CHAPTER 81
The Pequod
Meets The Virgin
The predestinated day arrived,
and we duly met the ship
Jungfrau, Derick De Deer, master, of Bremen.
At one time
the greatest whaling people in the world, the Dutch and
Germans are now among the least; but here and there at very
wide intervals of latitude and longitude, you still
occasionally meet with their flag in the Pacific.
For some
reason, the Jungfrau seemed quite eager to pay her respects.
While yet some distance from the Pequod, she rounded to, and
dropping a boat, her captain was impelled towards us,
impatiently standing in the bows instead of the stern.
"What has he
in his hand there?" cried Starbuck, pointing to something
wavingly held by the German. "Impossible!—a lamp-feeder!"
"Not that,"
said Stubb, "no, no, it's a coffee-pot, Mr. Starbuck; he's
coming off to make us our coffee, is the Yarman; don't you
see that big tin can there alongside of him?—that's his
boiling water. Oh! he's all right, is the Yarman."
"Go along with
you," cried Flask, "it's a lamp-feeder and an oil-can.
He's out of oil, and has come a-begging."
However
curious it may seem for an oil-ship to be borrowing oil on
the whale-ground, and however much it may invertedly
contradict the old proverb about carrying coals to
Newcastle, yet sometimes such a thing really happens; and in
the present case Captain Derick De Deer did indubitably
conduct a lamp-feeder as Flask did declare.
As he mounted
the deck, Ahab abruptly accosted him, without at all heeding
what he had in his hand; but in his broken lingo, the German
soon evinced his complete ignorance of the White Whale;
immediately turning the conversation to his lamp-feeder and
oil can, with some remarks touching his having to turn into
his hammock at night in profound darkness—his last drop of
Bremen oil being gone, and not a single flying-fish yet
captured to supply the deficiency; concluding by hinting
that his ship was indeed what in the Fishery is technically
called a clean one (that is, an empty one), well deserving
the name of Jungfrau or the Virgin.
His
necessities supplied, Derick departed; but he had not gained
his ship's side, when whales were almost simultaneously
raised from the mast-heads of both vessels; and so eager for
the chase was Derick, that without pausing to put his
oil-can and lamp-feeder aboard, he slewed round his boat and
made after the leviathan lamp-feeders.
Now, the game
having risen to leeward, he and the other three German boats
that soon followed him, had considerably the start of the
Pequod's keels. There were eight whales, an average pod.
Aware of their danger, they were going all abreast with
great speed straight before the wind, rubbing their flanks
as closely as so many spans of horses in harness. They left
a great, wide wake, as though continually unrolling a great
wide parchment upon the sea.
Full in this
rapid wake, and many fathoms in the rear, swam a huge,
humped old bull, which by his comparatively slow progress,
as well as by the unusual yellowish incrustations
over-growing him, seemed afflicted with the jaundice, or
some other infirmity. Whether this whale belonged to the pod
in advance, seemed questionable; for it is not customary for
such venerable leviathans to be at all social. Nevertheless,
he stuck to their wake, though indeed their back water must
have retarded him, because the white-bone or swell at his
broad muzzle was a dashed one, like the swell formed when
two hostile currents meet. His spout was short, slow, and
laborious; coming forth with a choking sort of gush, and
spending itself in torn shreds, followed by strange
subterranean commotions in him, which seemed to have egress
at his other buried extremity, causing the waters behind him
to upbubble.
"Who's got
some paregoric?" said Stubb, "he has the stomach-ache,
I'm afraid. Lord, think of having half an acre of
stomach-ache!
Adverse winds are holding mad Christmas in him, boys.
It's the first foul wind I ever knew to blow from astern;
but look,
did ever whale yaw so before? it must be, he's lost his
tiller."
As an
overladen Indiaman bearing down the Hindostan coast with a
deck load of frightened horses, careens, buries, rolls, and
wallows on her way; so did this old whale heave his aged
bulk, and now and then partly turning over on his cumbrous
rib-ends, expose the cause of his devious wake in the
unnatural stump of his starboard fin. Whether he had lost
that fin in battle, or had been born without it, it were
hard to say.
"Only wait a
bit, old chap, and I'll give ye a sling for that wounded
arm," cried cruel Flask, pointing to the whale-line near
him.
"Mind he don't
sling thee with it," cried Starbuck. "Give way, or the
German will have him."
With one
intent all the combined rival boats were pointed for this
one fish, because not only was he the largest, and therefore
the most valuable whale, but he was nearest to them, and the
other whales were going with such great velocity, moreover,
as almost to defy pursuit for the time. At this juncture,
the Pequod's keels had shot by the three German boats last
lowered; but from the great start he had had, Derick's boat
still led the chase, though every moment neared by his
foreign rivals. The only thing they feared, was, that from
being already so nigh to his mark, he would be enabled to
dart his iron before they could completely overtake and pass
him. As for Derick, he seemed quite confident that this
would be the case, and occasionally with a deriding gesture
shook his lamp-feeder at the other boats.
"The
ungracious and ungrateful dog!" cried Starbuck; "he mocks
and dares me with the very poor-box I filled for him not
five minutes ago!"— Then in his old intense whisper—"give
way, greyhounds! Dog to it!"
"I tell ye
what it is, men"—cried Stubb to his crew—It's against my
religion to get mad; but I'd like to eat that villainous
Yarman—Pull— won't ye? Are ye going to let that rascal beat
ye? Do ye love brandy? A hogshead of brandy, then, to the
best man. Come, why don't some of ye burst a blood-vessel?
Who's that been dropping an anchor overboard— we don't budge
an inch—we're becalmed. Halloo, here's grass growing in the
boat's bottom—and by the Lord, the mast there's budding.
This won't do, boys. Look at that Yarman! The short and long
of it is, men, will ye spit fire or not?"
"Oh! see the
suds he makes!" cried Flask, dancing up and down—"What a
hump—Oh, do pile on the beef—lays like a log! Oh! my lads,
do spring—slap-jacks and quahogs for supper, you know, my
lads— baked clams and muffins—oh, do, do, spring,—he's a
hundred barreler— don't lose him now—don't oh, don't!—see
that Yarman—Oh, won't ye pull for your duff, my lads—such a
sog! such a sogger! Don't ye love sperm? There goes three
thousand dollars, men!—a bank!—a whole bank! The bank of
England!—Oh, do, do, do!—What's that Yarman about now?"
At this moment
Derick was in the act of pitching his lamp-feeder at the
advancing boats, and also his oil-can; perhaps with the
double view of retarding his rivals' way, and at the same
time economically accelerating his own by the momentary
impetus of the backward toss.
"The
unmannerly Dutch dogger!" cried Stubb. "Pull now, men, like
fifty thousand line-of-battle-ship loads of red-haired
devils. What d'ye say, Tashtego; are you the man to snap
your spine in two-and-twenty pieces for the honor of old
Gayhead? What d'ye say?"
"I say, pull
like god-dam,"—cried the Indian.
Fiercely, but
evenly incited by the taunts of the German, the Pequod's
three boats now began ranging almost abreast; and, so
disposed, momentarily neared him. In that fine, loose,
chivalrous attitude of the headsman when drawing near to his
prey, the three mates stood up proudly, occasionally backing
the after oarsman with an exhilarating cry of, "There she
slides, now! Hurrah for the white-ash breeze! Down with the
Yarman! Sail over him!"
But so decided
an original start had Derick had, that spite of all their
gallantry, he would have proved the victor in this race, had
not a righteous judgment descended upon him in a crab which
caught the blade of his midship oarsman. While this clumsy
lubber was striving to free his white-ash, and while, in
consequence, Derick's boat was nigh to capsizing, and he
thundering away at his men in a mighty rage;—that was a good
time for Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask. With a shout, they took
a mortal start forwards, and slantingly ranged up on the
German's quarter. An instant more, and all four boats were
diagonically in the whale's immediate wake, while stretching
from them, on both sides, was the foaming swell that he
made.
It was a
terrific, most pitiable, and maddening sight. The whale was
now going head out, and sending his spout before him in a
continual tormented jet; while his one poor fin beat his
side in an agony of fright. Now to this hand, now to that,
he yawed in his faltering flight, and still at every billow
that he broke, he spasmodically sank in the sea, or sideways
rolled towards the sky his one beating fin. So have I seen a
bird with clipped wing, making affrighted broken circles in
the air, vainly striving to escape the piratical hawks. But
the bird has a voice, and with plaintive cries will make
known her fear; but the fear of this vast dumb brute of the
sea, was chained up and enchanted in him; he had no voice,
save that choking respiration through his spiracle, and this
made the sight of him unspeakably pitiable; while still, in
his amazing bulk, portcullis jaw, and omnipotent tail, there
was enough to appal the stoutest man who so pitied.
Seeing now
that but a very few moments more would give the Pequod's
boats the advantage, and rather than be thus foiled of his
game, Derick chose to hazard what to him must have seemed a
most unusually long dart, ere the last chance would for ever
escape.
But no sooner
did his harpooneer stand up for the stroke, than all three
tigers—Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo—instinctively sprang to
their feet, and standing in a diagonal row, simultaneously
pointed their barbs; and darted over the head of the German
harpooneer, their three Nantucket irons entered the whale.
Blinding vapors of foam and white-fire! The three boats, in
the first fury of the whale's headlong rush, bumped the
German's aside with such force, that both Derick and his
baffled harpooneer were spilled out, and sailed over by the
three flying keels.
"Don't be
afraid, my butter-boxes," cried Stubb, casting a passing
glance upon them as he shot by; "ye'll be picked up
presently— all right—I saw some sharks astern—St. Bernard's
dogs, you know— relieve distressed travellers. Hurrah! this
is the way to sail now. Every keel a sunbeam! Hurrah!—Here
we go like three tin kettles at the tail of a mad cougar!
This puts me in mind of fastening to an elephant in a
tilbury on a plain— makes the wheelspokes fly, boys, when
you fasten to him that way; and there's danger of being
pitched out too, when you strike a hill. Hurrah! this is the
way a fellow feels when he's going to Davy Jones—all a rush
down an endless inclined plane! Hurrah! this whale carries
the everlasting mail!"
But the
monster's run was a brief one. Giving a sudden gasp, he
tumultuously sounded. With a grating rush, the three lines
flew round the loggerheads with such a force as to gouge
deep grooves in them; while so fearful were the harpooneers
that this rapid sounding would soon exhaust the lines, that
using all their dexterous might, they caught repeated
smoking turns with the rope to hold on; till at last—owing
to the perpendicular strain from the lead-lined chocks of
the boats, whence the three ropes went straight down into
the blue—the gunwales of the bows were almost even with the
water, while the three sterns tilted high in the air. And
the whale soon ceasing to sound, for some time they remained
in that attitude, fearful of expending more line, though the
position was a little ticklish. But though boats have been
taken down and lost in this way, yet it is this "holding
on," as it is called; this hooking up by the sharp barbs of
his live flesh from the back; this it is that often torments
the Leviathan into soon rising again to meet the sharp lance
of his foes. Yet not to speak of the peril of the thing, it
is to be doubted whether this course is always the best; for
it is but reasonable to presume, that the longer the
stricken whale stays under water, the more he is exhausted.
Because, owing to the enormous surface of him— in a full
grown sperm whale something less than 2000 square feet— the
pressure of the water is immense. We all know what an
astonishing atmospheric weight we ourselves stand up under;
even here, above-ground, in the air; how vast, then, the
burden of a whale, bearing on his back a column of two
hundred fathoms of ocean! It must at least equal the weight
of fifty atmospheres. One whaleman has estimated it at the
weight of twenty line-of-battle ships, with all their guns,
and stores, and men on board.
As the three
boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down into
its eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan or cry of
any sort, nay, not so much as a ripple or a bubble came up
from its depths; what landsman would have thought, that
beneath all that silence and placidity, the utmost monster
of the seas was writhing and wrenching in agony! Not eight
inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows. Seems
it credible that by three such thin threads the great
Leviathan was suspended like the big weight to an eight day
clock. Suspended? and to what? To three bits of board. Is
this the creature of whom it was once so triumphantly
said—"Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his
head with fish-spears? The sword of him that layeth at him
cannot hold, the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon: he
esteemeth iron as straw; the arrow cannot make him flee;
darts are counted as stubble; he laugheth at the shaking of
a spear!" This the creature? this he? Oh! that unfulfilments
should follow the prophets. For with the strength of a
thousand thighs in his tail, Leviathan had run his head
under the mountains of the sea, to hide him from the
Pequod's fishspears!
In that
sloping afternoon sunlight, the shadows that the three boats
sent down beneath the surface, must have been long enough
and broad enough to shade half Xerxes' army. Who can tell
how appalling to the wounded whale must have been such huge
phantoms flitting over his head!
"Stand by,
men; he stirs," cried Starbuck, as the three lines suddenly
vibrated in the water, distinctly conducting upwards to
them, as by magnetic wires, the life and death throbs of the
whale, so that every oarsman felt them in his seat. The next
moment, relieved in a great part from the downward strain at
the bows, the boats gave a sudden bounce upwards, as a small
icefield will, when a dense herd of white bears are scared
from it into the sea.
"Haul in! Haul
in!" cried Starbuck again; "he's rising."
The lines, of
which, hardly an instant before, not one hand's breadth
could have been gained, were now in long quick coils flung
back all dripping into the boats, and soon the whale broke
water within two ship's length of the hunters.
His motions
plainly denoted his extreme exhaustion. In most land animals
there are certain valves or flood-gates in many of their
veins, whereby when wounded, the blood is in some degree at
least instantly shut off in certain directions. Not so with
the whale; one of whose peculiarities it is, to have an
entire non-valvular structure of the blood-vessels, so that
when pierced even by so small a point as a harpoon, a deadly
drain is at once begun upon his whole arterial system; and
when this is heightened by the extraordinary pressure of
water at a great distance below the surface, his life may be
said to pour from him in incessant streams. Yet so vast is
the quantity of blood in him, and so distant and numerous
its interior fountains, that he will keep thus bleeding and
bleeding for a considerable period; even as in a drought a
river will flow, whose source is in the well-springs of
far-off and indiscernible hills. Even now, when the boats
pulled upon this whale, and perilously drew over his swaying
flukes, and the lances were darted into him, they were
followed by steady jets from the new made wound, which kept
continually playing, while the natural spout-hole in his
head was only at intervals, however rapid, sending its
affrighted moisture into the air. From this last vent no
blood yet came, because no vital part of him had thus far
been struck. His life, as they significantly call it, was
untouched.
As the boats
now more closely surrounded him, the whole upper part of his
form, with much of it that is ordinarily submerged, was
plainly revealed. His eyes, or rather the places where his
eyes had been, were beheld. As strange misgrown masses
gather in the knot-holes of the noblest oaks when prostrate,
so from the points which the whale's eyes had once occupied,
now protruded blind bulbs, horribly pitiable to see. But
pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm,
and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered,
in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of
men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach
unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all. Still rolling
in his blood, at last he partially disclosed a strangely
discolored bunch or protuberance, the size of a bushel, low
down on the flank.
"A nice spot,"
cried Flask; "just let me prick him there once."
"Avast!" cried
Starbuck, "there's no need of that!"
But humane
Starbuck was too late. At the instant of the dart an
ulcerous jet shot from this cruel wound, and goaded by it
into more than sufferable anguish, the whale now spouting
thick blood, with swift fury blindly darted at the craft,
bespattering them and their glorying crews all over with
showers of gore, capsizing Flask's boat and marring the
bows. It was his death stroke. For, by this time, so spent
was he by loss of blood, that he helplessly rolled away from
the wreck he had made; lay panting on his side, impotently
flapped with his stumped fin, then over and over slowly
revolved like a waning world; turned up the white secrets of
his belly; lay like a log, and died. It was most piteous,
that last expiring spout. As when by unseen hands the water
is gradually drawn off from some mighty fountain, and with
half-stifled melancholy gurglings the spray-column lowers
and lowers to the ground— so the last long dying spout of
the whale.
Soon, while
the crews were awaiting the arrival of the ship, the body
showed symptoms of sinking with all its treasures unrifled.
Immediately, by Starbuck's orders, lines were secured to it
at different points, so that ere long every boat was a buoy;
the sunken whale being suspended a few inches beneath them
by the cords. By very heedful management, when the ship drew
nigh, the whale was transferred to her side, and was
strongly secured there by the stiffest fluke-chains, for it
was plain that unless artificially upheld, the body would at
once sink to the bottom.
It so chanced
that almost upon first cutting into him with the spade, the
entire length of a corroded harpoon was found imbedded in
his flesh, on the lower part of the bunch before described.
But as the stumps of harpoons are frequently found in the
dead bodies of captured whales, with the flesh perfectly
healed around them, and no prominence of any kind to denote
their place; therefore, there must needs have been some
other unknown reason in the present case fully to account
for the ulceration alluded to. But still more curious was
the fact of a lance-head of stone being found in him, not
far from the buried iron, the flesh perfectly firm about it.
Who had darted that stone lance? And when? It might have
been darted by some Nor' West Indian long before America was
discovered.
What other
marvels might have been rummaged out of this monstrous
cabinet there is no telling. But a sudden stop was put to
further discoveries, by the ship's being unprecedentedly
dragged over sideways to the sea, owing to the body's
immensely increasing tendency to sink. However, Starbuck,
who had the ordering of affairs, hung on to it to the last;
hung on to it so resolutely, indeed, that when at length the
ship would have been capsized, if still persisting in
locking arms with the body; then, when the command was given
to break clear from it, such was the immovable strain upon
the timber-heads to which the fluke-chains and cables were
fastened, that it was impossible to cast them off. Meantime
everything in the Pequod was aslant. To cross to the other
side of the deck was like walking up the steep gabled roof
of a house. The ship groaned and gasped. Many of the ivory
inlayings of her bulwarks and cabins were started from their
places, by the unnatural dislocation. In vain handspikes and
crows were brought to bear upon the immovable fluke-chains,
to pry them adrift from the timberheads; and so low had the
whale now settled that the submerged ends could not be at
all approached, while every moment whole tons of ponderosity
seemed added to the sinking bulk, and the ship seemed on the
point of going over.
"Hold on, hold
on, won't ye?" cried Stubb to the body, "don't be in such a
devil of a hurry to sink! By thunder, men, we must do
something or go for it. No use prying there; avast, I say
with your handspikes, and run one of ye for a prayer book
and a pen-knife, and cut the big chains."
"Knife? Aye,
aye," cried Queequeg, and seizing the carpenter's heavy
hatchet, he leaned out of a porthole, and steel to iron,
began slashing at the largest fluke-chains. But a few
strokes, full of sparks, were given, when the exceeding
strain effected the rest. With a terrific snap, every
fastening went adrift; the ship righted, the carcase sank.
Now, this
occasional inevitable sinking of the recently killed Sperm
Whale is a very curious thing; nor has any fisherman yet
adequately accounted for it. Usually the dead Sperm Whale
floats with great buoyancy, with its side or belly
considerably elevated above the surface. If the only whales
that thus sank were old, meagre, and broken-hearted
creatures, their pads of lard diminished and all their bones
heavy and rheumatic; then you might with some reason assert
that this sinking is caused by an uncommon specific gravity
in the fish so sinking, consequent upon this absence of
buoyant matter in him. But it is not so. For young whales,
in the highest health, and swelling with noble aspirations,
prematurely cut off in the warm flush and May of life, with
all their panting lard about them! even these brawny,
buoyant heroes do sometimes sink.
Be it said,
however, that the Sperm Whale is far less liable to this
accident than any other species. Where one of that sort go
down, twenty Right Whales do. This difference in the species
is no doubt imputable in no small degree to the greater
quantity of bone in the Right Whale; his Venetian blinds
alone sometimes weighing more than a ton; from this
incumbrance the Sperm Whale is wholly free. But there are
instances where, after the lapse of many hours or several
days, the sunken whale again rises, more buoyant than in
life. But the reason of this is obvious. Gases are generated
in him; he swells to a prodigious magnitude; becomes a sort
of animal balloon. A line-of-battle ship could hardly keep
him under then. In the Shore Whaling, on soundings, among
the Bays of New Zealand, when a Right Whale gives token of
sinking, they fasten buoys to him, with plenty of rope; so
that when the body has gone down, they know where to look
for it when it shall have ascended again.
It was not
long after the sinking of the body that a cry was heard from
the Pequod's mast-heads, announcing that the Jungfrau was
again lowering her boats; though the only spout in sight was
that of a Fin-Back, belonging to the species of uncapturable
whales, because of its incredible power of swimming.
Nevertheless, the Fin-Back's spout is so similar to the
Sperm Whale's, that by unskilful fishermen it is often
mistaken for it. And consequently Derick and all his host
were now in valiant chase of this unnearable brute. The
Virgin crowding all sail, made after her four young keels,
and thus they all disappeared far to leeward, still in bold,
hopeful chase.
Oh! many are
the Fin-Backs, and many are the Dericks, my friend.
CHAPTER 82
The Honor and
Glory of Whaling
There are some enterprises in
which a careful disorderliness is the true method.
The more I
dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up
to the very spring-head of it so much the more am I
impressed with its great honorableness and antiquity; and
especially when I find so many great demi-gods and heroes,
prophets of all sorts, who one way or other have shed
distinction upon it, I am transported with the reflection
that I myself belong, though but subordinately, to so
emblazoned a fraternity.
The gallant
Perseus, a son of Jupiter, was the first whaleman; and to
the eternal honor of our calling be it said, that the first
whale attacked by our brotherhood was not killed with any
sordid intent. Those were the knightly days of our
profession, when we only bore arms to succor the distressed,
and not to fill men's lamp-feeders. Every one knows the fine
story of Perseus and Andromeda; how the lovely Andromeda,
the daughter of a king, was tied to a rock on the sea-coast,
and as Leviathan was in the very act of carrying her off,
Perseus, the prince of whalemen, intrepidly advancing,
harpooned the monster, and delivered and married the maid.
It was an admirable artistic exploit, rarely achieved by the
best harpooneers of the present day; inasmuch as this
Leviathan was slain at the very first dart. And let no man
doubt this Arkite story; for in the ancient Joppa, now
Jaffa, on the Syrian coast, in one of the Pagan temples,
there stood for many ages the vast skeleton of a whale,
which the city's legends and all the inhabitants asserted to
be the identical bones of the monster that Perseus slew.
When the Romans took Joppa, the same skeleton was carried to
Italy in triumph. What seems most singular and suggestively
important in this story, is this: it was from Joppa that
Jonah set sail.
Akin to the
adventure of Perseus and Andromeda—indeed, by some supposed
to be indirectly derived from it—is that famous story of St.
George and the Dragon; which dragon I maintain to have been
a whale; for in many old chronicles whales and dragons are
strangely jumbled together, and often stand for each other.
"Thou art as a lion of the waters, and as a dragon of the
sea," said Ezekiel; hereby, plainly meaning a whale; in
truth, some versions of the Bible use that word itself.
Besides, it would much subtract from the glory of the
exploit had St. George but encountered a crawling reptile of
the land, instead of doing battle with the great monster of
the deep. Any man may kill a snake, but only a Perseus, a
St. George, a Coffin, have the heart in them to march boldly
up to a whale.
Let not the
modern paintings of this scene mislead us; for though the
creature encountered by that valiant whaleman of old is
vaguely represented of a griffin-like shape, and though the
battle is depicted on land and the saint on horseback, yet
considering the great ignorance of those times, when the
true form of the whale was unknown to artists; and
considering that as in Perseus' case, St. George's whale
might have crawled up out of the sea on the beach; and
considering that the animal ridden by St. George might have
been only a large seal, or sea-horse; bearing all this in
mind, it will not appear altogether incompatible with the
sacred legend and the ancientest draughts of the scene, to
hold this so-called dragon no other than the great Leviathan
himself. In fact, placed before the strict and piercing
truth, this whole story will fare like that fish, flesh, and
fowl idol of the Philistines, Dagon by name; who being
planted before the ark of Israel, his horse's head and both
the palms of his hands fell off from him, and only the stump
or fishy part of him remained. Thus, then, one of our own
noble stamp, even a whaleman, is the tutelary guardian of
England; and by good rights, we harpooneers of Nantucket
should be enrolled in the most noble order of St. George.
And therefore, let not the knights of that honorable company
(none of whom, I venture to say, have ever had to do with a
whale like their great patron), let them never eye a
Nantucketer with disdain, since even in our woollen frocks
and tarred trowsers we are much better entitled to St.
George's decoration than they.
Whether to
admit Hercules among us or not, concerning this I long
remained dubious: for though according to the Greek
mythologies, that antique Crockett and Kit Carson—that
brawny doer of rejoicing good deeds, was swallowed down and
thrown up by a whale; still, whether that strictly makes a
whaleman of him, that might be mooted. It nowhere appears
that he ever actually harpooned his fish, unless, indeed,
from the inside. Nevertheless, he may be deemed a sort of
involuntary whaleman; at any rate the whale caught him, if
he did not the whale. I claim him for one of our clan.
But, by the
best contradictory authorities, this Grecian story of
Hercules and the whale is considered to be derived from the
still more ancient Hebrew story of Jonah and the whale; and
vice versa; certainly they are very similar. If I claim the
demigod then, why not the prophet?
Nor do heroes,
saints, demigods, and prophets alone comprise the whole roll
of our order. Our grand master is still to be named; for
like royal kings of old times, we find the head-waters of
our fraternity in nothing short of the great gods
themselves. That wondrous oriental story is now to be
rehearsed from the Shaster, which gives us the dread
Vishnoo, one of the three persons in the godhead of the
Hindoos; gives us this divine Vishnoo himself for our
Lord;—Vishnoo, who, by the first of his ten earthly
incarnations, has for ever set apart and sanctified the
whale. When Brahma, or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster,
resolved to recreate the world after one of its periodical
dissolutions, he gave birth to Vishnoo, to preside over the
work; but the Vedas, or mystical books, whose perusal would
seem to have been indispensable to Vishnoo before beginning
the creation, and which therefore must have contained
something in the shape of practical hints to young
architects, these Vedas were lying at the bottom of the
waters; so Vishnoo became incarnate in a whale, and sounding
down in him to the uttermost depths, rescued the sacred
volumes. Was not this Vishnoo a whaleman, then? even as a
man who rides a horse is called a horseman?
Perseus, St.
George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there's a member-roll
for you! What club but the whaleman's can head off like
that?
CHAPTER 83
Jonah
Historically Regarded
Reference was made to the
historical story of Jonah and the whale in the preceding
chapter. Now some Nantucketers rather distrust this
historical story of Jonah and the whale. But then there were
some sceptical Greeks and Romans, who, standing out from the
orthodox pagans of their times, equally doubted the story of
Hercules and the whale, and Arion and the dolphin; and yet
their doubting those traditions did not make those
traditions one whit the less facts, for all that.
One old
Sag-Harbor whaleman's chief reason for questioning the
Hebrew story was this:—He had one of those quaint
old-fashioned Bibles, embellished with curious, unscientific
plates; one of which represented Jonah's whale with two
spouts in his head—a peculiarity only true with respect to a
species of the Leviathan (the Right Whale, and the varieties
of that order), concerning which the fishermen have this
saying, "A penny roll would choke him"; his swallow is so
very small. But, to this, Bishop Jebb's anticipative answer
is ready. It is not necessary, hints the Bishop, that we
consider Jonah as tombed in the whale's belly, but as
temporarily lodged in some part of his mouth. And this seems
reasonable enough in the good Bishop. For truly, the Right
Whale's mouth would accommodate a couple of whist-tables,
and comfortably seat all the players. Possibly, too, Jonah
might have ensconced himself in a hollow tooth; but, on
second thoughts, the Right Whale is toothless.
Another reason
which Sag-Harbor (he went by that name) urged for his want
of faith in this matter of the prophet, was something
obscurely in reference to his incarcerated body and the
whale's gastric juices. But this objection likewise falls to
the ground, because a German exegetist supposes that Jonah
must have taken refuge in the floating body of a dead whale—
even as the French soldiers in the Russian campaign turned
their dead horses into tents, and crawled into them.
Besides, it has been divined by other continental
commentators, that when Jonah was thrown overboard from the
Joppa ship, he straightway effected his escape to another
vessel near by, some vessel with a whale for a figure-head;
and, I would add, possibly called "The Whale," as some craft
are nowadays christened the "Shark," the "Gull," the
"Eagle." Nor have there been wanting learned exegetists who
have opined that the whale mentioned in the book of Jonah
merely meant a life-preserver—an inflated bag of wind—which
the endangered prophet swam to, and so was saved from a
watery doom. Poor Sag-Harbor, therefore, seems worsted all
round. But he had still another reason for his want of
faith. It was this, if I remember right: Jonah was swallowed
by the whale in the Mediterranean Sea, and after three days'
he was vomited up somewhere within three days' journey of
Nineveh, a city on the Tigris, very much more than three
days' journey across from the nearest point of the
Mediterranean coast. How is that?
