
present case, had been done. The carcases of both whales had
dropped astern; and the head-laden ship not a little
resembled a mule carrying a pair of overburdening panniers.
Meantime,
Fedallah was calmly eyeing the right whale's head, and ever
and anon glancing from the deep wrinkles there to the lines
in his own hand. And Ahab chanced so to stand, that the
Parsee occupied his shadow; while, if the Parsee's shadow
was there at all it seemed only to blend with, and lengthen
Ahab's. As the crew toiled on, Laplandish speculations were
bandied among them, concerning all these passing things.
CHAPTER 74
The Sperm
Whale's Head - Contrasted View
Here, now, are two great
whales, laying their heads together; let us join them, and
lay together our own.
Of the grand
order of folio leviathans, the Sperm Whale and the Right
Whale are by far the most noteworthy. They are the only
whales regularly hunted by man. To the Nantucketer, they
present the two extremes of all the known varieties of the
whale. As the external difference between them is mainly
observable in their heads; and as a head of each is this
moment hanging from the Pequod's side; and as we may freely
go from one to the other, by merely stepping across the
deck:—where, I should like to know, will you obtain a better
chance to study practical cetology than here?
In the first
place, you are struck by the general contrast between these
heads. Both are massive enough in all conscience; but, there
is a certain mathematical symmetry in the Sperm Whale's
which the Right Whale's sadly lacks. There is more character
in the Sperm Whale's head. As you behold it, you
involuntarily yield the immense superiority to him, in point
of pervading dignity. In the present instance, too, this
dignity is heightened by the pepper and salt color of his
head at the summit, giving token of advanced age and large
experience. In short, he is what the fishermen technically
call a "grey-headed whale."
Let us now
note what is least dissimilar in these heads— namely, the
two most important organs, the eye and the ear. Far back on
the side of the head, and low down, near the angle of either
whale's jaw, if you narrowly search, you will at last see a
lashless eye, which you would fancy to be a young colt's
eye; so out of all proportion is it to the magnitude of the
head.
Now, from this
peculiar sideway position of the whale's eyes, it is plain
that he can never see an object which is exactly ahead, no
more than he can one exactly astern. In a word, the position
of the whale's eyes corresponds to that of a man's ears; and
you may fancy, for yourself, how it would fare with you, did
you sideways survey objects through your ears. You would
find that you could only command some thirty degrees of
vision in advance of the straight side-line of sight; and
about thirty more behind it. If your bitterest foe were
walking straight towards you, with dagger uplifted in broad
day, you would not be able to see him, any more than if he
were stealing upon you from behind. In a word, you would
have two backs, so to speak; but, at the same time, also,
two fronts (side fronts): for what is it that makes the
front of a man— what, indeed, but his eyes?
Moreover,
while in most other animals that I can now think of, the
eyes are so planted as imperceptibly to blend their visual
power, so as to produce one picture and not two to the
brain; the peculiar position of the whale's eyes,
effectually divided as they are by many cubic feet of solid
head, which towers between them like a great mountain
separating two lakes in valleys; this, of course, must
wholly separate the impressions which each independent organ
imparts. The whale, therefore, must see one distinct picture
on this side, and another distinct picture on that side;
while all between must be profound darkness and nothingness
to him. Man may, in effect, be said to look out on the world
from a sentry-box with two joined sashes for his window. But
with the whale, these two sashes are separately inserted,
making two distinct windows, but sadly impairing the view.
This peculiarity of the whale's eyes is a thing always to be
borne in mind in the fishery; and to be remembered by the
reader in some subsequent scenes.
A curious and
most puzzling question might be started concerning this
visual matter as touching the Leviathan. But I must be
content with a hint. So long as a man's eyes are open in the
light, the act of seeing is involuntary; that is, he cannot
then help mechanically seeing whatever objects are before
him. Nevertheless, any one's experience will teach him, that
though he can take in an undiscriminating sweep of things at
one glance, it is quite impossible for him, attentively, and
completely, to examine any two things—however large or
however small— at one and the same instant of time; never
mind if they lie side by side and touch each other. But if
you now come to separate these two objects, and surround
each by a circle of profound darkness; then, in order to see
one of them, in such a manner as to bring your mind to bear
on it, the other will be utterly excluded from your
contemporary consciousness. How is it, then, with the whale?
True, both his eyes, in themselves, must simultaneously act;
but is his brain so much more comprehensive, combining, and
subtle than man's, that he can at the same moment of time
attentively examine two distinct prospects, one on one side
of him, and the other in an exactly opposite direction? If
he can, then is it as marvellous a thing in him, as if a man
were able simultaneously to go through the demonstrations of
two distinct problems in Euclid. Nor, strictly investigated,
is there any incongruity in this comparison.
It may be but
an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the
extraordinary vacillations of movement displayed by some
whales when beset by three or four boats; the timidity and
liability to queer frights, so common to such whales; I
think that all this indirectly proceeds from the helpless
perplexity of volition, in which their divided and
diametrically opposite powers of vision must involve them.
But the ear of
the whale is full as curious as the eye. If you are an
entire stranger to their race, you might hunt over these two
heads for hours, and never discover that organ. The ear has
no external leaf whatever; and into the hole itself you can
hardly insert a quill, so wondrously minute is it. It is
lodged a little behind the eye. With respect to their ears,
this important difference is to be observed between the
sperm whale and the right. While the ears of the former has
an external opening, that of the latter is entirely and
evenly covered over with a membrane, so as to be quite
imperceptible from without.
Is it not
curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the
world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through
an ear which is smaller than a hare's? But if his eyes were
broad as the lens of Herschel's great telescope; and his
ears capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would that make
him any longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Not at
all.—Why then do you try to "enlarge" your mind? Subtilize
it.
Let us now
with whatever levers and steam-engines we have at hand, cant
over the sperm whale's head, so, that it may lie bottom up;
then, ascending by a ladder to the summit, have a peep down
the mouth; and were it not that the body is now completely
separated from it, with a lantern we might descend into the
great Kentucky Mammoth Cave of his stomach. But let us hold
on here by this tooth, and look about us where we are. What
a really beautiful and chaste-looking mouth! from floor to
ceiling, lined, or rather papered with a glistening white
membrane, glossy as bridal satins.
But come out
now, and look at this portentous lower jaw, which seems like
the long narrow lid of an immense snuff-box, with the hinge
at one end, instead of one side. If you pry it up, so as to
get it overhead, and expose its rows of teeth, it seems a
terrific portcullis; and such, alas! it proves to many a
poor wight in the fishery, upon whom these spikes fall with
impaling force. But far more terrible is it to behold, when
fathoms down in the sea, you see some sulky whale, floating
there suspended, with his prodigious jaw, some fifteen feet
long, hanging straight down at right-angles with his body;
for all the world like a ship's jibboom. This whale is not
dead; he is only dispirited; out of sorts, perhaps;
hypochondriac; and so supine, that the hinges of his jaw
have relaxed, leaving him there in that ungainly sort of
plight, a reproach to all his tribe, who must, no doubt,
imprecate lock-jaws upon him.
In most cases
this lower jaw—being easily unhinged by a practised artist—
is disengaged and hoisted on deck for the purpose of
extracting the ivory teeth, and furnishing a supply of that
hard white whalebone with which the fishermen fashion all
sorts of curious articles including canes, umbrella-stocks,
and handles to riding-whips.
With a long,
weary hoist the jaw is dragged on board, as if it were an
anchor; and when the proper time comes— some few days after
the other work—Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego, being all
accomplished dentists, are set to drawing teeth. With a keen
cutting-spade, Queequeg lances the gums; then the jaw is
lashed down to ringbolts, and a tackle being rigged from
aloft, they drag out these teeth, as Michigan oxen drag
stumps of old oaks out of wild woodlands. There are
generally forty-two teeth in all; in old whales, much worn
down, but undecayed; nor filled after our artificial
fashion. The jaw is afterwards sawn into slabs, and piled
away like joists for building houses.
CHAPTER 75
The Right
Whale's Head - Contrasted View
Crossing the deck, let us now
have a good long look at the the
Right Whale's head.
As in general
shape the noble Sperm Whale's head may be compared to a
Roman war-chariot (especially in front, where it is so
broadly rounded); so, at a broad view, the Right Whale's
head bears a rather inelegant resemblance to a gigantic
galliot-toed shoe. Two hundred years ago an old Dutch
voyager likened its shape to that of a shoemaker's last. And
in this same last or shoe, that old woman of the nursery
tale with the swarming brood, might very comfortably be
lodged, she and all her progeny.
But as you
come nearer to this great head it begins to assume different
aspects, according to your point of view. If you stand on
its summit and look at these two f-shaped spout-holes, you
would take the whole head for an enormous bass viol, and
these spiracles, the apertures in its soundingboard. Then,
again, if you fix your eye upon this strange, crested,
comblike incrustation on the top of the mass—this green,
barnacled thing, which the Greenlanders call the "crown,"
and the Southern fishers the "bonnet" of the Right Whale;
fixing your eyes solely on this, you would take the head for
the trunk of some huge oak, with a bird's nest in its
crotch. At any rate, when you watch those live crabs that
nestle here on this bonnet, such an idea will be almost sure
to occur to you; unless, indeed, your fancy has been fixed
by the technical term "crown" also bestowed upon it; in
which case you will take great interest in thinking how this
mighty monster is actually a diademed king of the sea, whose
green crown has been put together for him in this marvellous
manner. But if this whale be a king, he is a very sulky
looking fellow to grace a diadem. Look at that hanging lower
lip! what a huge sulk and pout is there! a sulk and pout, by
carpenter's measurement, about twenty feet long and five
feet deep; a sulk and pout that will yield you some 500
gallons of oil and more.