But was there
no other way for the whale to land the prophet within that
short distance of Nineveh? Yes. He might have carried him
round by the way of the Cape of Good Hope. But not to speak
of the passage through the whole length of the
Mediterranean, and another passage up the Persian Gulf and
Red Sea, such a supposition would involve the complete
circumnavigation of all Africa in three days, not to speak
of the Tigris waters, near the site of Nineveh, being too
shallow for any whale to swim in. Besides, this idea of
Jonah's weathering the Cape of Good Hope at so early a day
would wrest the honor of the discovery of that great
headland from Bartholomew Diaz, its reputed discoverer, and
so make modern history a liar.
But all these
foolish arguments of old Sag-Harbor only evinced his foolish
pride of reason—a thing still more reprehensible in him,
seeing that he had but little learning except what he had
picked up from the sun and the sea. I say it only shows his
foolish, impious pride, and abominable, devilish rebellion
against the reverend clergy. For by a Portuguese Catholic
priest, this very idea of Jonah's going to Nineveh via the
Cape of Good Hope was advanced as a signal magnification of
the general miracle. And so it was. Besides, to this day,
the highly enlightened Turks devoutly believe in the
historical story of Jonah. And some three centuries ago, an
English traveller in old Harris's Voyages, speaks of a
Turkish Mosque built in honor of Jonah, in which Mosque was
a miraculous lamp that burnt without any oil.
CHAPTER 84
Pitchpoling
To make them run easily and
swiftly, the axles of carriages are anointed; and for much
the same purpose, some whalers perform an analogous
operation upon their boat; they grease the bottom. Nor is it
to be doubted that as such a procedure can do no harm, it
may possibly be of no contemptible advantage; considering
that oil and water are hostile; that oil is a sliding thing,
and that the object in view is to make the boat slide
bravely. Queequeg believed strongly in anointing his boat,
and one morning not long after the German ship Jungfrau
disappeared, took more than customary pains in that
occupation; crawling under its bottom, where it hung over
the side, and rubbing in the unctuousness as though
diligently seeking to insure a crop of hair from the craft's
bald keel. He seemed to be working in obedience to some
particular presentiment. Nor did it remain unwarranted by
the event.
Towards noon
whales were raised; but so soon as the ship sailed down to
them, they turned and fled with swift precipitancy; a
disordered flight, as of Cleopatra's barges from Actium.
Nevertheless,
the boats pursued, and Stubb's was foremost. By great
exertion, Tashtego at last succeeded in planting one iron;
but the stricken whale, without at all sounding, still
continued his horizontal flight, with added fleetness. Such
unintermitted strainings upon the planted iron must sooner
or later inevitably extract it. It became imperative to
lance the flying whale, or be content to lose him. But to
haul the boat up to his flank was impossible, he swam so
fast and furious. What then remained?
Of all the
wondrous devices and dexterities, the sleights of hand and
countless subtleties, to which the veteran whaleman is so
often forced, none exceed that fine manoeuvre with the lance
called pitchpoling. Small sword, or broad sword, in all its
exercises boasts nothing like it. It is only indispensable
with an inveterate running whale; its grand fact and feature
is the wonderful distance to which the long lance is
accurately darted from a violently rocking, jerking boat,
under extreme headway. Steel and wood included, the entire
spear is some ten or twelve feet in length; the staff is
much slighter than that of the harpoon, and also of a
lighter material—pine. It is furnished with a small rope
called a warp, of considerable length, by which it can be
hauled back to the hand after darting.
But before
going further, it is important to mention here, that though
the harpoon may be pitchpoled in the same way with the
lance, yet it is seldom done; and when done, is still less
frequently successful, on account of the greater weight and
inferior length of the harpoon as compared with the lance,
which in effect become serious drawbacks. As a general
thing, therefore, you must first get fast to a whale, before
any pitchpoling comes into play.
Look now at
Stubb; a man who from his humorous, deliberate coolness and
equanimity in the direst emergencies, was specially
qualified to excel in pitchpoling. Look at him; he stands
upright in the tossed bow of the flying boat; wrapt in
fleecy foam, the towing whale is forty feet ahead. Handling
the long lance lightly, glancing twice or thrice along its
length to see if it be exactly straight, Stubb whistlingly
gathers up the coil of the warp in one hand, so as to secure
its free end in his grasp, leaving the rest unobstructed.
Then holding the lance full before his waistband's middle,
he levels it at the whale; when, covering him with it, he
steadily depresses the butt-end in his hand, thereby
elevating the point till the weapon stands fairly balanced
upon his palm, fifteen feet in the air. He minds you
somewhat of a juggler, balancing a long staff on his chin.
Next moment with a rapid, nameless impulse, in a superb
lofty arch the bright steel spans the foaming distance, and
quivers in the life spot of the whale. Instead of sparkling
water, he now spouts red blood.
"That drove
the spigot out of him!" cried Stubb. "'Tis July's immortal
Fourth; all fountains must run wine today! Would now, it
were old Orleans whiskey, or old Ohio, or unspeakable old
Monongahela! Then, Tashtego, lad, I'd have ye hold a canakin
to the jet, and we'd drink round it! Yea, verily, hearts
alive, we'd brew choice punch in the spread of his
spout-hole there, and from that live punch-bowl quaff the
living stuff."
Again and
again to such gamesome talk, the dexterous dart is repeated,
the spear returning to its master like a greyhound held in
skilful leash. The agonized whale goes into his flurry; the
tow-line is slackened, and the pitchpoler dropping astern,
folds his hands, and mutely watches the monster die.
CHAPTER 85
The Fountain
That for six thousand
years—and no one knows how many millions of ages before—the
great whales should have been spouting all over the sea, and
sprinkling and mistifying the gardens of the deep, as with
so many sprinkling or mistifying pots; and that for some
centuries back, thousands of hunters should have been close
by the fountain of the whale, watching these sprinklings and
spoutings— that all this should be, and yet, that down to
this blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter minutes past one
o'clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1851),
it should still remain a problem, whether these spoutings
are, after all, really water, or nothing but vapor—this is
surely a noteworthy thing.
Let us, then,
look at this matter, along with some interesting items
contingent. Every one knows that by the peculiar cunning of
their gills, the finny tribes in general breathe the air
which at all times is combined with the element in which
they swim; hence, a herring or a cod might live a century,
and never once raise its head above the surface. But owing
to his marked internal structure which gives him regular
lungs, like a human being's, the whale can only live by
inhaling the disengaged air in the open atmosphere.
Wherefore the necessity for his periodical visits to the
upper world. But he cannot in any degree breathe through his
mouth, for, in his ordinary attitude, the Sperm Whale's
mouth is buried at least eight feet beneath the surface; and
what is still more, his windpipe has no connexion with his
mouth. No, he breathes through his spiracle alone; and this
is on the top of his head.
If I say, that
in any creature breathing is only a function indispensable
to vitality, inasmuch as it withdraws from the air a certain
element, which being subsequently brought into contact with
the blood imparts to the blood its vivifying principle, I do
not think I shall err; though I may possibly use some
superfluous scientific words. Assume it, and it follows that
if all the blood in a man could be aerated with one breath,
he might then seal up his nostrils and not fetch another for
a considerable time. That is to say, he would then live
without breathing. Anomalous as it may seem, this is
precisely the case with the whale, who systematically lives,
by intervals, his full hour and more (when at the bottom)
without drawing a single breath, or so much as in any way
inhaling a particle of air; for, remember, he has no gills.
How is this? Between his ribs and on each side of his spine
he is supplied with a remarkable involved Cretan labyrinth
of vermicelli-like vessels, which vessels, when he quits the
surface, are completely distended with oxygenated blood. So
that for an hour or more, a thousand fathoms in the sea, he
carries a surplus stock of vitality in him, just as the
camel crossing the waterless desert carries a surplus supply
of drink for future use in its four supplementary stomachs.
The anatomical fact of this labyrinth is indisputable; and
that the supposition founded upon it is reasonable and true,
seems the more cogent to me, when I consider the otherwise
inexplicable obstinacy of that leviathan in having his
spoutings out, as the fishermen phrase it. This is what I
mean. If unmolested, upon rising to the surface, the Sperm
Whale will continue there for a period of time exactly
uniform with all his other unmolested risings. Say he stays
eleven minutes, and jets seventy times, that is, respires
seventy breaths; then whenever he rises again, he will be
sure to have his seventy breaths over again, to a minute.
Now, if after he fetches a few breaths you alarm him, so
that he sounds, he will be always dodging up again to make
good his regular allowance of air. And not till those
seventy breaths are told, will he finally go down to stay
out his full term below. Remark, however, that in different
individuals these rates are different; but in any one they
are alike. Now, why should the whale thus insist upon having
his spoutings out, unless it be to replenish his reservoir
of air, ere descending for good? How obvious it is it, too,
that this necessity for the whale's rising exposes him to
all the fatal hazards of the chase. For not by hook or by
net could this vast leviathan be caught, when sailing a
thousand fathoms beneath the sunlight. Not so much thy
skill, then, O hunter, as the great necessities that strike
the victory to thee!
In man,
breathing is incessantly going on—one breath only serving
for two or three pulsations; so that whatever other business
he has to attend to, waking or sleeping, breathe he must, or
die he will. But the Sperm Whale only breathes about one
seventh or Sunday of his time.
It has been
said that the whale only breathes through his spout-hole; if
it could truthfully be added that his spouts are mixed with
water, then I opine we should be furnished with the reason
why his sense of smell seems obliterated in him; for the
only thing about him that at all answers to his nose is that
identical spout-hole; and being so clogged with two
elements, it could not be expected to have the power of
smelling. But owing to the mystery of the spout—whether it
be water or whether it be vapor—no absolute certainty can as
yet be arrived at on this head. Sure it is, nevertheless,
that the Sperm Whale has no proper olfactories. But what
does he want of them? No roses, no violets, no Cologne-water
in the sea.
Furthermore,
as his windpipe solely opens into the tube of his spouting
canal, and as that long canal—like the grand Erie Canal— is
furnished with a sort of locks (that open and shut) for the
downward retention of air or the upward exclusion of water,
therefore the whale has no voice; unless you insult him by
saying, that when he so strangely rumbles, he talks through
his nose. But then again, what has the whale to say? Seldom
have I known any profound being that had anything to say to
this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of
getting a living. Oh! happy that the world is such an
excellent listener!
Now, the
spouting canal of the Sperm Whale, chiefly intended as it is
for the conveyance of air, and for several feet laid along,
horizontally, just beneath the upper surface of his head,
and a little to one side; this curious canal is very much
like a gas-pipe laid down in a city on one side of a street.
But the question returns whether this gas-pipe is also a
water-pipe; in other words, whether the spout of the Sperm
Whale is the mere vapor of the exhaled breath, or whether
that exhaled breath is mixed with water taken in at the
mouth, and discharged through the spiracle. It is certain
that the mouth indirectly communicates with the spouting
canal; but it cannot be proved that this is for the purpose
of discharging water through the spiracle. Because the
greatest necessity for so doing would seem to be, when in
feeding he accidentally takes in water. But the Sperm
Whale's food is far beneath the surface, and there he cannot
spout even if he would. Besides, if you regard him very
closely, and time him with your watch, you will find that
when unmolested, there is an undeviating rhyme between the
periods of his jets and the ordinary periods of respiration.
But why pester
one with all this reasoning on the subject? Speak out! You
have seen him spout; then declare what the spout is; can you
not tell water from air? My dear sir, in this world it is
not so easy to settle these plain things. I have ever found
your plain things the knottiest of all. And as for this
whale spout, you might almost stand in it, and yet be
undecided as to what it is precisely.
The central
body of it is hidden in the snowy sparkling mist enveloping
it; and how can you certainly tell whether any water falls
from it, when, always, when you are close enough to a whale
to get a close view of his spout, he is in a prodigious
commotion, the water cascading all around him. And if at
such times you should think that you really perceived drops
of moisture in the spout, how do you know that they are not
merely condensed from its vapor; or how do you know that
they are not those identical drops superficially lodged in
the spout-hole fissure, which is countersunk into the summit
of the whale's head? For even when tranquilly swimming
through the mid-day sea in a calm, with his elevated hump
sun-dried as a dromedary's in the desert; even then, the
whale always carries a small basin of water on his head, as
under a blazing sun you will sometimes see a cavity in a
rock filled up with rain.
Nor is it at
all prudent for the hunter to be over curious touching the
precise nature of the whale spout. It will not do for him to
be peering into it, and putting his face in it. You cannot
go with your pitcher to this fountain and fill it, and bring
it away. For even when coming into slight contact with the
outer, vapory shreds of the jet, which will often happen,
your skin will feverishly smart, from the acridness of the
thing so touching it. And I know one, who coming into still
closer contact with the spout, whether with some scientific
object in view, or otherwise, I cannot say, the skin peeled
off from his cheek and arm. Wherefore, among whalemen, the
spout is deemed poisonous; they try to evade it. Another
thing; I have heard it said, and I do not much doubt it,
that if the jet is fairly spouted into your eyes, it will
blind you. The wisest thing the investigator can do then, it
seems to me, is to let this deadly spout alone.
Still, we can
hypothesize, even if we cannot prove and establish. My
hypothesis is this: that the spout is nothing but mist. And
besides other reasons, to this conclusion I am impelled, by
considerations touching the great inherent dignity and
sublimity of the Sperm Whale; I account him no common,
shallow being, inasmuch as it is an undisputed fact that he
is never found on soundings, or near shores; all other
whales sometimes are. He is both ponderous and profound. And
I am convinced that from the heads of all ponderous profound
beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante,
and so on, there always goes up a certain semi-visible
steam, while in the act of thinking deep thoughts. While
composing a little treatise on Eternity, I had the curiosity
to place a mirror before me; and ere long saw reflected
there, a curious involved worming and undulation in the
atmosphere over my head. The invariable moisture of my hair,
while plunged in deep thought, after six cups of hot tea in
my thin shingled attic, of an August noon; this seems an
additional argument for the above supposition.
And how nobly
it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster, to
behold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea; his
vast, mild head overhung by a canopy of vapor, engendered by
his incommunicable contemplations, and that vapor— as you
will sometimes see it—glorified by a rainbow, as if Heaven
itself had put its seal upon his thoughts. For d'ye see,
rainbows do not visit the clear air; they only irradiate
vapor. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts
in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling
my fog with a heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for
all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along
with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly,
and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination
makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who
regards them both with equal eye.
CHAPTER 86
The Tail
Other poets have warbled the
praises of the soft eye of the antelope, and the lovely
plumage of the bird that never alights; less celestial, I
celebrate a tail.
Reckoning the
largest sized Sperm Whale's tail to begin at that point of
the trunk where it tapers to about the girth of a man, it
comprises upon its upper surface alone, an area of at least
fifty square feet. The compact round body of its root
expands into two broad, firm, flat palms or flukes,
gradually shoaling away to less than an inch in thickness.
At the crotch or junction, these flukes slightly overlap,
then sideways recede from each other like wings, leaving a
wide vacancy between. In no living thing are the lines of
beauty more exquisitely defined than in the crescentic
borders of these flukes. At its utmost expansion in the full
grown whale, the tail will considerably exceed twenty feet
across.
The entire
member seems a dense webbed bed of welded sinews; but cut
into it, and you find that three distinct strata compose
it:—upper, middle, and lower. The fibres in the upper and
lower layers, are long and horizontal; those of the middle
one, very short, and running crosswise between the outside
layers. This triune structure, as much as anything else,
imparts power to the tail. To the student of old Roman
walls, the middle layer will furnish a curious parallel to
the thin course of tiles always alternating with the stone
in those wonderful relics of the antique, and which
undoubtedly contribute so much to the great strength of the
masonry.
But as if this
vast local power in the tendinous tail were not enough, the
whole bulk of the leviathan is knit over with a warp and
woof of muscular fibres and filaments, which passing on
either side the loins and running down into the flukes,
insensibly blend with them, and largely contribute to their
might; so that in the tail the confluent measureless force
of the whole whale seems concentrated to a point. Could
annihilation occur to matter, this were the thing to do it.
Nor does
this—its amazing strength, at all tend to cripple the
graceful flexion of its motions; where infantileness of ease
undulates through a Titanism of power. On the contrary,
those motions derive their most appalling beauty from it.
Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often
bestows it; and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength
has much to do with the magic. Take away the tied tendons
that all over seem bursting from the marble in the carved
Hercules, and its charm would be gone. As devout Eckerman
lifted the linen sheet from the naked corpse of Goethe, he
was overwhelmed with the massive chest of the man, that
seemed as a Roman triumphal arch. When Angelo paints even
God the Father in human form, mark what robustness is there.
And whatever they may reveal of the divine love in the Son,
the soft, curled, hermaphroditical Italian pictures, in
which his idea has been most successfully embodied; these
pictures, so destitute as they are of all brawniness, hint
nothing of any power, but the mere negative, feminine one of
submission and endurance, which on all hands it is conceded,
form the peculiar practical virtues of his teachings.
Such is the
subtle elasticity of the organ I treat of, that whether
wielded in sport, or in earnest, or in anger, whatever be
the mood it be in, its flexions are invariably marked by
exceeding grace. Therein no fairy's arm can transcend it.
Five great
motions are peculiar to it. First, when used as a fin for
progression; Second, when used as a mace in battle; Third,
in sweeping; Fourth, in lobtailing; Fifth, in peaking
flukes.
First: Being
horizontal in its position, the Leviathan's tail acts in a
different manner from the tails of all other sea creatures.
It never wriggles. In man or fish, wriggling is a sign of
inferiority. To the whale his tail is the sole means of
propulsion. Scroll-wise coiled forwards beneath the body,
and then rapidly sprung backwards, it is this which gives
that singular darting, leaping motion to the monster when
furiously swimming. His side-fins only serve to steer by.
Second: It is
a little significant, that while one sperm whale only fights
another sperm whale with his head and jaw, nevertheless, in
his conflicts with man, he chiefly and contemptuously uses
his tail. In striking at a boat, he swiftly curves away his
flukes from it, and the blow is only inflicted by the
recoil. If it be made in the unobstructed air, especially if
it descend to its mark, the stroke is then simply
irresistible. No ribs of man or boat can withstand it. Your
only salvation lies in eluding it; but if it comes sideways
through the opposing water, then partly owing to the light
buoyancy of the whale-boat, and the elasticity of its
materials, a cracked rib or a dashed plank or two, a sort of
stitch in the side, is generally the most serious result.
These submerged side blows are so often received in the
fishery, that they are accounted mere child's play. Some one
strips off a frock, and the hole is stopped.
Third: I
cannot demonstrate it, but it seems to me, that in the whale
the sense of touch is concentrated in the tail; for in this
respect there is a delicacy in it only equalled by the
daintiness of the elephant's trunk. This delicacy is chiefly
evinced in the action of sweeping, when in maidenly
gentleness the whale with a certain soft slowness moves his
immense flukes from side to side upon the surface of the
sea; and if he feel but a sailor's whisker, woe to that
sailor, whiskers and all. What tenderness there is in that
preliminary touch! Had this tail any prehensile power, I
should straightway bethink me of Darmonodes' elephant that
so frequented the flower-market, and with low salutations
presented nosegays to damsels, and then caressed their
zones. On more accounts than one, a pity it is that the
whale does not possess this prehensile virtue in his tail;
for I have heard of yet another elephant, that when wounded
in the fight, curved round his trunk and extracted the dart.
Fourth:
Stealing unawares upon the whale in the fancied security of
the middle of solitary seas, you find him unbent from the
vast corpulence of his dignity, and kitten-like, he plays on
the ocean as if it were a hearth. But still you see his
power in his play. The broad palms of his tail are flirted
high into the air! then smiting the surface, the thunderous
concussion resounds for miles. You would almost think a
great gun had been discharged; and if you noticed the light
wreath of vapor from the spiracle at his other extremity,
you would think that that was the smoke from the touch-hole.
Fifth: As in
the ordinary floating posture of the leviathan the flukes
lies considerably below the level of his back, they are then
completely out of sight beneath the surface; but when he is
about to plunge into the deeps, his entire flukes with at
least thirty feet of his body are tossed erect in the air,
and so remain vibrating a moment, till they downwards shoot
out of view. Excepting the sublime breach— somewhere else to
be described—this peaking of the whale's flukes is perhaps
the grandest sight to be seen in all animated nature. Out of
the bottomless profundities the gigantic tail seems
spasmodically snatching at the highest heaven. So in dreams,
have I seen majestic Satan thrusting forth his tormented
colossal claw from the flame Baltic of Hell. But in gazing
at such scenes, it is all in all what mood you are in; if in
the Dantean, the devils will occur to you; if in that of
Isaiah, the archangels. Standing at the mast-head of my ship
during a sunrise that crimsoned sky and sea, I once saw a
large herd of whales in the east, all heading towards the
sun, and for a moment vibrating in concert with peaked
flukes. As it seemed to me at the time, such a grand
embodiment of adoration of the gods was never beheld, even
in Persia, the home of the fire worshippers. As Ptolemy
Philopater testified of the African elephant, I then
testified of the whale, pronouncing him the most devout of
all beings. For according to King Juba, the military
elephants of antiquity often hailed the morning with their
trunks uplifted in the profoundest silence.
The chance
comparison in this chapter, between the whale and the
elephant, so far as some aspects of the tail of the one and
the trunk of the other are concerned, should not tend to
place those two opposite organs on an equality, much less
the creatures to which they respectively belong. For as the
mightiest elephant is but a terrier to Leviathan, so,
compared with Leviathan's tail, his trunk is but the stalk
of a lily. The most direful blow from the elephant's trunk
were as the playful tap of a fan, compared with the
measureless crush and crash of the sperm whale's ponderous
flukes, which in repeated instances have one after the other
hurled entire boats with all their oars and crews into the
air, very much as an Indian juggler tosses his balls.*
*Though all comparison in the
way of general bulk between the whale and the elephant is
preposterous, inasmuch as in that particular the elephant
stands in much the same respect to the whale that a dog does
to the elephant; nevertheless, there are not wanting some
points of curious similitude; among these is the spout. It
is well known that the elephant will often draw up water or
dust in his trunk, and then elevating it, jet it forth in a
stream.
The more I consider this
mighty tail, the more do I deplore my inability to express
it. At times there are gestures in it, which, though they
would well grace the hand of man, remain wholly
inexplicable. In an extensive herd, so remarkable,
occasionally, are these mystic gestures, that I have heard
hunters who have declared them akin to Free-Mason signs and
symbols; that the whale, indeed, by these methods
intelligently conversed with the world. Nor are there
wanting other motions of the whale in his general body, full
of strangeness, and unaccountable to his most experienced
assailant. Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep.
I know him not, and never will. But if I know not even the
tail of this whale, how understand his head? much more, how
comprehend his face, when face he has none? Thou shalt see
my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall
not be seen. But I cannot completely make out his back
parts; and hint what he will about his face, I say again he
has no face.
CHAPTER 87
The Grand
Armada
The long and narrow peninsula
of Malacca, extending south-eastward from the territories of
Birmah, forms the most southerly point of all Asia. In a
continuous line from that peninsula stretch the long islands
of Sumatra, Java, Bally, and Timor; which, with many others,
form a vast mole, or rampart, lengthwise connecting Asia
with Australia, and dividing the long unbroken Indian ocean
from the thickly studded oriental archipelagoes. This
rampart is pierced by several sally-ports for the
convenience of ships and whales; conspicuous among which are
the straits of Sunda and Malacca. By the straits of Sunda,
chiefly, vessels bound to China from the west, emerge into
the China seas.
Those narrow
straits of Sunda divide Sumatra from Java; and standing
midway in that vast rampart of islands, buttressed by that
bold green promontory, known to seamen as Java Head; they
not a little correspond to the central gateway opening into
some vast walled empire: and considering the inexhaustible
wealth of spices, and silks, and jewels, and gold, and
ivory, with which the thousand islands of that oriental sea
are enriched, it seems a significant provision of nature,
that such treasures, by the very formation of the land,
should at least bear the appearance, however ineffectual, of
being guarded from the all-grasping western world. The
shores of the Straits of Sunda are unsupplied with those
domineering fortresses which guard the entrances to the
Mediterranean, the Baltic, and the Propontis. Unlike the
Danes, these Orientals do not demand the obsequious homage
of lowered top-sails from the endless procession of ships
before the wind, which for centuries past, by night and by
day, have passed between the islands of Sumatra and Java,
freighted with the costliest cargoes of the east. But while
they freely waive a ceremonial like this, they do by no
means renounce their claim to more solid tribute.
Time out of
mind the piratical proas of the Malays, lurking among the
low shaded coves and islets of Sumatra, have sallied out
upon the vessels sailing through the straits, fiercely
demanding tribute at the point of their spears. Though by
the repeated bloody chastisements they have received at the
hands of European cruisers, the audacity of these corsairs
has of late been somewhat repressed; yet, even at the
present day, we occasionally hear of English and American
vessels, which, in those waters, have been remorselessly
boarded and pillaged.
With a fair,
fresh wind, the Pequod was now drawing nigh to these
straits; Ahab purposing to pass through them into the Java
sea, and thence, cruising northwards, over waters known to
be frequented here and there by the Sperm Whale, sweep
inshore by the Philippine Islands, and gain the far coast of
Japan, in time for the great whaling season there. By these
means, the circumnavigating Pequod would sweep almost all
the known Sperm Whale cruising grounds of the world,
previous to descending upon the Line in the Pacific; where
Ahab, though everywhere else foiled in his pursuit, firmly
counted upon giving battle to Moby Dick, in the sea he was
most known to frequent; and at a season when he might most
reasonably be presumed to be haunting it.
But how now?
in this zoned quest, does Ahab touch no land? does his crew
drink air? Surely, he will stop for water. Nay. For a long
time, now, the circus-running sun has raced within his fiery
ring, and needs no sustenance but what's in himself. So
Ahab. Mark this, too, in the whaler. While other hulls are
loaded down with alien stuff, to be transferred to foreign
wharves; the world-wandering whale-ship carries no cargo but
herself and crew, their weapons and their wants. She has a
whole lake's contents bottled in her ample hold. She is
ballasted with utilities; not altogether with unusable
pig-lead and kentledge. She carries years' water in her.
Clear old prime Nantucket water; which, when three years
afloat, the Nantucketer, in the Pacific, prefers to drink
before the brackish fluid, but yesterday rafted off in
casks, from the Peruvian or Indian streams. Hence it is,
that, while other ships may have gone to China from New
York, and back again, touching at a score of ports, the
whale-ship, in all that interval, may not have sighted one
grain of soil; her crew having seen no man but floating
seamen like themselves. So that did you carry them the news
that another flood had come; they would only answer—"Well,
boys, here's the ark!"
Now, as many
Sperm Whales had been captured off the western coast of
Java, in the near vicinity of the Straits of Sunda; indeed,
as most of the ground, roundabout, was generally recognised
by the fishermen as an excellent spot for cruising;
therefore, as the Pequod gained more and more upon Java
Head, the look-outs were repeatedly hailed, and admonished
to keep wide awake. But though the green palmy cliffs of the
land soon loomed on the starboard bow, and with delighted
nostrils the fresh cinnamon was snuffed in the air, yet not
a single jet was descried. Almost renouncing all thought of
falling in with any game hereabouts, the ship had well nigh
entered the straits, when the customary cheering cry was
heard from aloft, and ere long a spectacle of singular
magnificence saluted us.
But here be it
premised, that owing to the unwearied activity with which of
late they have been hunted over all four oceans, the Sperm
Whales, instead of almost invariably sailing in small
detached companies, as in former times, are now frequently
met with in extensive herds, sometimes embracing so great a
multitude, that it would almost seem as if numerous nations
of them had sworn solemn league and covenant for mutual
assistance and protection. To this aggregation of the Sperm
Whale into such immense caravans, may be imputed the
circumstance that even in the best cruising grounds, you may
now sometimes sail for weeks and months together, without
being greeted by a single spout; and then be suddenly
saluted by what sometimes seems thousands on thousands.
Broad on both
bows, at the distance of some two or three miles, and
forming a great semicircle, embracing one half of the level
horizon, a continuous chain of whale-jets were up-playing
and sparkling in the noon-day air. Unlike the straight
perpendicular twin-jets of the Right Whale, which, dividing
at top, falls over in two branches, like the cleft drooping
boughs of a willow, the single forward-slanting spout of the
Sperm Whale presents a thick curled bush of white mist,
continually rising and falling away to leeward.
Seen from the
Pequod's deck, then, as she would rise on a high hill of the
sea, this host of vapory spouts, individually curling up
into the air, and beheld through a blending atmosphere of
bluish haze, showed like the thousand cheerful chimneys of
some dense metropolis, descried of a balmy autumnal morning,
by some horseman on a height.
As marching
armies approaching an unfriendly defile in the mountains,
accelerate their march, all eagerness to place that perilous
passage in their rear, and once more expand in comparative
security upon the plain; even so did this vast fleet of
whales now seem hurrying forward through the straits;
gradually contracting the wings of their semicircle, and
swimming on, in one solid, but still crescentic centre.
Crowding all
sail the Pequod pressed after them; the harpooneers handling
their weapons, and loudly cheering from the heads of their
yet suspended boats. If the wind only held, little doubt had
they, that chased through these Straits of Sunda, the vast
host would only deploy into the Oriental seas to witness the
capture of not a few of their number. And who could tell
whether, in that congregated caravan, Moby Dick himself
might not temporarily be swimming, like the worshipped
white-elephant in the coronation procession of the Siamese!
So with stun-sail piled on stun-sail, we sailed along,
driving these leviathans before us; when, of a sudden, the
voice of Tashtego was heard, loudly directing attention to
something in our wake.
Corresponding
to the crescent in our van, we beheld another in our rear.
It seemed formed of detached white vapors, rising and
falling something like the spouts of the whales; only they
did not so completely come and go; for they constantly
hovered, without finally disappearing. Levelling his glass
at this sight, Ahab quickly revolved in his pivot-hole,
crying, "Aloft there, and rig whips and buckets to wet the
sails;—Malays, sir, and after us!"
As if too long
lurking behind the headlands, till the Pequod should fairly
have entered the straits, these rascally Asiatics were now
in hot pursuit, to make up for their over-cautious delay.
But when the swift Pequod, with a fresh leading wind, was
herself in hot chase; how very kind of these tawny
philanthropists to assist in speeding her on to her own
chosen pursuit,— mere riding-whips and rowels to her, that
they were. As with glass under arm, Ahab to-and-fro paced
the deck; in his forward turn beholding the monsters he
chased, and in the after one the bloodthirsty pirates
chasing him; some such fancy as the above seemed his. And
when he glanced upon the green walls of the watery defile in
which the ship was then sailing, and bethought him that
through that gate lay the route to his vengeance, and
beheld, how that through that same gate he was now both
chasing and being chased to his deadly end; and not only
that, but a herd of remorseless wild pirates and inhuman
atheistical devils were infernally cheering him on with
their curses;—when all these conceits had passed through his
brain, Ahab's brow was left gaunt and ribbed, like the black
sand beach after some stormy tide has been gnawing it,
without being able to drag the firm thing from its place.
But thoughts
like these troubled very few of the reckless crew; and when,
after steadily dropping and dropping the pirates astern, the
Pequod at last shot by the vivid green Cockatoo Point on the
Sumatra side, emerging at last upon the broad waters beyond;
then, the harpooneers seemed more to grieve that the swift
whales had been gaining upon the ship, than to rejoice that
the ship had so victoriously gained upon the Malays. But
still driving on in the wake of the whales, at length they
seemed abating their speed; gradually the ship neared them;
and the wind now dying away, word was passed to spring to
the boats. But no sooner did the herd, by some presumed
wonderful instinct of the Sperm Whale, become notified of
the three keels that were after them,— though as yet a mile
in their rear,—than they rallied again, and forming in close
ranks and battalions, so that their spouts all looked like
flashing lines of stacked bayonets, moved on with redoubled
velocity.
Stripped to
our shirts and drawers, we sprang to the white-ash, and
after several hours' pulling were almost disposed to
renounce the chase, when a general pausing commotion among
the whales gave animating tokens that they were now at last
under the influence of that strange perplexity of inert
irresolution, which, when the fishermen perceive it in the
whale, they say he is gallied*. The compact martial columns
in which they had been hitherto rapidly and steadily
swimming, were now broken up in one measureless rout; and
like King Porus' elephants in the Indian battle with
Alexander, they seemed going mad with consternation. In all
directions expanding in vast irregular circles, and
aimlessly swimming hither and thither, by their short thick
spoutings, they plainly betrayed their distraction of panic.
This was still more strangely evinced by those of their
number, who, completely paralysed as it were, helplessly
floated like water-logged dismantled ships on the sea. Had
these Leviathans been but a flock of simple sheep, pursued
over the pasture by three fierce wolves, they could not
possibly have evinced such excessive dismay. But this
occasional timidity is characteristic of almost all herding
creatures. Though banding together in tens of thousands, the
lion-maned buffaloes of the West have fled before a solitary
horseman. Witness, too, all human beings, how when herded
together in the sheepfold of a theatre's pit, they will, at
the slightest alarm of fire, rush helter-skelter for the
outlets, crowding, trampling, jamming, and remorselessly
dashing each other to death. Best, therefore, withhold any
amazement at the strangely gallied whales before us, for
there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not
infinitely outdone by the madness of men.
* To gally, or gallow, is to
frighten excessively— to confound with fright. It is an old
Saxon word. It occurs once in Shakespeare:—
The wrathful
skies Gallow the very wanderers of the dark And make them
keep their caves.
To common
language, the word is now completely obsolete. When the
polite landsman first hears it from the gaunt Nantucketer,
he is apt to set it down as one of the whaleman's
self-derived savageries. Much the same is it with many other
sinewy Saxonisms of this sort, which emigrated to
New-England rocks with the noble brawn of the old English
emigrants in the time of the Commonwealth. Thus, some of the
best and furthest-descended English words—the etymological
Howards and Percys—are now democratised, nay,
plebeianised—so to speak— in the New World.
Though many of the whales, as
has been said, were in violent motion, yet it is to be
observed that as a whole the herd neither advanced nor
retreated, but collectively remained in one place. As is
customary in those cases, the boats at once separated, each
making for some one lone whale on the outskirts of the
shoal. In about three minutes' time, Queequeg's harpoon was
flung; the stricken fish darted blinding spray in our faces,
and then running away with us like light, steered straight
for the heart of the herd. Though such a movement on the
part of the whale struck under such circumstances, is in no
wise unprecedented; and indeed is almost always more or less
anticipated; yet does it present one of the more perilous
vicissitudes of the fishery. For as the swift monster drags
you deeper and deeper into the frantic shoal, you bid adieu
to circumspect life and only exist in a delirious throb.
As, blind and
deaf, the whale plunged forward, as if by sheer power of
speed to rid himself of the iron leech that had fastened to
him; as we thus tore a white gash in the sea, on all sides
menaced as we flew, by the crazed creatures to and fro
rushing about us; our beset boat was like a ship mobbed by
ice-isles in a tempest, and striving to steer through their
complicated channels and straits, knowing not at what moment
it may be locked in and crushed.
But not a bit
daunted, Queequeg steered us manfully; now sheering off from
this monster directly across our route in advance; now
edging away from that, whose colossal flukes were suspended
overhead, while all the time, Starbuck stood up in the bows,
lance in hand, pricking out of our way whatever whales he
could reach by short darts, for there was no time to make
long ones. Nor were the oarsmen quite idle, though their
wonted duty was now altogether dispensed with. They chiefly
attended to the shouting part of the business. "Out of the
way, Commodore!" cried one, to a great dromedary that of a
sudden rose bodily to the surface, and for an instant
threatened to swamp us. "Hard down with your tail, there!"
cried a second to another, which, close to our gunwale,
seemed calmly cooling himself with his own fan-like
extremity.
All
whale-boats carry certain curious contrivances, originally
invented by the Nantucket Indians, called druggs. Two thick
squares of wood of equal size are stoutly clenched together,
so that they cross each other's grain at right angles; a
line of considerable length is then attached to the middle
of this block, and the other end of the line being looped,
it can in a moment be fastened to a harpoon. It is chiefly
among gallied whales that this drugg is used. For then, more
whales are close round you than you can possibly chase at
one time. But sperm whales are not every day encountered;
while you may, then, you must kill all you can. And if you
cannot kill them all at once, you must wing them, so that
they can be afterwards killed at your leisure. Hence it is,
that at times like these the drug, comes into requisition.
Our boat was furnished with three of them. The first and
second were successfully darted, and we saw the whales
staggeringly running off, fettered by the enormous sidelong
resistance of the towing drugg. They were cramped like
malefactors with the chain and ball. But upon flinging the
third, in the act of tossing overboard the clumsy wooden
block, it caught under one of the seats of the boat, and in
an instant tore it out and carried it away, dropping the
oarsman in the boat's bottom as the seat slid from under
him. On both sides the sea came in at the wounded planks,
but we stuffed two or three drawers and shirts in, and so
stopped the leaks for the time.
It had been
next to impossible to dart these drugged-harpoons, were it
not that as we advanced into the herd, our whale's way
greatly diminished; moreover, that as we went still further
and further from the circumference of commotion, the direful
disorders seemed waning. So that when at last the jerking
harpoon drew out, and the towing whale sideways vanished;
then, with the tapering force of his parting momentum, we
glided between two whales into the innermost heart of the
shoal, as if from some mountain torrent we had slid into a
serene valley lake. Here the storms in the roaring glens
between the outermost whales, were heard but not felt. In
this central expanse the sea presented that smooth
satin-like surface, called a sleek, produced by the subtle
moisture thrown off by the whale in his more quiet moods.
Yes, we were now in that enchanted calm which they say lurks
at the heart of every commotion. And still in the distracted
distance we beheld the tumults of the outer concentric
circles, and saw successive pods of whales, eight or ten in
each, swiftly going round and round, like multiplied spans
of horses in a ring; and so closely shoulder to shoulder,
that a Titanic circus-rider might easily have over-arched
the middle ones, and so have gone round on their backs.
Owing to the density of the crowd of reposing whales, more
immediately surrounding the embayed axis of the herd, no
possible chance of escape was at present afforded us. We
must watch for a breach in the living wall that hemmed us
in; the wall that had only admitted us in order to shut us
up. Keeping at the centre of the lake, we were occasionally
visited by small tame cows and calves; the women and
children of this routed host.
Now, inclusive
of the occasional wide intervals between the revolving outer
circles, and inclusive of the spaces between the various
pods in any one of those circles, the entire area at this
juncture, embraced by the whole multitude, must have
contained at least two or three square miles. At any
rate—though indeed such a test at such a time might be
deceptive—spoutings might be discovered from our low boat
that seemed playing up almost from the rim of the horizon. I
mention this circumstance, because, as if the cows and
calves had been purposely locked up in this innermost fold;
and as if the wide extent of the herd had hitherto prevented
them from learning the precise cause of its stopping; or,
possibly, being so young, unsophisticated, and every way
innocent and inexperienced; however it may have been, these
smaller whales— now and then visiting our becalmed boat from
the margin of the lake— evinced a wondrous fearlessness and
confidence, or else a still becharmed panic which it was
impossible not to marvel at. Like household dogs they came
snuffling round us, right up to our gunwales, and touching
them; till it almost seemed that some spell had suddenly
domesticated them. Queequeg patted their foreheads; Starbuck
scratched their backs with his lance; but fearful of the
consequences, for the time refrained from darting it.
But far
beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and
still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side.
For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of
the nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their
enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers. The lake,
as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly
transparent; and as human infants while suckling will calmly
and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two
different lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal
nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some
unearthly reminiscence;—even so did the young of these
whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we
were but a bit of Gulfweed in their new-born sight. Floating
on their sides, the mothers also seemed quietly eyeing us.
One of these little infants, that from certain queer tokens
seemed hardly a day old, might have measured some fourteen
feet in length, and some six feet in girth. He was a little
frisky; though as yet his body seemed scarce yet recovered
from that irksome position it had so lately occupied in the
maternal reticule; where, tail to head, and all ready for
the final spring, the unborn whale lies bent like a Tartar's
bow. The delicate side-fins, and the palms of his flukes,
still freshly retained the plaited crumpled appearance of a
baby's ears newly arrived from foreign parts.
"Line! line!"
cried Queequeg, looking over the gunwale; "him fast! him
fast!—Who line him! Who struck?—Two whale; one big, one
little!"
"What ails ye,
man?" cried Starbuck.
"Look-e here,"
said Queequeg, pointing down.
As when the
stricken whale, that from the tub has reeled out hundreds of
fathoms of rope; as, after deep sounding, he floats up
again, and shows the slackened curling line buoyantly rising
and spiralling towards the air; so now, Starbuck saw long
coils of the umbilical cord of Madame Leviathan, by which
the young cub seemed still tethered to its dam. Not seldom
in the rapid vicissitudes of the chase, this natural line,
with the maternal end loose, becomes entangled with the
hempen one, so that the cub is thereby trapped. Some of the
subtlest secrets of the seas seemed divulged to us in this
enchanted pond. We saw young Leviathan amours in the deep.*
*The sperm whale, as with all
other species of the Leviathan, but unlike most other fish,
breeds indifferently at all seasons; after a gestation which
may probably be set down at nine months, producing but one
at a time; though in some few known instances giving birth
to an Esau and Jacob:—a contingency provided for in suckling
by two teats, curiously situated, one on each side of the
anus; but the breasts themselves extend upwards from that.
When by chance these precious parts in a nursing whale are
cut by the hunter's lance, the mother's pouring milk and
blood rivallingly discolor the sea for rods. The milk is
very sweet and rich; it has been tasted by man; it might do
well with strawberries. When overflowing with mutual esteem,
the whales salute more hominum.
And thus, though surrounded by
circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did
these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and
fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea,
serenely revelled in dalliance and delight. But even so,
amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still
for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous
planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep
inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.
Meanwhile, as
we thus lay entranced, the occasional sudden frantic
spectacles in the distance evinced the activity of the other
boats, still engaged in drugging the whales on the frontier
of the host; or possibly carrying on the war within the
first circle, where abundance of room and some convenient
retreats were afforded them. But the sight of the enraged
drugged whales now and then blindly darting to and fro
across the circles, was nothing to what at last met our
eyes. It is sometimes the custom when fast to a whale more
than commonly powerful and alert, to seek to hamstring him,
as it were, by sundering or maiming his gigantic
tail-tendon. It is done by darting a short-handled
cutting-spade, to which is attached a rope for hauling it
back again. A whale wounded (as we afterwards learned) in
this part, but not effectually, as it seemed, had broken
away from the boat, carrying along with him half of the
harpoon line; and in the extraordinary agony of the wound,
he was now dashing among the revolving circles like the lone
mounted desperado Arnold, at the battle of Saratoga,
carrying dismay wherever he went.
But agonizing
as was the wound of this whale, and an appalling spectacle
enough, any way; yet the peculiar horror with which he
seemed to inspire the rest of the herd, was owing to a cause
which at first the intervening distance obscured from us.
But at length we perceived that by one of the unimaginable
accidents of the fishery, this whale had become entangled in
the harpoon-line that he towed; he had also run away with
the cutting-spade in him; and while the free end of the rope
attached to that weapon, had permanently caught in the coils
of the harpoon-line round his tail, the cutting-spade itself
had worked loose from his flesh. So that tormented to
madness, he was now churning through the water, violently
flailing with his flexible tail, and tossing the keen spade
about him, wounding and murdering his own comrades.
This terrific
object seemed to recall the whole herd from their stationary
fright. First, the whales forming the margin of our lake
began to crowd a little, and tumble against each other, as
if lifted by half spent billows from afar; then the lake
itself began faintly to heave and swell; the submarine
bridal-chambers and nurseries vanished; in more and more
contracting orbits the whales in the more central circles
began to swim in thickening clusters. Yes, the long calm was
departing. A low advancing hum was soon heard; and then like
to the tumultuous masses of block-ice when the great river
Hudson breaks up in Spring, the entire host of whales came
tumbling upon their inner centre, as if to pile themselves
up in one common mountain. Instantly Starbuck and Queequeg
changed places; Starbuck taking the stern.
"Oars! Oars!"
he intensely whispered, seizing the helm—"gripe your oars,
and clutch your souls, now! My God, men, stand by! Shove him
off, you Queequeg—the whale there!—prick him!—hit him! Stand
up—stand up, and stay so! Spring men—pull, men; never mind
their backs—scrape them!—scrape away!"
The boat was
now all but jammed between two vast black bulks, leaving a
narrow Dardanelles between their long lengths. But by
desperate endeavor we at last shot into a temporary opening;
then giving way rapidly, and at the same time earnestly
watching for another outlet. After many similar hair-breadth
escapes, we at last swiftly glided into what had just been
one of the outer circles, but now crossed by random whales,
all violently making for one centre. This lucky salvation
was cheaply purchased by the loss of Queequeg's hat, who,
while standing in the bows to prick the fugitive whales, had
his hat taken clean from his head by the air-eddy made by
the sudden tossing of a pair of broad flukes close by.
Riotous and
disordered as the universal commotion now was, it soon
resolved itself into what seemed a systematic movement; for
having clumped together at last in one dense body, they then
renewed their onward flight with augmented fleetness.
Further pursuit was useless; but the boats still lingered in
their wake to pick up what drugged whales might be dropped
astern, and likewise to secure one which Flask had killed
and waited. The waif is a pennoned pole, two or three of
which are carried by every boat; and which, when additional
game is at hand, are inserted upright into the floating body
of a dead whale, both to mark its place on the sea, and also
as token of prior possession, should the boats of any other
ship draw near.
The result of
this lowering was somewhat illustrative of that sagacious
saying in the Fishery,—the more whales the less fish. Of all
the drugged whales only one was captured. The rest contrived
to escape for the time, but only to be taken, as will
hereafter be seen, by some other craft than the Pequod.
CHAPTER 88
Schools and
Schoolmasters
The previous chapter gave
account of an immense body or herd of Sperm Whales, and
there was also then given the probable cause inducing those
vast aggregations.
Now, though
such great bodies are at times encountered, yet, as must
have been seen, even at the present day, small detached
bands are occasionally observed, embracing from twenty to
fifty individuals each. Such bands are known as schools.
They generally are of two sorts; those composed almost
entirely of females, and those mustering none but young
vigorous males, or bulls as they are familiarly designated.
In cavalier
attendance upon the school of females, you invariably see a
male of full grown magnitude, but not old; who, upon any
alarm, evinces his gallantry by falling in the rear and
covering the flight of his ladies. In truth, this gentleman
is a luxurious Ottoman, swimming about over the watery
world, surroundingly accompanied by all the solaces and
endearments of the harem. The contrast between this Ottoman
and his concubines is striking; because, while he is always
of the largest leviathanic proportions, the ladies, even at
full growth, are not more than one-third of the bulk of an
average-sized male. They are comparatively delicate, indeed;
I dare say, not to exceed half a dozen yards round the
waist. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied, that upon the
whole they are hereditarily entitled to en bon point.
It is very
curious to watch this harem and its lord in their indolent
ramblings. Like fashionables, they are for ever on the move
in leisurely search of variety. You meet them on the Line in
time for the full flower of the Equatorial feeding season,
having just returned, perhaps, from spending the summer in
the Northern seas, and so cheating summer of all unpleasant
weariness and warmth. By the time they have lounged up and
down the promenade of the Equator awhile, they start for the
Oriental waters in anticipation of the cool season there,
and so evade the other excessive temperature of the year.
When serenely
advancing on one of these journeys, if any strange
suspicious sights are seen, my lord whale keeps a wary eye
on his interesting family. Should any unwarrantably pert
young Leviathan coming that way, presume to draw
confidentially close to one of the ladies, with what
prodigious fury the Bashaw assails him, and chases him away!
High times, indeed, if unprincipled young rakes like him are
to be permitted to invade the sanctity of domestic bliss;
though do what the Bashaw will, he cannot keep the most
notorious Lothario out of his bed; for alas! all fish bed in
common. As ashore, the ladies often cause the most terrible
duels among their rival admirers; just so with the whales,
who sometimes come to deadly battle, and all for love. They
fence with their long lower jaws, sometimes locking them
together, and so striving for the supremacy like elks that
warringly interweave their antlers. Not a few are captured
having the deep scars of these encounters,— furrowed heads,
broken teeth, scolloped fins; and in some instances,
wrenched and dislocated mouths.
But supposing
the invader of domestic bliss to betake himself away at the
first rush of the harem's lord, then is it very diverting to
watch that lord. Gently he insinuates his vast bulk among
them again and revels there awhile, still in tantalizing
vicinity to young Lothario, like pious Solomon devoutly
worshipping among his thousand concubines. Granting other
whales to be in sight, the fisherman will seldom give chase
to one of these Grand Turks; for these Grand Turks are too
lavish of their strength, and hence their unctuousness is
small. As for the sons and the daughters they beget, why,
those sons and daughters must take care of themselves; at
least, with only the maternal help. For like certain other
omnivorous roving lovers that might be named, my Lord Whale
has no taste for the nursery, however much for the bower;
and so, being a great traveller, he leaves his anonymous
babies all over the world; every baby an exotic. In good
time, nevertheless, as the ardor of youth declines; as years
and dumps increase; as reflection lends her solemn pauses;
in short, as a general lassitude overtakes the sated Turk;
then a love of ease and virtue supplants the love for
maidens; our Ottoman enters upon the impotent, repentant,
admonitory stage of life, forswears, disbands the harem, and
grown to an exemplary, sulky old soul, goes about all alone
among the meridians and parallels saying his prayers, and
warning each young Leviathan from his amorous errors.
Now, as the
harem of whales is called by the fishermen a school, so is
the lord and master of that school technically known as the
schoolmaster. It is therefore not in strict character,
however admirably satirical, that after going to school
himself, he should then go abroad inculcating not what he
learned there, but the folly of it. His title, schoolmaster,
would very naturally seem derived from the name bestowed
upon the harem itself, but some have surmised that the man
who first thus entitled this sort of Ottoman whale, must
have read the memoirs of Vidocq, and informed himself what
sort of a country-schoolmaster that famous Frenchman was in
his younger days, and what was the nature of those occult
lessons he inculcated into some of his pupils.
The same
secludedness and isolation to which the schoolmaster whale
betakes himself in his advancing years, is true of all aged
Sperm Whales. Almost universally, a lone whale— as a
solitary Leviathan is called—proves an ancient one. Like
venerable moss-bearded Daniel Boone, he will have no one
near him but Nature herself; and her he takes to wife in the
wilderness of waters, and the best of wives she is, though
she keeps so many moody secrets.
The schools
composing none but young and vigorous males, previously
mentioned, offer a strong contrast to the harem schools. For
while those female whales are characteristically timid, the
young males, or forty-barrel-bulls, as they call them, are
by far the most pugnacious of all Leviathans, and
proverbially the most dangerous to encounter; excepting
those wondrous grey-headed, grizzled whales, sometimes met,
and these will fight you like grim fiends exasperated by a
penal gout.
The
Forty-barrel-bull schools are larger than the harem schools.
Like a mob of young collegians, they are full of fight, fun,
and wickedness, tumbling round the world at such a reckless,
rollicking rate, that no prudent underwriter would insure
them any more than he would a riotous lad at Yale or
Harvard. They soon relinquish this turbulence though, and
when about three-fourths grown, break up, and separately go
about in quest of settlements, that is, harems.
Another point
of difference between the male and female schools is still
more characteristic of the sexes. Say you strike a
Forty-barrel-bull—poor devil! all his comrades quit him. But
strike a member of the harem school, and her companions swim
around her with every token of concern, sometimes lingering
so near her and so long, as themselves to fall a prey.
CHAPTER 89
Fast-Fish and
Loose-Fish
The allusion to the waifs and
waif-poles in the last chapter but one, necessitates some
account of the laws and regulations of the whale fishery, of
which the waif may be deemed the grand symbol and badge.
It frequently
happens that when several ships are cruising in company, a
whale may be struck by one vessel, then escape, and be
finally killed and captured by another vessel; and herein
are indirectly comprised many minor contingencies, all
partaking of this one grand feature. For example,—after a
weary and perilous chase and capture of a whale, the body
may get loose from the ship by reason of a violent storm;
and drifting far away to leeward, be retaken by a second
whaler, who, in a calm, snugly tows it alongside, without
risk of life or line. Thus the most vexatious and violent
disputes would often arise between the fishermen, were there
not some written or unwritten, universal, undisputed law
applicable to all cases.
Perhaps the
only formal whaling code authorized by legislative
enactment, was that of Holland. It was decreed by the
States-General in A.D. 1695. But though no other nation has
ever had any written whaling law, yet the American fishermen
have been their own legislators and lawyers in this matter.
They have provided a system which for terse
comprehensiveness surpasses Justinian's Pandects and the
By-laws of the Chinese Society for the Suppression of
Meddling with other People's Business. Yes; these laws might
be engraven on a Queen Anne's farthing, or the barb of a
harpoon, and worn round the neck, so small are they.
I. A Fast-Fish
belongs to the party fast to it.
II. A
Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch
it.
But what plays
the mischief with this masterly code is the admirable
brevity of it, which necessitates a vast volume of
commentaries to expound it.
First: What is
a Fast-Fish? Alive or dead a fish is technically fast, when
it is connected with an occupied ship or boat, by any medium
at all controllable by the occupant or occupants,—a mast, an
oar, a nine-inch cable, a telegraph wire, or a strand of
cobweb, it is all the same. Likewise a fish is technically
fast when it bears a waif, or any other recognized symbol of
possession; so long as the party wailing it plainly evince
their ability at any time to take it alongside, as well as
their intention so to do.
These are
scientific commentaries; but the commentaries of the
whalemen themselves sometimes consist in hard words and
harder knocks— the Coke-upon-Littleton of the fist. True,
among the more upright and honorable whalemen allowances are
always made for peculiar cases, where it would be an
outrageous moral injustice for one party to claim possession
of a whale previously chased or killed by another party. But
others are by no means so scrupulous.
Some fifty
years ago there was a curious case of whale-trover litigated
in England, wherein the plaintiffs set forth that after a
hard chase of a whale in the Northern seas; and when indeed
they (the plaintiffs) had succeeded in harpooning the fish;
they were at last, through peril of their lives, obliged to
forsake not only their lines, but their boat itself.
Ultimately the defendants (the crew of another ship) came up
with the whale, struck, killed, seized, and finally
appropriated it before the very eyes of the plaintiffs. And
when those defendants were remonstrated with, their captain
snapped his fingers in the plaintiffs' teeth, and assured
them that by way of doxology to the deed he had done, he
would now retain their line, harpoons, and boat, which had
remained attached to the whale at the time of the seizure.
Wherefore the plaintiffs now sued for the recovery of the
value of their whale, line, harpoons, and boat.
Mr. Erskine
was counsel for the defendants; Lord Ellenborough was the
judge. In the course of the defence, the witty Erskine went
on to illustrate his position, by alluding to a recent crim.
con. case, wherein a gentleman, after in vain trying to
bridle his wife's viciousness, had at last abandoned her
upon the seas of life; but in the course of years, repenting
of that step, he instituted an action to recover possession
of her. Erskine was on the other side; and he then supported
it by saying, that though the gentleman had originally
harpooned the lady, and had once had her fast, and only by
reason of the great stress of her plunging viciousness, had
at last abandoned her; yet abandon her he did, so that she
became a loose-fish; and therefore when a subsequent
gentleman re-harpooned her, the lady then became that
subsequent gentleman's property, along with whatever harpoon
might have been found sticking in her.
Now in the
present case Erskine contended that the examples of the
whale and the lady were reciprocally illustrative of each
other.
These
pleadings, and the counter pleadings, being duly heard, the
very learned Judge in set terms decided, to wit,— That as
for the boat, he awarded it to the plaintiffs, because they
had merely abandoned it to save their lives; but that with
regard to the controverted whale, harpoons, and line, they
belonged to the defendants; the whale, because it was a
Loose-Fish at the time of the final capture; and the
harpoons and line because when the fish made off with them,
it (the fish) acquired a property in those articles; and
hence anybody who afterwards took the fish had a right to
them. Now the defendants afterwards took the fish; ergo, the
aforesaid articles were theirs.