A great pity,
now, that this unfortunate whale should be hare-lipped. The
fissure is about a foot across. Probably the mother during
an important interval was sailing down the Peruvian coast,
when earthquakes caused the beach to gape. Over this lip, as
over a slippery threshold, we now slide into the mouth. Upon
my word were I at Mackinaw, I should take this to be the
inside of an Indian wigwam. Good Lord! is this the road that
Jonah went? The roof is about twelve feet high, and runs to
a pretty sharp angle, as if there were a regular ridge-pole
there; while these ribbed, arched, hairy sides, present us
with those wondrous, half vertical, scimitar-shaped slats of
whalebone, say three hundred on a side, which depending from
the upper part of the head or crown bone, form those
Venetian blinds which have elsewhere been cursorily
mentioned. The edges of these bones are fringed with hairy
fibres, through which the Right Whale strains the water, and
in whose intricacies he retains the small fish, when
openmouthed he goes through the seas of brit in feeding
time. In the central blinds of bone, as they stand in their
natural order, there are certain curious marks, curves,
hollows, and ridges, whereby some whalemen calculate the
creature's age, as the age of an oak by its circular rings.
Though the certainty of this criterion is far from
demonstrable, yet it has the savor of analogical
probability. At any rate, if we yield to it, we must grant a
far greater age to the Right Whale than at first glance will
seem reasonable.
In old times,
there seem to have prevailed the most curious fancies
concerning these blinds. One voyager in Purchas calls them
the wondrous "whiskers" inside of the whale's mouth;*
another, "hogs' bristles"; a third old gentleman in Hackluyt
uses the following elegant language: "There are about two
hundred and fifty fins growing on each side of his upper
chop, which arch over his tongue on each side of his mouth."
*This reminds us that the
Right Whale really has a sort of whisker, or rather a
moustache, consisting of a few scattered white hairs on the
upper part of the outer end of the lower jaw. Sometimes
these tufts impart a rather brigandish expression to his
otherwise solemn countenance.
As every one knows, these same
"hogs' bristles," "fins," "whiskers," "blinds," or whatever
you please, furnish to the ladies their busks and other
stiffening contrivances. But in this particular, the demand
has long been on the decline. It was in Queen Anne's time
that the bone was in its glory, the farthingale being then
all the fashion. And as those ancient dames moved about
gaily, though in the jaws of the whale, as you may say; even
so, in a shower, with the like thoughtlessness, do we
nowadays fly under the same jaws for protection; the
umbrella being a tent spread over the same bone.
But now forget
all about blinds and whiskers for a moment, and, standing in
the Right Whale's mouth, look around you afresh. Seeing all
these colonnades of bone so methodically ranged about, would
you not think you were inside of the great Haarlem organ,
and gazing upon its thousand pipes? For a carpet to the
organ we have a rug of the softest Turkey—the tongue, which
is glued, as it were, to the floor of the mouth. It is very
fat and tender, and apt to tear in pieces in hoisting it on
deck. This particular tongue now before us; at a passing
glance I should say it was a six-barreler; that is, it will
yield you about that amount of oil.
Ere this, you
must have plainly seen the truth of what I started with—
that the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale have almost
entirely different heads. To sum up, then: in the Right
Whale's there is no great well of sperm; no ivory teeth at
all; no long, slender mandible of a lower jaw, like the
Sperm Whale's. Nor in the Sperm Whale are there any of those
blinds of bone; no huge lower lip; and scarcely anything of
a tongue. Again, the Right Whale has two external
spout-holes, the Sperm Whale only one.
Look your last
now, on these venerable hooded heads, while they yet lie
together; for one will soon sink, unrecorded, in the sea;
the other will not be very long in following.
Can you catch
the expression of the Sperm Whale's there? It is the same he
died with, only some of the longer wrinkles in the forehead
seem now faded away. I think his broad brow to be full of a
prairie-like placidity, born of a speculative indifference
as to death. But mark the other head's expression. See that
amazing lower lip, pressed by accident against the vessel's
side, so as firmly to embrace the jaw. Does not this whole
head seem to speak of an enormous practical resolution in
facing death? This Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic;
the Sperm Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up
Spinoza in his latter years.
CHAPTER 76
The
Battering-Ram
Ere quitting, for the nonce,
the Sperm Whale's head, I would have you, as a sensible
physiologist, simply—particularly remark its front aspect,
in all its compacted collectedness. I would have you
investigate it now with the sole view of forming to yourself
some unexaggerated, intelligent estimate of whatever
battering-ram power may be lodged there. Here is a vital
point; for you must either satisfactorily settle this matter
with yourself, or for ever remain an infidel as to one of
the most appalling, but not the less true events, perhaps
anywhere to be found in all recorded history.