A common man
looking at this decision of the very learned Judge, might
possibly object to it. But ploughed up to the primary rock
of the matter, the two great principles laid down in the
twin whaling laws previously quoted, and applied and
elucidated by Lord Ellenborough in the above cited case;
these two laws touching Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, I say,
will on reflection, be found the fundamentals of all human
jurisprudence; For notwithstanding its complicated tracery
of sculpture, the Temple of the Law, like the Temple of the
Philistines, has but two props to stand on.
Is it not a
saying in every one's mouth, Possession is half of the law:
that is, regardless of how the thing came into possession?
But often possession is the whole of the law. What are the
sinews and souls of Russian serfs and Republican slaves but
Fast-Fish, whereof possession is the whole of the law? What
to the rapacious landlord is the widow's last mite but a
Fast-Fish? What is yonder undetected villain's marble
mansion with a doorplate for a waif; what is that but a
Fast-Fish? What is the ruinous discount which Mordecai, the
broker, gets from the poor Woebegone, the bankrupt, on a
loan to keep Woebegone's family from starvation; what is
that ruinous discount but a Fast-Fish? What is the
Archbishop of Savesoul's income of 100,000 pounds seized
from the scant bread and cheese of hundreds of thousands of
broken-backed laborers (all sure of heaven without any of
Savesoul's help) what is that globular 100,000 but a
Fast-Fish. What are the Duke of Dunder's hereditary towns
and hamlets but Fast-Fish? What to that redoubted
harpooneer, John Bull, is poor Ireland, but a Fast-Fish?
What to that apostolic lancer, Brother Jonathan, is Texas
but a Fast-Fish? And concerning all these, is not Possession
the whole of the law?
But if the
doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable, the
kindred doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so. That
is internationally and universally applicable.
What was
America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck
the Spanish standard by way of wailing it for his royal
master and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What
Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will
Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish.
What are the
Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish?
What all men's minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is
the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish?
What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the
thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe
itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a
Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?
CHAPTER 90
Heads or Tails
"De balena vero sufficit, si
rex habeat caput, et regina caudam."
BRACTON, L. 3, C. 3.
Latin from the books of the
Laws of England, which taken along with the context, means,
that of all whales captured by anybody on the coast of that
land, the King, as Honorary Grand Harpooneer, must have the
head, and the Queen be respectfully presented with the tail.
A division which, in the whale, is much like halving an
apple; there is no intermediate remainder. Now as this law,
under a modified form, is to this day in force in England;
and as it offers in various respects a strange anomaly
touching the general law of Fast—and Loose-Fish, it is here
treated of in a separate chapter, on the same courteous
principle that prompts the English railways to be at the
expense of a separate car, specially reserved for the
accommodation of royalty. In the first place, in curious
proof of the fact that the above-mentioned law is still in
force, I proceed to lay before you a circumstance-that
happened within the last two years.
It seems that
some honest mariners of Dover, or Sandwich, or some one of
the Cinque Ports, had after a hard chase succeeded in
killing and beaching a fine whale which they had originally
descried afar off from the shore. Now the Cinque Ports are
partially or somehow under the jurisdiction of a sort of
policeman or beadle, called a Lord Warden. Holding the
office directly from the crown, I believe, all the royal
emoluments incident to the Cinque Port territories become by
assignment his. By some writers this office is called a
sinecure. But not so. Because the Lord Warden is busily
employed at times in fobbing his perquisites; which are his
chiefly by virtue of that same fobbing of them.
Now when these
poor sun-burnt mariners, bare-footed, and with their
trowsers rolled high up on their eely legs, had wearily
hauled their fat fish high and dry, promising themselves a
good 150 pounds from the precious oil and bone; and in
fantasy sipping rare tea with their wives, and good ale with
their cronies, upon the strength of their respective shares;
up steps a very learned and most Christian and charitable
gentleman, with a copy of Blackstone under his arm; and
laying it upon the whale's head, he says—"Hands off! this
fish, my masters, is a Fast-Fish. I seize it as the Lord
Warden's." Upon this the poor mariners in their respectful
consternation—so truly English— knowing not what to say,
fall to vigorously scratching their heads all round;
meanwhile ruefully glancing from the whale to the stranger.
But that did in nowise mend the matter, or at all soften the
hard heart of the learned gentleman with the copy of
Blackstone. At length one of them, after long scratching
about for his ideas, made bold to speak,
"Please, sir,
who is the Lord Warden?"
"The Duke."
"But the duke
had nothing to do with taking this fish?"
"It is his."
"We have been
at great trouble, and peril, and some expense, and is all
that to go to the Duke's benefit; we getting nothing at all
for our pains but our blisters?"
"It is his."
"Is the Duke
so very poor as to be forced to this desperate mode of
getting a livelihood?"
"It is his."
"I thought to
relieve my old bed-ridden mother by part of my share of this
whale."
"It is his."
"Won't the
Duke be content with a quarter or a half?"
"It is his."
In a word, the
whale was seized and sold, and his Grace the Duke of
Wellington received the money. Thinking that viewed in some
particular lights, the case might by a bare possibility in
some small degree be deemed, under the circumstances, a
rather hard one, an honest clergyman of the town
respectfully addressed a note to his Grace, begging him to
take the case of those unfortunate mariners into full
consideration. To which my Lord Duke in substance replied
(both letters were published) that he had already done so,
and received the money, and would be obliged to the reverend
gentleman if for the future he (the reverend gentleman)
would decline meddling with other people's business. Is this
the still militant old man, standing at the corners of the
three kingdoms, on all hands coercing alms of beggars?
It will
readily be seen that in this case the alleged right of the
Duke to the whale was a delegated one from the Sovereign. We
must needs inquire then on what principle the Sovereign is
originally invested with that right. The law itself has
already been set forth. But Plowdon gives us the reason for
it. Says Plowdon, the whale so caught belongs to the King
and Queen, "because of its superior excellence." And by the
soundest commentators this has ever been held a cogent
argument in such matters.
But why should
the King have the head, and the Queen the tail?
A reason for that, ye lawyers!
In his
treatise on "Queen-Gold," or Queen-pin-money, an old King's
Bench author, one William Prynne, thus discourseth: "Ye tail
is ye Queen's, that ye Queen's wardrobe may be supplied with
ye whalebone." Now this was written at a time when the black
limber bone of the Greenland or Right whale was largely used
in ladies' bodices. But this same bone is not in the tail;
it is in the head, which is a sad mistake for a sagacious
lawyer like Prynne. But is the Queen a mermaid, to be
presented with a tail? An allegorical meaning may lurk here.
There are two
royal fish so styled by the English law writers— the whale
and the sturgeon; both royal property under certain
limitations, and nominally supplying the tenth branch of the
crown's ordinary revenue. I know not that any other author
has hinted of the matter; but by inference it seems to me
that the sturgeon must be divided in the same way as the
whale, the King receiving the highly dense and elastic head
peculiar to that fish, which, symbolically regarded, may
possibly be humorously grounded upon some presumed
congeniality. And thus there seems a reason in all things,
even in law.
CHAPTER 91
The Pequod
Meets The Rose-Bud
"In vain it was to rake for
Ambergriese in the paunch of this Leviathan, insufferable
fetor denying not inquiry." SIR T. BROWNE, V. E.
It was a week or two after the
last whaling scene recounted, and when we were slowly
sailing over a sleepy, vapory, mid-day sea, that the many
noses on the Pequod's deck proved more vigilant discoverers
than the three pairs of eyes aloft. A peculiar and not very
pleasant smell was smelt in the sea.
"I will bet
something now," said Stubb, "that somewhere hereabouts are
some of those drugged whales we tickled the other day. I
thought they would keel up before long."
Presently, the
vapors in advance slid aside; and there in the distance lay
a ship, whose furled sails betokened that some sort of whale
must be alongside. As we glided nearer, the stranger showed
French colors from his peak; and by the eddying cloud of
vulture sea-fowl that circled, and hovered, and swooped
around him, it was plain that the whale alongside must be
what the fishermen call a blasted whale, that is, a whale
that has died unmolested on the sea, and so floated an
unappropriated corpse. It may well be conceived, what an
unsavory odor such a mass must exhale; worse than an
Assyrian city in the plague, when the living are incompetent
to bury the departed. So intolerable indeed is it regarded
by some, that no cupidity could persuade them to moor
alongside of it. Yet are there those who will still do it;
notwithstanding the fact that the oil obtained from such
subjects is of a very inferior quality, and by no means of
the nature of attar-of-rose.
Coming still
nearer with the expiring breeze, we saw that the Frenchman
had a second whale alongside; and this second whale seemed
even more of a nosegay than the first. In truth, it turned
out to be one of those problematical whales that seem to dry
up and die with a sort of prodigious dyspepsia, or
indigestion; leaving their defunct bodies almost entirely
bankrupt of anything like oil. Nevertheless, in the proper
place we shall see that no knowing fisherman will ever turn
up his nose at such a whale as this, however much he may
shun blasted whales in general.
The Pequod had
now swept so nigh to the stranger, that Stubb vowed he
recognized his cutting spade-pole entangled in the lines
that were knotted round the tail of one of these whales.
"There's a
pretty fellow, now," he banteringly laughed, standing in the
ship's bows, "there's a jackal for ye! I well know that
these Crappoes of Frenchmen are but poor devils in the
fishery; sometimes lowering their boats for breakers,
mistaking them for Sperm Whale spouts; yes, and sometimes
sailing from their port with their hold full of boxes of
tallow candles, and cases of snuffers, foreseeing that all
the oil they will get won't be enough to dip the Captain's
wick into; aye, we all know these things; but look ye,
here's a Crappo that is content with our leavings, the
drugged whale there, I mean; aye, and is content too with
scraping the dry bones of that other precious fish he has
there. Poor devil! I say, pass round a hat, some one, and
let's make him a present of a little oil for dear charity's
sake. For what oil he'll get from that drugged whale there,
wouldn't be fit to burn in a jail; no, not in a condemned
cell. And as for the other whale, why, I'll agree to get
more oil by chopping up and trying out these three masts of
ours, than he'll get from that bundle of bones; though, now
that I think of it, it may contain something worth a good
deal more than oil; yes, ambergris. I wonder now if our old
man has thought of that. It's worth trying. Yes, I'm for
it;" and so saying he started for the quarter-deck.
By this time
the faint air had become a complete calm; so that whether or
no, the Pequod was now fairly entrapped in the smell, with
no hope of escaping except by its breezing up again. Issuing
from the cabin, Stubb now called his boat's crew, and pulled
off for the stranger. Drawing across her bow, he perceived
that in accordance with the fanciful French taste, the upper
part of her stem-piece was carved in the likeness of a huge
drooping stalk, was painted green, and for thorns had copper
spikes projecting from it here and there; the whole
terminating in a symmetrical folded bulb of a bright red
color. Upon her head boards, in large gilt letters, he read
"Bouton de Rose,"—Rose-button, or Rose-bud; and this was the
romantic name of this aromatic ship.
Though Stubb
did not understand the Bouton part of the inscription, yet
the word rose, and the bulbous figure-head put together,
sufficiently explained the whole to him.
"A wooden
rose-bud, eh?" he cried with his hand to his nose, "that
will do very well; but how like all creation it smells!"
Now in order
to hold direct communication with the people on deck, he had
to pull round the bows to the starboard side, and thus come
close to the blasted whale; and so talk over it.
Arrived then
at this spot, with one hand still to his nose, he
bawled—"Bouton-de-Rose, ahoy! are there any of you
Bouton-de-Roses that speak English?"
"Yes,"
rejoined a Guernsey-man from the bulwarks, who turned out to
be the chief-mate.
"Well, then,
my Bouton-de-Rose-bud, have you seen the White Whale?"
"What whale?"
"The White
Whale—a Sperm Whale—Moby Dick, have ye seen him?
"Never heard
of such a whale. Cachalot Blanche! White Whale—no."
"Very good,
then; good bye now, and I'll call again in a minute."
Then rapidly
pulling back towards the Pequod, and seeing Ahab leaning
over the quarter-deck rail awaiting his report, he moulded
his two hands into a trumpet and shouted—"No, Sir! No!" Upon
which Ahab retired, and Stubb returned to the Frenchman.
He now
perceived that the Guernsey-man, who had just got into the
chains, and was using a cutting-spade, had slung his nose in
a sort of bag.
"What's the
matter with your nose, there?" said Stubb. "Broke it?"
"I wish it was
broken, or that I didn't have any nose at all!" answered the
Guernsey-man, who did not seem to relish the job he was at
very much. "But what are you holding yours for?"
"Oh, nothing!
It's a wax nose; I have to hold it on. Fine day, ain't it?
Air rather gardenny, I should say; throw us a bunch of
posies, will ye, Bouton-de-Rose?"
"What in the
devil's name do you want here?" roared the Guernseyman,
flying into a sudden passion.
"Oh! keep
cool—cool? yes, that's the word! why don't you pack those
whales in ice while you're working at 'em? But joking aside,
though; do you know, Rose-bud, that it's all nonsense trying
to get any oil out of such whales? As for that dried up one,
there, he hasn't a gill in his whole carcase."
"I know that
well enough; but, d'ye see, the Captain here won't believe
it; this is his first voyage; he was a Cologne manufacturer
before. But come aboard, and mayhap he'll believe you, if he
won't me; and so I'll get out of this dirty scrape."
"Anything to
oblige ye, my sweet and pleasant fellow," rejoined Stubb,
and with that he soon mounted to the deck. There a queer
scene presented itself. The sailors, in tasselled caps of
red worsted, were getting the heavy tackles in readiness for
the whales. But they worked rather slow and talked very
fast, and seemed in anything but a good humor. All their
noses upwardly projected from their faces like so many
jibbooms. Now and then pairs of them would drop their work,
and run up to the mast-head to get some fresh air. Some
thinking they would catch the plague, dipped oakum in
coal-tar, and at intervals held it to their nostrils. Others
having broken the stems of their pipes almost short off at
the bowl, were vigorously puffing tobacco-smoke, so that it
constantly filled their olfactories.
Stubb was
struck by a shower of outcries and anathemas proceeding from
the Captain's round-house abaft; and looking in that
direction saw a fiery face thrust from behind the door,
which was held ajar from within. This was the tormented
surgeon, who, after in vain remonstrating against the
proceedings of the day, had betaken himself to the Captain's
round-house (cabinet he called it) to avoid the pest; but
still, could not help yelling out his entreaties and
indignations at times.
Marking all
this, Stubb argued well for his scheme, and turning to the
Guernsey-man had a little chat with him, during which the
stranger mate expressed his detestation of his Captain as a
conceited ignoramus, who had brought them all into so
unsavory and unprofitable a pickle. Sounding him carefully,
Stubb further perceived that the Guernsey-man had not the
slightest suspicion concerning the ambergris. He therefore
held his peace on that head, but otherwise was quite frank
and confidential with him, so that the two quickly concocted
a little plan for both circumventing and satirizing the
Captain, without his at all dreaming of distrusting their
sincerity. According to this little plan of theirs, the
Guernsey-man, under cover of an interpreter's office, was to
tell the Captain what he pleased, but as coming from Stubb;
and as for Stubb, he was to utter any nonsense that should
come uppermost in him during the interview.
By this time
their destined victim appeared from his cabin. He was a
small and dark, but rather delicate looking man for a
sea-captain, with large whiskers and moustache, however; and
wore a red cotton velvet vest with watch-seals at his side.
To this gentleman, Stubb was now politely introduced by the
Guernsey-man, who at once ostentatiously put on the aspect
of interpreting between them.
"What shall I
say to him first?" said he.
"Why," said
Stubb, eyeing the velvet vest and the watch and seals, "you
may as well begin by telling him that he looks a sort of
babyish to me, though I don't pretend to be a judge."
"He says,
Monsieur," said the Guernsey-man, in French, turning to his
captain, "that only yesterday his ship spoke a vessel, whose
captain and chief-mate, with six sailors, had all died of a
fever caught from a blasted whale they had brought
alongside."
Upon this the
captain started, and eagerly desired to know more.
"What now?"
said the Guernsey-man to Stubb.
"Why, since he
takes it so easy, tell him that now I have eyed him
carefully, I'm quite certain that he's no more fit to
command a whale-ship than a St. Jago monkey. In fact, tell
him from me he's a baboon."
"He vows and
declares, Monsieur, that the other whale, the dried one, is
far more deadly than the blasted one; in fine, Monsieur, he
conjures us, as we value our lives, to cut loose from these
fish."
Instantly the
captain ran forward, and in a loud voice commanded his crew
to desist from hoisting the cutting-tackles, and at once
cast loose the cables and chains confining the whales to the
ship.
"What now?"
said the Guernsey-man, when the Captain had returned to
them.
"Why, let me
see; yes, you may as well tell him now that—that—in fact,
tell him I've diddled him, and (aside to himself) perhaps
somebody else."
"He says,
Monsieur, that he's very happy to have been of any service
to us."
Hearing this,
the captain vowed that they were the grateful parties
(meaning himself and mate), and concluded by inviting Stubb
down into his cabin to drink a bottle of Bordeaux.
"He wants you
to take a glass of wine with him," said the interpreter.
"Thank him
heartily; but tell him it's against my principles to drink
with the man I've diddled. In fact, tell him I must go."
"He says,
Monsieur, that his principles won't admit of his drinking;
but that if Monsieur wants to live another day to drink,
then Monsieur had best drop all four boats, and pull the
ship away from these whales, for it's so calm they won't
drift."
By this time
Stubb was over the side, and getting into his boat, hailed
the Guernsey-man to this effect,—that having a long tow-line
in his boat, he would do what he could to help them, by
pulling out the lighter whale of the two from the ship's
side. While the Frenchman's boats, then, were engaged in
towing the ship one way, Stubb benevolently towed away at
his whale the other way, ostentatiously slacking out a most
unusually long tow-line.
Presently a
breeze sprang up; Stubb feigned to cast off from the whale;
hoisting his boats, the Frenchman soon increased his
distance, while the Pequod slid in between him and Stubb's
whale. Whereupon Stubb quickly pulled to the floating body,
and hailing the Pequod to give notice of his intentions, at
once proceeded to reap the fruit of his unrighteous cunning.
Seizing his sharp boat-spade, he commenced an excavation in
the body, a little behind the side fin. You would almost
have thought he was digging a cellar there in the sea; and
when at length his spade struck against the gaunt ribs, it
was like turning up old Roman tiles and pottery buried in
fat English loam. His boat's crew were all in high
excitement, eagerly helping their chief, and looking as
anxious as gold-hunters.
And all the
time numberless fowls were diving, and ducking, and
screaming, and yelling, and fighting around them. Stubb was
beginning to look disappointed, especially as the horrible
nosegay increased, when suddenly from out the very heart of
this plague, there stole a faint stream of perfume, which
flowed through the tide of bad smells without being absorbed
by it, as one river will flow into and then along with
another, without at all blending with it for a time.
"I have it, I
have it," cried Stubb, with delight, striking something in
the subterranean regions, "a purse! a purse!"
Dropping his
spade, he thrust both hands in, and drew out handfuls of
something that looked like ripe Windsor soap, or rich
mottled old cheese; very unctuous and savory withal. You
might easily dent it with your thumb; it is of a hue between
yellow and ash color. And this, good friends, is ambergris,
worth a gold guinea an ounce to any druggist. Some six
handfuls were obtained; but more was unavoidably lost in the
sea, and still more, perhaps, might have been secured were
it not for impatient Ahab's loud command to Stubb to desist,
and come on board, else the ship would bid them good-bye.
CHAPTER 92
Ambergris
Now this ambergris is a very
curious substance, and so important as an article of
commerce, that in 1791 a certain Nantucket-born Captain
Coffin was examined at the bar of the English House of
Commons on that subject. For at that time, and indeed until
a comparatively late day, the precise origin of ambergris
remained, like amber itself, a problem to the learned.
Though the word ambergris is but the French compound for
grey amber, yet the two substances are quite distinct. For
amber, though at times found on the sea-coast, is also dug
up in some far inland soils, whereas ambergris is never
found except upon the sea. Besides, amber is a hard,
transparent, brittle, odorless substance, used for
mouth-pieces to pipes, for beads and ornaments; but
ambergris is soft, waxy, and so highly fragrant and spicy,
that it is largely used in perfumery, in pastiles, precious
candles, hair-powders, and pomatum. The Turks use it in
cooking, and also carry it to Mecca, for the same purpose
that frankincense is carried to St. Peter's in Rome. Some
wine merchants drop a few grains into claret, to flavor it.
Who would
think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should
regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious
bowels of a sick whale! Yet so it is. By some, ambergris is
supposed to be the cause, and by others the effect, of the
dyspepsia in the whale. How to cure such a dyspepsia it were
hard to say, unless by administering three or four boat
loads of Brandreth's pills, and then running out of harm's
way, as laborers do in blasting rocks.
I have
forgotten to say that there were found in this ambergris,
certain hard, round, bony plates, which at first Stubb
thought might be sailors' trousers buttons; but it
afterwards turned out that they were nothing, more than
pieces of small squid bones embalmed in that manner.
Now that the
incorruption of this most fragrant ambergris should be found
in the heart of such decay; is this nothing? Bethink thee of
that saying of St. Paul in Corinthians, about corruption and
incorruption; how that we are sown in dishonor, but raised
in glory. And likewise call to mind that saying of
Paracelsus about what it is that maketh the best musk. Also
forget not the strange fact that of all things of ill-savor,
Cologne-water, in its rudimental manufacturing stages, is
the worst.
I should like
to conclude the chapter with the above appeal, but cannot,
owing to my anxiety to repel a charge often made against
whalemen, and which, in the estimation of some already
biased minds, might be considered as indirectly
substantiated by what has been said of the Frenchman's two
whales. Elsewhere in this volume the slanderous aspersion
has been disproved, that the vocation of whaling is
throughout a slatternly, untidy business. But there is
another thing to rebut. They hint that all whales always
smell bad. Now how did this odious stigma originate?
I opine, that
it is plainly traceable to the first arrival of the
Greenland whaling ships in London, more than two centuries
ago. Because those whalemen did not then, and do not now,
try out their oil at sea as the Southern ships have always
done; but cutting up the fresh blubber in small bits, thrust
it through the bung holes of large casks, and carry it home
in that manner; the shortness of the season in those Icy
Seas, and the sudden and violent storms to which they are
exposed, forbidding any other course. The consequence is,
that upon breaking into the hold, and unloading one of these
whale cemeteries, in the Greenland dock, a savor is given
forth somewhat similar to that arising from excavating an
old city graveyard, for the foundations of a Lying-in
Hospital.
I partly
surmise also, that this wicked charge against whalers may be
likewise imputed to the existence on the coast of Greenland,
in former times, of a Dutch village called Schmerenburgh or
Smeerenberg, which latter name is the one used by the
learned Fogo Von Slack, in his great work on Smells, a
text-book on that subject. As its name imports (smeer, fat;
berg, to put up), this village was founded in order to
afford a place for the blubber of the Dutch whale fleet to
be tried out, without being taken home to Holland for that
purpose. It was a collection of furnaces, fat-kettles, and
oil sheds; and when the works were in full operation
certainly gave forth no very pleasant savor. But all this is
quite different from a South Sea Sperm Whaler; which in a
voyage of four years perhaps, after completely filling her
hold with oil, does not, perhaps, consume fifty days in the
business of boiling out; and in the state that it is casked,
the oil is nearly scentless. The truth is, that living or
dead, if but decently treated, whales as a species are by no
means creatures of ill odor; nor can whalemen be recognised,
as the people of the middle ages affected to detect a Jew in
the company, by the nose. Nor indeed can the whale possibly
be otherwise than fragrant, when, as a general thing, he
enjoys such high health; taking abundance of exercise;
always out of doors; though, it is true, seldom in the open
air. I say, that the motion of a Sperm Whale's flukes above
water dispenses a perfume, as when a musk-scented lady
rustles her dress in a warm parlor. What then shall I liken
the Sperm Whale to for fragrance, considering his magnitude?
Must it not be to that famous elephant, with jewelled tusks,
and redolent with myrrh, which was led out of an Indian town
to do honor to Alexander the Great?
CHAPTER 93
The Castaway
It was but some few days after
encountering the Frenchman, that a most significant event
befell the most insignificant of the Pequod's crew; an event
most lamentable; and which ended in providing the sometimes
madly merry and predestinated craft with a living and ever
accompanying prophecy of whatever shattered sequel might
prove her own.
Now, in the
whale ship, it is not every one that goes in the boats. Some
few hands are reserved called shipkeepers, whose province it
is to work the vessel while the boats are pursuing the
whale. As a general thing, these shipkeepers are as hardy
fellows as the men comprising the boats' crews. But if there
happen to be an unduly slender, clumsy, or timorous wight in
the ship, that wight is certain to be made a ship-keeper. It
was so in the Pequod with the little negro Pippin by
nick-name, Pip by abbreviation. Poor Pip! ye have heard of
him before; ye must remember his tambourine on that dramatic
midnight, so gloomy-jolly.
In outer
aspect, Pip and Dough-Boy made a match, like a black pony
and a white one, of equal developments, though of dissimilar
color, driven in one eccentric span. But while hapless
Dough-Boy was by nature dull and torpid in his intellects,
Pip, though over tender-hearted, was at bottom very bright,
with that pleasant, genial, jolly brightness peculiar to his
tribe; a tribe, which ever enjoy all holidays and
festivities with finer, freer relish than any other race.
For blacks, the year's calendar should show naught but three
hundred and sixty-five Fourth of Julys and New Year's Days.
Nor smile so, while I write that this little black was
brilliant, for even blackness has its brilliancy; behold yon
lustrous ebony, panelled in king's cabinets. But Pip loved
life, and all life's peaceable securities; so that the
panic-striking business in which he had somehow
unaccountably become entrapped, had most sadly blurred his
brightness; though, as ere long will be seen, what was thus
temporarily subdued in him, in the end was destined to be
luridly illumined by strange wild fires, that fictitiously
showed him off to ten times the natural lustre with which in
his native Tolland County in Connecticut, he had once
enlivened many a fiddler's frolic on the green; and at
melodious even-tide, with his gay ha-ha! had turned the
round horizon into one star-belled tambourine. So, though in
the clear air of day, suspended against a blue-veined neck,
the pure-watered diamond drop will healthful glow; yet, when
the cunning jeweller would show you the diamond in its most
impressive lustre, he lays it against a gloomy ground, and
then lights it up, not by the sun, but by some unnatural
gases. Then come out those fiery effulgences, infernally
superb; then the evil-blazing diamond, once the divinest
symbol of the crystal skies, looks like some crown-jewel
stolen from the King of Hell. But let us to the story.
It came to
pass, that in the ambergris affair Stubb's after-oarsman
chanced so to sprain his hand, as for a time to become quite
maimed; and, temporarily, Pip was put into his place.
The first time
Stubb lowered with him, Pip evinced much nervousness; but
happily, for that time, escaped close contact with the
whale; and therefore came off not altogether discreditably;
though Stubb observing him, took care, afterwards, to exhort
him to cherish his courageousness to the utmost, for he
might often find it needful.
Now upon the
second lowering, the boat paddled upon the whale; and as the
fish received the darted iron, it gave its customary rap,
which happened, in this instance, to be right under poor
Pip's seat. The involuntary consternation of the moment
caused him to leap, paddle in hand, out of the boat; and in
such a way, that part of the slack whale line coming against
his chest, he breasted it overboard with him, so as to
become entangled in it, when at last plumping into the
water. That instant the stricken whale started on a fierce
run, the line swiftly straightened; and presto! poor Pip
came all foaming up to the chocks of the boat, remorselessly
dragged there by the line, which had taken several turns
around his chest and neck.
Tashtego stood
in the bows. He was full of the fire of the hunt. He hated
Pip for a poltroon. Snatching the boat-knife from its
sheath, he suspended its sharp edge over the line, and
turning towards Stubb, exclaimed interrogatively, "Cut?"
Meantime Pip's blue, choked face plainly looked, Do, for
God's sake! All passed in a flash. In less than half a
minute, this entire thing happened.
"Damn him,
cut!" roared Stubb; and so the whale was lost and Pip was
saved.
So soon as he
recovered himself, the poor little negro was assailed by
yells and execrations from the crew. Tranquilly permitting
these irregular cursings to evaporate, Stubb then in a
plain, business-like, but still half humorous manner, cursed
Pip officially; and that done, unofficially gave him much
wholesome advice. The substance was, Never jump from a boat,
Pip, except—but all the rest was indefinite, as the soundest
advice ever is. Now, in general, Stick to the boat, is your
true motto in whaling; but cases will sometimes happen when
Leap from the boat, is still better. Moreover, as if
perceiving at last that if he should give undiluted
conscientious advice to Pip, he would be leaving him too
wide a margin to jump in for the future; Stubb suddenly
dropped all advice, and concluded with a peremptory command
"Stick to the boat, Pip, or by the Lord, I won't pick you up
if you jump; mind that. We can't afford to lose whales by
the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what
you would, Pip, in Alabama. Bear that in mind, and don't
jump any more." Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that
though man loved his fellow, yet man is a money-making
animal, which propensity too often interferes with his
benevolence.