You observe
that in the ordinary swimming position of the Sperm Whale,
the front of his head presents an almost wholly vertical
plane to the water; you observe that the lower part of that
front slopes considerably backwards, so as to furnish more
of a retreat for the long socket which receives the
boom-like lower jaw; you observe that the mouth is entirely
under the head, much in the same way, indeed, as though your
own mouth were entirely under your chin. Moreover you
observe that the whale has no external nose; and that what
nose he has—his spout hole— is on the top of his head; you
observe that his eyes and ears are at the sides of his head;
nearly one third of his entire length from the front.
Wherefore, you must now have perceived that the front of the
Sperm Whale's head is a dead, blind wall, without a single
organ or tender prominence of any sort whatsoever.
Furthermore, you are now to consider that only in the
extreme, lower, backward sloping part of the front of the
head, is there the slightest vestige of bone; and not till
you get near twenty feet from the forehead do you come to
the full cranial development. So that this whole enormous
boneless mass is as one wad. Finally, though, as will soon
be revealed, its contents partly comprise the most delicate
oil; yet, you are now to be apprised of the nature of the
substance which so impregnably invests all that apparent
effeminacy. In some previous place I have described to you
how the blubber wraps the body of the whale, as the rind
wraps an orange. Just so with the head; but with this
difference: about the head this envelope, though not so
thick is of a boneless toughness, inestimable by any man who
has not handled it. The severest pointed harpoon, the
sharpest lance darted by the strongest human arm, impotently
rebounds from it. It is as though the forehead of the Sperm
Whale were paved with horses' hoofs. I do not think that any
sensation lurks in it.
Bethink
yourself also of another thing. When two large, loaded
Indian-men chance to crowd and crush towards each other in
the docks, what do the sailors do? They do not suspend
between them, at the point of coming contact, any merely
hard substance, like iron or wood. No, they hold there a
large, round wad of tow and cork, enveloped in the thickest
and toughest of ox-hide. That bravely and uninjured takes
the jam which would have snapped all their oaken handspikes
and iron crow-bars. By itself this sufficiently illustrates
the obvious fact I drive at. But supplementary to this, it
has hypothetically occurred to me, that as ordinary fish
possess what is called a swimming bladder in them, capable,
at will, of distension or contraction; and as the Sperm
Whale, as far as I know, has no such provision in him;
considering, too, the otherwise inexplicable manner in which
he now depresses his head altogether beneath the surface,
and anon swims with it high elevated out of the water;
considering the unobstructed elasticity of its envelope;
considering the unique interior of his head; it has
hypothetically occurred to me, I say, that those mystical
lung-celled honeycombs there may possibly have some hitherto
unknown and unsuspected connexion with the outer air, so as
to be susceptible to atmospheric distension and contraction.
If this be so, fancy the irresistibleness of that might, to
which the most impalpable and destructive of all elements
contributes.
Now, mark.
Unerringly impelling this dead, impregnable, uninjurable
wall, and this most buoyant thing within; there swims behind
it all a mass of tremendous life, only to be adequately
estimated as piled wood is— by the cord; and all obedient to
one volition, as the smallest insect. So that when I shall
hereafter detail to you all the specialities and
concentrations of potency everywhere lurking in this
expansive monster; when I shall show you some of his more
inconsiderable braining feats; I trust you will have
renounced all ignorant incredulity, and be ready to abide by
this; that though the Sperm Whale stove a passage through
the Isthmus of Darien, and mixed the Atlantic with the
Pacific, you would not elevate one hair of your eye-brow.
For unless you own the whale, you are but a provincial and
sentimentalist in Truth. But clear Truth is a thing for
salamander giants only to encounter; how small the chances
for the provincials then? What befell the weakling youth
lifting the dread goddess's veil at Lais?
CHAPTER 77
The Great
Heidelburgh Tun
Now comes the Baling of the
Case. But to comprehend it aright, you must know something
of the curious internal structure of the thing operated
upon.
Regarding the
Sperm Whale's head as a solid oblong, you may, on an
inclined plane, sideways divide it into two quoins,* whereof
the lower is the bony structure, forming the cranium and
jaws, and the upper an unctuous mass wholly free from bones;
its broad forward end forming the expanded vertical apparent
forehead of the whale. At the middle of the forehead
horizontally subdivide this upper quoin, and then you have
two almost equal parts, which before were naturally divided
by an internal wall of a thick tendinous substance.
*Quoin is not a Euclidean
term. It belongs to the pure nautical mathematics. I know
not that it has been defined before. A quoin is a solid
which differs from a wedge in having its sharp end formed by
the steep inclination of one side, instead of the mutual
tapering of both sides.
The lower subdivided part,
called the junk, is one immense honeycomb of oil, formed by
the crossing and recrossing, into ten thousand infiltrated
cells, of tough elastic white fibres throughout its whole
extent. The upper part, known as the Case, may be regarded
as the great Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale. And as that
famous great tierce is mystically carved in front, so the
whale's vast plaited forehead forms innumerable strange
devices for the emblematical adornment of his wondrous tun.
Moreover, as that of Heidelburgh was always replenished with
the most excellent of the wines of the Rhenish valleys, so
the tun of the whale contains by far the most precious of
all his oily vintages; namely, the highly-prized spermaceti,
in its absolutely pure, limpid, and odoriferous state. Nor
is this precious substance found unalloyed in any other part
of the creature. Though in life it remains perfectly fluid,
yet, upon exposure to the air, after death, it soon begins
to concrete; sending forth beautiful crystalline shoots, as
when the first thin delicate ice is just forming in water. A
large whale's case generally yields about five hundred
gallons of sperm, though from unavoidable circumstances,
considerable of it is spilled, leaks, and dribbles away, or
is otherwise irrevocably lost in the ticklish business of
securing what you can.
I know not
with what fine and costly material the Heidelburgh Tun was
coated within, but in superlative richness that coating
could not possibly have compared with the silken
pearl-colored membrane, like the lining of a fine pelisse,
forming the inner surface of the Sperm Whale's case.
It will have
been seen that the Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale
embraces the entire length of the entire top of the head;
and since—as has been elsewhere set forth—the head embraces
one third of the whole length of the creature, then setting
that length down at eighty feet for a good sized whale, you
have more than twenty-six feet for the depth of the tun,
when it is lengthwise hoisted up and down against a ship's
side.
As in
decapitating the whale, the operator's instrument is brought
close to the spot where an entrance is subsequently forced
into the spermaceti magazine; he has, therefore, to be
uncommonly heedful, lest a careless, untimely stroke should
invade the sanctuary and wastingly let out its invaluable
contents. It is this decapitated end of the head, also,
which is at last elevated out of the water, and retained in
that position by the enormous cutting tackles, whose hempen
combinations, on one side, make quite a wilderness of ropes
in that quarter.
Thus much
being said, attend now, I pray you, to that marvellous and—
in this particular instance—almost fatal operation whereby
the Sperm Whale's great Heidelburgh Tun is tapped.
CHAPTER 78
Cistern and
Buckets
Nimble as a cat, Tashtego
mounts aloft; and without altering his erect posture, runs
straight out upon the overhanging mainyard-arm, to the part
where it exactly projects over the hoisted Tun. He has
carried with him a light tackle called a whip, consisting of
only two parts, travelling through a single-sheaved block.
Securing this block, so that it hangs down from the
yard-arm, he swings one end of the rope, till it is caught
and firmly held by a hand on the deck. Then, hand-over-hand,
down the other part, the Indian drops through the air, till
dexterously he lands on the summit of the head. There—still
high elevated above the rest of the company, to whom he
vivaciously cries— he seems some Turkish Muezzin calling the
good people to prayers from the top of a tower. A
short-handled sharp spade being sent up to him, he
diligently searches for the proper place to begin breaking
into the Tun. In this business he proceeds very heedfully,
like a treasure-hunter in some old house, sounding the walls
to find where the gold is masoned in. By the time this
cautious search is over, a stout ironbound bucket, precisely
like a well-bucket, has been attached to one end of the
whip; while the other end, being stretched across the deck,
is there held by two or three alert hands. These last now
hoist the bucket within grasp of the Indian, to whom another
person has reached up a very long pole. Inserting this pole
into the bucket, Tashtego downward guides the bucket into
the Tun, till it entirely disappears; then giving the word
to the seamen at the whip, up comes the bucket again, all
bubbling like a dairy-maid's pail of new milk. Carefully
lowered from its height, the full-freighted vessel is caught
by an appointed hand, and quickly emptied into a large tub.
Then remounting aloft, it again goes through the same round
until the deep cistern will yield no more. Towards the end,
Tashtego has to ram his long pole harder and harder, and
deeper and deeper into the Tun, until some twenty feet of
the pole have gone down.
Now, the
people of the Pequod had been baling some time in this way;
several tubs had been filled with the fragrant sperm; when
all at once a queer accident happened. Whether it was that
Tashtego, that wild Indian, was so heedless and reckless as
to let go for a moment his one-handed hold on the great
cabled tackles suspending the head; or whether the place
where he stood was so treacherous and oozy; or whether the
Evil One himself would have it to fall out so, without
stating his particular reasons; how it was exactly, there is
no telling now; but, on a sudden, as the eightieth or
ninetieth bucket came suckingly up—my God! poor Tashtego—
like the twin reciprocating bucket in a veritable well,
dropped head-foremost down into this great Tun of
Heidelburgh, and with a horrible oily gurgling, went clean
out of sight!