But we are all
in the hands of the Gods; and Pip jumped again. It was under
very similar circumstances to the first performance; but
this time he did not breast out the line; and hence, when
the whale started to run, Pip was left behind on the sea,
like a hurried traveller's trunk. Alas! Stubb was but too
true to his word. It was a beautiful, bounteous, blue day!
the spangled sea calm and cool, and flatly stretching away,
all round, to the horizon, like gold-beater's skin hammered
out to the extremest. Bobbing up and down in that sea, Pip's
ebon head showed like a head of cloves. No boat-knife was
lifted when he fell so rapidly astern. Stubb's inexorable
back was turned upon him; and the whale was winged. In three
minutes, a whole mile of shoreless ocean was between Pip and
Stubb. Out from the centre of the sea, poor Pip turned his
crisp, curling, black head to the sun, another lonely
castaway, though the loftiest and the brightest.
Now, in calm
weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the
practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore.
But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense
concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless
immensity, my God! who can tell it? Mark, how when sailors
in a dead calm bathe in the open sea— mark how closely they
hug their ship and only coast along her sides.
But had Stubb
really abandoned the poor little negro to his fate? No; he
did not mean to, at least. Because there were two boats in
his wake, and he supposed, no doubt, that they would of
course come up to Pip very quickly, and pick him up; though,
indeed, such considerations towards oarsmen jeopardized
through their own timidity, is not always manifested by the
hunters in all similar instances; and such instances not
unfrequently occur; almost invariably in the fishery, a
coward, so called, is marked with the same ruthless
detestation peculiar to military navies and armies.
But it so
happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly
spying whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave
chase; and Stubb's boat was now so far away, and he and all
his crew so intent upon his fish, that Pip's ringed horizon
began to expand around him miserably. By the merest chance
the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the
little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least,
they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body
up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned
entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous
depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world
glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the
miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among
the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the
multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of
the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw
God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and
therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is
heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man
comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason,
is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then
uncompromised, indifferent as his God.
For the rest
blame not Stubb too hardly. The thing is common in that
fishery; and in the sequel of the narrative, it will then be
seen what like abandonment befell myself.
CHAPTER 94
A Squeeze of
the Hand
That whale of Stubb's, so
dearly purchased, was duly brought to the Pequod's side,
where all those cutting and hoisting operations previously
detailed, were regularly gone through, even to the baling of
the Heidelburgh Tun, or Case.
While some
were occupied with this latter duty, others were employed in
dragging away the larger tubs, so soon as filled with the
sperm; and when the proper time arrived, this same sperm was
carefully manipulated ere going to the try-works, of which
anon.
It had cooled
and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several
others, I sat down before a large Constantine's bath of it,
I found it strangely concreted into lumps, here and there
rolling about in the liquid part. It was our business to
squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A sweet and unctuous
duty! No wonder that in old times this sperm was such a
favorite cosmetic. Such a clearer! such a sweetener! such a
softener; such a delicious mollifier! After having my hands
in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and
began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralize.
As I sat there
at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter
exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the
ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as
I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of
infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour; as they
richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their
opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as. I snuffed
up that uncontaminated aroma,— literally and truly, like the
smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time
I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our
horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my
hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old
Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in
allaying the heat of anger; while bathing in that bath, I
felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or
malice, of any sort whatsoever.
Squeeze!
squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that
sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that
sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I
found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers' hands in
it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an
abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this
avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing
their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally;
as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we
longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest
ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round;
nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us
squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm
of kindness.
Would that I
could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by
many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that
in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift,
his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere
in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart,
the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side; the country;
now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze
case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I
saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in
a jar of spermaceti.
Now, while discoursing of
sperm it behooves to speak of other things akin to it, in
the business of preparing the sperm whale for the try-works.
First comes
white-horse, so called, which is obtained from the tapering
part of the fish, and also from the thicker portions of his
flukes. It is tough with congealed tendons—a wad of
muscle—but still contains some oil. After being severed from
the whale, the white-horse is first cut into portable
oblongs ere going to the mincer. They look much like blocks
of Berkshire marble.
Plum-pudding
is the term bestowed upon certain fragmentary parts of the
whale's flesh, here and there adhering to the blanket of
blubber, and often participating to a considerable degree in
its unctuousness. It is a most refreshing, convivial,
beautiful object to behold. As its name imports, it is of an
exceedingly rich, mottled tint, with a bestreaked snowy and
golden ground, dotted with spots of the deepest crimson and
purple. It is plums of rubies, in pictures of citron. Spite
of reason, it is hard to keep yourself from eating it. I
confess, that once I stole behind the foremast to try it. It
tasted something as I should conceive a royal cutlet from
the thigh of Louis le Gros might have tasted, supposing him
to have been killed the first day after the venison season,
and that particular venison season contemporary with an
unusually fine vintage of the vineyards of Champagne.
There is
another substance, and a very singular one, which turns up
in the course of this business, but which I feel it to be
very puzzling adequately to describe. It is called
slobgollion; an appellation original with the whalemen, and
even so is the nature of the substance. It is an ineffably
oozy, stringy affair, most frequently found in the tubs of
sperm, after a prolonged squeezing, and subsequent
decanting. I hold it to be the wondrously thin, ruptured
membranes of the case, coalescing.
Gurry, so
called, is a term properly belonging to right whalemen, but
sometimes incidentally used by the sperm fishermen. It
designates the dark, glutinous substance which is scraped
off the back of the Greenland or right whale, and much of
which covers the decks of those inferior souls who hunt that
ignoble Leviathan.
Nippers.
Strictly this word is not indigenous to the whale's
vocabulary. But as applied by whalemen, it becomes so. A
whaleman's nipper is a short firm strip of tendinous stuff
cut from the tapering part of Leviathan's tail: it averages
an inch in thickness, and for the rest, is about the size of
the iron part of a hoe. Edgewise moved along the oily deck,
it operates like a leathern squilgee; and by nameless
blandishments, as of magic, allures along with it all
impurities.
But to learn
all about these recondite matters, your best way is at once
to descend into the blubber-room, and have a long talk with
its inmates. This place has previously been mentioned as the
receptacle for the blanket-pieces, when stript and hoisted
from the whale. When the proper time arrives for cutting up
its contents, this apartment is a scene of terror to all
tyros, especially by night. On one side, lit by a dull
lantern, a space has been left clear for the workmen. They
generally go in pairs,—a pike-and-gaffman and a spade-man.
The whaling-pike is similar to a frigate's boarding-weapon
of the same name. The gaff is something like a boat-hook.
With his gaff, the gaffman hooks on to a sheet of blubber,
and strives to hold it from slipping, as the ship pitches
and lurches about. Meanwhile, the spade-man stands on the
sheet itself, perpendicularly chopping it into the portable
horse-pieces. This spade is sharp as hone can make it; the
spademan's feet are shoeless; the thing he stands on will
sometimes irresistibly slide away from him, like a sledge.
If he cuts off one of his own toes, or one of his
assistants', would you be very much astonished? Toes are
scarce among veteran blubber-room men.
CHAPTER 95
The Cassock
Had you stepped on board the
Pequod at a certain juncture of this post-mortemizing of the
whale; and had you strolled forward nigh the windlass,
pretty sure am I that you would have scanned with no small
curiosity a very strange, enigmatical object, which you
would have seen there, lying along lengthwise in the lee
scuppers. Not the wondrous cistern in the whale's huge head;
not the prodigy of his unhinged lower jaw; not the miracle
of his symmetrical tail; none of these would so surprise
you, as half a glimpse of that unaccountable cone,—longer
than a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the
base, and jet-black as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg. And
an idol, indeed, it is; or rather, in old times, its
likeness was. Such an idol as that found in the secret
groves of Queen Maachah in Judea; and for worshipping which,
King Asa, her son, did depose her, and destroyed the idol,
and burnt it for an abomination at the brook Kedron, as
darkly set forth in the 15th chapter of the First Book of
Kings.
Look at the
sailor, called the mincer, who now comes along, and assisted
by two allies, heavily backs the grandissimus, as the
mariners call it, and with bowed shoulders, staggers off
with it as if he were a grenadier carrying a dead comrade
from the field. Extending it upon the forecastle deck, he
now proceeds cylindrically to remove its dark pelt, as an
African hunter the pelt of a boa. This done he turns the
pelt inside out, like a pantaloon leg; gives it a good
stretching, so as almost to double its diameter; and at last
hangs it, well spread, in the rigging, to dry. Ere long, it
is taken down; when removing some three feet of it, towards
the pointed extremity, and then cutting two slits for
arm-holes at the other end, he lengthwise slips himself
bodily into it. The mincer now stands before you invested in
the full canonicals of his calling. Immemorial to all his
order, this investiture alone will adequately protect him,
while employed in the peculiar functions of his office.
That office
consists in mincing the horse-pieces of blubber for the
pots; an operation which is conducted at a curious wooden
horse, planted endwise against the bulwarks, and with a
capacious tub beneath it, into which the minced pieces drop,
fast as the sheets from a rapt orator's desk. Arrayed in
decent black; occupying a conspicuous pulpit; intent on
bible leaves; what a candidate for an archbishopric, what a
lad for a Pope were this mincer!*
* Bible
leaves! Bible leaves! This is the invariable cry from the
mates to the mincer. It enjoins him to be careful, and cut
his work into as thin slices as possible, inasmuch as by so
doing the business of boiling out the oil is much
accelerated, and its quantity considerably increased,
besides perhaps improving it in quality.
CHAPTER 96
The Try-Works
Besides her hoisted boats, an
American whaler is outwardly distinguished by her try-works.
She presents the curious anomaly of the most solid masonry
joining with oak and hemp in constituting the completed
ship. It is as if from the open field a brick-kiln were
transported to her planks.
The try-works
are planted between the foremast and mainmast, the most
roomy part of the deck. The timbers beneath are of a
peculiar strength, fitted to sustain the weight of an almost
solid mass of brick and mortar, some ten feet by eight
square, and five in height. The foundation does not
penetrate the deck, but the masonry is firmly secured to the
surface by ponderous knees of iron bracing it on all sides,
and screwing it down to the timbers. On the flanks it is
cased with wood, and at top completely covered by a large,
sloping, battened hatchway. Removing this hatch we expose
the great try-pots, two in number, and each of several
barrels' capacity. When not in use, they are kept remarkably
clean. Sometimes they are polished with soapstone and sand,
till they shine within like silver punchbowls. During the
night-watches some cynical old sailors will crawl into them
and coil themselves away there for a nap. While employed in
polishing them—one man in each pot, side by side— many
confidential communications are carried on, over the iron
lips. It is a place also for profound mathematical
meditation. It was in the left hand try-pot of the Pequod,
with the soapstone diligently circling round me, that I was
first indirectly struck by the remarkable fact, that in
geometry all bodies gliding along the cycloid, my soapstone
for example, will descend from any point in precisely the
same time.
Removing the
fire-board from the front of the try-works, the bare masonry
of that side is exposed, penetrated by the two iron mouths
of the furnaces, directly underneath the pots. These mouths
are fitted with heavy doors of iron. The intense heat of the
fire is prevented from communicating itself to the deck, by
means of a shallow reservoir extending under the entire
inclosed surface of the works. By a tunnel inserted at the
rear, this reservoir is kept replenished with water as fast
as it evaporates. There are no external chimneys; they open
direct from the rear wall. And here let us go back for a
moment.
It was about
nine o'clock at night that the Pequod's try-works were first
started on this present voyage. It belonged to Stubb to
oversee the business.
"All ready
there? Off hatch, then, and start her. You cook, fire the
works." This was an easy thing, for the carpenter had been
thrusting his shavings into the furnace throughout the
passage. Here be it said that in a whaling voyage the first
fire in the try-works has to be fed for a time with wood.
After that no wood is used, except as a means of quick
ignition to the staple fuel. In a word, after being tried
out, the crisp, shrivelled blubber, now called scraps or
fritters, still contains considerable of its unctuous
properties. These fritters feed the flames. Like a plethoric
burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once
ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his
own body. Would that he consumed his own smoke! for his
smoke is horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must, and not
only that, but you must live in it for the time. It has an
unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in
the vicinity of funereal pyres. It smells like the left wing
of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit.
By midnight
the works were in full operation. We were clear from the
carcass; sail had been made; the wind was freshening; the
wild ocean darkness was intense. But that darkness was
licked up by the fierce flames, which at intervals forked
forth from the sooty flues, and illuminated every lofty rope
in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire. The burning
ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to some
vengeful deed. So the pitch and sulphur-freighted brigs of
the bold Hydriote, Canaris, issuing from their midnight
harbors, with broad sheets of flame for sails, bore down
upon the Turkish frigates, and folded them in
conflagrations.
The hatch,
removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide
hearth in front of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean
shapes of the pagan harpooneers, always the whale-ship's
stokers. With huge pronged poles they pitched hissing masses
of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires
beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the
doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled away in
sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch
of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into
their faces. Opposite the mouth of the works, on the further
side of the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass. This
served for a sea-sofa. Here lounged the watch, when not
otherwise employed, looking into the red heat of the fire,
till their eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their tawny
features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their
matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of
their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in the
capricious emblazonings of the works. As they narrated to
each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror
told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked
upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to
and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated
with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind
howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and
dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and
further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and
scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and
viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing
Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and
burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of
darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac
commander's soul.
So seemed it
to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently
guided the way of this fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped, for
that interval, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the
redness, the madness, the ghastliness of others. The
continual sight of the fiend shapes before me, capering half
in smoke and half in fire, these at last begat kindred
visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield to that
unaccountable drowsiness which ever would come over me at a
midnight helm.
But that
night, in particular, a strange (and ever since
inexplicable) thing occurred to me. Starting from a brief
standing sleep, I was horribly conscious of something
fatally wrong. The jaw-bone tiller smote my side, which
leaned against it; in my ears was the low hum of sails, just
beginning to shake in the wind; I thought my eyes were open;
I was half conscious of putting my fingers to the lids and
mechanically stretching them still further apart. But, spite
of all this, I could see no compass before me to steer by;
though it seemed but a minute since I had been watching the
card, by the steady binnacle lamp illuminating it. Nothing
seemed before me but a jet gloom, now and then made ghastly
by flashes of redness. Uppermost was the impression, that
whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much
bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern.
A stark, bewildered feeling, as of death, came over me.
Convulsively my hands grasped the tiller, but with the crazy
conceit that the tiller was, somehow, in some enchanted way,
inverted. My God! what is the matter with me? thought I. Lo!
in my brief sleep I had turned myself about, and was
fronting the ship's stern, with my back to her prow and the
compass. In an instant I faced back, just in time to prevent
the vessel from flying up into the wind, and very probably
capsizing her. How glad and how grateful the relief from
this unnatural hallucination of the night, and the fatal
contingency of being brought by the lee!
Look not too
long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy
hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept
the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the
artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look
ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be
bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames,
the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief;
the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp—all
others but liars!
Nevertheless
the sun hides not Virginia's Dismal Swamp, nor Rome's
accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of
miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun
hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth,
and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that
mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that
mortal man cannot be true—not true, or undeveloped. With
books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of
Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon's, and
Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. "All is
vanity." ALL. This wilful world hath not got hold of
unchristian Solomon's wisdom yet. But he who dodges
hospitals and jails, and walks fast crossing graveyards, and
would rather talk of operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young,
Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and
throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as
passing wise, and therefore jolly;—not that man is fitted to
sit down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with
unfathomably wondrous Solomon.
But even
Solomon, he says, "the man that wandereth out of the way of
understanding shall remain" (i.e. even while living) "in the
congregation of the dead." Give not thyself up, then, to
fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it
did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe
that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls
that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar
out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces.
And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge
is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the
mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the
plain, even though they soar.
CHAPTER 97
The Lamp
Had you descended from the
Pequod's try-works to the Pequod's forecastle, where the off
duty watch were sleeping, for one single moment you would
have almost thought you were standing in some illuminated
shrine of canonized kings and counsellors. There they lay in
their triangular oaken vaults, each mariner a chiselled
muteness; a score of lamps flashing upon his hooded eyes.
In
merchantmen, oil for the sailor is more scarce than the milk
of queens. To dress in the dark, and eat in the dark, and
stumble in darkness to his pallet, this is his usual lot.
But the whaleman, as he seeks the food of light, so he lives
in light. He makes his berth an Aladdin's lamp, and lays him
down in it; so that in the pitchiest night the ship's black
hull still houses an illumination.
See with what
entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful of lamps—often
but old bottles and vials, though—to the copper cooler at
the tryworks, and replenishes them there, as mugs of ale at
a vat. He burns, too, the purest of oil, in its
unmanufactured, and, therefore, unvitiated state; a fluid
unknown to solar, lunar, or astral contrivances ashore. It
is sweet as early grass butter in April. He goes and hunts
for his oil, so as to be sure of its freshness and
genuineness, even as the traveller on the prairie hunts up
his own supper of game.
CHAPTER 98
Stowing Down
and Clearing Up
Already has it been related
how the great leviathan is afar off descried from the
mast-head; how he is chased over the watery moors, and
slaughtered in the valleys of the deep; how he is then towed
alongside and beheaded; and how (on the principle which
entitled the headsman of old to the garments in which the
beheaded was killed) his great padded surtout becomes the
property of his executioner; how, in due time, he is
condemned to the pots, and, like Shadrach, Meshach, and
Abednego, his spermaceti, oil, and bone pass unscathed
through the fire;—but now it remains to conclude the last
chapter of this part of the description by
rehearsing—singing, if I may—the romantic proceeding of
decanting off his oil into the casks and striking them down
into the hold, where once again leviathan returns to his
native profundities, sliding along beneath the surface :is
before; but, alas! never more to rise and blow.
While still
warm, the oil, like hot punch, is received into the
six-barrel casks; and while, perhaps, the ship is pitching
and rolling this way and that in the midnight sea, the
enormous casks are slewed round and headed over, end for
end, and sometimes perilously scoot across the slippery
deck, like so many land slides, till at last man-handled and
stayed in their course; and all round the hoops, rap, rap,
go as many hammers as can play upon them, for now, ex
officio, every sailor is a cooper.
At length,
when the last pint is casked, and all is cool, then the
great hatchways are unsealed, the bowels of the ship are
thrown open, and down go the casks to their final rest in
the sea. This done, the hatches are replaced, and
hermetically closed, like a closet walled up.
In the sperm
fishery, this is perhaps one of the most remarkable
incidents in all the business of whaling. One day the planks
stream with freshets of blood and oil; on the sacred
quarter-deck enormous masses of the whale's head are
profanely piled; great rusty casks lie about, as in a
brewery yard; the smoke from the try-works has besooted all
the bulwarks; the mariners go about suffused with
unctuousness; the entire ship seems great leviathan himself;
while on all hands the din is deafening.
But a day or
two after, you look about you, and prick your ears in this
self-same ship! and were it not for the tell-tale boats and
try-works, you would all but swear you trod some silent
merchant vessel, with a most scrupulously neat commander.
The unmanufactured sperm oil possesses a singularly
cleansing virtue. This is the reason why the decks never
look so white as just after what they call an affair of oil.
Besides, from the ashes of the burned scraps of the whale, a
potent lye is readily made; and whenever any adhesiveness
from the back of the whale remains clinging to the side,
that lye quickly exterminates it. Hands go diligently along
the bulwarks, and with buckets of water and rags restore
them to their full tidiness. The soot is brushed from the
lower rigging. All the numerous implements which have been
in use are likewise faithfully cleansed and put away. The
great hatch is scrubbed and placed upon the try-works,
completely hiding the pots; every cask is out of sight; all
tackles are coiled in unseen nooks; and when by the combined
and, simultaneous industry of almost the entire ship's
company, the whole of this conscientious duty is at last
concluded, then the crew themselves proceed to their own
ablutions; shift themselves from top to toe; and finally
issue to the immaculate deck, fresh and all aglow as
bridegrooms new-leaped from out the daintiest Holland.
Now, with
elated step, they pace the planks in twos and threes, and
humorously discourse of parlors, sofas, carpets, and fine
cambrics; propose to mat the deck; think of having hangings
to the top; object not to taking tea by moonlight on the
piazza of the forecastle. To hint to such musked mariners of
oil, and bone, and blubber, were little short of audacity.
They know not the thing you distantly allude to. Away, and
bring us napkins!
But mark:
aloft there, at the three mast heads, stand three men intent
on spying out more whales, which, if caught, infallibly will
again soil the old oaken furniture, and drop at least one
small grease-spot somewhere. Yes; and many is the time,
when, after the severest uninterrupted labors, which know no
night; continuing straight through for ninety-six hours;
when from the boat, where they have swelled their wrists
with all day rowing on the Line,—they only step to the deck
to carry vast chains, and heave the heavy windlass, and cut
and slash, yea, and in their very sweatings to be smoked and
burned anew by the combined fires of the equatorial sun and
the equatorial try-works; when, on the heel of all this,
they have finally bestirred themselves to cleanse the ship,
and make a spotless dairy room of it; many is the time the
poor fellows, just buttoning the necks of their clean
frocks, are startled by the cry of "There she blows!" and
away they fly to fight another whale, and go through the
whole weary thing again. Oh! my friends, but this is
man-killing! Yet this is life. For hardly have we mortals by
long toilings extracted from this world's vast bulk its
small but valuable sperm; and then, with weary patience,
cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live
here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done,
when—There she blows!—the ghost is spouted up, and away we
sail to fight some other world, and go through young life's
old routine again.
Oh! the
metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two
thousand years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I
sailed with thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage—and,
foolish as I am, taught thee, a green simple boy, how to
splice a rope.
CHAPTER 99
The Doubloon
Ere now it has been related
how Ahab was wont to pace his quarter-deck, taking regular
turns at either limit, the binnacle and mainmast; but in the
multiplicity of other things requiring narration it has not
been added how that sometimes in these walks, when most
plunged in his mood, he was wont to pause in turn at each
spot, and stand there strangely eyeing the particular object
before him. When he halted before the binnacle, with his
glance fastened on the pointed needle in the compass, that
glance shot like a javelin with the pointed intensity of his
purpose; and when resuming his walk he again paused before
the mainmast, then, as the same riveted glance fastened upon
the riveted gold coin there, he still wore the same aspect
of nailed firmness, only dashed with a certain wild longing,
if not hopefulness.
But one
morning, turning to pass the doubloon, he seemed to be newly
attracted by the strange figures and inscriptions stamped on
it, as though now for the first time beginning to interpret
for himself in some monomaniac way whatever significance
might lurk in them. And some certain significance lurks in
all things, else all things are little worth, and the round
world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the
cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some
morass in the Milky Way.
Now this
doubloon was of purest, virgin gold, raked somewhere out of
the heart of gorgeous hills, whence, east and west, over
golden sands, the head-waters of many a Pactolus flows. And
though now nailed amidst all the rustiness of iron bolts and
the verdigris of copper spikes, yet, untouchable and
immaculate to any foulness, it still preserved its Quito
glow. Nor, though placed amongst a ruthless crew and every
hour passed by ruthless hands, and through the livelong
nights shrouded with thick darkness which might cover any
pilfering approach, nevertheless every sunrise found the
doubloon where the sunset last left it last. For it was set
apart and sanctified to one awe-striking end; and however
wanton in their sailor ways, one and all, the mariners
revered it as the white whale's talisman. Sometimes they
talked it over in the weary watch by night, wondering whose
it was to be at last, and whether he would ever live to
spend it.
Now those
noble golden coins of South America are as medals of the sun
and tropic token-pieces. Here palms, alpacas, and volcanoes;
sun's disks and stars, ecliptics, horns-of-plenty, and rich
banners waving, are in luxuriant profusion stamped; so that
the precious gold seems almost to derive an added
preciousness and enhancing glories, by passing through those
fancy mints, so Spanishly poetic.
It so chanced
that the doubloon of the Pequod was a most wealthy example
of these things. On its round border it bore the letters,
REPUBLICA DEL ECUADOR: QUITO. So this bright coin came from
a country planted in the middle of the world, and beneath
the great equator, and named after it; and it had been cast
midway up the Andes, in the unwaning clime that knows no
autumn. Zoned by those letters you saw the likeness of three
Andes' summits; from one a flame; a tower on another; on the
third a crowing cock; while arching over all was a segment
of the partitioned zodiac, the signs all marked with their
usual cabalistics, and the keystone sun entering the
equinoctial point at Libra.
Before this
equatorial coin, Ahab, not unobserved by others, was now
pausing.
"There's
something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and
all other grand and lofty things; look here,— three peaks as
proud as Lucifer. The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano,
that is Ahab; the courageous, the undaunted, and victorious
fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all are Ahab; and this round gold
is but the image of the rounder globe, which, like a
magician's glass, to each and every man in turn but mirrors
back his own mysterious self. Great pains, small gains for
those who ask the world to solve them; it cannot solve
itself. Methinks now this coined sun wears a ruddy face; but
see! aye, he enters the sign of storms, the equinox! and but
six months before he wheeled out of a former equinox at
Aries! From storm to storm! So be it, then. Born in throes,
't is fit that man should live in pains and die in pangs! So
be it, then! Here's stout stuff for woe to work on. So be
it, then."
"No fairy
fingers can have pressed the gold, but devil's claws must
have left their mouldings there since yesterday," murmured
Starbuck to himself, leaning against the bulwarks. "The old
man seems to read Belshazzar's awful writing. I have never
marked the coin inspectingly. He goes below; let me read. A
dark valley between three mighty, heaven-abiding peaks, that
almost seem the Trinity, in some faint earthly symbol. So in
this vale of Death, God girds us round; and over all our
gloom, the sun of Righteousness still shines a beacon and a
hope. If we bend down our eyes, the dark vale shows her
mouldy soil; but if we lift them, the bright sun meets our
glance half way, to cheer. Yet, oh, the great sun is no
fixture; and if, at midnight, we would fain snatch some
sweet solace from him, we gaze for him in vain! This coin
speaks wisely, mildly, truly, but still sadly to me. I will
quit it, lest Truth shake me falsely."
"There now's
the old Mogul," soliloquized Stubb by the try-works, "he's
been twigging it; and there goes Starbuck from the same, and
both with faces which I should say might be somewhere within
nine fathoms long. And all from looking at a piece of gold,
which did I have it now on Negro Hill or in Corlaer's Hook,
I'd not look at it very long ere spending it. Humph! in my
poor, insignificant opinion, I regard this as queer. I have
seen doubloons before now in my voyagings; your doubloons of
old Spain, your doubloons of Peru, your doubloons of Chili,
your doubloons of Bolivia, your doubloons of Popayan; with
plenty of gold moidores and pistoles, and joes, and half
joes, and quarter joes. What then should there be in this
doubloon of the Equator that is so killing wonderful? By
Golconda! let me read it once. Halloa! here's signs and
wonders truly! That, now, is what old Bowditch in his
Epitome calls the zodiac, and what my almanack below calls
ditto. I'll get the almanack; and as I have heard devils can
be raised with Daboll's arithmetic, I'll try my hand at
raising a meaning out of these queer curvicues here with the
Massachusetts calendar. Here's the book. Let's see now.
Signs and wonders; and the sun, he's always among 'em. Hem,
hem, hem; here they are— here they go—all alive: Aries, or
the Ram; Taurus, or the Bull and Jimimi! here's Gemini
himself, or the Twins. Well; the sun he wheels among 'em.
Aye, here on the coin he's just crossing the threshold
between two of twelve sitting-rooms all in a ring. Book! you
lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places.