"Man
overboard!" cried Daggoo, who amid the general consternation
first came to his senses. "Swing the bucket this way!" and
putting one foot into it, so as the better to secure his
slippery hand-hold on the whip itself the hoisters ran him
high up to the top of the head, almost before Tashtego could
have reached its interior bottom. Meantime, there was a
terrible tumult. Looking over the side, they saw the before
lifeless head throbbing and heaving just below the surface
of the sea, as if that moment seized with some momentous
idea; whereas it was only the poor Indian unconsciously
revealing by those struggles the perilous depth to which he
had sunk.
At this
instant, while Daggoo, on the summit of the head, was
clearing the whip—which had somehow got foul of the great
cutting tackles— a sharp cracking noise was heard; and to
the unspeakable horror of all, one of the two enormous hooks
suspending the head tore out, and with a vast vibration the
enormous mass sideways swung, till the drunk ship reeled and
shook as if smitten by an iceberg. The one remaining hook,
upon which the entire strain now depended, seemed every
instant to be on the point of giving way; an event still
more likely from the violent motions of the head.
"Come down,
come down!" yelled the seamen to Daggoo, but with one hand
holding on to the heavy tackles, so that if the head should
drop, he would still remain suspended; the negro having
cleared the foul line, rammed down the bucket into the now
collapsed well, meaning that the buried harpooneer should
grasp it, and so be hoisted out.
"In heaven's
name, man," cried Stubb, "are you ramming home a cartridge
there?—Avast! How will that help him; jamming that
iron-bound bucket on top of his head? Avast, will ye!"
"Stand clear
of the tackle!" cried a voice like the bursting of a rocket.
Almost in the
same instant, with a thunder-boom, the enormous mass dropped
into the sea, like Niagara's Table-Rock into the whirlpool;
the suddenly relieved hull rolled away from it, to far down
her glittering copper; and all caught their breath, as half
swinging—now over the sailors' heads, and now over the
water—Daggoo, through a thick mist of spray, was dimly
beheld clinging to the pendulous tackles, while poor,
buried-alive Tashtego was sinking utterly down to the bottom
of the sea! But hardly had the blinding vapor cleared away,
when a naked figure with a boardingsword in his hand, was
for one swift moment seen hovering over the bulwarks. The
next, a loud splash announced that my brave Queequeg had
dived to the rescue. One packed rush was made to the side,
and every eye counted every ripple, as moment followed
moment, and no sign of either the sinker or the diver could
be seen. Some hands now jumped into a boat alongside, and
pushed a little off from the ship.
"Ha! ha!"
cried Daggoo, all at once, from his now quiet, swinging
perch overhead; and looking further off from the side, we
saw an arm thrust upright from the blue waves; a sight
strange to see, as an arm thrust forth from the grass over a
grave.
"Both!
both!—it is both!"-cried Daggoo again with a joyful shout;
and soon after, Queequeg was seen boldly striking out with
one hand, and with the other clutching the long hair of the
Indian. Drawn into the waiting boat, they were quickly
brought to the deck; but Tashtego was long in coming to, and
Queequeg did not look very brisk.
Now, how had
this noble rescue been accomplished? Why, diving after the
slowly descending head, Queequeg with his keen sword had
made side lunges near its bottom, so as to scuttle a large
hole there; then dropping his sword, had thrust his long arm
far inwards and upwards, and so hauled out our poor Tash by
the head. He averred, that upon first thrusting in for him,
a leg was presented; but well knowing that that was not as
it ought to be, and might occasion great trouble;—he had
thrust back the leg, and by a dexterous heave and toss, had
wrought a somerset upon the Indian; so that with the next
trial, he came forth in the good old way— head foremost. As
for the great head itself, that was doing as well as could
be expected.
And thus,
through the courage and great skill in obstetrics of
Queequeg, the deliverance, or rather, delivery of Tashtego,
was successfully accomplished, in the teeth, too, of the
most untoward and apparently hopeless impediments; which is
a lesson by no means to be forgotten. Midwifery should be
taught in the same course with fencing and boxing, riding
and rowing.
I know that
this queer adventure of the Gay-Header's will be sure to
seem incredible to some landsmen, though they themselves may
have either seen or heard of some one's falling into a
cistern ashore; an accident which not seldom happens, and
with much less reason too than the Indian's, considering the
exceeding slipperiness of the curb of the Sperm Whale's
well.
But,
peradventure, it may be sagaciously urged, how is this? We
thought the tissued, infiltrated head of the Sperm Whale,
was the lightest and most corky part about him; and yet thou
makest it sink in an element of a far greater specific
gravity than itself. We have thee there. Not at all, but I
have ye; for at the time poor Tash fell in, the case had
been nearly emptied of its lighter contents, leaving little
but the dense tendinous wall of the well—a double welded,
hammered substance, as I have before said, much heavier than
the sea water, and a lump of which sinks in it like lead
almost. But the tendency to rapid sinking in this substance
was in the present instance materially counteracted by the
other parts of the head remaining undetached from it, so
that it sank very slowly and deliberately indeed, affording
Queequeg a fair chance for performing his agile obstetrics
on the run, as you may say. Yes, it was a running delivery,
so it was.
Now, had
Tashtego perished in that head, it had been a very precious
perishing; smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of
fragrant spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in the
secret inner chamber and sanctum sanctorum of the whale.
Only one sweeter end can readily be recalled—the delicious
death of an Ohio honey-hunter, who seeking honey in the
crotch of a hollow tree, found such exceeding store of it,
that leaning too far over, it sucked him in, so that he died
embalmed. How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into
Plato's honey head, and sweetly perished there?
CHAPTER 79
The Prairie
To scan the lines of his face,
or feel the bumps on the head of this Leviathan; this is a
thing which no Physiognomist or Phrenologist has as yet
undertaken. Such an enterprise would seem almost as hopeful
as for Lavater to have scrutinized the wrinkles on the Rock
of Gibraltar, or for Gall to have mounted a ladder and
manipulated the Dome of the Pantheon. Still, in that famous
work of his, Lavater not only treats of the various faces of
men, but also attentively studies the faces of horses,
birds, serpents, and fish; and dwells in detail upon the
modifications of expression discernible therein. Nor have
Gall and his disciple Spurzheim failed to throw out some
hints touching the phrenological characteristics of other
beings than man. Therefore, though I am but ill qualified
for a pioneer, in the application of these two semi-sciences
to the whale, I will do my endeavor. I try all things; I
achieve what I can.
Physiognomically regarded, the Sperm Whale is an anomalous
creature. He has no proper nose. And since the nose is the
central and most conspicuous of the features; and since it
perhaps most modifies and finally controls their combined
expression; hence it would seem that its entire absence, as
an external appendage, must very largely affect the
countenance of the whale. For as in landscape gardening, a
spire, cupola, monument, or tower of some sort, is deemed
almost indispensable to the completion of the scene; so no
face can be physiognomically in keeping without the elevated
open-work belfry of the nose. Dash the nose from Phidias's
marble Jove, and what a sorry remainder! Nevertheless,
Leviathan is of so mighty a magnitude, all his proportions
are so stately, that the same deficiency which in the
sculptured Jove were hideous, in him is no blemish at all.
Nay, it is an added grandeur. A nose to the whale would have
been impertinent. As on your physiognomical voyage you sail
round his vast head in your jollyboat, your noble
conceptions of him are never insulted by the reflection that
he has a nose to be pulled. A pestilent conceit, which so
often will insist upon obtruding even when beholding the
mightiest royal beadle on his throne.
In some
particulars, perhaps the most imposing physiognomical view
to be had of the Sperm Whale, is that of the full front of
his head. This aspect is sublime.
In thought, a
fine human brow is like the East when troubled with the
morning. In the repose of the pasture, the curled brow of
the bull has a touch of the grand in it. Pushing heavy
cannon up mountain defiles, the elephant's brow is majestic.
Human or animal, the mystical brow is as that great golden
seal affixed by the German Emperors to their decrees. It
signifies—"God: done this day by my hand." But in most
creatures, nay in man himself, very often the brow is but a
mere strip of alpine land lying along the snow line. Few are
the foreheads which like Shakespeare's or Melancthon's rise
so high, and descend so low, that the eyes themselves seem
clear, eternal, tideless mountain lakes; and all above them
in the forehead's wrinkles, you seem to track the antlered
thoughts descending there to drink, as the Highland hunters
track the snow prints of the deer. But in the great Sperm
Whale, this high and mighty god-like dignity inherent in the
brow is so immensely amplified, that gazing on it, in that
full front view, you feel the Deity and the dread powers
more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living
nature. For you see no one point precisely; not one distinct
feature is revealed; no nose, eyes, ears, or mouth; no face;
he has none, proper; nothing but that one broad firmament of
a forehead, pleated with riddles; dumbly lowering with the
doom of boats, and ships, and men. Nor, in profile, does
this wondrous brow diminish; though that way viewed its
grandeur does not domineer upon you so. In profile, you
plainly perceive that horizontal, semi-crescentic depression
in the forehead's middle, which, in a man, is Lavater's mark
of genius.
But how?
Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written
a book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in
his doing nothing particular to prove it. It is moreover
declared in his pyramidical silence. And this reminds me
that had the great Sperm Whale been known to the young
Orient World, he would have been deified by their
child-magian thoughts. They deified the crocodile of the
Nile, because the crocodile is tongueless; and the Sperm
Whale has no tongue, or at least it is so exceedingly small,
as to be incapable of protrusion. If hereafter any highly
cultured, poetical nation shall lure back to their
birth-right, the merry May-day gods of old; and livingly
enthrone them again in the now egotistical sky; in the now
unhaunted hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove's high seat,
the great Sperm Whale shall lord it.