You'll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come
in to supply the thoughts. That's my small experience, so
far as the Massachusetts calendar, and Bowditch's navigator,
and Daboll's arithmetic go. Signs and wonders, eh? Pity if
there is nothing wonderful in signs, and significant in
wonders! There's a clue somewhere; wait a bit; hist—hark! By
Jove, I have it! Look you, Doubloon, your zodiac here is the
life of man in one round chapter; and now I'll read it off,
straight out of the book. Come, Almanack! To begin: there's
Aries, or the Ram— lecherous dog, he begets us; then,
Taurus, or the Bull— he bumps us the first thing; then
Gemini, or the Twins— that is, Virtue and Vice; we try to
reach Virtue, when lo! comes Cancer the Crab, and drags us
back; and here, going from Virtue, Leo, a roaring Lion, lies
in the path— he gives a few fierce bites and surly dabs with
his paw; we escape, and hail Virgo, the Virgin! that's our
first love; we marry and think to be happy for aye, when pop
comes Libra, or the Scales—happiness weighed and found
wanting; and while we are very sad about that, Lord! how we
suddenly jump, as Scorpio, or the Scorpion, stings us in the
rear; we are curing the wound, when whang comes the arrows
all round; Sagittarius, or the Archer, is amusing himself.
As we pluck out the shafts, stand aside! here's the
battering-ram, Capricornus, or the Goat; full tilt, he comes
rushing, and headlong we are tossed; when Aquarius, or the
Waterbearer, pours out his whole deluge and drowns us; and
to wind up with Pisces, or the Fishes, we sleep. There's a
sermon now, writ in high heaven, and the sun goes through it
every year, and yet comes out of it all alive and hearty.
Jollily he, aloft there, wheels through toil and trouble;
and so, alow here, does jolly Stubb. Oh, jolly's the word
for aye! Adieu, Doubloon! But stop; here comes little
King-Post; dodge round the try-works, now, and let's hear
what he'll have to say. There; he's before it; he'll out
with something presently. So, so; he's beginning."
"I see nothing
here, but a round thing made of gold, and whoever raises a
certain whale, this round thing belongs to him. So, what's
all this staring been about? It is worth sixteen dollars,
that's true; and at two cents the cigar, that's nine hundred
and sixty cigars. I won't smoke dirty pipes like Stubb, but
I like cigars, and here's nine hundred and sixty of them; so
here goes Flask aloft to spy 'em out."
"Shall I call
that Wise or foolish, now; if it be really wise it has a
foolish look to it; yet, if it be really foolish, then has
it a sort of wiseish look to it. But, avast; here comes our
old Manxman—the old hearse-driver, he must have been, that
is, before he took to the sea. He luffs up before the
doubloon; halloa, and goes round on the other side of the
mast; why, there's a horse-shoe nailed on that side; and now
he's back again; what does that mean? Hark! he's muttering—
voice like an old worn-out coffee-mill. Prick ears, and
listen!"
"If the White
Whale be raised, it must be in a month and a day, when the
sun stands in some one of these signs. I've studied signs,
and know their marks; they were taught me two score years
ago, by the old witch in Copenhagen. Now, in what sign will
the sun then be? The horse-shoe sign; for there it is, right
opposite the gold. And what's the horse-shoe sign? The lion
is the horse-shoe sign— the roaring and devouring lion.
Ship, old ship! my old head shakes to think of thee."
"There's
another rendering now; but still one text. All sorts of men
in one kind of world, you see. Dodge again! here comes
Queequeg— all tattooing—looks like the signs of the Zodiac
himself. What says the Cannibal? As I live he's comparing
notes; looking at his thigh bone; thinks the sun is in the
thigh, or in the calf, or in the bowels, I suppose, as the
old women talk Surgeon's Astronomy in the back country. And
by Jove, he's found something there in the vicinity of his
thigh— I guess it's Sagittarius, or the Archer. No: he don't
know what to make of the doubloon; he takes it for an old
button off some king's trowsers. But, aside again! here
comes that ghost-devil, Fedallah; tail coiled out of sight
as usual, oakum in the toes of his pumps as usual. What does
he say, with that look of his? Ah, only makes a sign to the
sign and bows himself; there is a sun on the coin— fire
worshipper, depend upon it. Ho! more and more. This way
comes Pip— poor boy! would he had died, or I; he's half
horrible to me. He too has been watching all of these
interpreters myself included— and look now, he comes to
read, with that unearthly idiot face. Stand away again and
hear him. Hark!"
"I look, you
look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look."
"Upon my soul,
he's been studying Murray's Grammar! Improving his mind,
poor fellow! But what's that he says now—hist!"
"I look, you
look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look."
"Why, he's
getting it by heart—hist! again."
"I look, you
look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look."
"Well, that's
funny."
"And I, you,
and he; and we, ye, and they, are all bats; and I'm a crow,
especially when I stand a'top of this pine tree here. Caw!
caw! caw! caw! caw! caw! Ain't I a crow? And where's the
scare-crow? There he stands; two bones stuck into a pair of
old trowsers, and two more poked into the sleeves of an old
jacket."
"Wonder if he
means me?—complimentary—poor lad!—I could go hang myself.
Any way, for the present, I'll quit Pip's vicinity. I can
stand the rest, for they have plain wits; but he's too
crazy-witty for my sanity. So, so, I leave him muttering."
"Here's the
ship's navel, this doubloon here, and they are all one fire
to unscrew it. But, unscrew your navel, and what's the
consequence? Then again, if it stays here, that is ugly,
too, for when aught's nailed to the mast it's a sign that
things grow desperate. Ha! ha! old Ahab! the White Whale;
he'll nail ye! This is a pine tree. My father, in old
Tolland county, cut down a pine tree once, and found a
silver ring grown over in it; some old darkey's wedding
ring. How did it get there? And so they'll say in the
resurrection, when they come to fish up this old mast, and
find a doubloon lodged in it, with bedded oysters for the
shaggy bark. Oh, the gold! the precious, precious gold!—the
green miser'll hoard ye soon! Hish! hish! God goes 'mong the
worlds blackberrying. Cook! ho, cook! and cook us! Jenny!
hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, Jenny, Jenny! and get your hoe-cake
done!"
CHAPTER 100
Leg and Arm
The Pequod of
Nantucket, Meets the Samuel Enderby, of London
"Ship, ahoy! Hast seen the
White Whale?"
So cried Ahab,
once more hailing a ship showing English colors, bearing
down under the stern. Trumpet to mouth, the old man was
standing in his hoisted quarter-deck, his ivory leg plainly
revealed to the stranger captain, who was carelessly
reclining in his own boat's bow. He was a darkly-tanned,
burly, goodnatured, fine-looking man, of sixty or
thereabouts, dressed in a spacious roundabout, that hung
round him in festoons of blue pilot-cloth; and one empty arm
of this jacket streamed behind him like the broidered arm of
a huzzar's surcoat.
"Hast seen the
White Whale!"
"See you
this?" and withdrawing it from the folds that had hidden it,
he held up a white arm of sperm whale bone, terminating in a
wooden head like a mallet.
"Man my boat!"
cried Ahab, impetuously, and tossing about the oars near
him—"Stand by to lower!"
In less than a
minute, without quitting his little craft, he and his crew
were dropped to the water, and were soon alongside of the
stranger. But here a curious difficulty presented itself. In
the excitement of the moment, Ahab had forgotten that since
the loss of his leg he had never once stepped on board of
any vessel at sea but his own, and then it was always by an
ingenious and very handy mechanical contrivance peculiar to
the Pequod, and a thing not to be rigged and shipped in any
other vessel at a moment's warning. Now, it is no very easy
matter for anybody— except those who are almost hourly used
to it, like whalemen— to clamber up a ship's side from a
boat on the open sea; for the great swells now lift the boat
high up towards the bulwarks, and then instantaneously drop
it half way down to the kelson. So, deprived of one leg, and
the strange ship of course being altogether unsupplied with
the kindly invention, Ahab now found himself abjectly
reduced to a clumsy landsman again; hopelessly eyeing the
uncertain changeful height he could hardly hope to attain.
It has before
been hinted, perhaps, that every little untoward
circumstance that befell him, and which indirectly sprang
from his luckless mishap, almost invariably irritated or
exasperated Ahab. And in the present instance, all this was
heightened by the sight of the two officers of the strange
ship, leaning over the side, by the perpendicular ladder of
nailed cleets there, and swinging towards him a pair of
tastefully-ornamented man-ropes; for at first they did not
seem to bethink them that a one-legged man must be too much
of a cripple to use their sea bannisters. But this
awkwardness only lasted a minute, because the strange
captain, observing at a glance how affairs stood, cried out,
"I see, I see!— avast heaving there! Jump, boys, and swing
over the cutting-tackle."
As good luck
would have it, they had had a whale alongside a day or two
previous, and the great tackles were still aloft, and the
massive curved blubber-hook, now clean and dry, was still
attached to the end. This was quickly lowered to Ahab, who
at once comprehending it all, slid his solitary thigh into
the curve of the hook (it was like sitting in the fluke of
an anchor, or the crotch of an apple tree), and then giving
the word, held himself fast, and at the same time also
helped to hoist his own weight, by pulling hand-over-hand
upon one of the running parts of the tackle. Soon he was
carefully swung inside the high bulwarks, and gently landed
upon the capstan head. With his ivory arm frankly thrust
forth in welcome, the other captain advanced, and Ahab,
putting out his ivory leg, and crossing the ivory arm (like
two sword-fish blades) cried out in his walrus way, "Aye,
aye, hearty! let us shake bones together!—an arm and a leg!—
an arm that never can shrink, d'ye see; and a leg that never
can run. Where did'st thou see the White Whale?—how long
ago?"
"The White
Whale," said the Englishman, pointing his ivory arm towards
the East, and taking a rueful sight along it, as if it had
been a telescope; There I saw him, on the Line, last
season."
"And he took
that arm off, did he?" asked Ahab, now sliding down from the
capstan, and resting on the Englishman's shoulder, as he did
so.
"Aye, he was
the cause of it, at least; and that leg, too?"
"Spin me the
yarn," said Ahab; "how was it?"
"It was the
first time in my life that I ever cruised on the Line,"
began the Englishman. "I was ignorant of the White Whale at
that time. Well, one day we lowered for a pod of four or
five whales, and my boat fastened to one of them; a regular
circus horse he was, too, that went milling and milling
round so that my boat's crew could only trim dish, by
sitting all their sterns on the outer gunwale. Presently up
breaches from the bottom of the sea a bouncing great whale,
with a milky-white head and hump, all crows' feet and
wrinkles."
"It was he, it
was he!" cried Ahab, suddenly letting out his suspended
breath.
"And harpoons
sticking in near his starboard fin. Aye, aye— they were
mine—my irons," cried Ahab, exultingly—"but on!"
"Give me a
chance, then," said the Englishman, good-humoredly. "Well,
this old great-grandfather, with the white head and hump,
runs all afoam into the pod, and goes to snapping furiously
at my fast-line!
"Aye, I
see!—wanted to part it; free the fast-fish—an old trick—
I know him."
"How it was
exactly," continued the one-armed commander, "I do not know;
but in biting the line, it got foul of his teeth, caught
there somehow; but we didn't know it then; so that when we
afterwards pulled on the line, bounce we came plump on to
his hump! instead of the other whale's; that went off to
windward, all fluking. Seeing how matters stood, and what a
noble great whale it was— the noblest and biggest I ever
saw, sir, in my life—I resolved to capture him, spite of the
boiling rage he seemed to be in. And thinking the hap-hazard
line would get loose, or the tooth it was tangled to might
draw (for I have a devil of a boat's crew for a pull on a
whale-line); seeing all this, I say, I jumped into my first
mate's boat—Mr. Mounttop's here (by the way,
Captain—Mounttop; Mounttop—the captain);— as I was saying, I
jumped into Mounttop's boat, which, d'ye see, was gunwale
and gunwale with mine, then; and snatching the first
harpoon, let this old great-grandfather have it. But, Lord,
look you, sir—hearts and souls alive, man—the next instant,
in a jiff, I was blind as a bat—both eyes out—all befogged
and bedeadened with black foam—the whale's tail looming
straight up out of it, perpendicular in the air, like a
marble steeple. No use sterning all, then; but as I was
groping at midday, with a blinding sun, all crown-jewels; as
I was groping, I say, after the second iron, to toss it
overboard—down comes the tail like a Lima tower, cutting my
boat in two, leaving each half in splinters; and, flukes
first, the white hump backed through the wreck, as though it
was all chips. We all struck out. To escape his terrible
flailings, I seized hold of my harpoon-pole sticking in him,
and for a moment clung to that like a sucking fish. But a
combing sea dashed me off, and at the same instant, the
fish, taking one good dart forwards, went down like a flash;
and the barb of that cursed second iron towing along near me
caught me here" (clapping his hand just below his shoulder);
"yes, caught me just here, I say, and bore me down to Hell's
flames, I was thinking; when, when, all of a sudden, thank
the good God, the barb ript its way along the flesh— clear
along the whole length of my arm—came out nigh my wrist, and
up I floated;—and that gentleman there will tell you the
rest (by the way, captain—Dr. Bunger, ship's surgeon:
Bunger, my lad,— the captain). Now, Bunger boy, spin your
part of the yarn."
The
professional gentleman thus familiarly pointed out, had been
all the time standing near them, with nothing specific
visible, to denote his gentlemanly rank on board. His face
was an exceedingly round but sober one; he was dressed in a
faded blue woollen frock or shirt, and patched trowsers; and
had thus far been dividing his attention between a
marlingspike he held in one hand, and a pill-box held in the
other, occasionally casting a critical glance at the ivory
limbs of the two crippled captains. But, at his superior's
introduction of him to Ahab, he politely bowed, and
straightway went on to do his captain's bidding.
"It was a
shocking bad wound," began the whale-surgeon; "and, taking
my advice, Captain Boomer here, stood our old Sammy-"
"Samuel
Enderby is the name of my ship," interrupted the one-armed
captain, addressing Ahab; "go on, boy."
"Stood our old
Sammy off to the northward, to get out of the blazing hot
weather there on the Line. But it was no use—I did all I
could; sat up with him nights; was very severe with him in
the matter of diet-"
"Oh, very
severe!" chimed in the patient himself; then suddenly
altering his voice, "Drinking hot rum toddies with me every
night, till he couldn't see to put on the bandages; and
sending me to bed, half seas over, about three o'clock in
the morning. Oh, ye stars! he sat up with me indeed, and was
very severe in my diet. Oh! a great watcher, and very
dietetically severe, is Dr. Bunger. (Bunger, you dog, laugh
out! why don't ye? You know you're a precious jolly rascal.)
But, heave ahead, boy, I'd rather be killed by you than kept
alive by any other man."
"My captain,
you must have ere this perceived, respected sir"— said the
imperturbable godly-looking Bunger, slightly bowing to
Ahab—"is apt to be facetious at times; he spins us many
clever things of that sort. But I may as well say—en
passant, as the French remark—that I myself—that is to say,
Jack Bunger, late of the reverend clergy—am a strict total
abstinence man; I never drink-"
"Water!" cried
the captain; "he never drinks it; it's a sort of fits to
him; fresh water throws him into the hydrophobia; but go
on—go on with the arm story."
"Yes, I may as
well," said the surgeon, coolly. "I was about observing,
sir, before Captain Boomer's facetious interruption, that
spite of my best and severest endeavors, the wound kept
getting worse and worse; the truth was, sir, it was as ugly
gaping wound as surgeon ever saw; more than two feet and
several inches long. I measured it with the lead line. In
short, it grew black; I knew what was threatened, and off it
came. But I had no hand in shipping that ivory arm there;
that thing is against all rule"— pointing at it with the
marlingspike—"that is the captain's work, not mine; he
ordered the carpenter to make it; he had that club-hammer
there put to the end, to knock some one's brains out with, I
suppose, as he tried mine once. He flies into diabolical
passions sometimes. Do ye see this dent, sir"—removing his
hat, and brushing aside his hair, and exposing a bowl-like
cavity in his skull, but which bore not the slightest scarry
trace, or any token of ever having been a wound— "Well, the
captain there will tell you how that came there; he knows."
"No, I don't,"
said the captain, "but his mother did; he was born with it.
Oh, you solemn rogue, you—you Bunger! was there ever such
another Bunger in the watery world? Bunger, when you die,
you ought to die in pickle, you dog; you should be preserved
to future ages, you rascal."
"What became
of the White Whale?" now cried Ahab, who thus far had been
impatiently listening to this byeplay between the two
Englishmen.
"Oh!" cried
the one-armed captain, Oh, yes! Well; after he sounded, we
didn't see him again for some time; in fact, as I before
hinted, I didn't then know what whale it was that had served
me such a trick, till some time afterwards, when coming back
to the Line, we heard about Moby Dick—as some call him—and
then I knew it was he."
"Did'st thou
cross his wake again?"
"Twice."
"But could not
fasten?"
"Didn't want
to try to; ain't one limb enough? What should I do without
this other arm? And I'm thinking Moby Dick doesn't bite so
much as he swallows."
"Well, then,"
interrupted Bunger, "give him your left arm for bait to get
the right. Do you know, gentlemen"—very gravely and
mathematically bowing to each Captain in succession—"Do you
know, gentlemen, that the digestive organs of the whale are
so inscrutably constructed by Divine Providence, that it is
quite impossible for him to completely digest even a man's
arm? And he knows it too. So that what you take for the
White Whale's malice is only his awkwardness. For he never
means to swallow a single limb; he only thinks to terrify by
feints. But sometimes he is like the old juggling fellow,
formerly a patient of mine in Ceylon, that making believe
swallow jack-knives, once upon a time let one drop into him
in good earnest, and there it stayed for a twelvemonth or
more; when I gave him an emetic, and he heaved it up in
small tacks, d'ye see? No possible way for him to digest
that jack-knife, and fully incorporate it into his general
bodily system. Yes, Captain Boomer, if you are quick enough
about it, and have a mind to pawn one arm for the sake of
the privilege of giving decent burial to the other, why, in
that case the arm is yours; only let the whale have another
chance at you shortly, that's all."
"No, thank
you, Bunger," said the English Captain, "he's welcome to the
arm he has, since I can't help it, and didn't know him then;
but not to another one. No more White Whales for me; I've
lowered for him once, and that has satisfied me. There would
be great glory in killing him, I know that; and there is a
ship-load of precious sperm in him, but, hark ye, he's best
let alone; don't you think so, Captain?"—glancing at the
ivory leg.
"He is. But he
will still be hunted, for all that. What is best
let alone, that accursed thing is not always what least
allures.
He's all a magnet! How long since thou saw'st him last?
Which way heading?"
"Bless my
soul, and curse the foul fiend's," cried Bunger, stoopingly
walking round Ahab, and like a dog, strangely snuffing;
"this man's blood—bring the thermometer!—it's at the boiling
point!— his pulse makes these planks beat!—sir!"—taking a
lancet from his pocket, and drawing near to Ahab's arm.
"Avast!"
roared Ahab, dashing him against the bulwarks—"Man the boat!
Which way heading?"
"Good God!"
cried the English Captain, to whom the question was put.
"What's the matter? He was heading east, I think.—Is your
Captain crazy?" whispering Fedallah.
But Fedallah,
putting a finger on his lip, slid over the bulwarks to take
the boat's steering oar, and Ahab, swinging the
cutting-tackle towards him commanded the ship's sailors to
stand by to lower.
In a moment he
was standing in the boat's stern, and the Manilla men
were springing to their oars. In vain the English Captain
hailed him.
With back to the stranger ship, and face set like a flint to
his own,
Ahab stood upright till alongside of the Pequod.
CHAPTER 101
The Decanter
Ere the English ship fades
from sight be it set down here, that she hailed from London,
and was named after the late Samuel Enderby, merchant of
that city, the original of the famous whaling house of
enderby and sons; a house which in my poor whaleman's
opinion, comes not far behind the united royal houses of the
Tudors and Bourbons, in point of real historical interest.
How long, prior to the year of our Lord 1775, this great
whaling house was in existence, my numerous fish-documents
do not make plain; but in that year (1775) it fitted out the
first English ships that ever regularly hunted the Sperm
Whale; though for some score of years previous (ever since
1726) our valiant Coffins and Maceys of Nantucket and the
Vineyard had in large fleets pursued the Leviathan, but only
in the North and South Atlantic: not elsewhere. Be it
distinctly recorded here, that the Nantucketers were the
first among mankind to harpoon with civilized steel the
great Sperm Whale; and that for half a century they were the
only people of the whole globe who so harpooned him.
In 1778, a
fine ship, the Amelia, fitted out for the express purpose,
and at the sole charge of the vigorous Enderbys, boldly
rounded Cape Horn, and was the first among the nations to
lower a whale-boat of any sort in the great South Sea. The
voyage was a skilful and lucky one; and returning to her
berth with her hold full of the precious sperm, the Amelia's
example was soon followed by other ships, English and
American, and thus the vast Sperm Whale grounds of the
Pacific were thrown open. But not content with this good
deed, the indefatigable house again bestirred itself: Samuel
and all his Sons—how many, their mother only knows—and under
their immediate auspices, and partly, I think, at their
expense, the British government was induced to send the
sloop-of-war Rattler on a whaling voyage of discovery into
the South Sea. Commanded by a naval Post-Captain, the
Rattler made a rattling voyage of it, and did some service;
how much does not appear. But this is not all. In 1819, the
same house fitted out a discovery whale ship of their own,
to go on a tasting cruise to the remote waters of Japan.
That ship— well called the "Syren"—made a noble experimental
cruise; and it was thus that the great Japanese Whaling
Ground first became generally known. The Syren in this
famous voyage was commanded by a Captain Coffin, a
Nantucketer.
All honor to
the Enderbies, therefore, whose house, I think, exists to
the present day; though doubtless the original Samuel must
long ago have slipped his cable for the great South Sea of
the other world.
The ship named
after him was worthy of the honor, being a very fast sailer
and a noble craft every way. I boarded her once at midnight
somewhere off the Patagonian coast, and drank good flip down
in the forecastle. It was a fine gam we had, and they were
all trumps—every soul on board. A short life to them, and a
jolly death. And that fine gam I had— long, very long after
old Ahab touched her planks with his ivory heel— it minds me
of the noble, solid, Saxon hospitality of that ship; and may
my parson forget me, and the devil remember me, if I ever
lose sight of it. Flip? Did I say we had flip? Yes, and we
flipped it at the rate of ten gallons the hour; and when the
squall came (for it's squally off there by Patagonia), and
all hands— visitors and all—were called to reef topsails, we
were so top-heavy that we had to swing each other aloft in
bowlines; and we ignorantly furled the skirts of our jackets
into the sails, so that we hung there, reefed fast in the
howling gale, a warning example to all drunken tars.
However, the masts did not go overboard; and by and by we
scrambled down, so sober, that we had to pass the flip
again, though the savage salt spray bursting down the
forecastle scuttle, rather too much diluted and pickled it
for my taste.
The beef was
fine—tough, but with body in it. They said it was bullbeef;
others, that it was dromedary beef; but I do not know, for
certain, how that was. They had dumplings too; small, but
substantial, symmetrically globular, and indestructible
dumplings. I fancied that you could feel them, and roll them
about in you after they were swallowed. If you stooped over
too far forward, you risked their pitching out of you like
billiard-balls. The bread— but that couldn't be helped;
besides, it was an anti-scorbutic, in short, the bread
contained the only fresh fare they had. But the forecastle
was not very light, and it was very easy to step over into a
dark corner when you ate it. But all in all, taking her from
truck to helm, considering the dimensions of the cook's
boilers, including his own live parchment boilers; fore and
aft, I say, the Samuel Enderby was a jolly ship; of good
fare and plenty; fine flip and strong; crack fellows all,
and capital from boot heels to hat-band.
But why was
it, think ye, that the Samuel Enderby, and some other
English whalers I know of—not all though—were such famous,
hospitable ships; that passed round the beef, and the bread,
and the can, and the joke; and were not soon weary of
eating, and drinking, and laughing? I will tell you. The
abounding good cheer of these English whalers is matter for
historical research. Nor have I been at all sparing of
historical whale research, when it has seemed needed.
The English
were preceded in the whale fishery by the Hollanders,
Zealanders, and Danes; from whom they derived many terms
still extant in the fishery; and what is yet more, their fat
old fashions, touching plenty to eat and drink. For, as a
general thing, the English merchant-ship scrimps her crew;
but not so the English whaler. Hence, in the English, this
thing of whaling good cheer is not normal and natural, but
incidental and particular; and, therefore, must have some
special origin, which is here pointed out, and will be still
further elucidated.
During my
researches in the Leviathanic histories, I stumbled upon an
ancient Dutch volume, which, by the musty whaling smell of
it, I knew must be about whalers. The title was, "Dan
Coopman," wherefore I concluded that this must be the
invaluable memoirs of some Amsterdam cooper in the fishery,
as every whale ship must carry its cooper. I was reinforced
in this opinion by seeing that it was the production of one
"Fitz Swackhammer." But my friend Dr. Snodhead, a very
learned man, professor of Low Dutch and High German in the
college of Santa Claus and St. Potts, to whom I handed the
work for translation, giving him a box of sperm candles for
his trouble—this same Dr. Snodhead, so soon as he spied the
book, assured me that "Dan Coopman" did not mean "The
Cooper," but "The Merchant." In short, this ancient and
learned Low Dutch book treated of the commerce of Holland;
and, among other subjects, contained a very interesting
account of its whale fishery. And in this chapter it was,
headed, "Smeer," or "Fat," that I found a long detailed list
of the outfits for the larders and cellars of 180 sail of
Dutch whalemen; from which list, as translated by Dr.
Snodhead, I transcribe the following:
0084400,000 lbs. of beef.
60,000 lbs. Friesland pork.
150,000 lbs. of stock fish.
550,000 lbs. of biscuit.
72,000 lbs. of soft bread.
2,800 firkins of butter.
20,000 lbs. of Texel and Leyden cheese.
144,000 lbs. cheese (probably an inferior article).
550 ankers of Geneva.
10,800 barrels of beer.
Most
statistical tables are parchingly dry in the reading; not so
in the present case, however, where the reader is flooded
with whole pipes, barrels, quarts, and gills of good gin and
good cheer.
At the time, I
devoted three days to the studious digesting of all this
beer, beef, and bread, during which many profound thoughts
were incidentally suggested to me, capable of a
transcendental and Platonic application; and, furthermore, I
compiled supplementary tables of my own, touching the
probable quantity of stock-fish, &c., consumed by every Low
Dutch harpooneer in that ancient Greenland and Spitzbergen
whale fishery. In the first place, the amount of butter, and
Texel and Leyden cheese consumed, seems amazing. I impute
it, though, to their naturally unctuous natures, being
rendered still more unctuous by the nature of their
vocation, and especially by their pursuing their game in
those frigid Polar Seas, on the very coasts of that
Esquimaux country where the convivial natives pledge each
other in bumpers of train oil.
The quantity
of the beer, too, is very large, 10,800 barrels. Now, as
those polar fisheries could only be prosecuted in the short
summer of that climate, so that the whole cruise of one of
these Dutch whalemen, including the short voyage to and from
the Spitzbergen sea, did not much exceed three months, say,
and reckoning 30 men to each of their fleet of 180 sail, we
have 5,400 Low Dutch seamen in all; therefore, I say, we
have precisely two barrels of beer per man, for a twelve
weeks' allowance, exclusive of his fair proportion of that
550 ankers of gin. Now, whether these gin and beer
harpooneers, so fuddled as one might fancy them to have
been, were the right sort of men to stand up in a boat's
head, and take good aim at flying whales; this would seem
somewhat improbable. Yet they did aim at them, and hit them
too. But this was very far North, be it remembered, where
beer agrees well with the constitution; upon the Equator, in
our southern fishery, beer would be apt to make the
harpooneer sleepy at the mast-head and boozy in his boat;
and grievous loss might ensue to Nantucket and New Bedford.
But no more;
enough has been said to show that the old Dutch whalers of
two or three centuries ago were high livers; and that the
English whalers have not neglected so excellent an example.
For, say they, when cruising in an empty ship, if you can
get nothing better out of the world, get a good dinner out
of it, at least. And this empties the decanter.
CHAPTER 102
A Bower in the
Arsacides
Hitherto, in descriptively
treating of the Sperm Whale, I have chiefly dwelt upon the
marvels of his outer aspect; or separately and in detail
upon some few interior structural features. But to a large
and thorough sweeping comprehension of him, it behoves me
now to unbutton him still further, and untagging the points
of his hose, unbuckling his garters, and casting loose the
hooks and the eyes of the joints of his innermost bones, set
him before you in his ultimatum; that is to say, in his
unconditional skeleton.