Champollion
deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is
no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man's and
every being's face. Physiognomy, like every other human
science, is but a passing fable. If then, Sir William Jones,
who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest
peasant's face in its profounder and more subtle meanings,
how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of
the Sperm Whale's brow? I but put that brow before you. Read
if it if you can.
CHAPTER 80
The Nut
If the Sperm Whale be
physiognomically a Sphinx, to the phrenologist his brain
seems that geometrical circle which it is impossible to
square.
In the
full-grown creature the skull will measure at least twenty
feet in length. Unhinge the lower jaw, and the side view of
this skull is as the side view of a moderately inclined
plane resting throughout on a level base. But in life—as we
have elsewhere seen—this inclined plane is angularly filled
up, and almost squared by the enormous superincumbent mass
of the junk and sperm. At the high end the skull forms a
crater to bed that part of the mass; while under the long
floor of this crater—in another cavity seldom exceeding ten
inches in length and as many in depth reposes the mere
handful of this monster's brain. The brain is at least
twenty feet from his apparent forehead in life; it is hidden
away behind its vast outworks, like the innermost citadel
within the amplified fortifications of Quebec. So like a
choice casket is it secreted in him, that I have known some
whalemen who peremptorily deny that the Sperm Whale has any
other brain than that palpable semblance of one formed by
the cubic-yards of his sperm magazine. Lying in strange
folds, courses, and convolutions, to their apprehensions, it
seems more in keeping with the idea of his general might to
regard that mystic part of him as the seat of his
intelligence.
It is plain,
then, that phrenologically the head of this Leviathan, in
the creature's living intact state, is an entire delusion.
As for his true brain, you can then see no indications of
it, nor feel any. The whale, like all things that are
mighty, wears a false brow to the common world.
If you unload
his skull of its spermy heaps and then take a rear view of
its rear end, which is the high end, you will be struck by
its resemblance to the human skull, beheld in the same
situation, and from the same point of view. Indeed, place
this reversed skull (scaled down to the human magnitude)
among a plate of men's skulls, and you would involuntarily
confound it with them; and remarking the depressions on one
part of its summit, in phrenological phrase you would
say—This man had no self-esteem, and no veneration. And by
those negations, considered along with the affirmative fact
of his prodigious bulk and power, you can best form to
yourself the truest, though not the most exhilarating
conception of what the most exalted potency is.
But if from
the comparative dimensions of the whale's proper brain, you
deem it incapable of being adequately charted, then I have
another idea for you. If you attentively regard almost any
quadruped's spine, you will be struck with the resemblance
of its vertebrae to a strung necklace of dwarfed skulls, all
bearing rudimental resemblance to the skull proper. It is a
German conceit, that the vertebrae are absolutely
undeveloped skulls. But the curious external resemblance, I
take it the Germans were not the first men to perceive. A
foreign friend once pointed it out to me, in the skeleton of
a foe he had slain, and with the vertebrae of which he was
inlaying, in a sort of basso-relieve, the beaked prow of his
canoe. Now, I consider that the phrenologists have omitted
an important thing in not pushing their investigations from
the cerebellum through the spinal canal. For I believe that
much of a man's character will be found betokened in his
backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull,
whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a
full and noble soul. I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm
audacious staff of that flag which I fling half out to the
world.
Apply this
spinal branch of phrenology to the Sperm Whale. His cranial
cavity is continuous with the first neck-vertebra; and in
that vertebra the bottom of the spinal canal will measure
ten inches across, being eight in height, and of a
triangular figure with the base downwards. As it passes
through the remaining vertebrae the canal tapers in size,
but for a considerable distance remains of large capacity.
Now, of course, this canal is filled with much the same
strangely fibrous substance—the spinal cord—as the brain;
and directly communicates with the brain. And what is still
more, for many feet after emerging from the brain's cavity,
the spinal cord remains of an undecreasing girth, almost
equal to that of the brain. Under all these circumstances,
would it be unreasonable to survey and map out the whale's
spine phrenologically? For, viewed in this light, the
wonderful comparative smallness of his brain proper is more
than compensated by the wonderful comparative magnitude of
his spinal cord.
But leaving
this hint to operate as it may with the phrenologists, I
would merely assume the spinal theory for a moment, in
reference to the Sperm Whale's hump. This august hump, if I
mistake not, rises over one of the larger vertebrae, and is,
therefore, in some sort, the outer convex mould of it. From
its relative situation then, I should call this high hump
the organ of firmness or indomitableness in the Sperm Whale.
And that the great monster is indomitable, you will yet have
reason to know.