But how now,
Ishmael? How is it, that you, a mere oarsman in the fishery,
pretend to know aught about the subterranean parts of the
whale? Did erudite Stubb, mounted upon your capstan, deliver
lectures on the anatomy of the Cetacea; and by help of the
windlass, hold up a specimen rib for exhibition? Explain
thyself, Ishmael. Can you land a full-grown whale on your
deck for examination, as a cook dishes a roast-pig? Surely
not. A veritable witness have you hitherto been, Ishmael;
but have a care how you seize the privilege of Jonah alone;
the privilege of discoursing upon the joists and beams; the
rafters, ridge-pole, sleepers, and under-pinnings, making up
the frame-work of leviathan; and belike of the tallow-vats,
dairy-rooms, butteries, and cheeseries in his bowels.
I confess,
that since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated very far
beneath the skin of the adult whale; nevertheless, I have
been blessed with an opportunity to dissect him in
miniature. In a ship I belonged to, a small cub Sperm Whale
was once bodily hoisted to the deck for his poke or bag, to
make sheaths for the barbs of the harpoons, and for the
heads of the lances. Think you I let that chance go, without
using my boat-hatchet and jack-knife, and breaking the seal
and reading all the contents of that young cub?
And as for my
exact knowledge of the bones of the leviathan in their
gigantic, full grown development, for that rare knowledge I
am indebted to my late royal friend Tranquo, king of
Tranque, one of the Arsacides. For being at Tranque, years
ago, when attached to the trading-ship Dey of Algiers, I was
invited to spend part of the Arsacidean holidays with the
lord of Tranque, at his retired palm villa at Pupella; a
sea-side glen not very far distant from what our sailors
called Bamboo-Town, his capital.
Among many
other fine qualities, my royal friend Tranquo, being gifted
with a devout love for all matters of barbaric vertu, had
brought together in Pupella whatever rare things the more
ingenious of his people could invent; chiefly carved woods
of wonderful devices, chiselled shells, inlaid spears,
costly paddles, aromatic canoes; and all these distributed
among whatever natural wonders, the wonder-freighted,
tribute-rendering waves had cast upon his shores.
Chief among
these latter was a great Sperm Whale, which, after an
unusually long raging gale, had been found dead and
stranded, with his head against a cocoa-nut tree, whose
plumage-like, tufted droopings seemed his verdant jet. When
the vast body had at last been stripped of its fathomdeep
enfoldings, and the bones become dust dry in the sun, then
the skeleton was carefully transported up the Pupella glen,
where a grand temple of lordly palms now sheltered it.
The ribs were
hung with trophies; the vertebrae were carved with
Arsacidean annals, in strange hieroglyphics; in the skull,
the priests kept up an unextinguished aromatic flame, so
that the mystic head again sent forth its vapory spout;
while, suspended from a bough, the terrific lower jaw
vibrated over all the devotees, like the hair-hung sword
that so affrighted Damocles.
It was a
wondrous sight. The wood was green as mosses of the Icy
Glen; the trees stood high and haughty, feeling their living
sap; the industrious earth beneath was as a weaver's loom,
with a gorgeous carpet on it, whereof the ground-vine
tendrils formed the warp and woof, and the living flowers
the figures. All the trees, with all their laden branches;
all the shrubs, and ferns, and grasses; the message-carrying
air; all these unceasingly were active. Through the lacings
of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving
the unwearied verdure. Oh, busy weaver! unseen
weaver!—pause!—one word!— whither flows the fabric? what
palace may it deck? wherefore all these ceaseless toilings?
Speak, weaver!—stay thy hand!— but one single word with
thee! Nay—the shuttle flies— the figures float from forth
the loom; the fresher-rushing carpet for ever slides away.
The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he
deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that
humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and
only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices
that speak through it. For even so it is in all material
factories. The spoken words that are inaudible among the
flying spindles; those same words are plainly heard without
the walls, bursting from the opened casements. Thereby have
villainies been detected. Ah, mortal! then, be heedful; for
so, in all this din of the great world's loom, thy subtlest
thinkings may be overheard afar.
Now, amid the
green, life-restless loom of that Arsacidean wood, the
great, white, worshipped skeleton lay lounging—a gigantic
idler! Yet, as the ever-woven verdant warp and woof
intermixed and hummed around him, the mighty idler seemed
the cunning weaver; himself all woven over with the vines;
every month assuming greener, fresher verdure; but himself a
skeleton. Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim
god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed
glories.
Now, when with
royal Tranquo I visited this wondrous whale, and saw the
skull an altar, and the artificial smoke ascending from
where the real jet had issued, I marvelled that the king
should regard a chapel as an object of vertu. He laughed.
But more I marvelled that the priests should swear that
smoky jet of his was genuine. To and fro I paced before this
skeleton— brushed the vines aside—broke through the ribs—and
with a ball of Arsacidean twine, wandered, eddied long amid
its many winding, shaded colonnades and arbors. But soon my
line was out; and following it back, I emerged from the
opening where I entered. I saw no living thing within;
naught was there but bones.
Cutting me a
green measuring-rod, I once more dived within the skeleton.
From their arrow-slit in the skull, the priests perceived me
taking the altitude of the final rib, "How now!" they
shouted; "Dar'st thou measure this our god! That's for us."
"Aye, priests—well, how long do ye make him, then?" But
hereupon a fierce contest rose among them, concerning feet
and inches; they cracked each other's sconces with their
yard-sticks— the great skull echoed—and seizing that lucky
chance, I quickly concluded my own admeasurements.
These
admeasurements I now propose to set before you. But first,
be it recorded, that, in this matter, I am not free to utter
any fancied measurements I please. Because there are
skeleton authorities you can refer to, to test my accuracy.
There is a Leviathanic Museum, they tell me, in Hull,
England, one of the whaling ports of that country, where
they have some fine specimens of fin-backs and other whales.
Likewise, I have heard that in the museum of Manchester, in
New Hampshire, they have what the proprietors call "the only
perfect specimen of a Greenland or River Whale in the United
States." Moreover, at a place in Yorkshire, England, Burton
Constable by name, a certain Sir Clifford Constable has in
his possession the skeleton of a Sperm Whale, but of
moderate size, by no means of the full-grown magnitude of my
friend King Tranquo's.
In both cases,
the stranded whales to which these two skeletons belonged,
were originally claimed by their proprietors upon similar
grounds. King Tranquo seizing his because he wanted it; and
Sir Clifford, because he was lord of the seignories of those
parts. Sir Clifford's whale has been articulated throughout;
so that, like a great chest of drawers, you can open and
shut him, in all his bony cavities—spread out his ribs like
a gigantic fan— and swing all day upon his lower jaw. Locks
are to be put upon some of his trap-doors and shutters; and
a footman will show round future visitors with a bunch of
keys at his side. Sir Clifford thinks of charging twopence
for a peep at the whispering gallery in the spinal column;
threepence to hear the echo in the hollow of his cerebellum;
and sixpence for the unrivalled view from his forehead.
The skeleton
dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied
verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in
my wild wanderings at that period, there was no other secure
way of preserving such valuable statistics. But as I was
crowded for space, and wished the other parts of my body to
remain a blank page for a poem I was then composing— at
least, what untattooed parts might remain—I did not trouble
myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at
all enter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale.
CHAPTER 103
Measurement of
The Whale's Skeleton
In the first place, I wish to
lay before you a particular, plain statement, touching the
living bulk of this leviathan, whose skeleton we are briefly
to exhibit. Such a statement may prove useful here.
According to a
careful calculation I have made, and which I partly base
upon Captain Scoresby's estimate, of seventy tons for the
largest sized Greenland whale of sixty feet in length;
according to my careful calculation, I say, a Sperm Whale of
the largest magnitude, between eighty-five and ninety feet
in length, and something less than forty feet in its fullest
circumference, such a whale will weigh at least ninety tons;
so that, reckoning thirteen men to a ton, he would
considerably outweigh the combined population of a whole
village of one thousand one hundred inhabitants.
Think you not
then that brains, like yoked cattle, should be put to this
leviathan, to make him at all budge to any landsman's
imagination?
Having already
in various ways put before you his skull, spout-hole, jaw,
teeth, tail, forehead, fins, and divers other parts, I shall
now simply point out what is most interesting in the general
bulk of his unobstructed bones. But as the colossal skull
embraces so very large a proportion of the entire extent of
the skeleton; as it is by far the most complicated part; and
as nothing is to be repeated concerning it in this chapter,
you must not fail to carry it in your mind, or under your
arm, as we proceed, otherwise you will not gain a complete
notion of the general structure we are about to view.
In length, the
Sperm Whale's skeleton at Tranque measured seventy-two feet:
so that when fully invested and extended in life, he must
have been ninety feet long; for in the whale, the skeleton
loses about one fifth in length compared with the living
body. Of this seventy-two feet, his skull and jaw comprised
some twenty feet, leaving some fifty feet of plain backbone.
Attached to this back-bone, for something less than a third
of its length, was the mighty circular basket of ribs which
once enclosed his vitals.
To me this
vast ivory-ribbed chest, with the long, unrelieved spine,
extending far away from it in a straight line, not a little
resembled the hull of a great ship new-laid upon the stocks,
when only some twenty of her naked bow-ribs are inserted,
and the keel is otherwise, for the time, but a long,
disconnected timber.
The ribs were
ten on a side. The first, to begin from the neck, was nearly
six feet long; the second, third, and fourth were each
successively longer, till you came to the climax of the
fifth, or one of the middle ribs, which measured eight feet
and some inches. From that part, the remaining ribs
diminished, till the tenth and last only spanned five feet
and some inches. In general thickness, they all bore a
seemly correspondence to their length. The middle ribs were
the most arched. In some of the Arsacides they are used for
beams whereon to lay footpath bridges over small streams.
In considering
these ribs, I could not but be struck anew with the
circumstance, so variously repeated in this book, that the
skeleton of the whale is by no means the mould of his
invested form. The largest of the Tranque ribs, one of the
middle ones, occupied that part of the fish which, in life,
is greatest in depth. Now, the greatest depth of the
invested body of this particular whale must have been at
least sixteen feet; whereas, the corresponding rib measured
but little more than eight feet. So that this rib only
conveyed half of the true notion of the living magnitude of
that part. Besides, for some way, where I now saw but a
naked spine, all that had been once wrapped round with tons
of added bulk in flesh, muscle, blood, and bowels. Still
more, for the ample fins, I here saw but a few disordered
joints; and in place of the weighty and majestic, but
boneless flukes, an utter blank!
How vain and
foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man to try
to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring
over his dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this
peaceful wood. No. Only in the heart of quickest perils;
only when within the eddyings of his angry flukes; only on
the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale be
truly and livingly found out.
But the spine.
For that, the best way we can consider it is, with a crane,
to pile its bones high up on end. No speedy enterprise. But
now it's done, it looks much like Pompey's Pillar.
There are
forty and odd vertebrae in all, which in the skeleton are
not locked together. They mostly lie like the great knobbed
blocks on a Gothic spire, forming solid courses of heavy
masonry. The largest, a middle one, is in width something
less than three feet, and in depth more than four. The
smallest, where the spine tapers away into the tail, is only
two inches in width, and looks something like a white
billiard-ball. I was told that there were still smaller
ones, but they had been lost by some little cannibal
urchins, the priest's children, who had stolen them to play
marbles with. Thus we see how that the spine of even the
hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple
child's play.
CHAPTER 104
The Fossil
Whale
From his mighty bulk the whale
affords a most congenial theme whereon to enlarge, amplify,
and generally expatiate. Would you, you could not compress
him. By good rights he should only be treated of in imperial
folio. Not to tell over again his furlongs from spiracle to
tail, and the yards he measures about the waist; only think
of the gigantic involutions of his intestines, where they
lie in him like great cables and hawsers coiled away in the
subterranean orlop-deck of a line-of-battle-ship.
Since I have
undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behoves me to
approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise;
not overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood, and
spinning him out to the uttermost coil of his bowels. Having
already described him in most of his present habitatory and
anatomical peculiarities, it now remains to magnify him in
an archaeological, fossiliferous, and antediluvian point of
view. Applied to any other creature than the Leviathan—to an
ant or a flea— such portly terms might justly be deemed
unwarrantably grandiloquent. But when Leviathan is the text,
the case is altered. Fain am I to stagger to this enterprise
under the weightiest words of the dictionary. And here be it
said, that whenever it has been convenient to consult one in
the course of these dissertations, I have invariably used a
huge quarto edition of Johnson, expressly purchased for that
purpose; because that famous lexicographer's uncommon
personal bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon to be
used by a whale author like me.
One often
hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject,
though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me,
writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography
expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor's quill!
Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my
arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this
Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their
outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the
whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of
whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come,
with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and
throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs.
Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and
liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty
book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring
volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be
who have tried it.
Ere entering
upon the subject of Fossil Whales, I present my credentials
as a geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous time I
have been a stone-mason, and also a great digger of ditches,
canals and wells, wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all
sorts. Likewise, by way of preliminary, I desire to remind
the reader, that while in the earlier geological strata
there are found the fossils of monsters now almost
completely extinct; the subsequent relics discovered in what
are called the Tertiary formations seem the connecting, or
at any rate intercepted links, between the antichronical
creatures, and those whose remote posterity are said to have
entered the Ark; all the Fossil Whales hitherto discovered
belong to the Tertiary period, which is the last preceding
the superficial formations. And though none of them
precisely answer to any known species of the present time,
they are yet sufficiently akin to them in general respects,
to justify their taking ranks as Cetacean fossils.
Detached
broken fossils of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their
bones and skeletons, have within thirty years past, at
various intervals, been found at the base of the Alps, in
Lombardy, in France, in England, in Scotland, and in the
States of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Among the
more curious of such remains is part of a skull, which in
the year 1779 was disinterred in the Rue Dauphine in Paris,
a short street opening almost directly upon the palace of
the Tuileries; and bones disinterred in excavating the great
docks of Antwerp, in Napoleon's time. Cuvier pronounced
these fragments to have belonged to some utterly unknown
Leviathanic species.
But by far the
most wonderful of all Cetacean relics was the almost
complete vast skeleton of an extinct monster, found in the
year 1842, on the plantation of Judge Creagh, in Alabama.
The awe-stricken credulous slaves in the vicinity took it
for the bones of one of the fallen angels. The Alabama
doctors declared it a huge reptile, and bestowed upon it the
name of Basilosaurus. But some specimen bones of it being
taken across the sea to Owen, the English Anatomist, it
turned out that this alleged reptile was a whale, though of
a departed species. A significant illustration of the fact,
again and again repeated in this book, that the skeleton of
the whale furnishes but little clue to the shape of his
fully invested body. So Owen rechristened the monster
Zeuglodon; and in his paper read before the London
Geological Society, pronounced it, in substance, one of the
most extraordinary creatures which the mutations of the
globe have blotted out of existence.
When I stand
among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks, jaws,
ribs, and vertebrae, all characterized by partial
resemblances to the existing breeds of sea-monsters; but at
the same time bearing on the other hand similar affinities
to the annihilated antichronical Leviathans, their
incalculable seniors; I am, by a flood, borne back to that
wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun;
for time began with man. Here Saturn's grey chaos rolls over
me, and I obtain dim, shuddering glimpses into those Polar
eternities; when wedged bastions of ice pressed hard upon
what are now the Tropics; and in all the 25,000 miles of
this world's circumference, not an inhabitable hand's
breadth of land was visible. Then the whole world was the
whale's; and, king of creation, he left his wake along the
present lines of the Andes and the Himmalehs. Who can show a
pedigree like Leviathan? Ahab's harpoon had shed older blood
than the Pharaoh's. Methuselah seems a schoolboy. I look
round to shake hands with Shem. I am horror-struck at this
antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeakable terrors
of the whale, which, having been before all time, must needs
exist after all humane ages are over.
But not alone
has this Leviathan left his pre-adamite traces in the
stereotype plates of nature, and in limestone and marl
bequeathed his ancient bust; but upon Egyptian tablets,
whose antiquity seems to claim for them an almost
fossiliferous character, we find the unmistakable print of
his fin. In an apartment of the great temple of Denderah,
some fifty years ago, there was discovered upon the granite
ceiling a sculptured and painted planisphere, abounding in
centaurs, griffins, and dolphins, similar to the grotesque
figures on the celestial globe of the moderns. Gliding among
them, old Leviathan swam as of yore; was there swimming in
that planisphere, centuries before Solomon was cradled.
Nor must there
be omitted another strange attestation of the antiquity of
the whale, in his own osseous postdiluvian reality, as set
down by the venerable John Leo, the old Barbary traveller.
"Not far from
the Sea-side, they have a Temple, the Rafters and Beams of
which are made of Whale-Bones; for Whales of a monstrous
size are oftentimes cast up dead upon that shore. The Common
People imagine, that by a secret Power bestowed by God upon
the Temple, no Whale can pass it without immediate death.
But the truth of the Matter is, that on either side of the
Temple, there are Rocks that shoot two Miles into the Sea,
and wound the Whales when they light upon 'em. They keep a
Whale's Rib of an incredible length for a Miracle, which
lying upon the Ground with its convex part uppermost, makes
an Arch, the Head of which cannot be reached by a Man upon a
Camel's Back. This Rib (says John Leo) is said to have layn
there a hundred Years before I saw it. Their Historians
affirm, that a Prophet who prophesy'd of Mahomet, came from
this Temple, and some do not stand to assert, that the
Prophet Jonas was cast forth by the Whale at the Base of the
Temple."
In this Afric
Temple of the Whale I leave you, reader, and if you be a
Nantucketer, and a whaleman, you will silently worship
there.
CHAPTER 105
Does the
Whale's Magnitude Diminish? - Will He Perish?
Inasmuch, then, as this
Leviathan comes floundering down upon us from the
head-waters of the Eternities, it may be fitly inquired,
whether, in the long course of his generations, he has not
degenerated from the original bulk of his sires.
But upon
investigation we find, that not only are the whales of the
present day superior in magnitude to those whose fossil
remains are found in the Tertiary system (embracing a
distinct geological period prior to man), but of the whales
found in that Tertiary system, those belonging to its latter
formations exceed in size those of its earlier ones.
Of all the
pre-adamite whales yet exhumed, by far the largest is the
Alabama one mentioned in the last chapter, and that was less
than seventy feet in length in the skeleton. Whereas, we
have already seen, that the tape-measure gives seventy-two
feet for the skeleton of a large sized modern whale. And I
have heard, on whalemen's authority, that Sperm Whales have
been captured near a hundred feet long at the time of
capture.
But may it not
be, that while the whales of the present hour are an advance
in magnitude upon those of all previous geological periods;
may it not be, that since Adam's time they have degenerated?
Assuredly, we
must conclude so, if we are to credit the accounts of such
gentlemen as Pliny, and the ancient naturalists generally.
For Pliny tells us of Whales that embraced acres of living
bulk, and Aldrovandus of others which measured eight hundred
feet in length— Rope Walks and Thames Tunnels of Whales! And
even in the days of Banks and Solander, Cooke's naturalists,
we find a Danish member of the Academy of Sciences setting
down certain Iceland Whales (reydan-siskur, or Wrinkled
Bellies) at one hundred and twenty yards; that is, three
hundred and sixty feet. And Lacepede, the French naturalist,
in his elaborate history of whales, in the very beginning of
his work (page 3), sets down the Right Whale at one hundred
metres, three hundred and twenty-eight feet. And this work
was published so late as A.D. 1825.
But will any
whaleman believe these stories? No. The whale of to-day is
as big as his ancestors in Pliny's time. And if ever I go
where Pliny is, I, a whaleman (more than he was), will make
bold to tell him so. Because I cannot understand how it is,
that while the Egyptian mummies that were buried thousands
of years before even Pliny was born, do not measure so much
in their coffins as a modern Kentuckian in his socks; and
while the cattle and other animals sculptured on the oldest
Egyptian and Nineveh tablets, by the relative proportions in
which they are drawn, just as plainly prove that the
high-bred, stall-fed, prize cattle of Smithfield, not only
equal, but far exceed in magnitude the fattest of Pharaoh's
fat kine; in the face of all this, I will not admit that of
all animals the whale alone should have degenerated.
But still
another inquiry remains; one often agitated by the more
recondite Nantucketers. Whether owing to the almost
omniscient look-outs at the mast-heads of the whaleships,
now penetrating even through Behring's straits, and into the
remotest secret drawers and lockers of the world; and the
thousand harpoons and lances darted along all continental
coasts; the moot point is, whether Leviathan can long endure
so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must
not at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last
whale, like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and then
himself evaporate in the final puff.
Comparing the
humped herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo,
which, not forty years ago, overspread by tens of thousands
the prairies of Illinois and Missouri, and shook their iron
manes and scowled with their thunder-clotted brows upon the
sites of populous river-capitals, where now the polite
broker sells you land at a dollar an inch; in such a
comparison an irresistible argument would seem furnished, to
show that the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy
extinction.
But you must
look at this matter in every light. Though so short a period
ago—not a good lifetime—the census of the buffalo in
Illinois exceeded the census of men now in London, and
though at the present day not one horn or hoof of them
remains in all that region; and though the cause of this
wondrous extermination was the spear of man; yet the far
different nature of the whale-hunt peremptorily forbids so
inglorious an end to the Leviathan. Forty men in one ship
hunting the Sperm Whales for forty-eight months think they
have done extremely well, and thank God, if at last they
carry home the oil of forty fish. Whereas, in the days of
the old Canadian and Indian hunters and trappers of the
West, when the far west (in whose sunset suns still rise)
was a wilderness and a virgin, the same number of moccasined
men, for the same number of months, mounted on horse instead
of sailing in ships, would have slain not forty, but forty
thousand and more buffaloes; a fact that, if need were,
could be statistically stated.
Nor,
considered aright, does it seem any argument in favor of the
gradual extinction of the Sperm Whale, for example, that in
former years (the latter part of the last century, say)
these Leviathans, in small pods, were encountered much
oftener than at present, and, in consequence, the voyages
were not so prolonged, and were also much more remunerative.
Because, as has been elsewhere noticed, those whales,
influenced by some views to safety, now swim the seas in
immense caravans, so that to a large degree the scattered
solitaries, yokes, and pods, and schools of other days are
now aggregated into vast but widely separated, unfrequent
armies. That is all. And equally fallacious seems the
conceit, that because the so-called whale-bone whales no
longer haunt many grounds in former years abounding with
them, hence that species also is declining. For they are
only being driven from promontory to cape; and if one coast
is no longer enlivened with their jets, then, be sure, some
other and remoter strand has been very recently startled by
the unfamiliar spectacle.
Furthermore:
concerning these last mentioned Leviathans, they have two
firm fortresses, which, in all human probability, will for
ever remain impregnable. And as upon the invasion of their
valleys, the frosty Swiss have retreated to their mountains;
so, hunted from the savannas and glades of the middle seas,
the whale-bone whales can at last resort to their Polar
citadels, and diving under the ultimate glassy barriers and
walls there, come up among icy fields and floes! and in a
charmed circle of everlasting December, bid defiance to all
pursuit from man.
But as perhaps
fifty of these whale-bone whales are harpooned for one
cachalot, some philosophers of the forecastle have concluded
that this positive havoc has already very seriously
diminished their battalions. But though for some time past a
number of these whales, not less than 13,000, have been
annually slain on the nor'west coast by the Americans alone;
yet there are considerations which render even this
circumstance of little or no account as an opposing argument
in this matter.
Natural as it
is to be somewhat incredulous concerning the populousness of
the more enormous creatures of the globe, yet what shall we
say to Harto, the historian of Goa, when he tells us that at
one hunting the King of Siam took 4,000 elephants; that in
those regions elephants are numerous as droves of cattle in
the temperate climes. And there seems no reason to doubt
that if these elephants, which have now been hunted for
thousands of years, by Semiramis, by Porus, by Hannibal, and
by all the successive monarchs of the East— if they still
survive there in great numbers, much more may the great
whale outlast all hunting, since he has a pasture to
expatiate in, which is precisely twice as large as all Asia,
both Americas, Europe and Africa, New Holland, and all the
Isles of the sea combined.
Moreover: we
are to consider, that from the presumed great longevity of
whales, their probably attaining the age of a century and
more, therefore at any one period of time, several distinct
adult generations must be contemporary. And what this is, we
may soon gain some idea of, by imagining all the
grave-yards, cemeteries, and family vaults of creation
yielding up the live bodies of all the men, women, and
children who were alive seventy-five years ago; and adding
this countless host to the present human population of the
globe.
Wherefore, for
all these things, we account the whale immortal in his
species, however perishable in his individuality. He swam
the seas before the continents broke water; he once swam
over the site of the Tuileries, and Windsor Castle, and the
Kremlin. In Noah's flood he despised Noah's Ark; and if ever
the world is to be again flooded, like the Netherlands, to
kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still
survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the
equatorial flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies.
CHAPTER 106
Ahab's Leg
The precipitating manner in
which Captain Ahab had quitted the Samuel Enderby of London,
had not been unattended with some small violence to his own
person. He had lighted with such energy upon a thwart of his
boat that his ivory leg had received a half-splintering
shock. And when after gaining his own deck, and his own
pivot-hole there, he so vehemently wheeled round with an
urgent command to the steersman (it was, as ever, something
about his not steering inflexibly enough); then, the already
shaken ivory received such an additional twist and wrench,
that though it still remained entire, and to all appearances
lusty, yet Ahab did not deem it entirely trustworthy.
And, indeed,
it seemed small matter for wonder, that for all his
pervading, mad recklessness, Ahab, did at times give careful
heed to the condition of that dead bone upon which he partly
stood. For it had not been very long prior to the Pequod's
sailing from Nantucket, that he had been found one night
lying prone upon the ground, and insensible; by some
unknown, and seemingly inexplicable, unimaginable casualty,
his ivory limb having been so violently displaced, that it
had stake-wise smitten, and all but pierced his groin; nor
was it without extreme difficulty that the agonizing wound
was entirely cured.
Nor, at the
time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that all
the anguish of that then present suffering was but the
direct issue of a former woe; and he too plainly seemed to
see, that as the most poisonous reptile of the marsh
perpetuates his kind as inevitably as the sweetest songster
of the grove; so, equally with every felicity, all miserable
events do naturally beget their like. Yea, more than
equally, thought Ahab; since both the ancestry and posterity
of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy.
For, not to hint of this: that it is an inference from
certain canonic teachings, that while some natural
enjoyments here shall have no children born to them for the
other world, but, on the contrary, shall be followed by the
joy-childlessness of all hell's despair; whereas, some
guilty mortal miseries shall still fertilely beget to
themselves an eternally progressive progeny of griefs beyond
the grave; not at all to hint of this, there still seems an
inequality in the deeper analysis of the thing. For, thought
Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a
certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at
bottom, all heartwoes, a mystic significance, and, in some
men, an archangelic grandeur; so do their diligent
tracings-out not belie the obvious deduction. To trail the
genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at
last among the sourceless primogenitures of the gods; so
that, in the face of all the glad, hay-making suns, and
softcymballing, round harvest-moons, we must needs give in
to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad. The
ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the
stamp of sorrow in the signers.
Unwittingly
here a secret has been divulged, which perhaps might more
properly, in set way, have been disclosed before. With many
other particulars concerning Ahab, always had it remained a
mystery to some, why it was, that for a certain period, both
before and after the sailing of the Pequod, he had hidden
himself away with such Grand-Lama-like exclusiveness; and,
for that one interval, sought speechless refuge, as it were,
among the marble senate of the dead. Captain Peleg's bruited
reason for this thing appeared by no means adequate; though,
indeed, as touching all Ahab's deeper part, every revelation
partook more of significant darkness than of explanatory
light. But, in the end, it all came out; this one matter
did, at least. That direful mishap was at the bottom of his
temporary recluseness. And not only this, but to that
ever-contracting, dropping circle ashore, who for any
reason, possessed the privilege of a less banned approach to
him; to that timid circle the above hinted
casualty—remaining, as it did, moodily unaccounted for by
Ahab—invested itself with terrors, not entirely underived
from the land of spirits and of wails. So that, through
their zeal for him, they had all conspired, so far as in
them lay, to muffle up the knowledge of this thing from
others; and hence it was, that not till a considerable
interval had elapsed, did it transpire upon the Pequod's
decks.
But be all
this as it may; let the unseen, ambiguous synod in the air,
or the vindictive princes and potentates of fire, have to do
or not with earthly Ahab, yet, in this present matter of his
leg, he took plain practical procedures;— he called the
carpenter.
And when that
functionary appeared before him, he bade him without delay
set about making a new leg, and directed the mates to see
him supplied with all the studs and joists of jaw-ivory
(Sperm Whale) which had thus far been accumulated on the
voyage, in order that a careful selection of the stoutest,
clearest-grained stuff might be secured. This done, the
carpenter received orders to have the leg completed that
night; and to provide all the fittings for it, independent
of those pertaining to the distrusted one in use. Moreover,
the ship's forge was ordered to be hoisted out of its
temporary idleness in the hold; and, to accelerate the
affair, the blacksmith was commanded to proceed at once to
the forging of whatever iron contrivances might be needed.
CHAPTER 107
The Carpenter
Seat thyself sultanically
among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man
alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But
from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most
part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both
contemporary and hereditary. But most humble though he was,
and far from furnishing an example of the high, humane
abstraction; the Pequod's carpenter was no duplicate; hence,
he now comes in person on this stage.
Like all
sea-going ship carpenters, and more especially those
belonging to whaling vessels, he was, to a certain off-hand,
practical extent, alike experienced in numerous trades and
callings collateral to his own; the carpenter's pursuit
being the ancient and outbranching trunk of all those
numerous handicrafts which more or less have to do with wood
as an auxiliary material. But, besides the application to
him of the generic remark above, this carpenter of the
Pequod was singularly efficient in those thousand nameless
mechanical emergencies continually recurring in a large
ship, upon a three or four years' voyage, in uncivilized and
far-distant seas. For not to speak of his readiness in
ordinary duties:— repairing stove boats, sprung spars,
reforming the shape of clumsy-bladed oars, inserting bull's
eyes in the deck, or new tree-nails in the side planks, and
other miscellaneous matters more directly pertaining to his
special business; he was moreover unhesitatingly expert in
all manner of conflicting aptitudes, both useful and
capricious.
The one grand
stage where he enacted all his various parts so manifold,
was his vice-bench; a long rude ponderous table furnished
with several vices, of different sizes, and both of iron and
of wood. At all times except when whales were alongside,
this bench was securely lashed athwartships against the rear
of the Try-works.
A belaying pin
is found too large to be easily inserted into its hole: the
carpenter claps it into one of his ever ready vices, and
straightway files it smaller. A lost landbird of strange
plumage strays on board, and is made a captive: out of clean
shaved rods of right-whale bone, and cross-beams of sperm
whale ivory, the carpenter makes a pagoda-looking cage for
it. An oarsman sprains his wrist: the carpenter concocts a
soothing lotion. Stubb longed for vermillion stars to be
painted upon the blade of his every oar; screwing each oar
in his big vice of wood, the carpenter symmetrically
supplies the constellation. A sailor takes a fancy to wear
shark-bone ear-rings: the carpenter drills his ears. Another
has the toothache: the carpenter out pincers, and clapping
one hand upon his bench bids him be seated there; but the
poor fellow unmanageably winces under the unconcluded
operation; whirling round the handle of his wooden vice, the
carpenter signs him to clap his jaw in that, if he would
have him draw the tooth.
Thus, this
carpenter was prepared at all points, and alike indifferent
and without respect in all. Teeth he accounted bits of
ivory; heads he deemed but top-blocks; men themselves he
lightly held for capstans. But while now upon so wide a
field thus variously accomplished and with such liveliness
of expertness in him, too; all this would seem to argue some
uncommon vivacity of intelligence. But not precisely so. For
nothing was this man more remarkable, than for a certain
impersonal stolidity as it were; impersonal, I say; for it
so shaded off into the surrounding infinite of things, that
it seemed one with the general stolidity discernible in the
whole visible world; which while pauselessly active in
uncounted modes, still eternally holds its peace, and
ignores you, though you dig foundations for cathedrals. Yet
was this half-horrible stolidity in him, involving, too, as
it appeared, an all-ramifying heartlessness;— yet was it
oddly dashed at times, with an old, crutch-like,
antediluvian, wheezing humorousness, not unstreaked now and
then with a certain grizzled wittiness; such as might have
served to pass the time during the midnight watch on the
bearded forecastle of Noah's ark. Was it that this old
carpenter had been a life-long wanderer, whose much rolling,
to and fro, not only had gathered no moss; but what is more,
had rubbed off whatever small outward clingings might have
originally pertained to him? He was a stript abstract; an
unfractioned integral; uncompromised as a new-born babe;
living without premeditated reference to this world or the
next. You might almost say, that this strange
uncompromisedness in him involved a sort of unintelligence;
for in his numerous trades, he did not seem to work so much
by reason or by instinct, or simply because he had been
tutored to it, or by any intermixture of all these, even or
uneven; but merely by a kind of deaf and dumb, spontaneous
literal process. He was a pure manipulator; his brain, if he
had ever had one, must have early oozed along into the
muscles of his fingers. He was like one of those unreasoning
but still highly useful, multum in parvo, Sheffield
contrivances, assuming the exterior— though a little
swelled—of a common pocket knife; but containing, not only
blades of various sizes, but also screw-drivers,
cork-screws, tweezers, awls, pens, rulers, nail-filers,
countersinkers. So, if his superiors wanted to use the
carpenter for a screw-driver, all they had to do was to open
that part of him, and the screw was fast: or if for
tweezers, take him up by the legs, and there they were.
Yet, as
previously hinted, this omnitooled, open-and-shut carpenter,
was, after all, no mere machine of an automaton. If he did
not have a common soul in him, he had a subtle something
that somehow anomalously did its duty. What that was,
whether essence of quicksilver, or a few drops of hartshorn,
there is no telling. But there it was; and there it had
abided for now some sixty years or more. And this it was,
this same unaccountable, cunning life-principle in him; this
it was, that kept him a great part of the time
soliloquizing; but only like an unreasoning wheel, which
also hummingly soliloquizes; or rather, his body was a
sentry-box and this soliloquizer on guard there, and talking
all the time to keep himself awake.
CHAPTER 108
Ahab and the
Carpenter
The Deck -
First Night Watch
(Carpenter standing before his
vice-bench, and by the light of two lanterns busily filing
the ivory joist for the leg, which joist is firmly fixed in
the vice. Slabs of ivory, leather straps, pads, screws, and
various tools of all sorts lying about the bench. Forward,
the red flame of the forge is seen, where the blacksmith is
at work.)
Drat the file, and drat the
bone! That is hard which should be soft, and that is soft
which should be hard. So we go, who file old jaws and shin
bones. Let's try another. Aye, now, this works better
(sneezes). Halloa, this bone dust is (sneezes)—why it's
(sneezes)—yes it's (sneezes)—bless my soul, it won't let me
speak! This is what an old fellow gets now for working in
dead lumber. Saw a live tree, and you don't get this dust;
amputate a live bone, and you don't get it (sneezes). Come,
come, you old Smut, there, bear a hand, and let's have that
ferrule and buckle-screw; I'll be ready for them presently.
Lucky now (sneezes) there's no knee-joint to make; that
might puzzle a little; but a mere shin-bone—why it's easy as
making hop-poles; only I should like to put a good finish
on. Time, time; if I but only had the time, I could turn him
out as neat a leg now as ever (sneezes) scraped to a lady in
a parlor. Those buckskin legs and calves of legs I've seen
in shop windows wouldn't compare at all. They soak water,
they do; and of course get rheumatic, and have to be
doctored (sneezes) with washes and lotions, just like live
legs. There; before I saw it off, now, I must call his old
Mogulship, and see whether the length will be all right; too
short, if anything, I guess. Ha! that's the heel; we are in
luck; here he comes, or it's somebody else, that's certain.
AHAB (advancing)
(During the
ensuing scene, the carpenter continues sneezing at times).
Well, manmaker!
Just in time,
sir. If the captain pleases, I will now mark the length.
Let me measure, sir.
Measured for a
leg! good. Well, it's not the first time.
About it! There; keep thy finger on it. This is a cogent
vice thou hast here, carpenter; let me feel its grip once.
So, so; it does pinch some.
Oh, sir, it
will break bones—beware, beware!
No fear; I
like a good grip; I like to feel something in this slippery
world that can hold, man. What's Prometheus about there?—
the blacksmith, I mean—what's he about?
He must be
forging the buckle-screw, sir, now.
Right. It's a
partnership; he supplies the muscle part.
He makes a fierce red flame there!
Aye, sir; he
must have the white heat for this kind of fine work.
Um-m. So he
must. I do deem it now a most meaning thing, that that old
Greek, Prometheus, who made men, they say, should have been
a blacksmith, and animated them with fire; for what's made
in fire must properly belong to fire; and so hell's
probable. How the soot flies! This must be the remainder the
Greek made the Africans of. Carpenter, when he's through
with that buckle, tell him to forge a pair of steel
shoulder-blades; there's a pedlar aboard with a crushing
pack.
Sir?
Hold; while
Prometheus is about it, I'll order a complete man after a
desirable pattern. Imprimis, fifty feet high in his socks;
then, chest modelled after the Thames Tunnel then, legs with
roots to 'em, to stay in one place; then, arms three feet
through the wrist; no heart at all, brass forehead, and
about a quarter of an acre of fine brains; and let me
see—shall I order eyes to see outwards? No, but put a
sky-light on top of his head to illuminate inwards. There,
take the order, and away.
Now, what's he
speaking about, and who's he speaking to,
I should like to know? Shall I keep standing here? (aside.)
'Tis but
indifferent architecture to make a blind dome; here's one.
No, no, no; I must have a lantern.
Ho, ho! That's
it, hey? Here are two, sir; one will serve my turn.
What art thou
thrusting that thief-catcher into my face for, man?
Thrusted light is worse than presented pistols.
I thought,
sir, that you spoke to carpenter.
Carpenter? why that's—but
no;—a very tidy, and, I may say, an extremely gentlemanlike
sort of business thou art in here, carpenter;—or would'st
thou rather work in clay?
Sir?—Clay?
clay, sir? That's mud; we leave clay to ditchers, sir.
The fellow's
impious! What art thou sneezing about?
Bone is rather
dusty, sir.
Take the hint,
then; and when thou art dead, never bury thyself under
living people's noses.
Sir?—oh! ah!—I
guess so; so;—yes, yes—oh dear!
Look ye,
carpenter, I dare say thou callest thyself a right good
workmanlike workman, eh? Well, then, will it speak
thoroughly well for thy work, if, when I come to mount this
leg thou makest, I shall nevertheless feel another leg in
the same identical place with it; that is, carpenter, my old
lost leg; the flesh and blood one, I mean. Canst thou not
drive that old Adam away?
Truly, sir, I
begin to understand somewhat now. Yes, I have heard
something curious on that score, sir; how that a dismasted
man never entirely loses the feeling of his old spar, but it
will be still pricking him at times. May I humbly ask if it
be really so, sir?
It is, man.
Look, put thy live leg here in the place where mine once
was; so, now, here is only one distinct leg to the eye, yet
two to the soul. Where thou feelest tingling life; there,
exactly there, there to a hair, do I. Is't a riddle?
I should
humbly call it a poser, sir.
Hist, then.
How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing
may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing
precisely where thou now standest; aye, and standing there
in thy spite? In thy most solitary hours, then, dost thou
not fear eavesdroppers? Hold, don't speak! And if I still
feel the smart of my crushed leg, though it be now so long
dissolved; then, why mayest not thou, carpenter, feel the
fiery pains of hell for ever, and without a body? Hah!
Good Lord!
Truly, sir, if it comes to that, I must calculate over
again;
I think I didn't carry a small figure, sir.
Look ye,
pudding-heads should never grant premises.—How long before
this leg is done?
Perhaps an
hour, sir.
Bungle away at
it then, and bring it to me (turns to go). Oh, Life. Here I
am, proud as Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this
blockhead for a bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal
inter-indebtedness which will not do away with ledgers. I
would be free as air; and I'm down in the whole world's
books. I am so rich, I could have given bid for bid with the
wealthiest Praetorians at the auction of the Roman empire
(which was the world's); and yet I owe for the flesh in the
tongue I brag with. By heavens! I'll get a crucible, and
into it, and dissolve myself down to one small, compendious
vertebra. So.
Carpenter (
resuming his work).
Well, well, well! Stubb knows
him best of all, and Stubb always says he's queer; says
nothing but that one sufficient little word queer; he's
queer, says Stubb; he's queer—queer, queer; and keeps
dinning it into Mr. Starbuck all the time—queer—sir—queer,
queer, very queer. And here's his leg. Yes, now that I think
of it, here's his bed-fellow! has a stick of whale's
jaw-bone for a wife! And this is his leg; he'll stand on
this. What was that now about one leg standing in three
places, and all three places standing in one hell— how was
that? Oh! I don't wonder he looked so scornful at me! I'm a
sort of strange-thoughted sometimes, they say; but that's
only haphazard-like. Then, a short, little old body like me,
should never undertake to wade out into deep waters with
tall, heron-built captains; the water chucks you under the
chin pretty quick, and there's a great cry for life-boats.
And here's the heron's leg! long and slim, sure enough! Now,
for most folks one pair of legs lasts a lifetime, and that
must be because they use them mercifully, as a
tender-hearted old lady uses her roly-poly old coach-horses.
But Ahab; oh he's a hard driver. Look, driven one leg to
death, and spavined the other for life, and now wears out
bone legs by the cord. Halloa, there, you Smut! bear a hand
there with those screws, and let's finish it before the
resurrection fellow comes a-calling with his horn for all
legs, true or false, as brewery men go round collecting old
beer barrels, to fill 'em up again. What a leg this is! It
looks like a real live leg, filed down to nothing but the
core; he'll be standing on this to-morrow; he'll be taking
altitudes on it. Halloa! I almost forgot the little oval
slate, smoothed ivory, where he figures up the latitude. So,
so; chisel, file, and sand-paper, now!
CHAPTER 109
Ahab and
Starbuck in the Cabin
According to usage they were
pumping the ship next morning; and lo! no inconsiderable oil
came up with the water; the casks below must have sprung a
bad leak. Much concern was shown; and Starbuck went down
into the cabin to report this unfavorable affair.*
*In Sperm-whalemen with any
considerable quantity of oil on board, it is a regular
semiweekly duty to conduct a hose into the hold, and drench
the casks with sea-water; which afterwards, at varying
intervals, is removed by the ship's pumps. Hereby the casks
are sought to be kept damply tight; while by the changed
character of the withdrawn water, the mariners readily
detect any serious leakage in the precious cargo.
Now, from the South and West
the Pequod was drawing nigh to Formosa and the Bashee Isles,
between which lies one of the tropical outlets from the
China waters into the Pacific. And so Starbuck found Ahab
with a general chart of the oriental archipelagoes spread
before him; and another separate one representing the long
eastern coasts of the Japanese islands—Niphon, Matsmai, and
Sikoke. With his snow-white new ivory leg braced against the
screwed leg of his table, and with a long pruning-hook of a
jack-knife in his hand, the wondrous old man, with his back
to the gangway door, was wrinkling his brow, and tracing his
old courses again.
"Who's there?"
hearing the footstep at the door, but not turning round to
it. "On deck! Begone!"
"Captain Ahab
mistakes; it is I. The oil in the hold is leaking, sir.
We must up Burtons and break out."
"Up Burtons
and break out? Now that we are nearing Japan; heave-to here
for a week to tinker a parcel of old hoops?"
"Either do
that, sir, or waste in one day more oil than we may make
good in a year. What we come twenty thousand miles to get is
worth saving, sir."
"So it is, so
it is; if we get it."
"I was
speaking of the oil in the hold, sir."
"And I was not
speaking or thinking of that at all. Begone! Let it leak!
I'm all aleak myself. Aye! leaks in leaks! not only full of
leaky casks, but those leaky casks are in a leaky ship; and
that's a far worse plight than the Pequod's, man. Yet I
don't stop to plug my leak; for who can find it in the
deep-loaded hull; or how hope to plug it, even if found, in
this life's howling gale? Starbuck! I'll not have the
Burtons hoisted."
"What will the
owners say, sir?"
"Let the
owners stand on Nantucket beach and outyell the Typhoons.
What cares Ahab? Owners, owners? Thou art always prating to
me, Starbuck, about those miserly owners, as if the owners
were my conscience. But look ye, the only real owner of
anything is its commander; and hark ye, my conscience is in
this ship's keel.—On deck!"
"Captain
Ahab," said the reddening mate, moving further into the
cabin, with a daring so strangely respectful and cautious
that it almost seemed not only every way seeking to avoid
the slightest outward manifestation of itself, but within
also seemed more than half distrustful of itself; "A better
man than I might well pass over in thee what he would
quickly enough resent in a younger man; aye, and in a
happier, Captain Ahab."
"Devils! Dost
thou then so much as dare to critically think of me?—On
deck!"
"Nay, sir, not
yet; I do entreat. And I do dare, sir—to be forbearing!
Shall we not understand each other better than hitherto,
Captain Ahab?"
Ahab seized a
loaded musket from the rack (forming part of most
South-Sea-men's cabin furniture), and pointing it towards
Starbuck, exclaimed: "There is one God that is Lord over the
earth,
and one Captain that is lord over the Pequod.—On deck!"
For an instant
in the flashing eyes of the mate, and his fiery cheeks, you
would have almost thought that he had really received the
blaze of the levelled tube. But, mastering his emotion, he
half calmly rose, and as he quitted the cabin, paused for an
instant and said: "Thou hast outraged, not insulted me, Sir;
but for that I ask thee not to beware of Starbuck; thou
wouldst but laugh; but let Ahab beware of Ahab; beware of
thyself, old man."
"He waxes
brave, but nevertheless obeys; most careful bravery that!"
murmured Ahab, as Starbuck disappeared. "What's that he
said—Ahab beware of Ahab—there's something there!" Then
unconsciously using the musket for a staff, with an iron
brow he paced to and fro in the little cabin; but presently
the thick plaits of his forehead relaxed, and returning the
gun to the rack, he went to the deck.
"Thou art but
too good a fellow, Starbuck," he said lowly to the mate;
then raising his voice to the crew: "Furl the
t'gallant-sails, and close-reef the top-sails, fore and aft;
back the main-yard; up Burtons, and break out in the
main-hold."
It were
perhaps vain to surmise exactly why it was, that as
respecting Starbuck, Ahab thus acted. It may have been a
flash of honesty in him; or mere prudential policy which,
under the circumstance, imperiously forbade the slightest
symptom of open disaffection, however transient, in the
important chief officer of his ship. However it was, his
orders were executed; and the Burtons were hoisted.
CHAPTER 110
Queequeg in
His Coffin
Upon searching, it was found
that the casks last struck into the hold were perfectly
sound, and that the leak must be further off. So, it being
calm weather, they broke out deeper and deeper, disturbing
the slumbers of the huge ground-tier butts; and from that
black midnight sending those gigantic moles into the
daylight above. So deep did they go; and so ancient, and
corroded, and weedy the aspect of the lowermost puncheons,
that you almost looked next for some mouldy corner-stone
cask containing coins of Captain Noah, with copies of the
posted placards, vainly warning the infatuated old world
from the flood. Tierce after tierce, too, of water, and
bread, and beef, and shooks of staves, and iron bundles of
hoops, were hoisted out, till at last the piled decks were
hard to get about; and the hollow hull echoed under foot, as
if you were treading over empty catacombs, and reeled and
rolled in the sea like an air-freighted demijohn. Top-heavy
was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in
his head. Well was it that the Typhoons did not visit them
then.
Now, at this
time it was that my poor pagan companion, and fast
bosom-friend, Queequeg, was seized with a fever, which
brought him nigh to his endless end.
Be it said,
that in this vocation of whaling, sinecures are unknown;
dignity and danger go hand in hand; till you get to be
Captain, the higher you rise the harder you toil. So with
poor Queequeg, who, as harpooneer, must not only face all
the rage of the living whale, but—as we have elsewhere
seen—mount his dead back in a rolling sea; and finally
descend into the gloom of the hold, and bitterly sweating
all day in that subterraneous confinement, resolutely
manhandle the clumsiest casks and see to their stowage. To
be short, among whalemen, the harpooneers are the holders,
so called.
Poor Queequeg!
when the ship was about half disembowelled, you should have
stooped over the hatchway, and peered down upon him there;
where, stripped to his woollen drawers, the tattooed savage
was crawling about amid that dampness and slime, like a
green spotted lizard at the bottom of a well. And a well, or
an ice-house, it somehow proved to him, poor pagan; where,
strange to say, for all the heat of his sweatings, he caught
a terrible chill which lapsed into a fever; and at last,
after some days' suffering, laid him in his hammock, close
to the very sill of the door of death. How he wasted and
wasted away in those few long-lingering days, till there
seemed but little left of him but his frame and tattooing.
But as all else in him thinned, and his cheek-bones grew
sharper, his eyes, nevertheless, seemed growing fuller and
fuller; they became of a strange softness of lustre; and
mildly but deeply looked out at you there from his sickness,
a wondrous testimony to that immortal health in him which
could not die, or be weakened. And like circles on the
water, which, as they grow fainter, expand; so his eyes
seemed rounding and rounding, like the rings of Eternity. An
awe that cannot be named would steal over you as you sat by
the side of this waning savage, and saw as strange things in
his face, as any beheld who were bystanders when Zoroaster
died. For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man,
never yet was put into words or books. And the drawing near
of Death, which alike levels all, alike impresses all with a
last revelation, which only an author from the dead could
adequately tell. So that—let us say it again— no dying
Chaldee or Greek had higher and holier thoughts than those,
whose mysterious shades you saw creeping over the face of
poor Queequeg, as he quietly lay in his swaying hammock, and
the rolling sea seemed gently rocking him to his final rest,
and the ocean's invisible flood-tide lifted him higher and
higher towards his destined heaven.
Not a man of
the crew but gave him up; and, as for Queequeg himself, what
he thought of his case was forcibly shown by a curious favor
he asked. He called one to him in the grey morning watch,
when the day was just breaking, and taking his hand, said
that while in Nantucket he had chanced to see certain little
canoes of dark wood, like the rich war-wood of his native
isle; and upon inquiry, he had learned that all whalemen who
died in Nantucket, were laid in those same dark canoes, and
that the fancy of being so laid had much pleased him; for it
was not unlike the custom of his own race, who, after
embalming a dead warrior, stretched him out in his canoe,
and so left him to be floated away to the starry
archipelagoes; for not only do they believe that the stars
are isles, but that far beyond all visible horizons, their
own mild, uncontinented seas, interflow with the blue
heavens; and so form the white breakers of the milky way. He
added, that he shuddered at the thought of being buried in
his hammock, according to the usual sea-custom, tossed like
something vile to the death-devouring sharks. No: he desired
a canoe like those of Nantucket, all the more congenial to
him, being a whaleman, that like a whale-boat these
coffin-canoes were without a keel; though that involved but
uncertain steering, and much lee-way adown the dim ages.
Now, when this
strange circumstance was made known aft, the carpenter was
at once commanded to do Queequeg's bidding, whatever it
might include. There was some heathenish, coffin-colored old
lumber aboard, which, upon a long previous voyage, had been
cut from the aboriginal groves of the Lackaday islands, and
from these dark planks the coffin was recommended to be
made. No sooner was the carpenter apprised of the order,
than taking his rule, he forthwith with all the indifferent
promptitude of his character, proceeded into the forecastle
and took Queequeg's measure with great accuracy, regularly
chalking Queequeg's person as he shifted the rule.
"Ah! poor
fellow! he'll have to die now," ejaculated the
Long Island sailor.
Going to his
vice-bench, the carpenter for convenience sake and general
reference, now transferringly measured on it the exact
length the coffin was to be, and then made the transfer
permanent by cutting two notches at its extremities. This
done, he marshalled the planks and his tools, and to work.
When the last
nail was driven, and the lid duly planed and fitted, he
lightly shouldered the coffin and went forward with it,
inquiring whether they were ready for it yet in that
direction.
Overhearing
the indignant but half-humorous cries with which the people
on deck began to drive the coffin away, Queequeg, to every
one's consternation, commanded that the thing should be
instantly brought to him, nor was there any denying him;
seeing that, of all mortals, some dying men are the most
tyrannical; and certainly, since they will shortly trouble
us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be
indulged.
Leaning over
in his hammock, Queequeg long regarded the coffin with an
attentive eye. He then called for his harpoon, had the
wooden stock drawn from it, and then had the iron part
placed in the coffin along with one of the paddles of his
boat. All by his own request, also, biscuits were then
ranged round the sides within; a flask of fresh water was
placed at the head, and a small bag of woody earth scraped
up in the hold at the foot; and a piece of sail-cloth being
rolled up for a pillow, Queequeg now entreated to be lifted
into his final bed, that he might make trial of its
comforts, if any it had. He lay without moving a few
minutes, then told one to go to his bag and bring out his
little god, Yojo. Then crossing his arms on his breast with
Yojo between, he called for the coffin lid (hatch he called
it) to be placed over him. The head part turned over with a
leather hinge, and there lay Queequeg in his coffin with
little but his composed countenance in view. "Rarmai" (it
will do; it is easy), he murmured at last, and signed to be
replaced in his hammock.
But ere this
was done, Pip, who had been slily hovering near by all the
while, drew nigh to him where he lay, and with soft
sobbings, took him by the hand; in the other, holding his
tambourine.
"Poor rover!
will ye never have done with all this weary roving? Where go
ye now? But if the currents carry ye to those sweet Antilles
where the beaches are only beat with water-lilies, will ye
do one little errand for me? Seek out one Pip, who's now
been missing long: I think he's in those far Antilles. If ye
find him, then comfort him; for he must be very sad; for
look! he's left his tambourine behind;— I found it.
Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! Now, Queequeg, die; and I'll beat ye
your dying march."
"I have
heard," murmured Starbuck, gazing down the scuttle, "that in
violent fevers, men, all ignorance, have talked in ancient
tongues; and that when the mystery is probed, it turns out
always that in their wholly forgotten childhood those
ancient tongues had been really spoken in their hearing by
some lofty scholars. So, to my fond faith, poor Pip, in this
strange sweetness of his lunacy, brings heavenly vouchers of
all our heavenly homes. Where learned he that, but
there?—Hark! he speaks again; but more wildly now."
"Form two and
two! Let's make a General of him! Ho, where's his harpoon?
Lay it across here.—Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! huzza! Oh for a
game cock now to sit upon his head and crow! Queequeg dies
game!—mind ye that; Queequeg dies game!— take ye good heed
of that; Queequeg dies game! I say; game, game, game! but
base little Pip, he died a coward; died all a'shiver;—out
upon Pip! Hark ye; if ye find Pip, tell all the Antilles
he's a runaway; a coward, a coward, a coward! Tell them he
jumped from a whale-boat! I'd never beat my tambourine over
base Pip, and hail him General, if he were once more dying
here. No, no! shame upon all cowards— shame upon them!
Let'em go drown like Pip, that jumped from a whale-boat.
Shame! shame!"
During all
this, Queequeg lay with closed eyes, as if in a dream.
Pip was led away, and the sick man was replaced in his
hammock.
But now that
he had apparently made every preparation for death; now that
his coffin was proved a good fit, Queequeg suddenly rallied;
soon there seemed no need of the carpenter's box; and
thereupon, when some expressed their delighted surprise, he,
in substance, said, that the cause of his sudden
convalescence was this;— at a critical moment, he had just
recalled a little duty ashore, which he was leaving undone;
and therefore had changed his mind about dying: he could not
die yet, he averred. They asked him, then, whether to live
or die was a matter of his own sovereign will and pleasure.
He answered, certainly. In a word, it was Queequeg's
conceit, that if a man made up his mind to live, mere
sickness could not kill him: nothing but a whale, or a gale,
or some violent, ungovernable, unintelligent destroyer of
that sort.
Now, there is
this noteworthy difference between savage and civilized;
that while a sick, civilized man may be six months
convalescing, generally speaking, a sick savage is almost
half-well again in a day. So, in good time my Queequeg
gained strength; and at length after sitting on the windlass
for a few indolent days (but eating with a vigorous
appetite) he suddenly leaped to his feet, threw out his arms
and legs, gave himself a good stretching, yawned a little
bit, and then springing into the head of his hoisted boat,
and poising a harpoon, pronounced himself fit for a fight.
With a wild
whimsiness, he now used his coffin for a sea-chest; and
emptying into it his canvas bag of clothes, set them in
order there. Many spare hours he spent, in carving the lid
with all manner of grotesque figures and drawings; and it
seemed that hereby he was striving, in his rude way, to copy
parts of the twisted tattooing on his body. And this
tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet and seer
of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written
out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the
earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining
truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a
riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose
mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live
heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore
destined in the end to moulder away with the living
parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to
the last. And this thought it must have been which suggested
to Ahab that wild exclamation of his, when one morning
turning away from surveying poor Queequeg—"Oh, devilish
tantalization of the gods!"
